235 South McKinstry Street
Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills, American Brass Company, Anaconda American Brass
Have you ever felt pollution? That's how thick the air seemed the day I shot these photographs. I’d been meaning to look into this structure for ages, and the day I finally got around to it, Delray’s industrial smog hung so low in the air that it was palpable. Before we dive into this structure and its future, we must understand the company that built it.
In April 1880, the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills was incorporated with $100,000 in capital stock. The board of directors was jam-packed with recognizable names, even to the untrained eye. Christian H. Buhl, former Detroit Mayor, was President, and Oliver Goldsmith, a local businessman, was Vice President and Treasurer. Other involved parties were Russel A. Alger, who would later become a U.S. Senator, the U.S. Secretary of War, and Governor of Michigan, Theo D. Buhl, son of Christian H. Buhl, Thomas A. Bissell, and Fred Seymour.
The business was initially located at the corner of Larned and 4th Streets, which would have been somewhere around where the Joe Louis Parking Garage stands today. According to the articles of incorporation, the company planned to manufacture “sheet copper and brass, copper rivets, copper and brass wire, copper bars, bottoms and other articles in that line.”
By 1886, the business’ property at Larned and 4th was listed for sale. The operation was still utilizing the property, but they made it clear that the structures would be made available as soon as their new mills on the west side of the city were complete. In September, the Detroit Free Press shared an update on the plans for the new build. The primary facility would measure “504x150 feet in size and sixty-five feet high,” with four additional structures averaging “150x70 feet.” William Scott & Company were the builders, and the complex would be located at Mckinstry and the Wabash Railroad, where these photographs were taken. That said, I don’t think the article describes the structure you see here.
In 1889, work may have been ongoing. According to an advertisement for the Fisher Electric Company, the mill was to have 250 incandescent lights, which is a lot. I believe the first mills were complete at this location by 1890, give or take a few months.
Soon after the mill was complete, the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills likely went on a hiring spree. The move was a much larger facility, which meant more men were required to run at capacity. As the mills grew, so did the workforce. By the mid-1890s, DCBRM had a baseball team. This was common for the era, as amateur leagues were quite popular prior to the rise of the majors.
On January 23, 1894, Christian H. Buhl died. He was 83. Soon, the company he helped get off the ground would be one of the largest of its kind in the world.
In 1897, the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills hired E. A. Walshe & Son to design an addition to their mills. I’m unsure what the addition entailed, but the company continued expanding. In March 1899, permits were filed for another addition, a 1-story brick tube mill at 101-105 McKinstry Avenue. The permit was worth $3,000. That year, the paper called the mills the largest copper and brass manufacturing facility in Michigan and one of the largest in the United States.
In November 1899, Rogers & McFarlane were preparing another addition to the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills. The structure would sit at the “southwest corner of McKinstry Avenue and the Wabash Railroad.” This may be the structure pictured here, but I can’t be sure. In December, Rogers & McFarlane had drawn up plans for a single-story machine shop built to connect to their plant. According to the Detroit Free Press, ‘The roof will be supported by steel trusses resting upon steel columns encased with brick. It will cost $3,500.”
In January 1890, two bars of copper were stolen from the mills, each weighing 70 pounds. Detroit Police found the bars at a store run by Charles Barrick. The owner said that he purchased them from Frank Miller, who said that one of the boarders at his home must have stolen them and left them at the house. Miller said that his wife found them and sold them to Barrick. I’m unsure what happened, but the copper was worth a pretty penny.
In December 1900, Detroit Mayor William C. Maybury began collecting letters from prominent Detroiters to be encased inside a time capsule. In addition to commenting on the city’s health at the time, the writers were asked to predict what Detroit might be like in a century. The letters were placed inside a copper box given to the city by the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills. The time capsule was set to be opened a century later.
The mills continued to expand as the twentieth century came into full swing. In May 1901, a significant addition was planned at the corner of River Street and McKinstry Avenue. Jefferson was called River Street in this part of Detroit for a few more years. Additionally, the company was set to build a new office building on McKinstry opposite the mill. I’m not certain if this structure was ever built, as a new one was constructed on Clark Street a few years later. Still, the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills continued to grow into the 1900s. In 1902, another significant addition was planned.
