Cornish Pump

Built by the E. P. Allis Company of Milwaukee in 1890/91 and designed by Edwin C. Reynolds, this steam-driven pumping engine was heralded as the nation’s largest when it began operating on January 3, 1893, lifting two hundred tons of water per minute at “D” shaft of the Chapin Iron Mine. Underground conditions shifted the engine out of alignment in 1896, and it was dismantled. The Oliver Iron Mining Company purchased and rebuilt it at shaft “C” of the Ludington Mine in 1907, where it dewatered the combined Chapin, Ludington, and Hamilton mines until electric pumps replaced it in 1914. Patterned after similar pumps used in tin mines in Cornwall, England, it has a flywheel forty feet in diameter that weighs 160 tons and averaged ten revolutions per minute, and it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.

Iron Mountain, Michigan · United States