Cliffs Shaft Mine Museum opens
A museum showcasing the history of mining in the Upper Peninsula opened today for the summer season.
It’s the Cliffs Shaft Mine Museum in Ishpeming.
An hour-long tour of the museum takes a close look at some of the documentation from the opening and closing of the mine shaft, vintage equipment used in the mining process and more than 800 specimens of minerals that were collected during its time.
“When I opened this up in 1998, everything was all full of cobwebs,” museum board president Leo LaFond said. “And we did a lot of work in here, but I tried to leave everything as is. A lot of people that come, I always tell them, ‘you can pick things up and touch them, but you might get a little bit dirty because this was a mine’, and this mine ran for 99 years.”
A newly remodeled gift shop is also open for tour participants to pick up some souvenirs for themselves.
The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday.