In the 1980s, the UT DOGM-AMRP was an indirect party to the destruction of a NRHP mining landmark. By paying the contractor involved in a mine reclamation project at the historic Bullion Beck mine, the DOGM-AMRP used taxpayer dollars to partially derstroy the historic gallows headframe of the Bullion Beck mine.
Location
39.950112,-112.125204
there is a marker for this headframe:
http://history.utah.gov/apps/markers/detailed_results.php?markerid=1307
the maintenance contract
http://s.scribd.com/doc/3744895/PM-6060-Bullion-Beck-Mine-Maintanence-Contract-Bid-DOGM-Utah
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3960104/Bullion-Beck-Headframe-HAER-Plus-Extras
Photos [46 of them] from the NRHP of the entire Eureka historic district can be found here (photo #41 is of the headframe.)
Here is the text of a UAMRP report on the incident:
BULLION BECK HEADFRAME FIRE DAMAGE MITIGATION
J. Chris Rohrer, Reclamation Specialist
Utah Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program
Salt Lake City, Utah
The Utah Abandoned Mine Reclamation (AMR) Program is the agency responsible for reclaiming
abandoned mines in Utah under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA, P.L. 95-87). It is almost axiomatic that abandoned mines date from the historic era, and many abandoned mines were significant in the development of the state. SMCRA’s goals of eliminating safety hazards and environmental problems sometimes are at odds with the preservation goals of the Historic Preservation Act. The Bullion Beck headframe fire incident shows that the needs of both acts can be met. The
Bullion Beck headframe is a National Register site that was inadvertently damaged during a reclamation
project. This report will show how a severe, but unanticipated, adverse effect was mitigated.
The Bullion Beck headframe is located in Eureka, Utah, about fifty miles southwest of Salt Lake City.
Eureka is one of several hardrock mining boom towns that sprang up in the Tintic Mountains in the late
1800s. It still survives today with a population of 700.
The Bullion Beck and Champion Mining Company was started by John Beck, a German immigrant who
started mining in Utah in 1870. After several failures he struck valuable ore and became very wealthy.
The mine went through a major capital development phase in 1890, when a structure housing the shaft,
headframe, hoist, boilers, and shops was built. The mine declined during World War I, and in 1925 the
exterior structure was torn down for salvage, leaving the exposed headframe. The mine was revived in
1940 under new ownership, using the original headframe and a new hoist. It continued to operate until
1960.
The Bullion Beck headframe is an A-type (also known as a 2-post or Montana) headframe constructed
in 1890 of massive wooden timbers. It is 67 feet by 32 feet by 56 feet high. It stands over a shaft 12001500
feet deep. The shaft has two four-foot square compartments for skips and a smaller manway.
Three vertical timbers extend from the top of the headframe down into the shaft to quide the skips as
they travel. Significant to the story, but not apparent to observers or from photographs, is the belowground
structure. The primary support for the headframe is not concrete footers, but wooden beams and
cribbing buried in the fill around the shaft. The headframe was listed on the National Register of
Historic Places in 1976, along with the three other headframes remaining in Eureka. The Utah State
Historical Society erected a commemorative marker on the site and put chain link fencing around the
shaft.
The condition of the headframe steadily deteriorated after its abandonment. Two platforms, one where
ore was dumped from the skips and one by the sheave wheels, fell and hung swinging in the breeze. The
unconsolidated material around the shaft collar sloughed outside the wooden sheathing supporting the
sides of the shaft. The sloughing extended past the fencing placed by the historical society, so that it was
possible to stand outside the fence and fall into the shaft.
These conditions led the AMR program to include the Bullion Beck headframe in a 1985 project to
address hazards at 24 shafts and two adits in the town of Eureka. Most of the mine openings were
backfilled; four shafts, including the Bullion Beck, were to be closed with a steel grate. The grate is
made of 1/4-inch steel rod woven like a chain link fence held by I-beam supports and soil anchors. The
plan was to work around the skip guides and to move the wood in the shaft only to the extent necessary
to install the grate. After getting the necessary approvals and putting precautionary language in the
construction specifications, the project was bid and work began in the fall of 1985.
The project proceeded well until late March 19~6,when the contractor moved onto the Bullion Beck site.