In the early 1900s, the area surrounding the mills and Delray generally was the wild, wild west. In March 1903, watchman Joseph McCaffrey saw two men inside the company’s yard who weren’t employees. The men threw copper over the fence, and McCaffrey opened fire on the intruders. They clapped back and ran away, escaping the watchman. Later that day, Van Der Werken, another watchman, saw two men get out of a wagon and start picking up materials. He fired shots at them, which caused alarm, and the thieves ran away, leaving their horse and wagon behind, which, it turns out, were stolen.
Throughout my research on this piece, I found numerous reports of accidents at the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills. Working here was dangerous, and it wasn’t uncommon for workers to be severely injured or die at work. In May 1903, two men had body parts crushed on the same day. George Wood had his left arm completely crushed between two rollers, and Alex Bush’s right thumb was “crushed to a jelly.” The Detroit Free Press reported that he would likely lose it at the hospital.
Part of the reason that this location was so desirable for industry was its proximity to the railroad. The Wabash Railroad ran directly north of the mills, and there were industrial spurs jutting off the main line to service different businesses. The structure pictured here was built around, or modified to fit, a spur to service the mills and the Detroit Harbor Terminals Building across Jefferson. The structure has a curvature on the north side to accommodate this, which is unique from a bird's eye view. In October 1903, the Wabash Railroad purchased land on the west side of Ferdinand Avenue to build a new yard and line. It was meant to service the DCBRM and an automobile manufacturer nearby.
Every year in the early 1900s, the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills employees took an excursion to Put-in-Bay, Ohio. On August 20, 1904, over 500 employees were loaded onto the Frank E. Kirby steamer to head south.
By the early 1900s, there weren’t adverts for the company’s baseball team anymore, but the bowling league was in full swing. Formerly a part of the Manufacturers League, the company had an in-house one, too, and may have been a part of the Copper and Brass League. Locally, the teams were broken up by department. On October 23, 1904, there was a three-way tie for first place between the Copper, Brass, and Office departments. Next came the Wire and Mechanical departments, and the Tube department was in last place with zero wins.
In January 1907, Field, Hinchman, & Smith had drawn up plans for a $15,000 addition to the mills. The following year, the company increased its capital from $1,000,000 to $1,500,000. During this era, it was still incredibly common to find articles about workers losing hands and fingers, breaking bones, and occasionally dying on the job.
In September 1908, an argument over $15 turned fatal at the mills. A few years before, Louis Di Capo had sent $85 to his wife’s stepfather, Vito Laperno, in Italy to help fund his trip to America. Over time, Laperno paid Di Capo back. Eventually, needing his money back, Di Capo asked for the rest of his repayment. His stepfather-in-law said, “I will pay you with a crack in the face.” This infuriated Di Capo, so he sent a friend to get the money for him. Laperno said the same thing to the friend, and Di Capo was still missing his $15. Both men worked at the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills, so Di Capo decided to confront the loanee at work.
Around 6:30 AM, After asking for his $15, Laperno retorted the same wise-guy reply, which made Di Capo blow his top. He pulled a revolver and shot Laperno five times. This caused the man to fall to the floor, and Di Capo thought he saw him reaching for a blade on the ground, so he grabbed it and stabbed him six or seven times. He told the other workers nearby not to mess with his body, ran outside, and jumped the fence, eventually turning himself in later that day. Turns out, the two men had a history. Laperno had reportedly tried to stab Di Capo previously, and their neighbors weren’t surprised that one had killed the other.
The Detroit Free Press reported, “He [Di Capo] told his story with all the fire of a primitive mind that does not comprehend that there is any moral error involved in such an act.” This is a peek into how some whites felt about Italian immigrants at the time and how the ethnic group was viewed as less than others. Though not as murderous as the 1890s, discrimination against Italians in America was an issue across the country. Louis Di Capo was found guilty in December 1908 and was sentenced to either 20 or 25 years at Marquette Prison, depending on the article you look at.
