Fayette Brown, of the The Jackson Iron Company, chose Lake Michigan’s Garden Peninsula at Snail Shell Harbor to establish a blast furnace close to mining, where the ore could be smelted into pig iron before being shipped to steel manufacturers to reduce the shipping cost by hauling the refined iron instead of the ore. Fayette was once one of the Upper Peninsula’s most productive iron-smelting operations which was in operation from 1867 to 1891 and the two blast furnaces produced 225,000 tons of pig iron during those years.
Fayette’s Blast Furnaces
