Houghton calls itself the Birthplace of Professional Hockey, and the history backs it up
When you think of where hockey was born, you probably think of Canada. But the world’s first fully professional hockey league did not start in Montreal or Toronto. It started in a copper-mining town in the U.P.
That town is Houghton, way out in the Copper Country, and it proudly calls itself the Birthplace of Professional Hockey.
It happened because of copper.
In the early 1900s, the mines of the western U.P. were booming, and money was pouring into towns like Houghton and Calumet. With money came the ability to do something nobody else was doing openly yet: pay hockey players to play.
The local team, the Portage Lakes Hockey Club, started paying all of its players around 1903, which made it the first fully professional hockey team anywhere.
They played in a brand-new arena called the Amphidrome, right on the shore of Portage Lake. In one of its first games, in December 1902, the Portage Lakes thrashed the University of Toronto 13 to 2 in front of more than 5,000 fans.
Then, in 1904, two local figures, a businessman named James Dee and a transplanted Ontario dentist named “Doc” Gibson, took it a step further. They organized an entire professional league.
They called it the International Hockey League, and it was the first of its kind in the world. Five teams played in it, and three of them were right here in the U.P., in Houghton, Calumet, and Sault Ste. Marie. The other two came from Pittsburgh and across the border in Canada.
And the U.P. teams were not just first. They were good. The 1904 Portage Lakes beat the best teams in the United States and even knocked off a Montreal club billed as the champions of Canada.
The league only lasted three seasons. Once Canada started openly paying its own players, the talent drifted back north and the league folded in 1907. But by then the U.P. had already done it first.
That old arena burned down in 1927 and was rebuilt as the Dee Stadium, named for James Dee himself. It still stands in Houghton today, home to a hockey museum and, for decades, to the Michigan Tech Huskies.
It is no accident that hockey runs so deep up here. The U.P. is rink country, the kind of place where kids learn to skate before they can spell, and it has been sending players off to the pros for more than a century.
It is one more thing the U.P. did first and biggest, like the busiest lock system in the world over in the Soo.
And it is one more bit of Yooper pride, right up there with the Nobel Prize winner who grew up in Ishpeming.
So the next time someone tells you hockey belongs to Canada, you can smile and remind them. The pros started paying to play right here, on a frozen lake in the Copper Country, more than 120 years ago.
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