Fluorspar Mining: Photos from Illinois and Kentucky, 1905-1995: Shawnee Books
Autor Herbert K. Russellen Limba Engleză Paperback – 2 ian 2019
Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019
This first-ever pictorial record of the people and methods of the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District from the 1900s to the 1990s covers early and modern means of extracting, hoisting, processing, and transporting the mineral from mine mouth to end user. Nearly one hundred images carefully selected by author Herbert K. Russell show early pick-and-shovel extraction and open-flame lighting as well as primitive drilling methods and transportation by barrels, buckets, barges, mule teams, and trams, in addition to the use of modern equipment and sophisticated refinement procedures such as froth flotation. Russell also provides an overview of the many industrial uses of fluorspar, from metal work by ancient Romans to the processing of uranium by scientists seeking to perfect the atomic bomb. Preserving what is known about the industry by miners, managers, and museums, this detailed and fascinating pictorial history looks both above and below ground at fluorspar mining.
This first-ever pictorial record of the people and methods of the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District from the 1900s to the 1990s covers early and modern means of extracting, hoisting, processing, and transporting the mineral from mine mouth to end user. Nearly one hundred images carefully selected by author Herbert K. Russell show early pick-and-shovel extraction and open-flame lighting as well as primitive drilling methods and transportation by barrels, buckets, barges, mule teams, and trams, in addition to the use of modern equipment and sophisticated refinement procedures such as froth flotation. Russell also provides an overview of the many industrial uses of fluorspar, from metal work by ancient Romans to the processing of uranium by scientists seeking to perfect the atomic bomb. Preserving what is known about the industry by miners, managers, and museums, this detailed and fascinating pictorial history looks both above and below ground at fluorspar mining.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780809336685
ISBN-10: 0809336685
Pagini: 102
Ilustrații: 86
Dimensiuni: 222 x 216 x 8 mm
Greutate: 0.32 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Seria Shawnee Books
ISBN-10: 0809336685
Pagini: 102
Ilustrații: 86
Dimensiuni: 222 x 216 x 8 mm
Greutate: 0.32 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Seria Shawnee Books
Notă biografică
Herbert K. Russell, a retired director of college relations at John A. Logan College, is a literary scholar and Illinois historian who has been a college teacher, an editor, and a writer. The author of several encyclopedia articles and books, including The State of Southern Illinois: An Illustrated History, he is the editor of Southern Illinois Coal: A Portfolio and A Southern Illinois Album: Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1936–1943.
Extras
PRELUDE
Grief had leveled William Ogden as surely as if he had been struck by a bolt of lightning. It was as if his life had descended into perdition.
It had been three years since his fiancée, Sarah North, died, but the pain was still as raw as the day he received the unexpected news. He had been away on a business trip, much like the trip that brought him here to the Hudson River valley. They had been friends since childhood, playing together in the muddy, rutted streets of Weed’s Bridge and Walton, and riding their horses through the meadows of spring and summer wildflowers along the banks of upstate New York’s Delaware River. As family and friends had always anticipated, the couple eventually set the date for their wedding for June 1829. Then, unexpectedly, fate took her from him. A sudden onset of pneumonia, he was told.
Hollow meetings to discuss business or politics seemed so unimportant to him now; he couldn’t find a place for them in his mind, still so crowded with memories of Sarah and the future they had planned together. He must have known the grieving would eventually pass; he had felt the same sadness when his father died, but it had not immobilized him the way Sarah’s death did.
Ogden willed his attention back to the other men sitting around him in the small, cramped room. His brother-in-law, Charles Butler, who had enticed him to come to the meeting, was there, along with Charles’s brother Benjamin; but Ogden had probably been surprised at the presence of the other man in the room. Vice President Martin Van Buren was certainly not an imposing man. At only five-feet, six-inches tall, he was trim, erect, and fastidiously dressed. One biographer aptly described him as “a smiling little gentleman, not much taller than the back of his chair, daintily clad and possessed of a wavy golden crowned head.”
Matty, as his friends called him, had a reputation of being more politician than statesman. It had been said of him that he soared to the heights on borrowed wings, an indication that he was a master of adopting and adapting the ideas of others. An Albany attorney and Benjamin Butler’s law partner, he had become Andrew Jackson’s chief supporter in the North, and “Old Hickory” had selected him as his running mate in the 1832 election.
