Jack Mines.....Where The Lead and Zinc Come From!

[ROGER4314]

In the late 1960's, I dated a lady from Baxter Springs, Kansas which is located right in the lead and zinc mining areas of Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri. I had many experiences in the abandoned "Jack" mines and I'd like to share one.

First....a little background.
When the Jack mines were flourishing, there was tremendous growth in the area and trolley systems ran between the now forgotten mining towns.

When the high grade ore played out, the sites were simply abandoned with little effort made to reclaim the land or clean it up. Worse, "High Graders" went back into the closed mines and cut out the support pillars that were required by law. Those pillars were high grade ore and they made money even thought it left nothing to support the ceilings. The towns of Picher, Quapaw and others in the three states were constantly caving in from mine collapses! The entire main street of Picher, OK, was fenced off for being too dangerous to enter. There was a gigantic cave in that took the highway coming into Joplin Missouri away!

I actually saw one cave in. There was a house, car, driveway, flowers and everything that you normally see on a residential lot dropped intact approx 50 feet below ground level! The hole was approx 100 feet across and old mine prints showed that there was another shaft below that one!

Here's some history about Picher, OK.

http://www.geospectra.net/kite/picher/picher.htm

Hockerville was a huge mining town that was abandoned. There was a giant cave in hole right in the middle of where the town was! I hunted there many times in the abandoned property. Here's the story about that town:

http://schehrer2.homestead.com/hockerville1.html

Some enterprising soul pumped out the Nancy Jane mine on one end of Picher, OK and opened it up for tourists for a very short period of time. I went down into that mine. The venture didn't succeed and soon closed down so I was one of the only people to experience it.

We entered the mine in a cage lowered by a crane. The vertical holes are "Shafts" and the horizontal ones are "drifts". We descended through 160 feet of caprock then 90 feet to the bottom of the shaft. Jack mines aren't like coal mines that follow narrow veins of coal. The drifts of the Nancy Jane were 90 feet from floor to ceiling which explained the huge holes that resulted when a mine caved in!

All of the mining equipment was still in place and we were told that mules were lowered into the mines to work and they spent their entire lives below ground! Mining equipment was disassembled, lowered into the mine shaft then reassembled in the mine.

The ore was placed in large buckets and hoisted to the surface where it went to crushers to extract the lead and zinc. The end of that process was gravel about the size of the end of your finger known as "tailings" which were heaped in huge piles sometimes hundreds of feet tall. When the mines closed, the "tailin' piles" or "chat piles" were left as is.

Most of the area was declared a "superfund" pollution site but I have not been back to see the results of the clean up.

We all seek lead. I thought you might be interested in hearing about where it came from!

Flash

[rmatchell]

There is a old mine south of St Louis that used to have walk through tours, now they let it flood and run cave diving. They are still mining farther south working on taking out the pillers to recover the ore and replace with concrete before the close the mine for good.

[ROGER4314]

I have my Divemaster and Master SCUBA Diver ratings and always wanted to go there! It's Bonne Terre Mine but it's too expensive for my meager retirement!

http://www.2dive.com/btm.htm

I hope that you enjoyed the info about the lead & zinc mining!

Flash

[oldandslow]

roger,

Great article and links. Thanks.

best wishes- oldandslow

[rmatchell]

Yep thats the one, I remember walking through it every year in school. Not brave enough to try to dive it myself.

[DLCTEX]

I passed through Picher, Ok. and the south eastern Kansas many times in the early 1980's and saw the tailings piles. Ugly mess.

[ssnow]

Most of the area was declared a "superfund" pollution site but I have not been back to see the results of the clean up.

The clean up efforts in Picher went on for many years. The EPA contractors dug the contaminated soils from the residential yards replacing it with "clean" topsoil and new sod. Many millions were spent in this effort.

Eventually, it was decided to "buy out" the town, and move all the residents, in part due to the continued lead contamination, and in part due to the risks of the mines caving in.

