The dam exists because of stamp mills. In the 1890s, the Atlantic Mining Company needed water - enormous quantities of it - to power the stamp mills that crushed copper-bearing rock along the Lake Superior shore. In 1894, the company built a timber crib dam across the Salmon Trout River to create a reservoir. But the Atlantic stamp mill kept growing, and the Baltic Mining Company built its own mill nearby. The wooden dam could not supply enough water for both. In 1901, engineer J. F. Jackson designed a steel replacement, and the Wisconsin Bridge and Iron Company erected it over the submerged remains of the old timber dam. The new structure stood 74 feet high at its center and stretched 1,006 feet across the valley. A system of spillways, sluices, and pipes carried water downhill to the mills. The Atlantic and Baltic mines shared access through a common board of directors, an unusual arrangement that reflected how intertwined these mining operations had become.

Steel dams represented a brief moment of industrial optimism. The concept was elegant: thin steel plates face the water, angled so the water's own weight pushes them into the supporting framework rather than against it. This transfers force to the ground as compression, avoiding the bending stresses that would buckle a vertical wall. Engineers of the era believed steel dams could be built faster and more cheaply than masonry. They were partly right - the Redridge dam went up quickly. But the experiment did not spread. Only two other steel dams were attempted in the country, and one of them, the Hauser Lake Dam, failed within a year. The material posed challenges that concrete and earth did not: corrosion, fatigue, the difficulty of repair. The window for steel dam construction opened in the 1890s and closed within a decade. Redridge stands as one of the last artifacts of that brief, audacious experiment.

The mines closed, and the dam's purpose died with them. No one maintained the structure. On Easter morning of 1941, the spillway behind the dam gave way, sending a flood downstream. The steel portion itself survived largely intact - a testament to Jackson's design - but with no mining operations to justify repairs, the owners simply opened the spillway valves and let the reservoir drain. The water level dropped, and the decades-old timber crib dam, submerged since 1901, emerged like a ghost from the shrinking lake. Overtopping incidents continued. In 1979, the Copper Range Company, successor to the original Atlantic Mining Company, had large holes cut directly through the steel plates so the dam could never again hold a full reservoir. The deliberate wounds did their job. Water now flows freely through the structure, and the reservoir sits at a fraction of its original level.

Ownership passed to Stanton Township in 1992, the same year the dam was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It had already been designated a Michigan Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1985. But historic status did not solve the structural dilemma. Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality classified the dam as a "significant hazard," and by 2001 the township was forced to consider repair options. Proposals ranged from $311,000 for basic stabilization to over a million dollars for full restoration. Stanton Township could afford none of them. A compromise was found in 2004: the upper 13 feet of the old wooden dam were removed to lower the water level and relieve pressure on both structures. A more permanent fix has never materialized. A study by Michigan Technological University students concluded both dams are likely safe for the foreseeable future, and the site has become a pilgrimage for students of industrial archaeology, drawn to one of the most unusual engineering relics in the American landscape.