A Shaft Building
Our experience with shafts from Osceola and elsewhere has given us a general idea of what to expect when we find one. Generally they are marked with a barbwire fence, either on old rotten wood posts or rusty steel stakes. Inside the usually failing and fallen fence is a large depression, about ten feet or so square. Inside of this depression is usually a good amount of brush and small trees.
But these experiences have proven to be representative of only earlier mines. Later mines, as written in last weeks post, are of a different design. This more modern design hides these shafts inside a new type of ruin – the shaft house. Unlike shaft houses of old, these more modern structures are built with concrete foundations that are still usually intact.
Because of these facts, our search for the Gratiot Mine shaft proved futile at first. Looking for the standard barbed wire fence and depression turned up nothing. We turned out attention to a series of concrete walls a short distance away from the rock house. There were three of them, parallel and a constant distant apart. The middle wall was the tallest, perhaps a good dozen feet in height. On both sides of this wall stood two shorter walls, only about four feet in height. We thought the shaft could be between these walls, but the large wall would make that impossible. So we moved past the last wall to see what we could find. Instead of a shaft, we found ourselves remains of a second building.
This ruin consisted of a concrete foundation about twenty feet or so from the rock house. A rectangle in shape, the foundation consisted of a concrete slab incased in a short outer wall about a foot in height. Along this outer wall, at constant intervals, were short metal posts similar to what we were finding in Hoist Building ruins.
Stepping up on the ruin, we could see remnants of wooden beams running along the foundation floor. The beams then abruptly ended about three-quarters along the ruins length, at a conspicuous looking depression in the foundation itself. Here the concrete foundation disappeared, instead replaced by a short hole about two feet in depth at the bottom of which was only dirt, grass, and brush. The outer wall, however, continued past the depression along its edges. We wondered if we had finally found the shaft.
If it was, there were no fences or other markings denoting it as such. In fact there was nothing stopping us from stepping down into it except our suspicions of what it really was. Marked or not, getting too close to any mineshaft is considerably dangerous so we decided to move on – leaving the mystery for another time.