Working ahead of schedule and without AMR program supervision (both in breach of the contract), the
contractor broke the skip guides and other wooden structural members with a backhoe. These fell into
the shaft and lodged on square sets in the shaft. Unable to remove them, he burned them. The wooden
collar and the buried wooden supporting members were damaged and the parts that had fallen into the
85
shaft were destroyed. Fortunately, the aboveground structure was not damaged by the fire. However,
the upper parts of the skip guides were left dangling with ragged ends.
In response to the incident, the AMR program met and worked with the State Historic Preservation
Office, the Tintic Historic Society (representing the Certified Local Government), the U.S. Office of
Surface Mining, and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation to see what could be done to mitigate
the damage. An engineering study determined that the loss of the collar could lead to continued
sloughing of the shaft and ultimately the structural failure of the headframe. With this in mind a fourpart
mitigation plan was developed:
* Collar stabilization to prevent further sloughing
* Stabilization of the broken skip guides to prevent them from falling
* HAER documentation of the headframe
* Public interpretation to put the headframe into the context of the overall mine operation and the
Bullion Beck mine into the context of mining in Utah.
The public interpretation would take the form of a monument with an interpretive plaque at the
headframe and an interpretive pamphlet for distribution at the Tintic Museum in Eure~a.
Bullion Beck headframe, Eureka, Utah. (Built 1890, photo taken in 1977). Photo courtesy of J. Chris
Rohrer.
86
The HAER documentation and collar stabilization were completed in the fall of 1986. To stabilize the
collar, the shaft was cleared and a reinforced concrete slab floor was cast twenty feet down the shaft.
Reinforced concrete walls were then cast to support the sides of the shaft. The excavation outside the
walls was then backfilled. Timber sets and lagging were placed over the concrete walls to recreate the
original shaft appearance. A steel safety grid over the opening prevents anyone from falling in but
permits viewing down the shaft. In the summer of 1987 the broken skip guides were spliced with
matching timbers and extended to ground level. A stone monument with interpretive plaque was built
at the same time. The interpretive pamphlet has been written and will soon be printed.
Adopt-a-Mine would love to secure a copy of this interpretive pamphlet if anyone out there has a copy, let us know…
Chris’ report was one version of the Eureka story. Here is another:
MAKING MONEY OUT OF DIRT
papers of the UTAH MINING SYMPOSIUM UTAH CENTENNIAL FOUNDATION UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY UTAH MINING ASSOCIATION UTAH ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES
1987
Down The Shaft, Or Up?: Silver and Heritage in the Tintic Mining District by Gary B. Peterson.
DOWN THE SHAFT OR UP! SILVER AND HERITAGE IN THE TINTIC MINING DISTRICT
The old West of prospectors, hard rock districts and towns that go boom and bust is in the midst of another wave of change. The surge in precious metals prices at the end of the 1970s inflationary cycle saw new demand and new technologies appear as the old districts poised in a present extracting a price from the past. Generally higher metals prices have joined heap leaching and ion exchange extraction processes to cause old mines and waste dumps to suddenly assume “ore” status in the current economics. As seismic crews, core drillers and bulldozers lace the old claims in search of new data, the historic fabric of interrelated elements comprising a landscape is undergoing change. But
Change is ongoing at some rate in every landscape and in the fabulous but little known Tintic Mining District more destructive forces than the new crop of miners have been at work. The Multiple Resource National Register Historic District created in 1978 listed some 24 individual sites of major significance. By 1987 of 13 listed sites that had major structures 6 had disappeared.
