The U.S. Built Only Three Steel Dams. One Is in the Keweenaw — and the Wooden Dam It Replaced Outlasted It.

Almost every dam ever built is made of earth, concrete, or masonry. Steel dams are so rare that the United States built only three of them, ever.

One is in Arizona. One was in Montana, and it failed within a year of going up. The third is standing in the woods west of Houghton, 1,006 feet of riveted steel across the Salmon Trout River — and it has not held back water since 1979, because somebody deliberately cut holes in it.

What happened when they did is the best part of the story.

Two mills, one river

Redridge exists because of copper. In the early 1890s the Atlantic Mining Company put a stamp mill here, on the Lake Superior shore southwest of Houghton, to crush the ore coming out of its inland mines. A stamp mill runs on water, so Atlantic threw a timber crib dam across the Salmon Trout River — a wooden box filled with loose rock and dirt, 50 feet high, 53 feet wide at its base, built of hewn timbers 14 inches thick.

It worked fine until the neighbors showed up. The Baltic Mining Company — which shared a board of directors with Atlantic — opened its own mine and by 1901 had a second stamp mill running at Redridge. Two mills meant roughly double the water, and the wooden dam and its reservoir could not keep up.

So they built one out of steel

The answer was a flat slab buttress dam of structural steel, designed by engineer J. F. Jackson and erected by the Wisconsin Bridge and Iron Company. It was finished in November 1901: about 74 feet high at the center and 1,006 feet long, with a rail line running across the top of it.

They built it immediately upstream of the old timber dam, which stayed right where it was, submerged in the enlarged reservoir behind the new steel wall.

Steel was a strange choice, and the industry never really took to it. The Ashfork-Bainbridge dam went up in Arizona in 1898. Hauser Lake Dam followed in Montana in 1907 and collapsed inside of a year. After that, essentially nobody built another one. Redridge is the survivor of a three-item experiment that the engineering world quietly abandoned.

The mines leave, the dam stays

The Atlantic mill ran until about 1912. Atlantic itself was absorbed into the Copper Range Company, the mills were eventually dismantled, and the reason for the dam simply evaporated. Nobody maintained it.

On Easter morning in 1941, the spillway let go and flooded the ground below. The steel barely noticed — it came through with little damage — but with no mills left to supply, the owners opened the valves and left them open. Water kept overtopping the structure anyway.

So in 1979 the Copper Range Company had large holes cut straight through the steel, specifically so the thing could never impound a reservoir again.

What the water was hiding

The reservoir dropped. And as it fell, the 1890s timber crib dam rose back out of the water — still standing, still intact, still holding.

It is still holding today. The rare steel marvel that was built to replace it has been deliberately disabled for nearly fifty years, while the obsolete wooden box it was supposed to supersede quietly went back to doing the job.

That reversal created the problem Stanton Township now owns. The steel dam picked up its honors — a Michigan Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1985, the National Register of Historic Places in 1992 — and the township took possession of the site that same year. But by 2001 the state was treating the aging timber dam as a significant hazard, and the fixes on offer ran from roughly $311,000 to over a million dollars. Stanton Township has about 1,590 residents. It could not afford any of them.

The compromise came in 2004: crews cut the top 13 feet off the wooden dam to drop the water level and take pressure off the structure. More recent assessments suggest it is not likely to fail soon.

Go stand on it

Redridge is usually called a ghost town, though a handful of people still live there. The mills are gone. What remains is a rusting steel wall in the trees that you can walk out onto, a pool below it where people fish, and behind it a 130-year-old wooden dam still doing quiet work no one asks it to do.

The Keweenaw is full of monuments to the copper boom that built it, and most of them are ruins in the ordinary sense — things that stopped. This one is stranger. Head up across the lift bridge and go look at the only surviving steel dam of three, punched full of holes on purpose, standing guard over the wooden one that outlived it.

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Sources, credits, and reporting details

Sources & accountability

How this story was reported

Editorial methodArchival synthesis

Last verifiedJul. 23, 2026

Corrections statusNo material correction note is recorded on this article.

Verification note: Initial ledger, verified 2026-07-23 during publication prep. Construction dates, dimensions, the three-steel-dams claim, the 1941 spillway failure, the 1979 holes, the revealed timber dam, designations and township cost figures were checked against the municipal archive document and supporting engineering and history sources. Sources date the original timber dam variously to 1891-92, 1892 and 1894, so the article says early 1890s rather than picking one. The three-steel-dams point is attributed as what most sources indicate rather than asserted as certain. No direct quotations. Featured image CC BY-SA 3.0, credit Donovan Squires, resized without cropping. No AI-generated or AI-assisted media.

Primary sources

1. Redridge description, Stanton Township archives — Stanton Township, Houghton County

   Featured image record. Accessed Jul. 23, 2026. Municipal historical document; cited.

