Western Museum of Mining & Industry
Colorado
A replica 1890s ore mill here still runs, one of only five working stamp mills left in the country.
Inside a building modeled on the ore stamp mills of the 1890s, ten heavy stamps still pound rock. The mill is called the Yellow Jacket the Second. The original Yellow Jacket sat in Montezuma, Colorado, and crushed ore-bearing rock in that mining district into the nineteen forties. In nineteen seventy the museum bought the contents of the old mill, then spent three years putting up a building to hold them. Two five-stamp batteries and the amalgamation tables went inside, along with a jaw crusher and concentrating tables. It opened in June of nineteen eighty. Stamp mills go back to the sixteenth century, when someone worked out that smashing rock was the way to separate valuable metal from everything else. Of the mill buildings like this left in the United States, only five still work. This is one of them. Visitors watch it run during the museum's larger events.
This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
The replica was dubbed the “Yellow Jacket II” and is now one of only five such mill buildings in the United States that are fully operational.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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