An abandoned mining and milling site in the Jasper area, photographed with the landowner’s permission.
Twelve items in this collection
Twelve photographs of an abandoned mining and milling site in the Jasper area, taken on 27 October 2026. There are two sawmill slab piles, collapsed buildings, mine openings in two states, and the frame of a rock crusher lying where it was left. A broken bottle base picked up at the site carries a patent date of 1886, and the steel drum standing by the upper slab pile carries a shape patented at the end of 1905. Those are the only two things here that can be dated at all.
Nothing was dug, moved or taken apart. The site is on private land and was visited with the owner’s written permission.
This exhibit gives no location. It names no creek, no claim, no property and no owner, and the photographs had their GPS coordinates and camera data stripped out before they were published here. That is deliberate, and it is the condition on which they were taken.
The site is on private land, and around Jasper that is the ordinary case rather than the exception. The ground up these drainages was taken up as lode claims in the mining years, and a claim carried all the way through to patent passed out of federal ownership for good. Patented ground is private property in exactly the way a house lot is, whatever is standing on it and however long ago it was last worked. The museum’s own 1887 correspondent, writing about Cornwall mountain, counted seventeen patented mines in one group. Old workings that look like abandoned country almost always have an owner, a deed and a tax bill.
So the rule is simple. Find out who owns the ground and ask before you go, which is what was done here. If the answer is no, that is the end of it.
Where the ground is public, and a great deal of this valley is national forest, the rule is different but no looser. Taking an artefact more than a hundred years old off federal land is an offence under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, not a souvenir. And old adits and shafts kill people: bad air, rotten timber, and shafts that drop away under the floor in the dark. Photograph them from outside, which is what was done here too.
The most conspicuous thing on this site is not a building. It is slab.
When a sawmill squares a round log it takes four bark-edged outer cuts off it before it reaches usable boards, and those slabs are waste. A mill that runs for any length of time builds a slab pile beside itself, and the piles outlast nearly everything else on a site, because nobody ever has a reason to move them.
There are two of them here, and that is the useful part. Slab is bulk waste: the whole point of it is that it is not worth carting anywhere, so a slab pile marks the spot where the saw actually stood rather than somewhere the timber was taken afterwards. These two piles are a long way apart. Timber was being cut in at least two separate places on this ground. Whether that means two mills, or one portable mill shifted to the timber as the nearer stand was worked out, is not something these photographs can settle.
The upper pile, in the aspens, is the one still shaped like a pile: a long grown-over mound with young spruce coming up through it. The lower pile, down at the creek, is in worse condition for a recent reason. A flood scoured the bank out from under it and brought it down, and it now reads at first glance as a fallen building rather than as what it is.
The lumber in the one building on the site says the same thing from the other direction. Its boards are wide, flat-sawn and unplaned and its sills are squared timber, and none of it is hand-hewn. That is mill output, not axe work, and it is visibly different material from the rough slab lying in the piles.
The museum already holds a record of sawing for the mines in this camp. The La Jara Enterprise of 13 June 1913 reported that the first product of the sawmill then running was to go to the Gilmore mine for the erection of mine buildings. That clipping does not say where the mill stood, and it would be wrong to read it as describing this site. What it does show is that cutting timber locally for mine buildings was ordinary practice here, and this site is the physical side of the same practice.
Several buildings have come down on this ground, and one of them is in these photographs. It is in a clearing a little way off. Its sill beam is still lying where it was laid, a section of gable end is standing at one corner, and one of its walls went over outward and is lying flat with the courses still joined and the peak intact at one end. The others were not photographed. Nothing on the site is standing.
Mine openings appear in three of these photographs, in two very different states.
One is open. It is driven into a spur of rock stained yellow, ochre and bleached white, which is the colour oxidised, sulphide-bearing ground takes at surface. Prospectors drove at colour like that because it is where the sulphides were, and the museum’s own clippings record what the sulphides turned out to mean here. A correspondent writing to the Weekly Register on 14 October 1887 set out the assay figures being claimed for the camp and then said he did not believe they would matter, for a metallurgical reason rather than a geological one: the ore was very refractory, it was sulphides and not free milling, and in his judgement it was smelting ore. The fan of broken rock on the slope below the opening is what came out of it.
The other openings are gone. All that shows of one is the cap timber of a set and the tops of its two posts, with the slope slumped in over everything below them; of another, only splintered timber ends above the loose rock. Both are completely choked. An opening in that condition is the most dangerous kind, because the ground above it has already demonstrated what it does.
