Brockway Mountain Drive - History

History

Brockway Mountain is a 1,320-foot (400 m) volcanic landform on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan about 5 miles (8.0 km) west of Copper Harbor. The top of the mountain is 720 feet (220 m) above the level of Lake Superior. The peak was named for Daniel D. Brockway, local pioneer settler, postmaster and state road commissioner. Brockway moved to Copper Harbor in 1846 at the beginning of the area's copper boom. He built the first permanent structure in the community, a hostelry named The Brockway House, which was used by the miners and scientists in the area. By the time of his death on May 9, 1899, the ridge west of town had been named in his honor.

A road to the summit of Brockway Mountain was first proposed in the 1920s by Warren H. Manning, a renowned landscape architect. Manning was in the Keweenaw at the time to design Agassiz Park in Calumet and suggested the road while visiting the area. The road was designed in 1932 with three different options considered. The first involved the construction of the current road from near the Silver River on the west to the summit. It followed a route used by the previous Military Road that connected Fort Wilkins to Fort Howard; traffic would have to turn around to descend Brockway Mountain. Another option included a route from the summit southwest across the Upson Creek Valley to a second summit on the nearby Mount Lookout, a total of about 16 miles (26 km). The third option was that of the current route down the mountain to the west.

Construction of Brockway Mountain Drive began in early 1933 by the Keweenaw County Road Commission with federal highway funding designed to provide meaningful work to the many copper miners who became unemployed during the Great Depression. Rather than provide welfare, the government provided work for the jobless. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was the agency on the federal level responsible for the project. Up to 300 laborers were employed for a wage of 25¢/hr (equivalent to $NaN/hr in 2013). The work required to build the road was carried out by manual labor, with the assistance of a team of horses, in a project designed to maximize the numbers of men employed. The grading and leveling of the road surface was done by hand; no survey instruments were used to level the roadway. The road was opened for public use that October 14, at a cost of preliminary $30,000. During 1934, additional work was done to the roadway to build the stone walls. Motorists were restricted to one-way traffic, and the road was only open to the public on Sundays and holidays. In the interim, the road was temporarily used as a connection between completed segments of the parallel state highway, numbered M-129 at the time. This highway, now part of M-26, was built starting in July 1933 but was not completed through the area until October 1934. The KCRC declared the road initially finished on June 14, 1935, at a cost of $40,000.

According to historian LeRoy Barnett, "this county highway quickly became one of the most popular motoring destinations in the Midwest." According to the Ironwood Daily Globe in December 1938, "at least one million persons" had traveled on Brockway Mountain Drive in the first five years it was open, sparking a tourism boom in the area. The eastern end of the roadway was paved in 1938, with the final two miles done in 1940. The first Skytop Inn was built at the summit of Brockway Mountain in 1935. A replacement structure, the one that stands on the summit today, was built in 1965. During the first few winters of 1946/47 and 1947/48, a ski hill was operated down the roadway on the western end.