Delaware is an

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

in Grant Township in

Keweenaw County Keweenaw County (, ) is a county in the western Upper Peninsula of the U.S. state of Michigan. As of the 2020 census, the county's population was 2,046, making it Michigan's least populous county. It is also the state's largest county by total ...

in the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its so ...

Michigan Michigan ( ) is a peninsular U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, Upper Midwestern United States. It shares water and land boundaries with Minnesota to the northwest, Wisconsin to the west, ...

. It was established in 1846 as a

copper mining Copper extraction is the multi-stage process of obtaining copper from list of copper ores, its ores. The conversion of copper ores consists of a series of physical, chemical, and electrochemical processes. Methods have evolved and vary with coun ...

town. It is located in the

Keweenaw Peninsula The Keweenaw Peninsula (, ) is a peninsula of the U.S. state of Michigan. Part of the greater landmass of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Upper Peninsula, the Keweenaw Peninsula projects about northeasterly into Lake Superior, forming Keweena ...

, ten miles south of Copper Harbor and around twenty five miles north of Calumet. When the town was first settled it had a population of one hundred and rose to a population close to 1200 during full operation. When the town first started out the mining companies brought everything including housing, mining buildings,

schools A school is the educational institution (and, in the case of in-person learning, the building) designed to provide learning environments for the teaching of students, usually under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of ...

grocery store A grocery store ( AE), grocery shop or grocer's shop ( BE) or simply grocery is a retail store that primarily retails a general range of food products, which may be fresh or packaged. In everyday US usage, however, "grocery store" is a synon ...

, and a

church Church may refer to: Religion * Church (building), a place/building for Christian religious activities and praying * Church (congregation), a local congregation of a Christian denomination * Church service, a formalized period of Christian comm ...

. Today all that is left is a mining tour and foundations of old mining buildings. This is mostly because there were no other jobs and the location of the town is in a very remote location. The town made attempts to survive but in the end did not make it. The Bete Grise Light is located in the area. Delaware is recognized as the "Snow Capital of the Midwest". The Keweenaw County Road Commission maintains an unofficial record of snowfall at this location. The annual average, dating back to 1910, is around 240 inches. This is largely a result of

Lake-effect snow Lake-effect snow is produced during cooler atmospheric conditions when a cold air mass moves across long expanses of warmer lake water. The lower layer of air, heated by the lake water, picks up water vapor from the lake and rises through colde ...

. This average is the greatest of any location in the

Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes spanning the Canada–United States border. The five lakes are Lake Superior, Superior, Lake Michigan, Michigan, Lake Huron, H ...

snow belts. For the entire U.S. east of the

Rocky Mountains The Rocky Mountains, also known as the Rockies, are a major mountain range and the largest mountain system in North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch in great-circle distance, straight-line distance from the northernmost part of Western Can ...

, only select mountainous locations in

New England New England is a region consisting of six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York (state), New York to the west and by the ...

receive more snow. In the winter of 1978–79, the Delaware station measured a record 390 inches of snow. Measurements are taken once per day at this station. Official

National Weather Service The National Weather Service (NWS) is an Government agency, agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that is tasked with providing weather forecasts, warnings of hazardous weather, and other weathe ...

stations measure snowfall every six hours. This procedural difference leads to systematic underestimation of snowfall at Delaware due to compaction of the new snow over the 24-hour period. Helping to illustrate this point, Mount Bohemia, a ski resort in nearby Lac La Belle, Michigan, reports an annual average of 273 inches.

References

*Monette, Clarence. ''Delaware Mine Michigan: Its History''. Calumet MI: Greenlee Printing, 1987. Unincorporated communities in Keweenaw County, Michigan Unincorporated communities in Michigan Populated places established in 1862 1862 establishments in Michigan {{KeweenawCountyMI-geo-stub