Silver Islet: The Richest Silver Mine the Lake Reclaimed
For a few astonishing years, a tiny rock off the Sibley Peninsula was one of the richest silver mines on earth.
Off the tip of the Sibley Peninsula sits a speck of rock that, in the 1870s and 1880s, produced a fortune in silver - Silver Islet, for a time one of the richest silver mines in the world.
Miners chased the vein hundreds of metres below Lake Superior, holding back the water with pumps, breakwaters, and sheer stubbornness. When the coal needed to run the pumps failed to arrive one winter, the lake did what it had always threatened to do and flooded the workings for good.
Today the quiet summer community at Silver Islet sits beside one of the most dramatic boom-and-bust stories in the region's history - a reminder that the lake keeps its own ledger.