Dozens more that contributed to the sense of place and past also disappeared. Many of those were more significant than sites that were listed. A number of questions are raised by this ongoing process and in the time available we will address some of them. First, why have major historic sites been recognized and then destroyed and what difference if any does their passing make? To get a feel for the visual changes and the flavor of place involved, we may divide
the landscape into Eureka proper, other townsites, and mine surface plants or workings. Main Street Eureka in 1986 had a neglected but beautiful example of a commercial Victorian false front on the north side across from the BPOE building. Since most of the rows of business buildings on that side had been razed in the previous 10 years, it was especially striking in its isolation. It had the classic 19th-century recessed entry with display windows and tiled floor and a corrugated roof rusted to a mellow contrast with the backdrop earthtone hills. It was replaced with a 1940s caboose in fresh painted Union Pacific yellow and red. Next door went a slant-wall metal prefab for the fire department. Buildings leave a message. Post railroad era permanence was expressed in fancy brickwork and Victorian decoration. It is difficult to retain a sense of community or pride when structures have an air of impermanence that indicates the type of boom or bust we currently are in. Over the mountain in Mammoth, a miners cottage stared vacant-eyed across a valley once filled with the modest frame dwellings of the working man. An artist’s centerpiece in autumn, by 1985 it was gone joining most of its kin. The miner’s “dry” building at the Tintic Standard had served for years as storage for core samples after the miner’s changing room need had passed. It burned to the ground in 1986, the nefarious deed of an arsonist. The Chief No.2 headframe over its early concrete-lined shaft was unique in its width and number of structural members. It was bulldozed in the early 1980s and replaced with a steel headframe. The Yankee headframe, perched on a northeast flank of Godiva Mountain, was bulldozed by ARCO in 1979. While no reason was given, it was apparently easier to screen the collar for safety that way. Fundamental philosophical questions arise in view of these changes. Many factors operate in the destruction of historic mining sites. Hard economic times as well as good ones, taxes, liability costs, apathy and insensitivity are among them.
In 1987 Eureka suddenly found itself a “gateway” to the Great Basin National Park. National Parks are notorious for attracting tourists with dollars many of whom stop and leave some of those in historic mining districts enroute or nearby. Virginia City, Nevada and Montana, Georgetown, Colorado and Columbia, California come to mind. Ironically in the very same year three of Eureka’s major businesses closed and its most prominent if not most significant symbol of mining, the Bullion Beck headframe, was being stabilized by a state agency under pressure to reverse some of its more insensitive and illegal activites.
At this point we pause to tell the sordid tale (nearly as fascinating as John Beck’s discovery and development of the mine itself) of the Bullion Beck headframe’s recent near demise at the hands of the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program of Utah’s Division of Oil, Gas and Mining. Situated alongside US 6 just west of Eureka is a massive 65 foot Montana-type two post “gallows” frame which hoisted men and equipment in and out of the mine shaft. One of the largest and most substantial examples of such structures in the West, it annually becomes more rare as the ravages of time and man eliminate them. Many mining historic districts have only a stray small example in poor condition remaining. One of several of an excellent cross section of types in the Tintic, the Bullion Beck is fast becoming a symbol of mining history of significance far beyond Utah. The DOGM’s AMRP expanded out from such busy recreational sites as the Cottonwood Canyons to begin removing the “hazards” of abandoned mines from Eureka in 1985. By April 1986 they had performed the requisite paper work and had a contractor preparing the collar of the shaft for a steel safety grate.
In direct opposition to contractual guidelines and federal law, the skip guides were smashed down unceremoniously with a backhoe. Weather worn, they were viewed as “unsafe.” (letter, Tintic Historical Society Chairman of the Board to AMRP, April 3, 1986) The splintered pieces were reportedly doused with gasoline and set afire. This just months after the Wilberg Mine fire! .In spite of numerous tanks of water dumped by the local fire department, the cribbing around the collar smoldered and burned for weeks. Does this sound like the type of people you want responsible for removing hazards from your National Register Historic Site? In terms of Western mining history the destruction was comparable to swinging the wrecking ball at the angel Moroni atop the Salt Lake temple. AMRP people continued to assure the Tintic Historical Society and numerous concerned citizens that there was “no effect” on the historical significance of the site. When they finally viewed the damage the tune was changed, but mitigating of the “effect” required continued pressure from other government agencies and individuals. By summer 1987 the job was finally complete and done nearly as well as it should have been in the first place. But the tragedy was both more symbolic and more deep seated.
The real tragedy is that AMRP people have a mind set inherently insensitive to history. They possess the “beaver mentality” which views every problem as an engineering opportunity. Rather than approaching, for example, the problem of safely closing an open mine shaft with a view to minimum materials and visual intrusion they choose the opposite.
