Hi Dennis – As Paul Harvey used to say, here is the rest of the story to go along with the photos you scanned yesterday.

I was wandering around the country between the Elm and Misery rivers back in October of 1985 with a couple of my friends looking for birds or steelhead. We were headed down to Agate Beach off the Misery Bay Road when we happened upon a sign that an acquaintance of mine had painted up. It is in the local “Finnglish” style of phonetically speaking. My friend Joe Sanchez got out of the car to inspect it further and try to figure out what it meant. We had a good laugh and proceeded on our way.

During my various times at Michigan Tech I had become friends with a local amateur archaeologist by the name of “Wimpy” Salmi. I had helped him do a small dig at the mouth of the Misery River at the old town site of Franklin. He was interested in all aspects of the history of the Copper Country. We didn’t find much, only a few lead sinkers used by gill netters. But I would see Wimpy around town every so often and one day I asked him what he knew about some signs I had found. Of course, the Agate Beach sign but also one on top of Quincy Hill that read “Kowsit Lats”. He got a good laugh out of my question and told me he had made both of them. The one on top of Quincy Hill, of course, was meant to be “Cows**t” Flats in Finnglish and the other said “Go This Way To Agate Beach”. He also told me that he expected them to be stolen almost as soon as he put them up. The next time I went out to the Elm River, the one in the photo was gone. Glad I took a photo of it during its short lifetime.

The mention of this sign or a similar one in a recent email to you certainly is not the original sign. But the one I took a photo of was one man’s effort to retain some of the interesting and whimsical local history that surrounds us.

Nice job on the Newsletters. I always enjoy the comments sent in to the Email Bag.

Bill Deephouse, ’64 &’71

PS You will notice that whoever is responsible for installing road signs retained the name of the road on top of Quincy Hill – Kowsit Lats!

Bill: Thanks for the great story. We’ve always wondered how the Quincy Hill sign was created.