Quincy’s Copper Mine Tour

The day we did the copper mine tour it was cold, rainy and windy.  So the environment inside the mine was an improvement.  It wasn’t raining and windy in the mine, but it was cold.  This tour was better than I expected.  I think that has to do with the difference in this type of mining I had seen in the past.

First off, the mine has been closed for mining since 1947, so some of the surface buildings have been torn down before the Quincy Mine Hoist Association took over responsibility of maintain it and turned it into a museum and educational facility.  The Wiki on Quincy Mine gives you better details, but here’s what stood out for me.

The shaft to take workers into the mine and ore out is vertical at 54 degrees.  The men would sit on what looked like 10 sets of steep stairs, 3 men across and travel at 15 mph in the dark as far as 9000 feet down with the wall 1 foot in front of their face.  The ore would come out the same shaft at 30 mph. 

The steam hoist in another building several hundred feet away from the shaft house controlled the cable that pulled the man cars and ore cars. Prior to the underground tour we toured the hoist house.  It’s an impressive engineering structure for the early 20^th century.

To get tourist into the mine, they used a cogged railroad car to take you to an entry on level 7 that’s over the side of the mountain and was not originally an entrance, but a drain port for the water pumped out of the mine.  They widened it so they could drive tractors and other equipment into the mine long after the mine closed for business.  So, we road into the mine in a covered trailer pulled by a John Deere tractor.  We only went in a few thousand feet and it was only the 7^th level of almost 100 levels.  The tour guide showed us some of the tools used over the years of active mining and what it looked like with only a candle lit for the men to work in.  She also showed us what absolute darkness looked like when the candle went out.  That is scary.

On the ride into the mine we went by a classroom where the local college has mining engineering classes.  They also practice what they learn in this mine.