Houses Past and Way Past

While up in Hancock earlier this week, I passed by the house where I lived from 1988-1991, at the corner of two steep uphill streets.

Elevation Street House

It is, I think, a nice little house – though the current owners could be taking better care of it. Apart from the view to the south (a view I cannot remember ever admiring, even though it’s pretty good), the area around the house has been dramatically transformed since I last saw it. The scrubby woods on three sides of the house are now mostly gone, having been replaced by many new houses and office buildings, new high and elementary schools, churches, and a hospital.  This isn’t the first time the area has been transformed, though. Here’s what the neighborhood looked like in 1911:

Elevation Street House

The towering structure behind the house is a mine hoist, working one of the many copper lodes that made Hancock (temporarily) prosperous and populous. Between the cows in the foreground and the house in the middle ground is a trolley car, running up Ingot Street to mine locations further east. None of that is there any more, of course – except as ruins: heavy concrete foundations hiding in the woods, a few scary-looking openings in the earth, that kind of thing.

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