Early in 1909, John Horvat lost a leg while working at the plant and sued the company. He got $475, which is roughly $16,000 in 2024. In May, a fire in the roof of the wire mill caused $200 in damages. The cause was not known. In September, William Berry was crushed by a crane and died on site. According to the Detroit Free Press, 25 people died in Detroit’s factories, and 50 more were severely injured that year. Those statistics seem low.
By 1910, the company’s capital stock was increased again from $1,500,000 to $2,000,000. That year, the company was said to employ roughly 2,000 men. Detroit’s industrialists with factories and mills in Delray and the surrounding area were fed up with the city’s slow pace at upgrading the street car lines. According to a piece in the Detroit Free Press, “This condition has militated severely against the manufacturers in this section, due to their inability to secure employees.” With car ownership a decade or more away for most Detroiters, the street car system was the mode of transportation most people used. We’re still crying for better public transit one hundred fourteen years later.
In June 1910, Frank O’Neil, 48, was buried under a big machine in a wheel pit in the plant and died. That same month, William Leslie and Frank Gawak were splattered with white-hot copper after tripping over a bloc of wood and falling while carrying a ladle full of the molten material. Leslie was covered head to foot and was expected to die, whereas Gawak was expected to survive.
In 1912, John Stenkie died from his injuries while working at the plant. On September 14, 1913, employees at DCBRM threw hot cinders too close to an outbuilding at the mills, starting a fire that took firefighters a half hour to extinguish and caused $1,000 in damage. In 1915, another addition was completed at the mill. The following year, the company’s capital stock was upgraded again, reaching $3,000,000.
By 1917, the DCBRM plant was contracted for government work, likely relating to the United States’ involvement in World War One. That same year, the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills had warehouses in Chicago and St. Louis and branch offices in Cincinnati, New York, and San Francisco. Their only mills were in Detroit.
I believe that by 1920, most of the construction at the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills was complete. Minor additions and renovations occurred after that, but the majority of construction was done. The structure pictured here was the smallest of three between the Wabash Railroad and Jefferson Avenue. According to the 1921 Sanborn Map, this structure was utilized as a ‘brazed tube mill’ and ‘seamless tube mill.’ A bridge over McKinstry Avenue connected it to the brass and copper mills.
Further west, a third structure housed a casting shop, brass wire mill, copper wire mill, and rod mill. The largest rail yard was located just east of the structure pictured here, and a line ran through the other two structures. The DCBRM offices were in a small structure on Clark Street across from the rail yard.
Even as the company’s facilities on the outskirts of Delray entered their final form, deaths and injuries were still commonplace at the mills, and they were reported frequently in the 1920s.
On June 27, 1927, a potential sale of the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills was leaked to the press. The buyer would be one of the subsidiaries of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. The next day, the sale of the DCBRM to the American Brass Company was confirmed, and the sale was expected to be between $12 and $15 million. In 2024, that’s between $214 and $270 million. The plan was to keep the mills open and potentially expand them in the future. At the time, the plant consumed more than 100,000,000 pounds of copper annually.
After the sale, the company wasn’t mentioned in the local media nearly as much. The organization wasn’t localized anymore, and the investors were spread out across the country instead of mainly in Detroit. Most of the mentions of the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills were in obituaries, and there wasn’t much in the paper about the American Brass Company, which had been founded in the 1830s in Connecticut and purchased by Anaconda in 1922. Anaconda was founded in 1881 in Montana.
The American Brass Company weathered the Great Depression and strikes at the Detroit mills in the 1940s. By the 1960s, the company started to struggle and changed its name to the Anaconda American Brass Company. To understand these struggles, we need to go back a few decades.
Starting in the 1920s, Anaconda Copper owned Chuquicamata, a large, open-pit copper mine in Chile. In 1971, the mine was nationalized by newly elected president Salvador Allende Gossens, a socialist. He nationalized the mine, taking it from Anaconda through expropriation. This was catastrophic for Anaconda Copper, and the company started to feel the squeeze. Down in Chile, the United States began to undermine the socialist state, which resulted in a coup that led to Salvador Allende Gossens refusing to give up power and committing suicide while his followers were killed, imprisoned, or scattered around the region. Anaconda was eventually paid for the mine, but it was likely not what it was worth to the company in 1971, and, for many employees, the damage had been done.
