Feeding the Thirst
Stamp mills required large amounts of water to operate, in the order of tens of millions of gallons a day. While some mills such as those at Redridge relied on dams to create large reservoirs to supply their water needs, mills such as Champion simply pumped the needed water out of the lake. This required a large pump, and a pump house to house it.
Moving up along the south side of the mill, we discover a line of auxiliary buildings outside of the expansive concrete wash floor. The first is a short building, barely high enough to allow a person to stand upright. Roughly rectangular with a concrete roof, the buildings walls were lined with four square openings that appeared to once have a pipe or collar attached to them. Inside the building was empty, save a few remains of pipes sticking out of the ceiling or along the walls. While we were confident the building must have had some purpose in the pumping of water from the lake, it was too small to contain the large sized pump the mill would have needed. We moved on.
Further up from this smaller building was a much larger building. It was a good two to three stories in height, parts of its upper floor had collapsed down into the lower areas. Rising out of the ground and up to the building was a concrete culvert. At one point there was a small hole in the culvert, and looking into it was discovered it was connected to the other concrete culvert at the lakeshore we had mistaken for a launder. This must have been a conduit for the pipes leading up from the lake, making the large building the pump house. It was certainly large enough to house a good-sized pump, and the scattering of electrical boxes and conduits along its walls also suggested so.
Now what of the smaller building? I believe it housed some sort of machinery, but if it was related to the pumping or the stamp mill operation itself I don’t know. The fact that it sits in line with the pump house and the concrete conduit would lead me to believe it assisted pumping in some manner. Maybe someone else out there has a more educated guess.