Houghton County
Chimney Work in the Copper Country
Houghton County sits in the Keweenaw Peninsula of the Upper Peninsula, with Houghton and Hancock facing each other across the Portage Waterway and Michigan Technological University anchoring the area. Its housing stock dates substantially from the copper-mining era, and its snowfall is measured in hundreds of inches.
Mining-era company housing was built quickly, in quantity, and with the masonry practices of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Those chimneys have now stood through more than a century of the most severe freeze-thaw cycling in the state.
Century-Old Stacks Under Keweenaw Snow
The failure pattern here is cumulative rather than sudden. A hundred and twenty winters of water entering soft mortar, freezing and expanding leaves joints that have lost significant depth even where the brick faces still look intact from the ground.
On housing of this age and in this climate, we would rather assess the actual joint depth than judge from a photograph. Where the masonry is sound it is genuinely sound – these were well-built stacks – but where it has gone, it has usually gone further than the exterior suggests.