History
The Marquette Iron Range was discovered in 1844 by a party of surveyors led by William A. Burt, who found that their sensitive magnetic compasses produced skewed results because of the concentration of iron in the land they were surveying. Mining began in 1847. At first, the hematite iron ore of the Marquette Range was smelted with local charcoal into pig iron, but after the opening of the first Soo Canal in 1855 the iron ore itself began to be shipped down the Great Lakes from the newly developed port city of Marquette.
Capitalists from Cleveland played a key role in the development of the Marquette Iron Range, and the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company had acquired a controlling influence on the Range by 1890.
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