Whatever the vice president’s shortcomings may have been, William Ogden knew better than to take his fellow New Yorker lightly. Van Buren was the creator and still the spiritual leader of an organization known as the Albany Regency. It was an effective New York political machine—the nation’s first—that controlled the politics in the state and powerfully influenced it throughout the entire nation. His advocacy of New York’s right and responsibility to develop its own internal transportation improvements was well known. As a U.S. senator in 1825, he had introduced a resolution that declared, “Congress does not possess the power to make roads and canals within the respective states.” He extended that belief to the railroad industry when it began to emerge just a few years later.
It was unusual for the vice president to be in New York during the summer of 1833, attending to what appeared to be a relatively minor provincial matter, when he should have been in Washington at the side of his president, Andrew Jackson, who was fomenting a nationwide crisis over his plan to withdraw all federal funds from the Second Bank of the United States. But Van Buren was nothing if not circumspect. Staying far away from the hearth when the hot coals were being poked just seemed like a wise practice to the consummate little politician. His biographer Holmes Alexander described the vice president’s sudden departure from Washington succinctly: “Seeing to what a pass the affair had come, Mr. Van Buren ordered out fast horses in an effort to escape. ... the Vice President had plans for a protracted tour of upper New York, leaving no address behind.”
Charles Butler surely must have explained Van Buren’s presence to Ogden. The vice president had plans to meet his good friend Washington Irving so the two could ramble through the old Dutch villages of the Hudson River valley together; so he was conveniently in the neighborhood. More to the point, it was almost certainly at his bidding that the men were even having this meeting with Ogden.
Tall, brawny-shouldered, and handsome, twenty-eight-year-old William Butler Ogden was an extraordinarily successful businessman in his hometown of Walton and in the surrounding Delaware County, New York, towns and villages. He owned and managed a group of thriving lumber and woolen mills and had served his community with distinction in a number of civic posts. He was just the kind of man New York voters would support, which was why the cagey vice president had singled him out for the task he had in mind. Van Buren peered over the reading glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose and began laying out the reasons why New York’s 1835 winter legislative session would be so important. Someone had to be there to champion the important cause that had brought these four men together: railroads. What the vice president proposed was that the Democratic Party run William Ogden for the Delaware County seat in the New York State Assembly the following fall. The party needed someone with eloquence and conviction to address a joint session of the legislature and convince lawmakers to vote in favor of financial aid for the foundering New York and Erie Railroad, lest it fail. It was something the legislature had refused to do in past sessions, and an orator of Ogden’s skill was needed for one last try.
The railroad industry was in its infancy. Horses and mules still powered the small handful of short-run lines that operated in a few scattered places across the eastern seaboard. But to visionary men like Martin Van Buren, railroads would be the future of America and the catalyst for the nation’s nascent western expansion. One New York journalist, in the American Railroad Journal , put a more poetic spin on the economic potential of the New York and Erie: “It will prove a refreshing and fertilizing shower which will unquestionably enable thousands to reap a golden harvest.”
Other men disagreed, especially those New Yorkers living along the route of the Erie Canal, in the northern tier of the state. Their towns had prospered from the day the 363-mile-long canal had opened, a decade earlier. Waterborne systems, they insisted, were the answer to east–west transportation, not railroads. This political dichotomy raged in New York.
The vice president straightened in his chair until he was as stiff as a winter cornstalk. He glanced from one man to another and reminded them that state legislators had to be convinced of the value of the New York and Erie Railroad before they would commit funds to the project. He may have locked his eyes on Ogden when he drove home his critical point: it was vital to get legislators to agree on some sort of state aid, or loans, for the railroad, lest another legislative session pass without any action on the project. One big reason this was such a time-critical issue was that neighboring state Pennsylvania was getting dangerously close to approving a railroad from Towanda to Mansfield. That route, if built so close by, would siphon off revenue from the proposed New York and Erie Railroad. Haste was imperative if New York were to maintain its commercial superiority over the fiercely rival state to its south.
State loans to private enterprise for railroad ventures were not unheard of at the time; in fact, they were quite common for financing canals and plank roads. Eight years earlier, New York had advanced a half-million-dollar loan to the Delaware and Hudson Company for one of the country’s earliest railroads. States issued these loans in the form of state stock, an instrument backed by a first mortgage on the railroad’s property. Railroads’ most stupendous boondoggle, federal land grants, would not come into being for another fifteen years.
Ogden knew the problem firsthand. The Erie Canal had hurt his mills badly. It was located too far north to be of any benefit to his numerous lumber and woolen mills, but it certainly aided his northern competitors. But a railroad down in the southern corridor, where Walton was located, would be another story. That would cut his costs of getting his goods to market by as much as 90 percent.
