The Valley Milling Company’s flouring mill is pictured in a photo taken in 1899 by John M. Longyear. (Photo courtesy of the Marquette Regional History Center)

MARQUETTE — In addition to its mineral riches, an apparently inexhaustible supply of timber, and the fresh water of Lake Superior, the Marquette area boasted another natural resource of great interest to settlers and investors — an abundance of falling water. Before electrification, falling water was the primary way of powering everything from textile factories to sawmills.

On the mineral ranges of the Upper Peninsula, falling water powered forges and furnaces. Sawmills provided the timbers that shored up underground mines. Powder mills provided the explosives the mining industry depended on.  

The Dead River — sometimes labeled the Dashing River on early maps — drops more than 800 feet in the 40 miles between its headwaters north of Ishpeming and its mouth at Lake Superior, making it a prime location for mills.  

Just outside the Marquette city limits, the Collinsville Trails off of Wright Street give a glimpse of the area’s former industry, with graffiti-covered concrete structures and the huge penstock bringing water down to the hydroelectric plant to the east.

The ruins are from the Collinsville Powerplant, Marquette’s first electric generating facility, which began operations in 1889. But Collinsville’s supply of falling water had been in use for decades before the powerplant was established.  

The rushing waters of the Dead River in the area we now know as Collinsville were first used by the European settlers of our area in the production of iron. The Collins Iron Company built a forge there which went into operation in 1855. At the same time, under the leadership of Robert Graveraet, the village of Collinsville was established, including charcoal kilns, a company store (later used as a schoolhouse), machine shops, and log homes. 

The Collins Iron Company failed during the panic of 1857, but the property was almost immediately leased by Stephen Gay, who built the area’s first blast furnace on the site.  Although the furnace was successful for a number of years, employing up to 50 workers and producing an average of nine tons of pig iron each day, it finally closed in 1873 after the company’s timberlands had been so logged over that there was no longer enough wood to feed the charcoal kilns.  

The property attracted two new industries in the late 1880s.  On behalf of the city of Marquette, Mayor F.O. Clark negotiated to buy 400 acres at Collinsville to erect the city’s first electricity generating plant.  That plant, built on the north side of the river, went into operation in 1889. 

At the same time, a bit further downstream, a flour milling operation had begun.  

Alphonse Bertrand owned property on a small creek that emptied into the Dead River east of Collinsville.  In 1887, he dammed the creek and built the area’s first flour mill. In its first year of operation, the mill ground rye and grain for animal feed and more than 600 bushels of wheat for flour. The next year Bertrand sold a controlling interest in the mill to the Upper Peninsula Brewing Company and the business was renamed the Marquette Valley Milling Company. 

The small creek ultimately did not provide enough water for the milling operations, so in 1891 the owners negotiated with the city, which now owned the former Collinsville site, to lease a parcel of land below the new power plant.

In negotiations similar to those which still occur between municipalities and businesses looking to relocate, the city agreed to a 99 year lease, at the cost of $1 per year, plus taxes, on the condition that the property only be used for milling grain and never for the production of alcohol or explosives, and with the proviso that the lease would terminate if the mill ever went idle for year. In return, Nathan Kaufman, president of the Milling Company, promised to spend $30,000 on the new mill and to build a boarding house, a cooper shop and a barn as well as a railroad spur from the Dead River Railroad.  

As promised, the new mill, which ultimately cost $50,000 and went into operation in March 1892, was not a small operation. The mill itself was four stories high, and had two water wheels, one with a 75-horsepower capacity and a smaller one, which also ran an Edison electric light plant for the mill, of 25 horsepower. The grain elevator could store up to 20,000 bushels. 

The mill purchased all the wheat local farmers could produce and imported as many as five additional carloads a week from Duluth.  In harvest season the mill ran 24 hours a day, producing more than 200 barrels of flour each day. The finished flour was distributed not only to Upper Peninsula bakers, but also as far south as Atlanta, Georgia, and east to New York City where it was ultimately shipped to England.  

An 1895 article about the mill listed the grades of wheat flour produced as “wedding cake, four star best, choice straight, fancy, and patent roller.”  In addition, the mill produced wheat germ meal, wheat farina, wheat graham, rye, and rye graham flours and had in stock “oats, corn, screenings, chop feed, bran, and middlings.”

Ultimately the mill did not live out its 99-year lease. High freight rates and competition from larger mills in Minnesota were probably factors, but in 1904, the company surrendered its lease back to the city and agreed to remove all the buildings. As part of the negotiations, the city agreed to provide electricity to the Upper Peninsula Brewing Company for 20 years, apparently for free. 

Next time you walk or ski the Collinsville trails, stop for a moment to imagine all the history that’s been there before you.