Places of interest located in North America.
Hidden in the back of the Old Idaho Penitentiary Site, the Idaho Museum of Mining & Geology is a repurposed structure featuring 2300 square feet of maps, regional mining artifacts, and dioramas educating visitors on Idaho’s mining history and mineral wealth. Displays demonstrate the tools and techniques of placer and lode mining including a model stamp mill and mine elevator. While a model miner’s camp demonstrates how miner’s lived while working their claims.
The Sumpter Museum is just half a block down from the Sumpter Valley Dredge State Heritage Area and complements the park with displays of mining in the Sumpter Valley Area. While a relatively small building, the museum is full of donated mining artifacts, mineral specimens, and archival documents. Displays cover hydraulic mining, load mining, and, of course, dredging. A hard rock mining diorama includes an ore cart and assorted mining equipment. A collection of large copies include blueprints of a dredge, granting and architect’s eye view of these massive mining machines.
Kerbyville Historical Museum offers a rare glimpse into the history of Josephine County, Oregon. Exhibits span the culture of the local Takelma Tribe, timber industry, Illinois Valley pioneer settlers, and local gold mining history.
The Museums of Western Colorado are a collection of museums covering history, farming, paleontology, and most importantly, mining in Colorado. The Museum of the West displays the core collection. Along with a stage coach and a replica boomtown bar, the museum sports a replica mine and mining artifacts.
Some people get so excited about visiting the site of the original shootout at the OK Corral that they forget what it was silver that drew so many wild and adventurous characters to Tombstone. Yet, the silver mines of this town were, in their own right, the stuff of legend. The town itself is named…
Colorado School of Mines Geology Museum1310 Maple St.Golden, Colorado 80401 HoursMonday – Saturday: 9AM – 4PMSunday: 1 – 4PM AdmissionFree The Colorado School of Mines Geology Museum boasts the largest collection of Colorado mineral specimens housed in a slick, well curated, 2-story wing on the Colorado School of Mines campus. Notable in the museum’s collection…
On a pullout from Highway 299 in Trinity County is the largest hydraulic mine in California. Little remains of the operation aside from a monitor and four interpretive displays. Yet, the La Grange Mine looms large in gold mining history.
The DeWitt Museum is housed in the original 1910 two-story Prairie City Depot building. While much of the museum preserves the historic depot waiting room, station agent’s office, baggage and express room, and freight office, the second floor also houses displays highlighting local history. The collection includes mining artifacts, rocks, minerals, and photographs from the turn of the century.
Big Brutus lives up to its name. The massive Bucyrus-Erie model 1850-B electric shovel is so large it was abandoned at the location of its final use. Indeed, it was the second largest of its kind in the 1960s and 1970s and the largest shovel still in existence—16 stories tall with a 150-foot long boom and weighing in at 11 million pounds. The dipper can fill three railroad cars with its 90-cubic-yard capacity. It is less of a surprise that the shovel was abandoned, despite the $6.2 million price tag back in 1962, when one learns that it can only move at .22 MPH.
As gold deposits petered out in the Sierra foothills, prospectors who flooded California in 1849 fanned out, many coming south. Despite the harsh environment of modern day Joshua Tree Park, 300 mines were established within the park’s bounds. While most mines in Joshua Tree were poor producers, Lost Horse Mine was an exception: 10,000 ounces…
