Divers Found a Sealed Stone Door 400 Feet Down in a Michigan Copper Mine — No Plan Shows It

Four hundred feet below Michigan's Upper Peninsula, in water that has stood still since the pumps were shut off in 1945, there is a wall of dressed stone with a squared opening cut through it and a timber lintel still holding its shape. It is a doorway. Somebody built it. No surviving company plan shows it. The Keweenaw is the only place on earth where copper comes out of the ground as pure metal, and it has been worked for a very long time. When the Quincy Mining Company sank its shaft in 1846, the ground it entered had already been dug into — in 1848 a crew at the Minesota Mine broke into a filled pit and found a six-ton mass of native copper raised five feet on a crib of oak logs, with stone hammers scattered through the fill. The company took the copper. The pit never went onto a plan. Two separate bodies of paper describe that ground. The mining companies recorded what they took out, downward from the surface, and their record thins going back in time until it stops. Charles Whittlesey recorded what had already been taken out, and his survey, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1863, stops there — because what he was recording was being destroyed while he recorded it. Between the two archives is a band that neither of them describes, and it is now under water that no survey has ever reached. Who cut the oldest openings, and when? Leave your answer in the comments. #BuriedTestimony #FloodedMine #CopperCountry #MiningHistory