Their projects in Eureka first put down a massive aluminum painted steel mesh three or four times the size reason might suggest. After negative comment, they repainted them brown and covered most of them with earth. Robert Redford has commented on the “Neanderthal mentality” displayed by highway engineers in Provo Canyon. “You don’t have to destroy something to improve it,” he said. (Deseret News, Oct. 6, 1987, p. A7)
Mining and highway engineers are perhaps related. What AMRP does speaks much more loudly than what it says. Despite the sensitivity to history they proclaim, their actions in Iron County are exemplary. There “the bulldozers, backhoes and scrapers are sealing mine portals, hauling off mine tailings, and removing any traces of past mining….”
That the “Leyson mine, first opened in 1854, has been identified as the oldest coal mine in the state” (“Machines removing signs of Cedar Canyon mining,” Deseret News, Oct. 19, 1986) and was a significant contributor to pioneer iron smelting efforts was apparently insufficient justification to DOGM to save a few vestiges for the appreciation and edification of future generations. Oh, but they were going to put up a plaque, as if history were a zoo, and the whole thing only cost $182,750!
This is not to argue that there are no legitimate hazards around abandoned mines. Rather that this is another out of proportion bureaucratic program doing more damage than good crusading under questionable mandate to save a tiny minority of the population from its own stupidity. It is the razor edge of irony. One state agency tries to preserve a little of Utah’s mining past for the future while another works diligently to obliterate it.
One has a minimal budget, one has millions and the ear of the media. Which do you think will prevail? Only if the truth becomes known to a larger public can David entertain a modest chance of slaying Goliath.
Those who read discover that history has a way of repeating itself. Perhaps the best reason then for preserving some history is the time honored dictum that a knowlege of the past can save at least some of us from repeating some of the mistakes of the past. The preservation of buildings, townscapes and landscapes is an evolving idea that has been around in some form for centuries. Value in the practice is attributed to such diverse notions as aesthetics, enlightenment and, especially in these “cost-benefIt-ratio” times, economics. It has been well proven that in many cases the past yields monetary as well as more intangible profits.
Sometimes only curiosity or chance operate to save places that become appreciated in a later time.
Destruction of historic places also has many motives. Buildings as well as books have been burned because some group or individual has negative feelings about what a place symbolizes. Frequently the past stands in the way of someone’s view of “progress.” A societal anomie and preoccupation with materialism seem to be near the root of “tear it out” tendencies. The physical past cannot become symbolic in the minds of its viewers until there develops a chain of awareness, knowledge and ultimately appreciation.
The perception of what is “positive” or “negative” and to what degree is very dependent on the viewer’s frame of reference or previous experience. Political, tax and insurance ramifications often operate.
Apathy and benign neglect are a two edged sword both preserving and destroying. Reasons vary then for the preservation and destruction of historic places.
The question remains, “So what?” What difference does it make whether historic places are preserved or destroyed? The difference is far reaching and frequently subtle.
Numerous studies from urban planners and geographers show that shape, detail, flow, sense of past and attractiveness to pedestrians and human interaction all affect the social, psychological and ultimately the physical well being of both people and places. Since people tend to operate as left or right brain entities and the former dominate our structured society of political, economic and social systems, it appears to be an uphill battle to elevate the organization of habitat and environs to a humane level. Butte, Montana underwent an extensive Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) survey following local concerns that the adjacent open-pit copper mine was about to swallow the town. Janet Cornish, Urban Revitalization Agency director, said, “All of a sudden, people started getting excited. Before, downtown had seemed an old, cumbersome area with sentimental value and little else. Now the community saw its economic potential, and they saw that people from outside the community were recognizing it.” (Tom Huth, “Mining in the West: Will Our Heritage Survive,” Historic Preservation, May-June 1981 p. 15; also see USDI NPS, Butte, Montana A Project Report, April 1981)
In a materialistic world, the survivors in the preservation game soon discovered that an economic appeal based on well substantiated facts was their best approach. The modus operandi became simply “show ‘em how it makes ‘em money!”
