FTV: Smokestack Lightning
As one turns south on M – 64 in Silver City, Michigan, one can not help but to notice the large smokestack rising above the horizon. This iconic 504 foot tall structure was erected in 1952-53 when the White Pine copper mine was being renovated. The federal government funded the project that was being carried out by the Copper Range Company in response to copper supplies needed for the Korean War (or Conflict, if you prefer). Full production at the site began in 1955 and the company town of White Pine grew up just west of the power plant and refinery that made use of the stack.
There have been detailed accounts written about the history of the White Pine Mine (see This Land the Ontonagon by Bruce Johanson for one example), but for our purposes, a thumbnail version will suffice. The ore body mined in this location was discovered by Capt. Thomas Hooper when his mining instincts told him to follow the line of the Nonesuch Mine deposits to the east. When he found sufficient evidence of copper deposits in the roots of an upturned White Pine tree, it spurred on and off mining attempts at the site that eventually petered out in 1920.
The federal revitalization effort cited above loaned Copper Range Company $63 million dollars to develop and modernize the mine and milling operation. The chalcocite ore was finely ground in the milling process and the powdery rock was then separated from the copper via floatation. The first pouring of copper from the smelter took place in January of 1955. The Korean War ended in 1953 but the investment was not abandoned. The mine and refinery would continue to operate until 1995 and produced some 4.2 billion pounds of copper and 47 million ounces of silver. I arrived in Ontonagon as a newly minted teacher in the fall of 1975, the year after White Pine MIne reached their peak production in 1974. That year, the 3,000 employees were processing up to 15,000 tons of ore per day.
The mine’s employment base stretched from Ironwood to the Copper Country and supported a robust economy. The White Pine Transit buses carrying shift workers from both the Copper Country and the Gogebic Range were a testament to the mine’s wide reaching economic impact.
Both White Pine and the Ontonagon Area Schools (with more than 1,700 students enrolled in the latter) were well supported and thriving. The schools educated the children of families employed by the mine, the Ontonagon paper mill, and all the ancillary businesses that made up the local economic base. The mine’s work force began to wind down until the final closure of the operation in 1995. The attempt to convert to a copper leaching process faced numerous obstacles and was never able to return White Pine Mine into a profitable venture. My interest in the iconic smokestack still standing sentinel on the property came from my brother’s job there in the early 1980s.
When funding problems affected his position with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Ron had taken the job with the environmental department at the White Pine Mine. While he enjoyed his time working there, a couple of events sent him back to his old job with the DNR. During one of the last periods when the workers were on strike, Ron’s salaried position in the environmental lab was set aside and he was assigned to do shift work in the refinery. The only part of that period that made him second guess the job situation was having to work midnight shifts with unsafe, skeleton crew staffing. About the same time this was going on, the funding at his old DNR position was renewed, thus leading him back to work in Marquette.
Not long after the mine closed for good, Ron called and instructed me to go to his old environmental office and find his former boss. He mentioned something about rockets but why he sent me there was unclear until I arrived at the mine. Ron’s old boss explained they had found boxes containing rockets and solid fuel rocket engines in their store room that they wanted to dispose of. “Do you do anything with rockets in your class?” he asked. I replied in the affirmative and in no short order, we were loading a 1 X 2 X 3 foot wooden box and several cardboard boxes in the back of my car. When I inquired what they had been used for, he said, “It had something to do with the smokestack.” Once I was able to examine the whole package, it sent me on a little research odyssey into the saga of the White Pine smokestack.
The idea of employing large smokestacks at industrial sites wasn’t new. I was first introduced to the concept when a college geology field trip around Lake Superior took us to Sudbury, Ontario in the spring of 1974. Our primary objective in Sudbury was to visit the International Nickel Company (INCO) mine and processing facilities there. Like the White Pine stack, it was hard to miss what was known as the ‘Inco Superstack’. Erected in 1972, it stood 1,250 feet tall (yes, that would be a quarter of a mile and 1.5 times higher than the White Pine stack).
