An Immigrant Story - Mary Metesh Plutt

An excerpt from the 1910 Torch Lake Township census, which has the Plutt family listed.

13th U.S. Census image courtesy of NARA

Mary Metesh was born in Yugoslavia in 1872. She met and married Anton Plutt before they embarked on an immigrant story together. They came first to Calumet, then moved to Painesdale when the Copper Range Consolidated Mining Company was active. Anton worked for the mines as the family became established. The couple finally settled on a farm in Bootjack near Lake Linden; by 1910 they were the parents of eight children.

 

Agnes Plutt Terrian grave marker at the Mt. Calvary Cemetery in Lake Linden.

NPS Photo

Seven of their children survived to adulthood, including daughter Agnes. She married William Terrian at Calumet's Sacred Heart Catholic Church in 1928. They lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where William worked at an auto factory and Agnes became a mother. Her enjoyment of motherhood was to be short-lived; she died in 1932 at only 24 years of age. William returned his wife to the Copper Country to be buried at Lake Linden's Mt. Calvary Cemetery.

Who had the more perilous occupation; a miner, or a mother?