Of the many reasons for preserving mining history in Eureka and the Tintic, the best may be economic and historical. Economic because if the town’s depressed economy is ever to achieve a degree of revival and stability, the traveler’s interest in mining history and not the boom and bust mining economy itself will provide it. The district by accident of unpopularity and neglect maintained a range of mining, commercial and residential structures unexcelled in Utah and most of the West. The raw material was and may still be there, but lacking is a view of Tintic’s place in the scope of Western mining history, a vision of the district’s potential and a commitment to plan, execute and “do it right.” The historical rationale is based on the townscape and the array of headframes and surface plants that survive here compared to other districts that now “sell history” with much less of the authentic to show. Even building on your best bet, the material culture landscape of mining past, does not go unopposed. Philosophies of preservation vary as much as human beings. Some prefer to see the district remain a quiet rural retreat and personal playground. Some still carry that old West frontier notion transposed, “the only good planner is a dead planner.” Personal rights remain viscerally more important than public ones especially when it comes to property. Opposition also comes as an outgrowth of the automobile and mass communications. The locals can drive out and tune in to get what they want out of town, and the out-of-towners can commute to work the mines during the next mineral boom. These songs are replayed across rural America.
The preservation ethic did not win the West, Manifest Destiny did. There remains a refreshing lack of realization that the frontier era is over.
That can be a very appealing force to urbanites, tourists and other outsiders. It also points to the paradoxes pervading the story of preservation in Western mining districts.
One federal and state tier of bureaucracy labors to interpret and save our past so that we can understand and appreciate it. Another layer of federal and state agencies operating from the other side of the brain accidentally and on purpose destroy the same past under a relatively legitimate mandate to protect the public from hazards. One mining company bulldozes headframes and business blocks in a twinge of liability consciousness and tax reduction. Another opens a historic tunnel to tours and yet another shares its extensive historic research with interested historical societies. Some people bought locally, even if it cost a few dollars more, and others awaited the trek to the valley to shop. Now there is little option. Some are sensitive to commercial facades and paint schemes while others “don’t give a damn.”
Individualism, at least, is alive and well in the Tintic! Paradox also appears in other districts. Robert Hope, Australian president of Denver-based Houston International Minerals Corporation, acknowledges both past mistakes and the inevitability of conflict at their Virgina City, Nevada operation.
“We should have let the community know what we were doing; now we’re being more up front, and I think we’re being accepted as responsible corporate citizens.” After a $78,000 contribution to a historic district survey he said, “We were paying for information–we wanted to see what is really there. To some extent, people perceive value where we don’t. Obviously we can’t preserve every building.” (Huth, 1981) Perhaps more pressing than the direct mining impacts on past mining landscapes (to a degree natural and evolutionary) are the indirect or secondary effects of the recent mining and energy booms. A new mine or leach field or seismic survey is much less destructive than the associated influx of people with a vandal mentality and no roots in or appreciation of the local community and its history. Denice Wheeler, secretary of the Uinta County Historical Society in oil boom Evanston, Wyoming, summed up the flip side of the newcomer-oldtimer influence this way. “The new people in town have become extremely interested in our history. People who’ve lived here all their lives become sort of immune to their heritage ….” (Huth, 1981)
Landscape and townscape change in the Tintic Mining District may be conveniently divided into three major time periods; pre-1869, and before and after 1929. The era of Native American and Spanish Influence probably had little impact on the look of the place. Chief Tintic’s guerrila war forays from the springs at Homansville and vicinity put a little fear in a few valley settlers and a label on the district, but their nomadic lifestyle left little mark on the land. The Indians in fact were in close harmony with the natural scheme of things. The Spanish are reputed in some accounts to have left arrastra paths from mining efforts in the region, but this remains one of those obscure stories of an obscure place and time that has not been well researched. The Spanish were noted for primarily working surface outcrops and natural openings.
The second phase of landscape change in the Tintic came with discovery of the Sunbeam in 1869 and the beginning of the “Big Four” mines in Eureka Gulch the following year. The 1870s Discovery and Development era saw high grade ore so rich it was plucked from surface exposures, loaded in wagons for haulage to the railroad in Salt Lake and shipped to San Francisco and around the Horn to Wales for smelting. Consolidation and Expansion occurred in the 1880s and 1890s when mills and smelters struggled with the district’s complex ores and railroads finally connected the place to big city capital and technology. The boom and bust cycles had already begun. A 1900 description from the Salt Lake Mining Review (April 30, p. 5) serves to indicate the flavor of the district when Eureka had a population of 3500 and Mammoth 1200. Eureka “…boasts of nearly every metropolitan advantage and is a little city instead of an isolated mining camp … . Mammoth also has kept pace with the times, and, while not as large as Eureka, enjoys about the same facilities.” Three decades of New Technology from 1900 to 1930 saw the automobile and electric power arrive and a continuation of cyclical economics. The Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of October 24, 1929 marks a major downhill turn in the ongoing cycles of boom and bust in Tintic towns and mines. Production slowed in the ’30s to pick up with World War II demand in the ’40s. By the late 1940s many houses were moved from Tintic towns to valley towns like Springville, Spanish Fork and Nephi. Some were burned and others were torn down, but the late ’40s and ’50s saw significant portions of the built environment disappear.
