The Calumet and Hecla Consolidated Copper Company, which traces its founding to 1864, was the most successful corporation to have mined native copper on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Through nearly a century of mining activity, the company produced in excess of 4.5 billion pounds of refined copper and issued over $200 million in shareholder dividends. Unlike many of its competitors along the Keweenaw Peninsula, Calumet and Hecla successfully expanded its operations over several separate mineral bodies, developed capital-intensive ancillary industrial facilities, explored diversified non-mining enterprises, and remained a significant mining corporation at the national and international levels well past the district's most productive era (from "Preserving Copper Country's Mining Records, http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/annotation/march-98/copper-country.html, accessed Feb. 2010).