COPPER An American History
Eight thousand years of the metal that built America, and the mission to make it here again.
The Old Copper People
On the shore of Lake Superior, Archaic peoples hammered pure native copper into tools. It is among the oldest metalworking anywhere on Earth.
Hopewell trade
Lake Superior copper was worked into falcons in Ohio and traded across a continent.
The Birdman of Etowah
Mississippian artisans beat copper into falcon-warriors, carried from Cahokia across half a continent.
The mine that became a prison
British America's first chartered copper mine ran dry, then held Revolutionary prisoners deep in its worked-out shafts.
The Fugio cent
The first coin the United States ever issued was copper. Franklin's design read 'Mind Your Business.'
Copper for Old Ironsides
Paul Revere's bolts and spikes held the young navy's most famous frigate together.
Revere's rolling mill
Paul Revere became the first American to roll sheet copper, ending reliance on British mills.
The Keweenaw survey
A state geologist mapped the Keweenaw's copper and set off America's first mineral rush, eight years before California's gold.
Two tons of pure copper
A single mass of native copper, revered by the Ojibwe, was hauled off to the Smithsonian.
The Old Reliable
Quincy paid a dividend every year for half a century, its shaft sinking more than a mile and a half into rock.
Calumet & Hecla
One Michigan company produced more than half the nation's copper.
Pearl Street Station
Edison lit lower Manhattan from the first central power station, and every wire in it was copper.
A Senate seat, bought
William Clark bribes his way into the U.S. Senate.
The Bingham Canyon pit
Daniel Jackling's open pit made copper cheap enough to wire the country. The same ground is still being mined.
Heinze sells out
Augustus Heinze fought Standard Oil in court, sold out, then helped trigger the Panic of 1907.
The Bisbee Deportation
During a strike, a company posse seized 1,300 Bisbee miners at gunpoint, loaded them into cattle cars and left them in the desert.
Rural electrification
Federal co-ops string copper line to farms the utilities skipped.
Wartime production
Smelters poured copper around the clock for shells and wiring, while scrap drives collected copper from American kitchens.
Treasury silver
Too short of copper to wind its atomic electromagnets, the government borrowed 14,700 tons of silver from the Treasury.
The steel penny
The Mint stamps a billion pennies from steel to save copper for the war.
The Berkeley Pit
Butte's Berkeley Pit filled with acid water after the pumps shut off.
Where things stand
Also in Perspective
The United States consumes about 2,200 kt of refined copper a year, mines about 1,000 kt, and refines 850 kt. What closing that gap actually takes.
Read →America has decided to build again, and copper is the one material every part of it depends on. Where copper sits in the rebuilding of American industry.
Read →Copper projects from exploration to refining, in the United States and allied countries, with the status of each.
Read →- Historical photographs and prints are drawn from public-domain and Creative-Commons collections, principally the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, the Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Wikimedia Commons, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Smithsonian Institution. Each image carries its own source and rights line in the caption beside it.
- The narrative and dates in this feature follow Falcon Copper’s sourced timeline of copper in America; figures reproduce their original published sourcing.
This feature is a historical narrative provided for general information and education only. Third-party figures are reproduced with their published sourcing; Falcon Copper does not independently verify third-party data and does not undertake to update it.
Nothing on this page is an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, and nothing here constitutes investment, financial, legal, or tax advice. See full disclosures.