The 1950s and ’60s era of Diminishing Production saw the rails pulled up and a gradual exodus continue, leaving a ghostly shell of the district’s former self. The 1970s and ’80s witnessed the paradox of Preservation and Apathy as the nation’s bicentennial generated a superb local historical society and finally the closure of the last operating mines in the district. The post Depression period was one of disappearing and shrinking towns and a contracting Eureka commercial district. The town that had expanded up Eureka Gulch, and extended from nearly the Evans to Knightsville, began a process of shrinking at the margins and thinning from within. A counterpoint of new home building by natives and lovers
of the place and via the idiosyncrasies of politics also began to fill a few gaps. Not surprisingly, the mining towns of the American West bear striking similarities. The men were highly mobile in their thirst for that “big and architecture, mining methods, and social institutions flowed strike,” freely from place to place. Common themes and occurrences include fires, floods, celebrations, the arrival of “city slickers,” ladies of the evening, shootings, hangings, fast faro games at numerous saloons, and fortunes won and lost. The shift whistles resounded across the landscape, the pump and hoist engines hummed, and mighty teams of mules and horses freighted in life’s necessities until the railroad and later trucks appeared. Hard men at hard work in the mines, mills and smelters dominated the scene off Main Street.
Much appeared the same from Tintic to Tombstone. Structures moved quickly from canvas tents and log cabins through simple wood frame dwellings and false front businesses to more elaborate structures of wood, brick and stone in the style of the time. As mines played out and people departed, the towns became ghosts of their former glory or disappeared altogether.
The pattern was repeated full cycle throughout the West’s more prosperous mining districts.
Tintic has long been one of the West’s most overlooked districts. In spite of phenomenal production records and a history and folklore unexcelled by the more notorious districts, the Tintic has wallowed in the backwater eddys of obscurity. One reason is simply that it sits 75 miles southwest of Salt Lake City in a Utah long dominated by a view of history distinctly Mormon. The railroad and mining impacts continue to be perceived at best out of context with the Mormon story. Tintic was well known to the mobile miners who criss-crossed the West, but to the general population it was as unknown at the turn-of-the-century as it remains today.
If Utah is a perception depression in the West, Tintic is surely one in Utah. Part of the reason for that lies in the Wasatch Front’s peculiar “Westside-Eastside” mentality. Places west of the River Jordan have never been perceived as “desirable” in the eastside mind, no matter what their economic, historical or aesthetic amenities.
Perhaps that concept stems from sources of life-giving water, primarily a product of the Wasatch and Uinta Mountains. The old shorter range corporate mentality of squeezing the bottom line from afar is well represented by at least one Tintic mining company. The example of Jerome, Arizona where “historic properties are being held in limbo by inactive mining interests” (Huth, 1981) comes to mind. There is also evidence for a corporate view that includes history and its material expressions in a longer view. Centurion and Western have valued historic photographs that include mine dumps. They help evaluate old mines for potential reprocessing and help reconstruct past mining activity and even sections of mines underground. The company has uncovered records around the country, some painting an unpretty picture of the lot of labor and company policy. Maimings were frequent in the “good old days” and a death or two in the drifts was insufficient event to be noted in the local newspapers. It took a disaster like the September 1914 Oklahoma stope cave-in that trapped 12 miners and killed 11 to unavoidably appear in print. Life was hard way back when wages were $3.00 or $4.00 a day. Sunshine’s recent replacement of Kennecott was quietly heralded with the local comment, “finally got somebody in there knows how to mine underground.” Indeed, they discovered lost ore bodies and held great promise until $5.00 silver and state bureaucracy encouraged closure. The company contributed a mine tour, over-counter silver sales, dollars and enthusiasm to the Tintic Historical Society and town efforts to begin a viable tourism campaign.