The fact that Ogden had a vested interest in seeing the railroad built had not been lost on Vice President Van Buren. However, Ogden was just not sure he was the man who could sell the idea to northern legislators since they already had their canal up and running. Why would they be willing to help businessmen in the southern part of the state compete with them? Van Buren knew that was one of the chief stumbling blocks. Northern legislators would have to be convinced that the New York and Erie Railroad would benefit the entire state, not just businesses along its tracks in the southern corridor. Another big problem was that many of the legislators had their own money invested in competing technologies like plank roads, canals, and steamships. They had to be convinced to vote their consciences, not just their pocketbooks.
Charles Butler knew Ogden more intimately than the other two men did, and he knew his wife’s brother had the intelligence and skills to get the job done, if any man did. He also knew something the others did not: it was Ogden’s state of ennui over the death of his fiancée that gridlocked him, not any business issues he faced.
Ogden was skeptical. He certainly realized the importance of the railroad to the southern sector of the state; and he also knew it would be a vital part of New York’s emerging transportation system as it, like all the other Eastern states, tried to reach out to the developing lands to the west. But could he convince others of that fact? It wasn’t that he lacked self-confidence—that was something Ogden was never short of—but could he do what was required in his present state of mind?
There was another reason for his hesitation, too; Ogden simply did not trust Martin Van Buren. The Ogden family’s core business operations, their woolen mills, were being threatened by stiff competition from abroad. A tariff on imports that would help protect their business was passed in 1828 while Van Buren was in the Senate, but the man had seriously waffled on the measure. It was a heavily politicized issue, and Van Buren’s true feelings toward it were obfuscated by his political ambitions. Ogden likely guessed that Van Buren’s support of state funding for the railroad would never be made public for the same reason. Some members of his Albany Regency held interests in competitive modes of transportation—steamships, toll roads, and plank roads—so the organization had taken no official stand on state aid to the New York and Erie. The vice president rarely took a public stand on anything where there was serious opposition. That was why Ogden was unsure of the man.
The room had grown silent. To say more might dilute the strong arguments the men had made, so they waited. Ogden likely knew the others were correct in their practical assessment of the situation, and perhaps it might do him good to take on such a task.
He made his decision. He would do it.
Although Ogden did not know it at the time, the plan the men set in motion would profoundly affect the remainder of his life. More important, it would strongly influence the United States’ western expansion, the founding of one of the nation’s great cities, and the history of railroads in America.
Grief had leveled William Ogden as surely as if he had been struck by a bolt of lightning. It was as if his life had descended into perdition.
It had been three years since his fiancée, Sarah North, died, but the pain was still as raw as the day he received the unexpected news. He had been away on a business trip, much like the trip that brought him here to the Hudson River valley. They had been friends since childhood, playing together in the muddy, rutted streets of Weed’s Bridge and Walton, and riding their horses through the meadows of spring and summer wildflowers along the banks of upstate New York’s Delaware River. As family and friends had always anticipated, the couple eventually set the date for their wedding for June 1829. Then, unexpectedly, fate took her from him. A sudden onset of pneumonia, he was told.
Hollow meetings to discuss business or politics seemed so unimportant to him now; he couldn’t find a place for them in his mind, still so crowded with memories of Sarah and the future they had planned together. He must have known the grieving would eventually pass; he had felt the same sadness when his father died, but it had not immobilized him the way Sarah’s death did.
Ogden willed his attention back to the other men sitting around him in the small, cramped room. His brother-in-law, Charles Butler, who had enticed him to come to the meeting, was there, along with Charles’s brother Benjamin; but Ogden had probably been surprised at the presence of the other man in the room. Vice President Martin Van Buren was certainly not an imposing man. At only five-feet, six-inches tall, he was trim, erect, and fastidiously dressed. One biographer aptly described him as “a smiling little gentleman, not much taller than the back of his chair, daintily clad and possessed of a wavy golden crowned head.”
Matty, as his friends called him, had a reputation of being more politician than statesman. It had been said of him that he soared to the heights on borrowed wings, an indication that he was a master of adopting and adapting the ideas of others. An Albany attorney and Benjamin Butler’s law partner, he had become Andrew Jackson’s chief supporter in the North, and “Old Hickory” had selected him as his running mate in the 1832 election.
Whatever the vice president’s shortcomings may have been, William Ogden knew better than to take his fellow New Yorker lightly. Van Buren was the creator and still the spiritual leader of an organization known as the Albany Regency. It was an effective New York political machine—the nation’s first—that controlled the politics in the state and powerfully influenced it throughout the entire nation. His advocacy of New York’s right and responsibility to develop its own internal transportation improvements was well known. As a U.S. senator in 1825, he had introduced a resolution that declared, “Congress does not possess the power to make roads and canals within the respective states.” He extended that belief to the railroad industry when it began to emerge just a few years later.
