Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- Upper Peninsula
- Politics c. 1860?
- Unions, Organized Labor?
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Probable
- Was there an ordinance?
- Perhaps, Some Oral Evidence
- Sign?
- Don’t Know
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
- Probably Not, Although Still Very Few Black People
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | 7,743 | 0 | ||||||
| 1900 | ||||||||
| 1910 | 12821 | 4 | ||||||
| 1920 | ||||||||
| 1930 | 14,299 | 1 | ||||||
| 1940 | 13369 | 0 | ||||||
| 1950 | 11466 | 2 | ||||||
| 1960 | 10265 | 1 | ||||||
| 1970 | 8711 | 3 | ||||||
| 1980 | 7741 | 0 | ||||||
| 1990 | 6,849 | 6 | ||||||
| 2000 | 6,293 | 6 | 45 | 14 | ||||
| 2010 | 5387 | 29 | 58 | 13 | ||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Unknown
Main Ethnic Group(s)
- Unknown
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
“My father worked for the Chicago & Northwest RR and told me that as recently as the early 1960s anyone black on train crews would be told they couldn’t stay overnight in Ironwood. The porters on the passenger trains experienced enough harassment from local law enforcement that they wouldn’t step on to the depot platform while the train was in the station… I took the train often enough back then to notice and when I asked my dad why the porter never got off the train there he explained that Ironwood was a sun down town (and that’s the phrase he used) where blacks were not allowed to spend the night or, indeed, even be on the depot platform passing through once the sun went down.”
-posted to the web, 2005
A college professor, teaching at Michigan State in 1956, had a student who asked him “Are you a nigger-lover?” when the class discussed race.
* In the new millennium, Ironwood developed a more tolerant outlook and is no longer sundown.