A story of lead.....

[cabezaverde]

Found this on another forum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6HhdkkdsvTM

[RoGrrr]

Fella I used to work with lived near Galena Illinois and told me some stories about the lead mines. He also talked about a lead barge that was floating down the Miss River and hit some turbulence at a bend in the river. It swamped and sank. He said that he didn't think they ever bothered to recover it. I can't say I believe it's still there but one never knows....

[shredder]

That was really cool. I thought when I saw the lead ore I thought it would be a simple matter of crushing it up and heating it to 600 degrees, then watch the lead flow out of the rock, voila done!

Boy was I wrong! That is a really complex process.

[RoGrrr]

That was really cool. I thought when I saw the lead ore I thought it would be a simple matter of crushing it up and heating it to 600 degrees, then watch the lead flow out of the rock, voila done!
Boy was I wrong! That is a really complex process.


When I saw that the vid was half hour long I dint really (think I) want to watch it. Then I realized it was over, and it went by so fast !
It gives me a LOT more appreciation for the minor amount of mining and smelting I do.

cabezaverde, thank you for posting it

[Dannmann801]

Very cool video!
It was a different world back then - and I really appreciated seeing all the machinery.
Lots of hard work going on there.

[Vly]

Very interesting video. Think how hot it was working in the smelting areas during a Missouri summer. As a young man I worked in a plant making Portland cement, so I have some appreciation for the environment those guys were working in. Being up on the kiln deck in the summer was never fun.

[jonp]

ok, I started watching and then 1/2 hr was gone. That was very cool. I wonder what it looks like now?

[GOPHER SLAYER]

I was born and raised in southeast Missouri and I remember those mining operations very well . At the beginning of the video you saw the huge pile of grushed rock left over after the lead was extracted and mentioned it was called chat. My father used to haul chat from the mines to be used as road cover. Sometimes it was mixed with tar and became blacktop. Many of the mines were open pit mines, especially around Cape Giradeau, put on the map by their most famous native son, Rush Limbaugh. One of the mines was called the Blue Hole and it was so large and deep that I couldn't see the botom while standing on the edge. Of course I wasn't standing all that close. The only fencing around the hole was a single piece of cable running thru some posts that were no more that three feet tall. What would OSHA say about that. Looking across this huge hole I could see what looked like a toy truck, fully loaded slowly making its way to the top. On a trip to St Louis once with my father when I was twelve years old we were going thru the town of Farmington and I could see almot everything, especially the trees were covered with something white. I asked Dad what it was and he told me it was ash from the lead processing plant. Wouldn't that give the greenies apoplexy. I have no way of knowing if all these holes were made just to mine lead or chat or a combination of the two but I do know they were some darned big holes. I think when Daniel Boone died in Missouri he had gone there to speculate in lead mines, at least that is what I was told.