Station: Metropolitan, MI

Metropolitan was a mining town at the west end of the Chicago & North Western Metropolitan/Felch branch in central Dickenson County. The village was platted by the Metropolitan Mining Company in 1881. It was originally in Marquette County, then transferred to Iron County in 1885 and to Dickenson County in 1891. This village was also known as Felch Mountain.

Photo Info: Top, a section crew on the Metropolitan Branch of the C&NW, near the Metropolitan depot around 1910. 2nd photo, a similar view about 1910 showing the disk signal, likely a train order signal. The buildings just past the depot include an ice house and store where the post office was located.

Notes

Time Line

1885.  June 23. A.H. Butts, secretary of the Chicago lumber company, has just returned from the lumber camp near Metropolitan, Mich., a point in the pineries four miles north of Escanaba. He said the night before he left the camp the mercury had dropped 48 degrees below zero. This was the climax of four days of very extreme weather. That night an old trapper and Indian hunter named Tom Dudging, returning from hunting, was killed and eaten by wolves within two miles of camp. The wolves there are more numerous and bold than usual, on account of the scarcity of small game. His friends searching for him the next morning found his closely gnawed bones. Thirteen dead wolves were lying near him, pierced by his rifle balls, and his Winchester rifle by his side, with one chamber loaded. [Trenton Evening Times, NJ.]

1888. Something of a little railroad accident happened on Tuesday up on the Y heading to the Northwestern mine, ditching a freight car and placing an engine and tender hors du combat, until the wrecking train put them to rights. No body hurt fortunately. [DD-1888-0324]

1890. The County Hospital at Metropolitan has two patients, a paraletic (sic) from Iron River, and an individual who fell from a scaffolding at this place. [DD-1890-0830]

1896. As the accommodation train was backing up to the station at Metropolitan Thursday noon, of last week, a little daughter of Angus McKinnon and wife, who had come to the station to meet her parents, returning from a trip to this city, stepped upon the track barely six feet from the advancing train. Nobody was near enough to rescue the little one (she is only three years old,) nor could the train be stopped and the little child was knocked down and run over by the caboose, one of her legs were [sic] cut off above the knee and the toes of the other foot crushed. She did not lose consciousness and when her mother reached her said[,] "Mamma, I was coming to meet you." [RTR-1896-0627]

1918. The C&NW had an agent operator here on the day shift. [TRT]