Busted again by golly, but the minerals are there waiting to become ore again and usher in another boom era. The Tintic Mining District is a complex district. The ores baffled early smelter designers who found few mines produced a similar product. The same problem still puzzles the mining engineers. The geology is cut by numerous faults and intrusions and still intrigues serious students of the earth. The Salt Lake Tribune noted Tintic’s mineral potential Jan. 1, 1892. “Its growth has been commensurate with its merits.
It took years to find out that the rich surface deposits were not all that was good in the lodes. When these surface deposits were worked down to the pyrites, or ‘white iron,’ further sinking was stopped, and it has been the work of the past year or two to demonstrate that there is mineral in paying quantities and qualities below this iron stratum, and many old claims will soon become shippers.” Ninety-five years later thorough and perhaps first region-wide evaluations of the district’s mineral potential are finally underway.
What would the old-timers have done with seismic data, core drills and satellite imagery? Part of the change we view in mining and the boom towns of mining is related to other external changes. Supply and demand from far distant places, fear of war and depression and alternative materials all affect the silver market. Perception can even prove more important than reality. One reality that affected activity in the 1980s was noted by Rosenthal and Young. “Since the base price for silver is double or triple what it was back in the 1970s, and prices for lead, zinc, and copper have been level since the mid-1970s, the importance of silver in metal-mining
operations has multiplied.” (D. Rosenthal and E. Young, The New Case for Silver, 1985, p. 17) This factor led to reprocessing of tailings or dumps and increased capital flow toward primary silver mines. Recent indications are positive for life in the old district’s mines. A Seattle stockbroker and analyst specializing in North American gold and silver companies recently toured the district and noted that Centurion and Western now control an area almost as large as the famed Carlin District in Nevada. “Before [the Centennial-Eureka] was closed the mine produced 1.5 million tons of ore with an average grade of 0.3 ounces of gold and 14.0 ounces of silver per ton. At today’s prices this represents $288 million of gold and $180 million of silver. Since the mine was closed in 1927, there has been absolutely no modern exploration or drilling done … .” (Jeff Conley, “Centurion Mines A Sleeping Giant Reawakens,” Bull and Bear, Oct. 1987, p. 11) —A few predictions for the not so famous Tintic are perhaps in order. It seems likely that the past will continue to repeat itself in slightly altered forms. Mining will continue its cycles of boom and bust and those apocryphyl tales of a kings ransom in once “worthless” Tintic Standard mining stock traded for a night on the town may well repeat themselves. Those with the earliest information and the resolve to evaluate and act on it will again someday amass small fortunes from the Tintic. The mineral base would seem to be there awaiting the alignment of outside factors again. Another boom in mining will likely change the face of the main district. Men can move mountains a good deal more quickly these days. Historian Phillip Notarianni concluded a lecture on the district’s past in these words. “The idea of a ‘thread of optimism’ through the fabric of Tintic’s history exists. This is tied closely to the cyclical pattern of economy, or ‘peak and trough’ type of activity. Tintic is indeed still alive, and historic preservation may well help it to remain alive.” (Notarianni, unpublished paper, no date) Tintic is indeed no “ghost,” though a shadow of its former self. But in spite of a class local historical society (recipient of the coveted Corey Award for the finest local historical society on the continent in 1985) many landmark structures have disappeared. Even more tragically, many more non-landmark structures equally critical to the mining landscape compage–[its assemblage of elements creating a sense of place]-have disappeared. When it comes to historic landscape and townscape, it takes a well fired minority and broadening local base to first appreciate what it has and then to challenge adverse and insensitive changes spawned by big corporations, big government, big dollars and small minds.
The question arises, “at what point is it too late?” At what point have too many sites been lost to retain a flavor that tells enough of a story of the place to attract enough visitor dollars to begin to preserve it? It is a complex question. In any case, if answers emerge, they will find Tintic’s and the rest of the West’s material mining heritage held hostage in large degree to appetites and forces well beyond Eureka Gulch.
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