The Superstack was the tallest chimney in Canada and the second tallest in the world behind the one at the Ekibastuz GRESS-2 Power Station in Kazakhstan. The Inco stack was also the second tallest freestanding structure in Canada ( only the CN Tower in Toronto is taller) and the 51st tallest freestanding structure in the world. In the fall of 2025, approximately 110 feet of the stack was dismantled which now places it as the eighth tallest chimney in the world.
The nickel and copper deposits in Sudbury were created some 1.85 billion years ago when an asteroid (or perhaps a comet) between 6 and 9 miles in diameter slammed into the Earth’s then supercontinent of Laurasia. The resultant energy release was the equivalent to billions of atomic bombs and carved out a crater almost four miles deep and 120 miles wide. The impact created shock waves in the surrounding solid rock that are still visible today around the Sudbury Basin. The heat of the impact left deposits of nickel, copper, platinum, palladium, and other valuable metals that are still being extracted today. The 30 foot tall Big Nickel monument near the INCO facilities denotes Sudbury as being ‘the nickel capital of the world’.
In the earliest days, the mines of the Sudbury Basin relied on open pit smelting of the ore. Cutting of timber to fuel the smelting process combined with acid rain created by the sulphur released into the atmosphere laid waste to much of the countryside. Indeed, when we visited in 1974, there were still vast areas that looked like a moonscape from the previous damage. It was no surprise to find out the Apollo astronauts trained in Sudbury to familiarize themselves with breccia and shatter cones that were similar to what they would find at Lunar impact sites. The mining district includes some of the deepest underground mines with the Creighton Mine reaching the depth of some 8,000 feet. The particular mine we toured only took us down to about 2,400 feet.
When the Inco Superstack was designed and put into use, the idea was to take the SO2 emissions to an elevation where the upper level winds would disperse them. While this idea helped reduce the local acid rain effects, the environmental damage was spread downwind from Sudbury thus affecting a larger geographical area. This ‘throw the SO2 to the wind’ concept was replaced when current owner Vale replaced the monster stack with two 450 foot stacks that are more efficient in lowering the SO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions. Constructed as part of the $1 billion Clean AER (Atmospheric Emissions Reduction) project, the company has been able to turn the SO2 emissions into saleable sulfuric acid instead of it falling as acid rain.
The Superstack was taken out of operation in 2020 and the inner steel lining was removed. Top down dismantling began in 2025 using a machine called the Mantis. This device chips away at the concrete shell and drops the debris down the inside of the stack. A 30 foot by 20 foot opening at the bottom allows the accumulated material to be taken out and hauled to an abandoned open pit mine for disposal. The entire structure is expected to be removed by the end of this decade. An initiative to re-green the areas damaged by earlier ground level smelting has been taking place since the Superstack was first put into production in 1972.
Unlike the ore deposits in Sudbury, the copper found beneath the Upper Peninsula’s Copper Country doesn’t have a cosmic origin. In ancient times, massive lava flows were pouring from the Earth as they created some of the oldest crustal rock on our planet. These layers of the Laurentian Shield still occupy western Upper Michigan and a large part of Ontario north of Lake Superior. The depth of these deposits should rival the elevation of the Columbia Plateau in the Pacific Northwest but they don’t. In the pre-Great Lakes region, the weight of these thick lava flows depressed the crust down into the upper Mantle even as subsequent flows poured out onto the surface.
Mountain ranges on both sides of the eventual Lake Superior basin were pushed up higher than the Rocky Mountains as crustal plates jockeyed for position. As the mountains wore down, the lava flows and sediments accumulating in that basin continued to warp the crust downward. The extreme temperatures and pressure deep underground created a boiling soup saturated with dissolved minerals that moved through cracks toward the surface. As this hot mess cooled, minerals like gold, silver, copper, and nickel were deposited. There they would spend eons waiting to be discovered and exploited.
Again, we will sidestep the numerous mining ventures that were established on these Copper Country ore bodies. When plans to mine and process the chalcocite copper ore at White Pine were made, they gave a great deal of thought as to how they would deal with the operation’s emissions. They were already leaning toward erecting a stack tall enough to disperse these toxic fumes, but the engineers wanted more data on where they would end up. The rockets that were passed on to me were one of the methods used to answer those questions.
My brother and I had been launching solid fuel model rockets since the late 1960s so I had some foreknowledge of what I was picking up. The scale of the rockets still amazed me. Model rockets employ fuel enclosed in thick cardboard tubes with a ceramic nozzle on the aft end. The engines we had previously were designated A, B, C, and D (D being the largest, most powerful of the four). The rocket motors that came with the White Pine rockets were labeled ‘J’ and resembled sticks of dynamite. The rockets themselves were close to three feet in length and quite heavy. The extra weight was explained by the instrument package housed inside. This circuit board included sensors for temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure, two antennas and a 9 volt battery. The ground station (which was described in the owner’s manual but no longer with the rocket set up) indicated these sensors would broadcast to the ground station during flight. The instrument packet carried on the rocket also had a homing beacon to make it easier to recover once they had returned to the ground via multiple parachutes.
There were originally three rockets but one of them was in bits and pieces inside the carrying case. Many years later, Eli Isatalo from Mass City had seen an article I had written about the White Pine rockets. He stopped me after church one day and said, “You know, I was part of the crew that had to go out and find those rockets when they were launched. Boy, did we have to hunt on our hands and knees to find all the pieces of that one that didn’t deploy its parachute.”
Ron and I thought, ‘Okay, we have two left, so let’s see if we can get one to fly.”
Solid fuel rocket engines can be tricky. If they are not stored in dry conditions, they will absorb moisture from the atmosphere which makes them prone to exploding. To test if the ‘J’ motors were still viable, we planted one upside down in my newly tilled garden and ran the electric cables to a battery around the corner of the house. Having grown up in an active mining area (the Marquette Iron Range), we were often given safety lectures about avoiding the blasting caps used to set off charges in the mines. The igniters for the ‘J’ engines looked a lot like those blasting caps. We ignited the motor and were rewarded with a fifteen foot long plume of flame that shot upward. The rocket engine itself was pushed a foot into the soft garden soil.
Unfortunately, when we applied a new motor to one of the remaining rockets, our luck ran out. The second engine we fired exploded and the rocket was blown to pieces. We made two decisions on the spot: 1) we would not risk destroying the one remaining rocket and 2) when I was done using it for educational purposes, the set would be donated to the Ontonagon County Historical Society. To my knowledge, this display resides in the education section of the museum after first being part of the White Pine Mine exhibits.
Reading through the data recorded from the flights staged at White Pine, they showed there was no significant pattern to the wind direction. Over time, the wind affecting the smokestack emissions could be counted on to spread them in every compass direction. In other words, no significant damage would occur in any one area because the wind patterns would disperse the fumes in every direction over the course of a year.
There is a coda to this story. Not wanting to destroy the last historical relic of the White Pine Smokestack rocket test program, we decided to build a similarly long, heavy rocket that we could use to test more of the engines. The first couple did not survive as we kept running into motors that decided to be more T’N’T than rocket engine. We finally succeeded on a winter’s day on the ice near the head of Huron Bay. The rocket took off like a scared rabbit and went completely out of sight. We are not sure how high it got, but with the wind blowing out toward Lake Superior, we decided to look for it on the ice covered bay toward Skanee. We found the parachute had deployed as it should have and if one wants to do the math, the height can be extrapolated from where we found the rocket. It landed four miles from where we launched it and the moderate wind that day had carried it that far down range.
Before I showed my classes the rocket, I used to ask them, “How close to Ontonagon do you think rockets were launched that did real scientific research?” In those pre-Space X days, most guessed ‘Florida’. I would explain there were some launches done at High Rock Bay north of Calumet back in the 1970s. Then I would point west and ask, “Would you believe White Pine?”
Next time you drive by White Pine and see the 500 foot smoke stack, think about the rockets that were being launched there decades ago. Better yet, visit the Ontonagon County Historical Museum and ask them to direct you to the educational displays and see for yourself what is left of the rockets used to test the wind flow around the smokestack.
Top Piece Video: Howlin’ Wolf himself withhis signature tune, Smokestack Lightning from 1964