While I was in Michigan, I camped in a historic state park called "Fayette." The DNR website doesn’t do Fayette justice. It’s the site of an old pig-iron smelting boom town from the late 19th century. The remains of the couple decades of its heyday are kept in a tasteful and picturesque mix of ruin and restoration.
The old smelters are still standing (left) and parts of the company store (right) and some of the charcoal kilns (the cone to the very far left). And the little harbor where the schooners took away the pig-steel ingots is still functioning.
This is the town hotel.
Through the window is the superintendent’s house, a building that was the height of Northwoods opulence at the time, but would be barely middle-class now.
All the informational plaques gave me the tantalizing impression that I could recreate my own steam-era smelting operation if I needed. The iron ore, charcoal, and limestone (for slag purification) are crushed by steam-powered machines, then carried to the top of the smelters in steam-powered lifts. As they pour down the stacks, they are fanned into extreme heat by pre-heated air injected by a steam-powered blower assembly.
This operation was the opposite of steam-punk. There was no fashion, no prettiness. There was simply the rough power of labor and machine.
In the park gift shop they had a series of historical romance novels set in Fayette. Because when I think of grim and tough immigrants working long hours for low pay in the most brutal environment in the United States, I think of romance. Here’s the synopsis for Donna Winter‘s Fayette: A Time to Laugh:
"The greatest passion of Flora McAdams’ life has always been her love of animals. From girlhood, she has made it her mission to care for orphaned wild creatures and ailing family pets in the pig iron town of Fayette. Now, at age eighteen, she has no lack of four-footed patients needing her skill, and no time or thought for romance, until a quiet Norwegian machinist comes to town."
Quiet Norwegian machinists are the new vampire.
