Legacy of American Copper Smelting

Throughout world history, copper has been a significant metal for a vast number of cultures,from the oldest civilizations on record to the Bronze Age and Greek and Roman antiquity.Though replaced by iron as the primary metal for tools and weapons in ancient civilizations,copper found new resurgence in the nineteenth century when it was discovered to haveparticularly high thermal and electrical conductivity. Copper mining quickly escalated into alarge-scale industry, and because of its vast reserves and innovative mining techniques, theUnited States seized the reins of global production with the opening of significant copper minesin Tennessee and Michigan in the 1840s and Montana in the 1870s. Copper-mining prosperity and America's dominance of the industry came with a heavyenvironmental price, however. As rich copper deposits declined with increased mining efforts,large deposits of leaner oresoftentimes less than one percent purehad to be mined to keeppace with America's technological thirst for copper. Processing such ore left an inordinateamount of industrial waste, such as tailings and slag deposits from the refining process and toxicmaterials from the ores themselves, and copper mining regions around the United States began tosee firsthand the landscape degradation wrought by the industry. In The Legacy of American Copper Smelting, Bode J. Morin examines America's threepremier copper sites: Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, Tennessee's Copper Basin, and Butte-Anaconda, Montana. Morin focuses on what the copper industry meant to the townspeopleworking in and around these three major sites while also exploring the smelters' environmentaleffects. Each site dealt with pollution management differently, and each site had to balance anEPA-mandated cleanup effort alongside the preservation of a once-proud industry. Morin's work sheds new light on the EPA's efforts to utilize Superfund dollars and/orprotocols to erase the environmental consequences of copper-smelting while locals andpreservationists tried to keep memories of the copper industry alive in what were dying ordeclining post-industrial towns. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the Americanhistory of copper or heritage preservation studies, as well as historians of modern America,industrial technology, and the environment.