From the Archives: Story Time
By Erik Nordberg, University Archivist Michigan Tech Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections
Portrait of Edwin Collins, likely taken just before his service in the 1898 Spanish American war.
Someone once said that the root of all history is “his story.” We’re more gender-neutral these days, but so much of what we do here at the Michigan Tech Archives is about story collecting. History is looking at the reminiscences and stories as people have remembered or recorded them.
Often we get only a small chapter of someone’s life story, a bulletin about some historical event, or just a few descriptive sentences about an important place. It’s left to the historian to collect these pieces, fitting them together into a larger jigsaw puzzle, to glean some insight on the things that have preceded us.
For years, one of the story lines I’ve been following concerns the role that early graduates of the Michigan Mining School and the Michigan College of Mines played in developing areas outside of Michigan. I often find myself traveling to other historic mining districts and uncovering unexpected links to the Copper Country in places like Arizona, Montana, and California.
So it was with some interest that I took a call from a woman named Cindy Neureuther in Berkeley, California, in September 2002. Neureuther’s grandfather, Edwin James Collins, was a Tech graduate, and she wondered if we might want anything from his personal collections. Over the course of two or three shipments, we received textbooks, instruments, some reports, and mine maps of properties he worked on.
Collins was born in 1875 in Greenland near Ontonagon. His father, who owned a dry goods store, died when he was seven years old. His mother moved Edwin and his brother to Calumet to live with her parents. Collins attended local schools and worked in mine offices before enlisting to fight in the 1898 Spanish American War.
When he returned, he attended the college and graduated in 1903 as
a mining engineer.
At the time, I was a little concerned about taking the textbooks and three-dimensional artifacts, as we don’t generally have a lot of space for this sort of material. But I thought it might support some future exhibit about the lives of Tech mining engineers around the turn of the last century.
Two years later, I received another email from Berkeley. The family had some albums of photographs taken by Collins “of his mining travels from 1901 to 1908” and were offering them to us as a donation. “Oh, and there are some pocket journals he kept describing some of his work.”
It has taken another three years to complete the shipment and transfer, but the material is absolutely amazing.
The grandfather whom Collins went to live with was Captain Thomas Hoatson, a well-known superintendent at the Calumet & Hecla Mine. Uncles James and Thomas H. Hoatson would rise to even higher fame as the founders of the Calumet and Arizona Copper Company, one of the biggest players in the developing copper district around Bisbee, Arizona.
The Hoatsons and other Keweenaw investors reaped huge profits from the venture, much of which came back to Michigan in the form of charitable giving and memorable buildings (the Laurium Manor Inn was constructed by uncle Thomas H. Hoatson as a gift for his wife).
With this extended family—and a high-quality education from the Michigan College of Mines—Collins embarked on a fascinating career that took him to some of the world’s best-known mining districts. Photographs of Bisbee, Arizona; Tonopah, Nevada; and Butte, Montana; capture these towns at the full flush of their activity. They were also interesting to me at a personal level, having visited many of these towns in the last ten years.
Bisbee, Arizona—Fourth of July tug of war staged between workers of the town’s two largest mining companies, the Copper Queen Mining Company and the Calumet & Arizona Mining Company.
Although his journal entries aren’t overly detailed or personal, one can follow along with the albums as Collins works his way from entry-level mining engineer to superintendent of mining ventures owned by the Hoatson family in Bisbee and Tonopah. These scattered words and images help to capture Collins’ story, often working at very small start-up mining operations in some very remote and barren country.
Collins married Edith Cook in 1906 and built a home in Tonopah. After their first son was born, Edith insisted the family move back to civilization and her family in Duluth. Collins left his uncles’ employment and opened an office in Duluth as an independent mining engineer. Although the photographs end at this point, the journals chronicle his cross-country trips to evaluate mining claims in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California.
After the birth of his third son, Collins moved the family to Calumet and he took up work again for his uncles. He served on the board of directors for the Calumet & Arizona and participated in negotiations that sold C & A to Phelps Dodge in 1931. He also served with the Bureau of Mines during the Second World War.
In addition to his mining work, the journals capture much of Collins’ personal life. One can sense his enduring love for unexplored country, a natural expertise with a fishing pole, and ongoing dental problems (requiring all sorts of fillings, caps, and crowns). Many entries provide insight into life in Calumet during the last century, while others reflect on the family’s summer visits to a cottage at Bete Gris in Keweenaw County.
Edwin Collins remained a committed alumnus of the college throughout his life. He never missed a class reunion, maintained contact as part of a worldwide network of Tech’s mining engineering alumni, and even served on the Board of Control from 1929 to 1935. Although he and his wife relocated to Berkeley following the war, Collins died here in the Copper Country. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage right here on the Tech campus while attending the 1956 class reunion.
Looking back across the five-year process of acquiring these personal records, I am reminded of how fortunate we are to find and preserve stories like that of Edwin James Collins. Not only does it tell us about “his story,” but it opens a window to other stories about the Copper Country, Michigan Tech, and the important impact that our alumni have made in industries across the globe.