   Supports: The first dam was wooden, built by the Atlantic Mining Co. on the Salmon Trout River in 1891-92 to supply water for their stamp mill; timber crib filled with loose rock and dirt, 53 feet wide at the bottom and 28 feet at the top; ownership transferred to Stanton Township in 1992; fears the timber dam might fail and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality treating it as a significant hazard forced the township to consider renovation in 2001; five options ranged from repairing the steel and wooden dams for 311,000 dollars to restoring the entire structure for over a million; the township could not afford any option and a short-term fix removed the upper 13 feet of the wooden structure in 2004 to lower the water level.

   Primary municipal source for the timber dam, the hazard designation, cost options and the 2004 remedy.

Additional reporting

1. Redridge Steel Dam — Wikipedia

   Featured image record. Accessed Jul. 23, 2026. CC BY-SA text; cited.

   Supports: A flat slab buttress dam of steel across the Salmon Trout River in Redridge, Stanton Township, Houghton County, completed 1901; steel is a relatively rare dam material and most sources indicate it was one of only three such dams constructed in the United States, the others being the Ashfork-Bainbridge Steel Dam of 1898 in Arizona and the Hauser Lake Dam of 1907 in Montana, the last of which failed within a year of construction; prior to the steel dam the Atlantic Mining Company built a timber crib dam creating a reservoir supplying the Atlantic stamp mill; listed on the National Register of Historic Places April 2, 1992.

   Source of the three-steel-dams framing, which is attributed as what most sources indicate rather than asserted absolutely.

2. Redridge Steel Dam (Redridge, 1901) — Structurae

   Featured image record. Accessed Jul. 23, 2026. Copyright Structurae; cited.

   Supports: The dam measures 74 feet high at its center and extends 1,006 feet across the river; reservoir access was shared by the Atlantic and Baltic mines, which had a common board of directors; the dam operated until the mines closed and was then unmaintained; on Easter morning of 1941 the spillway broke causing a flood with little damage to the steel portion; owners opened the spillway valves but overtopping continued, and the Copper Range Company, successor to Atlantic, had large holes cut in it in 1979 so it would not retain water, lowering the reservoir and revealing the earlier timber dam; ownership transferred to Stanton Township in 1992.

   Source of dimensions, the 1941 spillway failure, the 1979 holes and the revealing of the timber dam.

3. Redridge, MI – Redridge Dam — michiganrailroads.com

   Featured image record. Accessed Jul. 23, 2026. Copyright michiganrailroads.com; cited.

   Supports: Original timber crib dam built around 1892 by the Atlantic Mining Company, 50 feet high with timbers 14 inches thick hewed flat; water served the Atlantic stamp mill half a mile away; in 1901 a new steel dam was constructed by the Wisconsin Bridge and Iron Company across the Salmon Trout River above the existing cribbed dam; the Copper Range railroad built a steel span bridge at the spillway in 1911; designated a Michigan Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1985; listed on the National Register in 1992; upper 13 feet of the wooden structure removed in 2004.

   Source of the 1985 engineering landmark designation and the built-above-the-timber-dam detail.

4. Redridge Steel Dam — Mi Roadtrip

   Featured image record. Published Feb. 16, 2024. Accessed Jul. 23, 2026. Copyright Mi Roadtrip; cited.

   Supports: The 1901 steel dam was designed by J. F. Jackson and constructed by the Wisconsin Bridge and Iron Company; a rail line ran atop the dam; Atlantic Mining Company became a subsidiary of the Copper Range Company and the mill was abandoned by the mid-1910s and dismantled in the 1940s; after the flood the steel dam was rendered inoperable, dropping the reservoir and revealing the intact wooden dam which continued to hold back water; Stanton Township had 1,590 residents at the 2020 census and lacked funds to repair or replace the dam; recent studies suggest failure is not likely soon; the site is popular with explorers, graffiti artists and anglers, with a small pool below the dam.

   Source of the designer name and the present-day visitor description.

5. History of Redridge Michigan: From Copper Boom to Bust — Michigan4You

   Featured image record. Published Oct. 30, 2025. Accessed Jul. 23, 2026. Copyright Michigan4You; cited.

   Supports: Atlantic built a stamp mill at Redridge in 1892 and a timber crib dam to power it; the neighboring Baltic Mining Company built a second stamp mill at Redridge by 1901, and two mills meant much greater water demand that the 1890s wooden dam and reservoir could not meet; the steel dam was finished in November 1901.

   Source of the two-mills water-demand rationale and the November 1901 completion.

Photo and media credits

1. Redridge Steel Dam.JPG — Donovan Squires / Wikimedia Commons

   Featured image record. Accessed Jul. 23, 2026. CC BY-SA 3.0; credit Donovan Squires.

   Supports: Featured image: the Redridge Steel Dam on the Salmon Trout River. Local copy resized without cropping.

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