also explorer/surveyor douglas houghton went up to the western part of the u.p. and discovered natural iron ore and copper deposits there. the 19th century in michigan can largely be considered extraction of natural resources. so in the last half of the 19th century, most of the lumber in the lower part of the lower peninsula was cut down and harvested and full-scale mining efforts began in the upper peninsula for copper and iron ore. as you can see here, when you are extracting the copper and iron ore, it rarely comes out perfectly pure. this is copper ore that has other impurities in it so that necessitated the building of some of michigan's first factories to process, smelting, forges, to take the raw materials and purify them to make the pure copper that is used in items such as ingots and pots and candlesticks and other things. and all of this, this early manufacturing to process this raw ore is one of the things that set michigan up to become a major manufacturing center in the late 19th and early 20th century. some of the earliest manufacturing industries