Biographical Dictionary of Copper Country Architects
by Katie Torrey Architect: Charles Archibald Pearce Location: 413, 409, 405, 401, 331, 327, 325, 317, 313, 309 Wright St., Hancock Built: 1900 Contractors: Parker & Hamill In developing the Quincy Hillside Addition to Hancock, the Quincy Mining Company displaced some residents. To accommodate them, the company built ten houses for sale. Built by contractors… Read more Quincy Mining Company Houses
by Katie Torrey Architect: Charles Archibald Pearce Location: 308 Harris St., East Hancock Built: 1900 Pearce designed this house for Richard and Catherine Light. Richard was a travel agent and commissioner. This house originally had a tower on the west side, which was later replaced by a dormer. The Light family owned this house until… Read more Richard Light House
by Katie Torrey Architect: Charles Archibald Pearce Location: 209 Center St., East Hancock Built: ca. 1900 If Pearce had any role in the design of this house, he borrowed heavily from Frank P. Allen, who published this design in his 1892 book Artistic Dwellings. Blueprints of Allen’s design were found in the house in 1986.1 Pearce… Read more Edwin Henwood House
by Katie Torrey Architect: Charles Archibald Pearce Location: 312 Cooper St., East Hancock Built: ca 1900 Pearce designed this house for his mother, Emma Jane Pearce, and his siblings.1 After his mother died in 1908, his unmarried sisters, Amy and Rhoda Pearce, inherited the house and continued to live there for the rest of their lives.2 Neither… Read more Emma Jane Pearce House
by Katie Torrey Architect: Charles Archibald Pearce Alternative Name: Finlandia University, Old Main Location: 601 Quincy St., Hancock Built: 1900 Contractors: Bajari & Ulseth; William Scott, masonry Suomi Old Main was the first permanent structure to be built for the Suomi Academy, a school that was started by the Finnish Lutheran Church to meet the spiritual… Read more Suomi College, Old Main
by Jeremy Rickli Architect: Henry Leopold Ottenheimer Location: 918 College Avenue, Houghton Built: 1899-1900 Allen Rees, a prominent lawyer, employed Ottenheimer to design his asymmetrical Classical Revival-style house. The two-and-a-half-story house has two-story Ionic columns and a squat two-story corner tower. The broad hip roof extends to cover the portico. Round-arched dormer windows punctuate the… Read more Allen Rees House
by Jeremy Rickli Architect: Henry Leopold Ottenheimer Location: Northwest corner of Shelden Avenue and Isle Royale Street, Houghton Built: 1899-1900 Contractor: Paul Mueller, Chicago; local superintendent, Herman Gundlach Located directly north of the Douglass House, the Shelden-Dee block was commissioned by James R. Dee and Mary Shelden in the late 1890s. The building provided elegant… Read more Shelden-Dee Block
by Jeremy Rickli Architect: Henry Leopold Ottenheimer Location: Southwest corner of Isle Royale Street and Shelden Avenue, Houghton Built: 1899-1900 Contractor: Paul Mueller, Chicago; local superintendent, Herman Gundlach The original Douglass House was built in 1860 out of wood and set back from Shelden Avenue, on Montezuma, with a terraced garden stretching to Shelden. Ottenheimer… Read more Douglass House
by David Bandlow Architect: Carl E. Nystrom Location: 332 5th Street, Calumet Built: 1900 Demolished The three-story brick building, 29’ x 112’, was built in the fall of 1900. Mary Corgan, who also owned property in Copper Harbor, was the owner of this speculatively built commercial block located next to the old firehouse. The building… Read more Corgan Block
by Morgan Davis. Architect: Charles W. Maass Location: 216-220 6th Street, corner of Oak, Calumet Addition: 1899-1900 John and Joseph Vertin established this department store, which grew to be biggest in the Copper Country. The ‘big store’ of the Copper Country housed everything a miner or millionaire family could need. Groceries, wallpaper, millinery, ready-to-wear, furniture,… Read more Vertin’s Department Store