Mrs. Iris Kwek was one of the employees affected by the downturn of Anaconda in the 1970s. She started at American Brass when she was 18 and worked there for three decades, getting a home economics degree at night from Wayne State along the way. She knew she could have made more money elsewhere, but she stuck around at Anaconda because of the pension she had been working towards. According to the Detroit Free Press, “if she continued to work for the company until she was 65, she could count on a pension of about $100 a week.” Combined with her husband’s smaller pension from the City of Detroit and Social Security, the two could live well in retirement. However, in 1971, Mrs. Kwek was informed that she would be let go in August and get nothing from her 30 years of pension rights.
She contacted Senator Harrison A. Williams Jr. from New Jersey, who had been working on American pension plans for two years. He started an investigation on Anaconda, and an hour after a subcommittee met with the company, Mrs. Kwek was called into her boss's office and told that they had a new job for her. The following week, her boss said it had fallen through, and she was let go from Anaconda with nothing. According to the Detroit Free Press, “They [Anaconda] were really sorry.”
Mrs. Kwek’s story was emblematic of the beginning of the end of the complex that took 30 years to build on the outskirts of Detroit’s Delray neighborhood. This was one of the first significant closures at the mills, and the last mention of the company I found in Detroit was in 1973. The company was mentioned in the late 1970s and 1980s in Detroit Edison’s notices of hearing to modify its rate schedules.
In 1977, Anaconda American Brass was acquired by the Atlantic Richfield Company, or ARCO, and would bounce around into the 2000s at various companies.
Eventually, the structure pictured here was turned into a warehouse. All of the other structures in the complex have been demolished, other than the offices on Clark Street, which I may photograph at some point. Likely, the structures and land here are still heavily polluted thanks to decades of brass and copper metal work.
At some point, the Great Lakes Water Authority, Michigan’s regional water authority, came into ownership of the property. The GLWA put the property up for sale in 2020, and according to city documents, New Horizons, LLC offered to purchase it for $1.4 million. I’m unsure if that purchase went through, as it’s currently owned by The Ambassador Port Company, LLC, which is a Maroun Company. The Marouns have increased their footprint in the area recently, coming into ownership of the former Harbor Terminals Building across Jefferson from the structure pictured here. Like that building, I imagine this one will come down at some point to make way for whatever the Marouns have planned for the area.
However, a new sign appeared on the Jefferson Avenue side of the building advertising warehouse space last year. Though it doesn’t say that space inside this structure is available, the building is currently being used for storage. On my recent visit, a door on the McKinstry side was wide open, and I looked through it while standing in the street. There were dozens, maybe hundreds, of storage bags inside, running the factory length from the former Wabash Railroad line to Jefferson Avenue. They were packed tightly into a line, running directly down the center of the former mill. I couldn’t be certain what was inside, but my mind quickly went to hazardous waste materials. That assumption might be due to my pessimistic mood about the owners of this structure and its likely future; however, regardless of the contents of the bags, their placement inside is strange.
Jim Saros owns the entire parcel on the Clark Street side of the structure. O-J Land Development Companies, Inc. owns the land on the other side of McKinstry where the other Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills structures used to stand. Recently, dozens of Ford trucks were parked here for storage with a 24/7 security guard. While photographing this structure, they questioned what I was doing but left me alone after I told them what I was after.
On December 31, 2000, the time capsule that Mayor Maybury had stowed inside a case delivered by the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills was opened by Mayor Dennis Archer. The Detroit Historical Society has cataloged the contents, but one of my favorite quotes comes from Orrin R. Baldwin, a Detroit businessman. He said, “I predict further that Sandwich, Windsor, and Walkerville now in Canada will be a part of the City of Detroit and that Ontario will be a state of the United States of America.”
My partner Kira and I have had a joke argument for a few years about whether or not Windsor is a suburb of Detroit. I feel that it is because it wouldn’t be there in the current state that it is if Detroit wasn’t there, and plenty of Windsorites commute across the Detroit River for work daily. She disagrees because Canada is a different country and you can’t just go there on a whim; you have to have your paperwork in order, have a passport, and not be a felon to gain entry. Over 120 years later, I’d like to think that Orrin R. Baldwin would have agreed with me.
