The history of Charter Township of Portage

Carnegie's gift replaces the old armory building

The Carnegie Museum of the Keweenaw is now a local history museum, with changing exhibits on the copper country around it. It stands on Shelden Avenue, built from red brick on a base of red Jacobsville sandstone.

Before any of that, the lot held the Armory Building, home to Company G of the Houghton Light Infantry. In 1908, Andrew Carnegie gave the town $15,000 to put a library there instead. Construction finished in 1909, and the building opened as the Houghton Public Library in 1910.

For nearly a century, this was where people in Houghton came to borrow books. The library stayed in this building until 2006, when it moved to a new site on the waterfront and left the old Carnegie building behind.

A historical society is founded inside the library

In 1913, the library hosted the founding of the Keweenaw Historical Society, the group that still keeps the region's past on record.

Across the waterway, plans were moving for a new library of its own. The city hoped to build it on a lot by the water, where a company called Gundlach had planned a warehouse. That warehouse burned down in 2004, clearing the way for a new building there instead.

Citizens open a museum in the empty library

When the library moved out in June 2006, the old Carnegie building sat empty on Shelden Avenue. A group of citizens who cared about local history asked the Houghton City Council for a chance to use it.

The citizens' group got permission to use the building. That fall, the group opened a small display of historical photographs inside the empty building and called it the Carnegie Museum.

Restoration brings back the building's original colors

The City of Houghton bought the building from the school district a few years later, and the museum kept growing inside it. Workers restored the original trim colors from 1909. The old children's library became a Community Room with a stage and seating for fifty people. The building's "Gentleman's Smoking Room" became the museum office and a room on Houghton's own history.

In October 2013, the National Park Service named the Carnegie Museum of the Keweenaw a Heritage Site of the Keweenaw National Historical Park, one of about twenty-one such sites across the copper country.

Volunteers run the museum amid a changing street

Today the museum runs on volunteers, led by part-time director Elise Nelson, inside a building the city still owns. Upstairs holds changing exhibits on the Keweenaw's history, culture, and science. The walls carry oil paintings by Ray Lahikainen, a painter who grew up in nearby Dollar Bay and came home in retirement to paint the place he was from.

Outside the door, Shelden Avenue still carries the rhythm of a small downtown. A wine bar opened a hundred feet away in 2026, and the city has been building a small public park down the block. In 2025, someone stole an Israeli flag from a storefront on the street, caught on camera just before 1:30 in the morning.

South of town, the ground beneath the Keweenaw Peninsula tells a harder history. In 1895, a fire in the Osceola copper mine near Calumet killed thirty miners. In 1927, an air blast ripped through the Quincy Mine south of Houghton, more than four thousand feet underground, trapping and killing eight men. The library on Shelden Avenue opened its doors the same years those mines were taking lives beneath the hills around it.