The "buy out" was welcome to many, as it was the only way they were ever going to see a return on thier investment in their homes, as values plummeted when the town was identified as a "Superfund Site". Others did not wish to move at all, as the town was their home, where they had lived their lives.

Then a terrible tornado ripped through town, destroying half of it, and that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin for the small town.

There is not much remaining there today; one drug store, the county barn, and some Indian offices and property. Most all of the homes are gone, and much of the land is now fenced off.

Most of the tailing piles are gone, with the chat being used in asphalt for many years. There are still a few remaining, but nothing like it was when you were there so many years ago.

The EPA is still doing remedial work in the area, much of the chat is being pushed into the cave-in's and open pits, and then capped with clean topsoil to reclaim the land for agricultural/farming use.

[41 mag fan]

Underground is a totally different world than above ground. At the heights of those mines, a rock the size of a baseball can kill you if it broke loose. Working underground myself, I've seen alot of things that'll make your butt hole pucker.

[303Guy]

That's very interesting, thanks.

[JackQuest]

5987759876Furthering this subject:

Galena, Illinois, up in the north-west corner of the State is in an area that the last glaciers did not grind flat. Highest spot in the State is about 10 miles away. Some beautiful vistas and twisty roads.

Named for galena, it was a major mining area for lead ore prior to the Civil War, and was a boom town all through that tragic time. When the war ended, so did the demand for lead and the area collapsed economically back to agrarian based incomes.

Gen. U.S. Grant parked himself in Galena, crawled in a bottle and recuperated from the war before becoming President. The town collapsed and remained on the edge of ruin until the 1960s when a group of women decided to fix the place back up to its Civil War glory. Today it is a cute day trip out of Chicago, lots of little boutiques and bistros ready to take your money. The wife and I make the 90 minute drive a couple of times a year just to take in the ambiance. As seen in the photos, streets are narrow, parking is limited, business fronts well maintained.

There are a couple of lead mines open for touring I believe, just haven't taken the time to see them.

On the Iowa side of the Mississippi River south of Dubuque on State road 52 is Crystal Lake Cave. This was a sealed cave that was discovered by lead miners looking for a vein of ore. A modern access tunnel makes touring this little cave easy.

[ROGER4314]

There was a "plus" side to the rape of this land by the lead & zinc mining. It was a great place to grow up and to play as a young person. I rode dirt bikes all over those chat piles and although it was dangerous as heck, none of us thought a thing about it.

When the mines closed, the operations simply left the area as is. There were many open shafts and I remember a dirt rider went over a hill and went down an open shaft. That's not a healthy thing!

At Galena, Kansas, there was a huge area where open shafts were everywhere. Some buddies and I used to go there to drop firecrackers down the holes and shoot the pigeons as they boiled up out of the shaft.

Another time in Galena, two friends were having a foot race and got over a hill when they stopped suddenly waving their arms wildly for balance. Both were about to run right into an open shaft!

Another time on the Kansas side, a bunch of us were hunting on the abandoned mining property about sundown. Crows had decided to make the area a roost so they began to circle in. We all reloaded our shells and carried many boxes of shells every time we went out. We didn't go home with a single round left unfired.

I was young then and none of us thought a thing about conservation or if it was "right" to kill a truck load of crows or bust pigeons flying out of mine shafts. The whole Jack mining area was trashed out and it seemed like the thing to do. Gotta admit, it was great spending the years I spent in the lead & zinc mining areas.

In the Pittsburg, Kansas area about 27 miles east of Baxter Springs, there was strip pit coal mining. I spent a huge amount of my time shooting in the trash dumps that those strip pits were turned into. I have personally shot almost every part, piece, material, product and substance on Earth! I shot toasters, blenders, ovens, pots, cars, wheels, chairs...............you got the idea. It was like a giant "Box of Truth" experience and I got real good at shooting rats with a 1911 .45acp!

The bottom line to the Jack mining was that when the mining was going strong, the land was ripped to shreds. When the mines closed, they left the land just like it was ......in ruins. That's the way we used to do things.

Flash