Down at the creek there is a waste rock dump with a young spruce growing out of the top of it. The cone shape is not evidence of anything clever. It is simply what a dump does when it is tipped over the edge from one fixed point, barrow after barrow, and it is one of the surest signs of a working from a distance.
The heaviest thing on the site, and the only machine left on it, is the frame of a rock crusher. It is lying on its side among the spruce with a coil of wire rope beside it.
A primary crusher is the first machine ore meets after it leaves the mine. It takes rock at the size a man can lift and breaks it down to something a mill can be fed. What is left here is the frame casting, with big openings cored through it to save metal and flat pads at the ends of the arms for bolting it down; a splined shaft standing up out of a flanged housing; square-headed bolts; and a heavy cylindrical component held between the arms.
All of it came up the valley on wagons. The castings are a bolted assembly rather than one piece, which is how a machine of this weight was moved at all, shipped in parts and put together where it was meant to stand. It never went back down again, and that is the usual ending rather than a remarkable one. Once a property stopped, hauling heavy iron back out over the road it had come in on cost more than the scrap was worth, so it stayed.
No maker’s name, foundry mark or patent date is visible on the castings in any of the three photographs. That is the one thing this site could still give up and has not. A maker’s plate would date the machine within a few years, and a maker and a date together would make the newspapers searchable for the shipment, the way the Barclay Monitor mill unloaded at Monte Vista in 1887 can be followed. If you recognise the frame, the curator would like to hear from you.
Only two things in these photographs can be dated at all, and both of them date the same way. Each gives a date before which the object cannot have existed, and says nothing whatever about when it arrived on this ground or when it was thrown down.
The first is the base of an amber bottle, picked up at the site and catalogued with the Relics. Round the underside it reads PATD AUG 24 1886, with the mould number 19 in the centre.
That patent date is recorded on bottles of Duffy’s Pure Malt Whiskey, of Rochester, New York, which was sold as a medicine rather than as a drink and advertised in 1886 as the greatest known heart tonic. The full reading of the date, the attribution and the company’s history are on the record for the base itself.
What it is worth being careful about is what the date proves. An embossed patent date is a floor and not a date of manufacture: the bottle cannot have been made before 24 August 1886, but moulds stayed in service for years and went on stamping the same date for as long as they were used, and Duffy’s ran into the 1920s. When the bottle was emptied and thrown away is a further question again, and it was not found inside any of the structures here.
So the bottle establishes one thing about this site, and it is a narrow thing: somebody was here on or after 24 August 1886. It does not date the buildings, the workings or the crusher. It is the firmer of the two dates on this page, because it is read off the object rather than inferred from its shape.
The second is the steel drum standing in front of the upper slab pile. It has two rolling hoops swaged into the body, and that pattern begins with Henry Wehrhahn’s United States patent 808,327 of 26 December 1905, for a flanged metal barrel with encircling hoops that let it be rolled under control. Wehrhahn assigned the patent to Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, better known as the reporter Nellie Bly, who was then running the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company. Steel barrels were being made before that, including a 42 gallon one by Standard Oil in 1902, but not in this shape. So the drum cannot be earlier than the end of 1905.
It would be easy to read it as modern rubbish and set it aside, and the photograph does not support that either. The pattern has barely changed since. Drums of this shape were made right through the twentieth century and are made now, so the shape gives a floor and nothing above it. The curator reports cans, nails and other metal scattered through the site that look of a piece with the rest of it. None of that has been recorded yet. The drum has also been shot at, which is common on abandoned ground and dates nothing.
Put together, the two objects do something neither does alone. Somebody was on this ground on or after August 1886, and somebody was on it again on or after December 1905. That is a span of use rather than a date, and it is the most the loose material here has given up.
Nothing in the collection names this site, and no document here has been matched to it. What the records do establish is that the two activities visible on the ground, which are mining and sawing timber to serve it, were both going on in this area in the period the bottle allows, which is the claim this exhibit makes and the limit of it.
Most of it. In particular:
These twelve photographs are a selection rather than a survey. More has come down on this ground than is shown here. They were taken by the curator on 27 October 2026 with the written permission of the owner of the ground, who asked that the property not be identified. Their GPS and camera metadata were removed before publication. Nothing at the site was dug, moved or dismantled, and nothing was taken from it except the bottle base, which was lying loose. If you recognise the machinery or know anything about mine workings of this kind in the Jasper area, the curator would like to hear from you. Please do not send, or ask for, a location.
The museum grows in fits and starts, whenever a box turns up or something finally gets identified. Leave your name and the curator will write when there is something new worth seeing. No more than once a month, and usually less.