NHPRC Documenting Deomcracy

The Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company Historical Records Digitization Project

Welcome to the Digitization Project Website

Annual Record for 1917

The Project

The Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Mining Company Digitization project, funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, focuses on three record series from the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Mining Company collection. The three series include over 70,000 historical documents contained in lumber, land, and mining annual reports, and over 235 maps dated 1893-1960. There is also a blog documenting the progress of the project; an assortment of photographs pertaining to or contained within the collection; and lesson plans utilizing the source materials to meet Michigan education standards.

The Website

Electric Hoists at the Cliffs Shaft MineAll of the digitized material can be accessed through this website. For information about the collection, the history, the grant, and lesson plans, follow the links in the sidebar. Here you can also find links to the Flikr feed of the collection's photographs, informational posters, and the project blog. There are several organizations that are related to the industry in Michigan and other states, and links to these pages can also be found in the sidebar. Included here is the page of Dr. Terry Reynolds, professor of history at Michigan Technological University and the foremost scholar on the history of iron mining in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
There is a search function powered by Google. This can search the text of the entire website, but as the annual reports themselves have not been indexed, it cannot search within the PDFs. We apologize for this inconvenience.

The most important bit of the website is the EAD Finding Aid. The initial page contains information about the collection, and another sidebar provides links to the Annual Reports for the Mining, Land, Lumber, and Land and Lumber departments, as well as the Historical Maps. The various reports are organized by year, and clicking on the individual chapter links opens the PDF document in a new page. The maps are organized according to their original arrangement, with thumbnails for each item rather than text links. Clicking on the thumbnail opens the map in a new page as well, and the maximum size can be viewed there. Both the reports and the maps can be saved by right-clicking on them in this new window and selecting "Save As."

If there are any questions regarding the collection, the website, the finding aid, or the Central Upper Peninsula and Northern Michigan University Archives, please do not hesitate to use the form found on the Contact Us page.

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