It was unusual for the vice president to be in New York during the summer of 1833, attending to what appeared to be a relatively minor provincial matter, when he should have been in Washington at the side of his president, Andrew Jackson, who was fomenting a nationwide crisis over his plan to withdraw all federal funds from the Second Bank of the United States. But Van Buren was nothing if not circumspect. Staying far away from the hearth when the hot coals were being poked just seemed like a wise practice to the consummate little politician. His biographer Holmes Alexander described the vice president’s sudden departure from Washington succinctly: “Seeing to what a pass the affair had come, Mr. Van Buren ordered out fast horses in an effort to escape. ... the Vice President had plans for a protracted tour of upper New York, leaving no address behind.”
Charles Butler surely must have explained Van Buren’s presence to Ogden. The vice president had plans to meet his good friend Washington Irving so the two could ramble through the old Dutch villages of the Hudson River valley together; so he was conveniently in the neighborhood. More to the point, it was almost certainly at his bidding that the men were even having this meeting with Ogden.
Tall, brawny-shouldered, and handsome, twenty-eight-year-old William Butler Ogden was an extraordinarily successful businessman in his hometown of Walton and in the surrounding Delaware County, New York, towns and villages. He owned and managed a group of thriving lumber and woolen mills and had served his community with distinction in a number of civic posts. He was just the kind of man New York voters would support, which was why the cagey vice president had singled him out for the task he had in mind. Van Buren peered over the reading glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose and began laying out the reasons why New York’s 1835 winter legislative session would be so important. Someone had to be there to champion the important cause that had brought these four men together: railroads. What the vice president proposed was that the Democratic Party run William Ogden for the Delaware County seat in the New York State Assembly the following fall. The party needed someone with eloquence and conviction to address a joint session of the legislature and convince lawmakers to vote in favor of financial aid for the foundering New York and Erie Railroad, lest it fail. It was something the legislature had refused to do in past sessions, and an orator of Ogden’s skill was needed for one last try.
The railroad industry was in its infancy. Horses and mules still powered the small handful of short-run lines that operated in a few scattered places across the eastern seaboard. But to visionary men like Martin Van Buren, railroads would be the future of America and the catalyst for the nation’s nascent western expansion. One New York journalist, in the American Railroad Journal , put a more poetic spin on the economic potential of the New York and Erie: “It will prove a refreshing and fertilizing shower which will unquestionably enable thousands to reap a golden harvest.”
Other men disagreed, especially those New Yorkers living along the route of the Erie Canal, in the northern tier of the state. Their towns had prospered from the day the 363-mile-long canal had opened, a decade earlier. Waterborne systems, they insisted, were the answer to east–west transportation, not railroads. This political dichotomy raged in New York.
The vice president straightened in his chair until he was as stiff as a winter cornstalk. He glanced from one man to another and reminded them that state legislators had to be convinced of the value of the New York and Erie Railroad before they would commit funds to the project. He may have locked his eyes on Ogden when he drove home his critical point: it was vital to get legislators to agree on some sort of state aid, or loans, for the railroad, lest another legislative session pass without any action on the project. One big reason this was such a time-critical issue was that neighboring state Pennsylvania was getting dangerously close to approving a railroad from Towanda to Mansfield. That route, if built so close by, would siphon off revenue from the proposed New York and Erie Railroad. Haste was imperative if New York were to maintain its commercial superiority over the fiercely rival state to its south.
State loans to private enterprise for railroad ventures were not unheard of at the time; in fact, they were quite common for financing canals and plank roads. Eight years earlier, New York had advanced a half-million-dollar loan to the Delaware and Hudson Company for one of the country’s earliest railroads. States issued these loans in the form of state stock, an instrument backed by a first mortgage on the railroad’s property. Railroads’ most stupendous boondoggle, federal land grants, would not come into being for another fifteen years.
Ogden knew the problem firsthand. The Erie Canal had hurt his mills badly. It was located too far north to be of any benefit to his numerous lumber and woolen mills, but it certainly aided his northern competitors. But a railroad down in the southern corridor, where Walton was located, would be another story. That would cut his costs of getting his goods to market by as much as 90 percent.
The fact that Ogden had a vested interest in seeing the railroad built had not been lost on Vice President Van Buren. However, Ogden was just not sure he was the man who could sell the idea to northern legislators since they already had their canal up and running. Why would they be willing to help businessmen in the southern part of the state compete with them? Van Buren knew that was one of the chief stumbling blocks. Northern legislators would have to be convinced that the New York and Erie Railroad would benefit the entire state, not just businesses along its tracks in the southern corridor. Another big problem was that many of the legislators had their own money invested in competing technologies like plank roads, canals, and steamships. They had to be convinced to vote their consciences, not just their pocketbooks.
