The Tower
Once copper leaves it’s underground home, it must endure a rather torturous ordeal before becoming a polished ingot. For most rock, this process begins long before the steam stamps go to work. The minute it is pulled to the surface – and before it even sees the light of day – the copper rock is pummeled and pulverized in a mine’s rock house. These houses of horror work to separate the men from the boys, removing as much poor rock from the copper as possible before being shipped on to the stamp mill. Machines such as drop hammers, grizzlies, grinders, and crushers break the rock into manageable sizes and sort them into categorized storage bins.
It is these structures more than any other, that have become the symbols of the Copper Country’s legacy. The shafts themselves are nothing more then fenced off potholes, and the buildings that served them mere concrete slabs. Much more impressive, and noticeable, are the towering structures and concrete buttresses of the rock houses. Most still stand today in some degree, and as we stood at the demolished front wall of the hoist building our thoughts turned to the rock house for this mine.
Like industrial Siamese twins, the hoist building and rock house are connected from birth by an iron umbilical cord; the hoist cable. This cable would run from the hoisting drum on the hoist through slits in the engine house’s walls; over a series of cable stays; into the rock house and over a large wheel at its top; and from there ran down into the shaft. Finding a rock house is as easy as following the breadcrumbs left by this important connection. For us, that meant following the concrete footings for the cable towers that were scattered between here and the rock house.
Moving through the thick underbrush we found our footings. They sat in groups of two – about five feet in height and a foot or so in width. We followed them until we came to a slight ridge. It was when we climbed that ridge that we saw it rising high above our heads – the tower.
Rising a good four stories above our heads the tower sat perched on one of two parallel concrete walls. It was in reality a concrete column wrapped in an iron blanket that had begun to peel off. The tower was new to us, but the concrete base was unmistakably that of a rock house; the gap between the walls once straddling a rail line the once brought copper rock from here to the mill down at Gay. It looked very similar to rock house remains found at Gratiot and Kingston. Because of this, I quickly realized what we had found and what purpose the tower once served.
Tomorrow: Anatomy of a Rock House…