The Mining Museum in Nederland, Colorado

On a dry but hot Colorado June day, we drove to Nederland, one of Boulder County’s mountain jewels, past the Barker Meadow Reservoir with its deep blue waters.

The winding road carved between rock peaks and the Boulder Creek eventually took us to the tiny hamlet of less than 1,500 inhabitants. I could only imagine how cold, slippery, and right down impassable the road must be at times in wintertime. 

We were on a quest to visit the Mining Museum and the century-old carousel with its beautiful figures carved by hand by a Vietnam veteran. 

The one room museum had displays inside and out, rusting in the elements, a close-up look at the lives and history of the miners who lived, worked, and died in this area. Opened by the Nederland Area Historical Society, the museum was purchased by the county in the fall of 2012.

The hard rock mining days in Boulder County during the 19^th and the early 20^th centuries were brought home by the huge boulders lining the modern highway, at times perched seemingly precarious above our heads, cutting through the mountains. 

Boulder County’s history for the first 75 years was tied to mining, the leading industry in a barely populated area. The first gold strike in 1859 on Gold Hill brought more explorers and more discoveries of gold and silver. The boom-and-bust cycles of mining through the early 20^th century opened newly discovered strikes, followed by abandonment when the ores were exhausted. It took one ton of rock and back breaking work to deliver one ounce of pure gold. 

Prospectors, working under unimaginably harsh conditions, would take their ore to the assay office whose employees would determine if individual prospectors “struck it rich.” Using heat and chemicals to test the ore, the assayer would deliver the good or the bad news to the prospector about the percentage of precious minerals found in the miner’s rock finds. These miners had migrated to the Wild West to become part of the 19^th century hard rock mining boom. 

Museum Archives photo

Among the rusting equipment sitting inside and outside the building, one can see one of the few surviving Panama Canal steam shovels. Miners used tools like helmets with lamps, bells, trams, and rare mining claim maps to find their “gold.” But the real gold crown jewel was the steam-powered shovel, one of the largest in the world at the time. It scooped tons of dirt while helping canal workers in Panama to build bridges, roads, and drains close to the waterway.

The museum displays blacksmithing tools, maps and documents, ore samples, hand, and pneumatic drills, mine trams, maps, and documents from the 1860s to the present.

The Mining Museum is home to a 1923 Bucyrus 50-B steam shovel whose epic move was chronicled on The History Channel's Mega Movers. Of the 25 steam shovels that helped build the Panama Canal, only this one survives, and it is fully operational, weighing at 130,000 pounds and rated at 75 tons. The 1923 Bucyrus Model 50-B was returned to California, then Denver, and finally was donated to the town of Nederland in 2005. The rest were scrapped for metal in Panama.

According to historical records, 534 Bucyrus and Bucyrus-Erie 50-B shovels were built between 1923 and 1939. “They were among the largest tracked steam shovels in the world at that time. Until 1932, most were steam powered and moved on railroad tracks. In 1923, crawler tracks were added to the 50-B model, creating the first heavy duty, 360-degree rotation mobile shovels.”

The shovel was donated by Steve and Laurel Higgins to the Nederland Mining Museum on October 21, 2005. “This national treasure links a historic engineering achievement, the industrial revolution of the United States, local history of Colorado mining, and good old fashioned hard work by two brothers trying to achieve the American dream. Today it is one of the largest operating shovels in the United States.” Nederland Area Historical Society (nederlandmuseums.org)

Transported to Rollinsville by Roy and Russell Durand, this amazing steam shovel was used at the Lump Gulch Placer, six miles south of Nederland, until 1978.

Hard rock mining is extremely difficult. The rock was blasted with dynamite, the smaller pieces shoveled into buckets and carts, hauled out of the mine, then processed by a mill, ground into a powder, then chemicals were used to separate the valuable ore, usually gold and silver, from the waste rock, and then smelted into bars. These chemicals were poisonous for the environment. One troy ounce of gold was usually extracted from a ton of rock.