Charles Butler knew Ogden more intimately than the other two men did, and he knew his wife’s brother had the intelligence and skills to get the job done, if any man did. He also knew something the others did not: it was Ogden’s state of ennui over the death of his fiancée that gridlocked him, not any business issues he faced.
Ogden was skeptical. He certainly realized the importance of the railroad to the southern sector of the state; and he also knew it would be a vital part of New York’s emerging transportation system as it, like all the other Eastern states, tried to reach out to the developing lands to the west. But could he convince others of that fact? It wasn’t that he lacked self-confidence—that was something Ogden was never short of—but could he do what was required in his present state of mind?
There was another reason for his hesitation, too; Ogden simply did not trust Martin Van Buren. The Ogden family’s core business operations, their woolen mills, were being threatened by stiff competition from abroad. A tariff on imports that would help protect their business was passed in 1828 while Van Buren was in the Senate, but the man had seriously waffled on the measure. It was a heavily politicized issue, and Van Buren’s true feelings toward it were obfuscated by his political ambitions. Ogden likely guessed that Van Buren’s support of state funding for the railroad would never be made public for the same reason. Some members of his Albany Regency held interests in competitive modes of transportation—steamships, toll roads, and plank roads—so the organization had taken no official stand on state aid to the New York and Erie. The vice president rarely took a public stand on anything where there was serious opposition. That was why Ogden was unsure of the man.
The room had grown silent. To say more might dilute the strong arguments the men had made, so they waited. Ogden likely knew the others were correct in their practical assessment of the situation, and perhaps it might do him good to take on such a task.
He made his decision. He would do it.
Although Ogden did not know it at the time, the plan the men set in motion would profoundly affect the remainder of his life. More important, it would strongly influence the United States’ western expansion, the founding of one of the nation’s great cities, and the history of railroads in America.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
History of the Fluorspar Industry
Uses and Applications of Fluorspar
Geology of the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District
Mining in the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District
Milling, Cleaning, and Concentrating
Dangers of Fluorspar Mining
Museums and Memorials
Sources
Gallery of Photographs
Acknowledgments
Introduction
History of the Fluorspar Industry
Uses and Applications of Fluorspar
Geology of the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District
Mining in the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District
Milling, Cleaning, and Concentrating
Dangers of Fluorspar Mining
Museums and Memorials
Sources
Gallery of Photographs
Recenzii
“Until now, the story of our local miners’ tribulation and triumph in producing the strategic mineral fluorspar has been untold. Herbert K. Russell’s Fluorspar Mining is a captivating visual essay of the vital role these great men played in winning two world wars.”—Ed Clement, director, Ben E. Clement Mineral Museum
“Fluorspar Mining: Photos from Illinois and Kentucky, 1905–1995 is an excellent pictorial history of one of the most important fluorspar mining regions in the world. The historical photographs and complementary text will be of interest to anyone seeking information about the mining practices or people of the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District.”—F. Brett Denny, associate economic geologist, Illinois State Geological Survey
“At last, author Herbert K. Russell provides a long overdue look at the former mining of fluorspar along the Ohio River in Illinois and Kentucky, a largely forgotten industry. The brave miners and the machines that brought the colorful mineral to the surface come to life in the book's splendid collection of historic photos. Russell clearly illustrates that coal extraction was not the only show in Illinois’s mining world.”—Taylor Pensoneau, author of Reporting on Life—and People along the Way
“Fluorspar Mining: Photos from Illinois and Kentucky, 1905–1995 is an excellent pictorial history of one of the most important fluorspar mining regions in the world. The historical photographs and complementary text will be of interest to anyone seeking information about the mining practices or people of the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District.”—F. Brett Denny, associate economic geologist, Illinois State Geological Survey
“At last, author Herbert K. Russell provides a long overdue look at the former mining of fluorspar along the Ohio River in Illinois and Kentucky, a largely forgotten industry. The brave miners and the machines that brought the colorful mineral to the surface come to life in the book's splendid collection of historic photos. Russell clearly illustrates that coal extraction was not the only show in Illinois’s mining world.”—Taylor Pensoneau, author of Reporting on Life—and People along the Way
Descriere
This first-ever pictorial record of the men and methods of the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District from the 1900s to the 1990s covers early and modern methods of extracting, hoisting, processing, and transporting the mineral from mine mouth to end user.