A lot of people from Cornwall settled in Wisconsin and the Michigan Upper Peninsula. My grandmother, who grew up in the UP and learned a number of different ethnic dishes, taught my mother how to make pasties. And there are areas of Wisconsin settled by Cornish immigrants, and they have pasty shops. But none of them were as good as the pasties I ate in Cornwall. Incidentally, there’s a rivalry between Cornwall and the adjoining county Devon over who has the best pasties. I’ll have to try a Devon pasty if I get the chance the next trip to Britain.
That’s interesting; I’d imagine the main difference would be stuffing ingredients available. I’ve seen similar things with different names, but the pasties I’ve gotten resemble a large empanada (almost a foot long). Some of the ingredients resemble what you’d have in shepherds pie.
BTW, the iron mining in your area is what shut down the mining in ours; the ore out there was more abundant and purer. Most of our mines shut down shortly after the Civil War (throughout the war they supplied West Point Foundry with iron for Parrott guns and ammunition, as well as swords and shovels); a few lingered into the 1920s.
I hike around some of the abandoned mines; a number of Cornish and Welsh worked them (only foundations and abandoned cemeteries are left where they lived, in land taken over by NY and NJ as parkland). The more recent mines employed Slovaks and Italians as well.