My Greatgrandpa Harvey was a baseball player for the Aetna Mine team in Copper Harbor. In those days the ball was delivered by underhand. They would walk all of the way to Calumet to play the team there. The trip would take three days one way.
At one time my Greatgrandma Harvey got tired of the weather and told Richard to go and find work in a warmer climate. He went to St. Louis by train and sent for the family. They arrived all bundled up in clothes of the northern climes. There were African Americans all over at the train station. My Grandfather went to play with them and Greatgrandma was ticketed and charged with cavorting. My Greatgrandpa never showed up and so they took the train back to the Copper Country. She was held up by the stagecoach driver on the way back to Eagle Harbor!
They ran the big boarding house in Deleware for a time. Horace Greely was a guest and that's when he proclaimed, "Go west young men." That's where the Buckeye Boys lived in the summer.
They bought the house at the harbor for $600 and ran a boarding house there. They lived there until the late 1800's and then moved to Calumet where they opened the Calumet Bottling Works on Pine Street. They later moved to Florida Street in Laurium and the business was changed to Harvey Bottling Works.
My Grandfather would deliver pop to the Keweenaw via the Keweenaw Central Railroad before 1919. He would load the soda onto box cars in Red Jacket and drop it off at Ojibway, Seneca, Vansville, Phoenix, the Casino, the junction for Central, Delaware, Wyoming or Helltown, and Mandan. A team would meet the train at Wyoming and take it on to Copper Harbor. There would be another team waiting at the junction to take the sasparilla pop to the Brown Cafe in Wyoming. (Wyoming is near the junction of the Lac La Belle Rd. and US 41) They named it "Helltown" because of all of the bar fights there. The cafe was owned by Charles Brown and Grandfather would wait at the cafe for the train to turn around at Mandan. Each trip to the Keweenaw took about three hours.
The lemon soda that they made was shipped to Mayo Clinic. Besides the two sodas mentioned they also made "Iron Brew". In those days the soda sold for 5 cents a bottle and sometimes two for a nickle. The bottling co. had one of the first foot powered capping machines. It was called the crown cork and seal.
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