The Copper Range Company, organized in January 1899 as a fully integrated industrial enterprise, operated the Champion, Baltic, and Trimountain copper mines south of Houghton, milling facilities, and a large smelting works along Portage Lake. Unusual among Keweenaw copper district companies, its first venture was construction of the Copper Range Railroad, the vital link between its dispersed operations, and unlike most mining company railways it also hauled freight for other companies and maintained an active passenger service. In Houghton, the company developed a multipurpose waterfront operation along a half-mile stretch of Portage Lake that included its roundhouse and car repair facility, full-service dock, freight house, and car yard. After these facilities were completed in 1900, supplies arriving by ship could be distributed along the Portage and the same ships loaded with finished copper ingots from the company smelter. The railroad's administrative headquarters were based in the main Houghton passenger depot, completed in 1899, designed by chief engineer Thomas Appleton, and built by Pendergast and Clarkson of Chicago at a cost of over $10,000. More elegant than the company's other depots, the two-story brick building had accents of red Jacobsville sandstone, with a ground floor containing a ticket office, baggage room, and separate ladies' and men's waiting rooms, second-floor offices and storage space, and a 400-foot wooden platform on the north side sheltered by an overhanging roof. Nearly 20,000 cubic feet of rock were removed from the hillside to make room for the depot, and a stairway once descended the hillside to give West Houghton residents easy access to the station. Although passenger service ended in the 1920s, copper ore and other freight kept the line in business for several more decades, until the last train traveled from McKeever junction in Ontonagon to the roundhouse at Houghton on November 3, 1972.