A fifth of this Upper Peninsula community's economy is mining. Can it diversify?

For more than 140 years, JM Longyear and its predecessors made most of their fortune from timber and minerals in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Then in 2017, the Marquette, Michigan, firm took a sharp turn away from tradition and acquired a medical device manufacturer. A few years later, the firm turned to residential development.

“We’re in the process of reinventing ourselves,” said Leo Isleib, JM Longyear’s director of development. The firm, started by land surveyor John Longyear, is still owned by his descendants. But times have changed, Isleib said, and they wanted to branch out from the timber business.

Marquette County is also in need of reinvention. The legacy industry that’s dominated the regional economy for 180 years is mining. But business sectors reliant on minerals, timber, and other commodities tend to be volatile. In fact, one of the county’s two mines is scheduled to close in 2029.

“Mining is always in that constant flux—prices go up, prices go down, and costs go up, costs go down,” said Amy Berglund, director of business initiatives at InvestUP.

Economic development agencies like hers work to diversify the economy to dampen those ups and downs.

One of the most promising sectors is manufacturing, which has grown almost continuously since the early 2000s and is now a major contributor to Marquette County’s economy. The challenge is developing the workforce to help the sector grow.

Uneven growth

Marquette County, located along Lake Superior’s south shore, is the biggest economy in the Upper Peninsula (UP). Its population of 68,000 and gross domestic product (GDP) of $3.7 billion, in current dollars, make up about a quarter of the entire UP.

For most of the 2010s, the county’s economy was in decline and shrinking an average of 3 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). This decline was driven largely by mining, which shrank faster.

But in 2019, the economy turned around, growing 2 percent a year on average; 2020 was the exception. Though nearly all economic sectors played some role in the turnaround—most grew by some amount—the drivers were manufacturing and mining. Both grew much faster than the overall economy (Figure 1).

That change shows diversification has opened a new path to growth. But Marquette County still relies heavily on mining partly because other major sectors have lagged.

For example, the government sector, anchored by Northern Michigan University (NMU), shrank nearly every year since the early 2000s, according to BEA. NMU enrollment mostly shrank or remained flat in that period, though it began rebounding in fall 2023.

Health care, another major sector, has grown an average of 1 percent a year since 2019, slower than the overall economy.

“Hospitals in general in the UP are operating at reduced capacity, and that’s simply because they can’t fill positions,” Berglund said. Retaining health care professionals has been especially challenging because of the shortage of housing and child care in the area, she said.

Mining’s enduring impact

Iron ore mining has been a vital industry in the region since before Marquette County was incorporated. Despite mine closures and job cuts over the decades, mining still has an outsized influence.

Cleveland-Cliffs’ Tilden Mine, the UP’s last remaining iron mine, employs more than 900, 3 percent of the county’s labor force. A decade ago, Cliffs employed 1,200 at two mines. The Empire Mine closed in 2016 because the remaining iron ore has too many impurities to be worth extracting under current market conditions, according to Paul Finan, executive vice president of strategic development.

Since 2014, another area mine has produced nickel and copper, which the government considers to be strategic metals. Lundin Mining’s Eagle Mine employs 200 but is expected to close in 2029 with the depletion of economical ore.

These jobs would be hard to replace. The average pay is $117,000, more than double the average for all jobs in the county, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For now, the Tilden Mine is not in danger of closing. Consultants estimate the mine has at least 25 years of life left.

“We’re very comfortable making those assumptions that it’ll be around for a while,” Finan said.

The mine has become more important for Cliffs as it shifts focus from overseas growth to its core North American market. Many U.S. steel mills are near the Great Lakes, giving the region’s iron mines, the only ones in the U.S., a significant transportation advantage.

Nickel and copper mining could continue into the next decade as well. Lundin announced in early 2025 plans to explore for new nickel and copper deposits near Eagle Mine.

Manufacturing’s consistent growth

But mining has been a volatile sector, fluctuating between 8 and 34 percent of Marquette County’s GDP over the past two decades (Figure 2). Diversification would help reduce the county’s reliance on mining.

Among the other major sectors, manufacturing has enjoyed the most sustained growth. Its share of county GDP has doubled to 5 percent over two decades. Employment in the sector has increased 42 percent to 1,100.

Manufacturers range from sawmills to a maker of extruded aluminum products to medical device makers.

The last of these make up a key cluster, employing around a third of all manufacturing workers in the county. The cluster started in 1992 with the founding of Pioneer Surgical Technology by orthopedic surgeon Matthew Songer, who was unhappy with the orthopedic devices available to him. The firm, now known as Resolve Surgical Technologies, grew to more than 200 before it was sold to investors.

Songer went on to found Frontier Medical Devices, the firm JM Longyear purchased in 2017 and renamed Able Medical Devices. Mount Manufacturing, started by a Marquette native in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, relocated to Marquette County in 2022.

“Those companies are growing by leaps and bounds, and, to some extent, are limited in growth by capacity in the workforce,” Berglund said. Other area manufacturers are interested in working on medical devices as well, she said.

Economic developers like Berglund consider clusters a region’s competitive advantage because they can stimulate growth. For example, a concentration of firms doing similar work usually brings a concentration of workers with specialized skills. This environment is attractive to new firms in need of such skills. Mount Manufacturing relocated for that reason. JM Longyear bought Frontier in part because it was assured labor would not be a barrier to growth, according to Isleib.

But there are, so far, few other clusters in Marquette County’s manufacturing sector, and fewer that are growing. Aluminum extrusion is growing but has only one firm. There are many sawmills, but smaller ones are struggling with high equipment cost and less expensive Canadian imports, according to Berglund.

Familiar challenges

Overall, Marquette County’s economy faces challenges familiar to many UP communities.

Labor availability is still a concern for many employers. The county’s labor force has only recently reversed course after a decade-long decline (Figure 3). Recruitment and retention have long been hampered by housing and child care shortages, though Berglund said housing developers are becoming more responsive to demand.

One advantage for Marquette County is NMU, which brings in new residents and trains new workers. In the early 2000s, only about 40 percent of NMU students were from outside the UP. By fall 2024, that figure had increased to 65 percent.

The county’s isolation in the middle of the sparsely populated peninsula is challenging, too. Clustering is more difficult, and shipping costs are higher.

All of these factors affect the way businesses grow in the region.

As JM Longyear evolves into a company that acquires and manages diverse firms, transportation and labor are among constraints it must consider in any expansion, according to Isleib. “We want to make sure we can find the talent pool that we need to support other investments.”