A wrong turn can lead to a good story. Sometimes, so can a U-turn.

On the way home from the Porcupine Mountains, a small sign outside Rockland caught my attention: Irish Hollow Cemetery. I turned down the dirt road expecting a quick stop. Instead, I found gravestones dating back to the earliest days of the western UP copper boom and evidence of a community I never knew existed.

In this episode, we follow those stones into the world that once surrounded them: Irish copper miners crossing an ocean for work, a booming mining settlement that has nearly disappeared into the woods, a long-lost Catholic church, families facing deadly nineteenth-century epidemics, and a massive piece of native copper that took miners more than a year to cut apart.

And then there's the riot.

An axe. A dead miner. A burning saloon. Men reportedly leaping from the windows and roof. Hundreds of angry Irish miners supposedly preparing to march through the wilderness for revenge.

It's a great story.

But is it true?

Irish Hollow is a story about immigration, mining, disease, folklore, and how an entire community can almost disappear while the people who lived there remain, quite literally, carved in stone.

Want to know more?

Explore the historical records, additional reading, and some of the evidence behind this episode here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q7GplsAxRoEYysKg_iogvbjvlJzObHNx/view?usp=drive_link

Have a story, correction, family connection, or piece of UP history I should investigate?

Email me at explorindaupeh@gmail.com

Want to support the show?
Explorin’ Da UP, Eh! is independently researched and produced. If you’d like to help cover gas, research materials, site admission, and other costs that go into exploring the UP and telling these stories, you can leave a completely optional tip here: 💲Venmo💲