The miners used single- or double-jacking methods, holding a steel drill in one hand and a hammer in the other. After each strike, “the miner turned the drill a quarter turn to reposition the cutting edge.” In competitions, a miner could swing a hammer 90 times a minute, that is how strong they were. In double-jacking, one miner would hold and turn the drill and the other swung the hammer.

According to the Mining Museum, the following ores were mined/found in Boulder County:

-          Galena (lead ore)

-          Chalcopyrite (copper ore)

-          Lepidolite (lithium ore)

-          Barite (barium ore)

-          Petzite/Coloradoite/Hessite (gold/mercury/silver ore)

-          Mica

-          Sphalerite (zinc ore)

-          Gold (old ore)

-          Molybdenite (molybdenum ore)

Tungsten (“heavy stone” in Swedish), a rare metal with the highest melting point of all metallic elements, was mined in Nederland, at the time considered the tungsten capital of the world in the early 1900s. Tungsten is used for lightbulbs, TV tubes, steel alloys; tungsten carbide is used in drill bits, high-speed cutting tools, and mining equipment. 

WWI required a lot of tungsten which raised its price from $5 per unit to $105 and the town of Tungsten grew to 3,000 people in a sparsely populated area, and it became the richest town of its size in Colorado. According to the archives, “peak production in 1916 generated $4 million in revenue. Barker Dam had been built to provide power to the mills.  The end of WWI put a stop to the tungsten mining.”

Gold mining in the area took place from the mid-1800s to mid -1900s. Clear Creek was dredged with Eleanor #1 and Eleanor #2 on the historic Arapahoe Bar between 1904 and 1907 by the National Dredging Company (led by Herman J. Reiling); it was environmentally disastrous as the dredges left behind ruined fertile bottom soils forever.  The dredges scooped the rich soil from the riverbed and sifted out the “flour gold.” The “flour gold” was too fine for the technology of that time to be able to recover all gold from the soil of Arapahoe Bar. Golden, Colorado farmers refused to sell any more land to the company.

Silver was found with gold, copper, lead, or zinc and was a major operation in the Mines. But the market crashed in 1893 and the silver boom ended. Silver is used for jewelry, electronics, silverware, photography, finance, and investment.

The assay office took the miner’s rock finds to determine how much precious gold and silver were mixed in with other metals. The entire process, described by the museum archives, was quite complicated:

-          Crushing (the rock was pulverized like salt; a “chipmunk crusher” transformed the rock to pea-size, then a muller ground it to rock flour)

-          Splitting (separated the sample with a riffle splitter)

-          Weighing (a precision balance weighed exactly 29.167 grams of the sample)

-          Firing (the sample was poured and melted at 2000 degrees into a ceramic cup called a “crucible” to create certain chemical reactions, i.e., lead fuses with gold and silver)

-          Pouring into a mold (the lead dropped at the tip of the mold and the “slag” sat on top; the mold looked like a cornbread baking tray)

-          Cupellation (the lead button was put into a “cupel,” a small cup made of bone ash, and heated; during heating, the molten lead oxidized back to litharge and was absorbed by the bone ash; a small bead of molten gold and silver were left)

-          Parting (silver was dissolved using nitric acid, and only gold was left)

-          Final weighing (gold was weighed and converted into ounces per ton, thus determining the value of the ore find)

Miners spent most of their days underground, away from precious sunlight, and it was essential that they had good lighting in the tunnels. They used oil wick cap lamps, carbide lamps (invented in 1900, they burned acetylene gas produced by mixing water and calcium carbide), candlesticks, safety lamps, and electric lights. Safety lamps, invented in 1815 in England, reduced gas explosions. The electric lights were the safest. Thomas Edison invented a battery-powered electric light in 1914 which gave the miners 12 hours of lighting and could be recharged at the end of each shift.

Driving by the closed mines, one wonders what became of the families whose livelihoods depended on such hard and dangerous labor, devoid of sunlight, with fathers and sons toiling underground like moles to extract metals from the rocks. We could never genuinely appreciate the sacrifice these men made to provide society with metals like tungsten, silver, and gold.