University Place

Diving the Flooded Mines of Baraboo’s Iron Range

– Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen, I work here at UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension, a Cooperative Extension. And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Alumni Association and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Mark Langenfeld and Tamara Thomsen. Tamara’s with the Wisconsin Historical Society, and was born in Bethesda, Maryland and went to high school at Carmel High School near Indianapolis, Indiana. She came to UW-Madison to get her undergraduate degree in horticulture and agronomy, stayed here to get a master’s degree in plant breeding, and then, like most people who get degrees in plant biology, like myself, went to work for the Wisconsin Historical Society… (audience laughing) which is where she’s been since 2004. And Mark Langenfeld was born in Racine, Wisconsin as was my dad. He went to Washington Park High School, as did my dad. And I understand everybody just calls it Park High School. Is that correct?

– That’s right.
– And came UW-Madison to get a degree in journalism. And the Department of Journalism was at what location?
– About where we’re standing. It was in the old Wisconsin High Building, 425 Henry Mall.
– Yep.
– So, it was here at 425 Henry Mall before this building was put up in 1995. And then, he got his law degree here at UW-Madison in 1985. They are going to talk to us about one of the more extraordinary stories I’ve seen in a long time. “Diving Into the Flooded Mines of Baraboo’s Iron Range” is what I call it. I think they’re calling it, “An Archeological Analysis of the Mines of the Baraboo Iron Range.” So, please join me in welcoming both Tamara Thomsen and Mark Langenfeld to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. (audience applauding)

– Well, candidly I’m stunned to see this many faces and it’s been kind of cold. (audience laughing) I didn’t know whether there’d be one or none or certainly didn’t expect this many. So, thanks for coming out, and we hope we’ll make this presentation worth your while. It’s a little unusual, the Baraboo Iron Mines. Well, who’d a thunk, Baraboo? And my job here, I’m not a diver. Well, I am a diver, but I’m not one of the divers that is doing the work in the mines. I’m here to provide a geological and historical context for the amazing stuff that Tami’s going to show you in a little while. So, let’s get to that.

If you’re really interested in this subject, I’m going to start right out by pointing you at probably the best extant resource on the iron mines of the Baraboo Range. This was an issue that, Volume 36, Number 4, December 2003 of the Mid-Continent Railway Gazette. I don’t know if any of you’ve been up to the Mid-Continent Railway Museum in North Freedom, but they have a very nice publication. It’s a quarterly usually. This was a special issue that they put out specifically on the iron mines up there. And they did so because the rail line on which the museum train operates is actually the same rail lines that service these mines. This particular rail line was put in to service these iron mines. So, if you find yourself stimulated and excited about this, and you want more information, this particular issue has been reprinted and is available at the museum probably by email order if you go to their website. I haven’t checked that, so I don’t know.

But, I mean, the fact of the matter is, and I have to learn how to use this mouse. The fact of the matter is few people connect Baraboo with mining. I mean, you think of Devil’s Lake State Park. You think of Circus World Museum. You think of the ties with the Ringling Brothers, but you don’t think of mining. You just, you just don’t. But, one thing that maybe you have heard of, certainly most geologists practicing in this area know about is a thing called the Baraboo syncline. Now, I’m not going to get too technical here, but basically what a syncline is is a big deformation of the bedrock. If you have a major disturbance where you have pressure in the bedrock moving inward, one of two things can happen.

The bedrock can buckle upward and create a thing called an anticline, or it can buckle downward and create a thing called a syncline. And what we have in the Baraboo area is a big geological feature called a syncline. The bedrock buckled downward. I think, I’m not a geologist, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express. You know that– (audience laughing) I think there’s still legitimate debate on what caused, what forces caused that syncline to occur. I think there’s general agreement that it was about 1.8 billion years ago. I could be off by a fraction of a billion. But, about 1.8 billion years ago, some force from the south-southeast and some counterforce from the north-northwest exerted enough force to actually buckle these rocks. What an astounding thing that must have been, and it probably occurred over a long period of time. But, there is it.

This is the remnant of that event, or those events. And just to give you, I’m going to use this little cursor here. The city of Baraboo lies right about in here. This syncline, if you can envision it as kind of a squat canoe. You get the picture. Baraboo kind of sits up here in the bow, And La Rue, where we’re going to be doing a lot of work, kind of sits semi toward the stern down in the canoe. All right, if you think of cutting a cross-section through the syncline north and south, roughly along the line of Highway 12 going north and south, this is roughly what it looks like. Now, once upon a time, all these beds of rocks were pretty much horizontal. But, when that smashing force occurred, it got forced into this sort of a canoe for lack of a better word.

And looking at the cross-section, this would be the North Range what’s called the North Range and the South Range over here that would sort of the be the gunwales of the canoe. And what’s in here is sort of in the bilges, okay? You get the picture? Now, initially that North Range and that South Range are a good deal higher. In fact, you could even argue that they were mountainous. We’re looking at, I think, now the geologists may pillory me here, but I think there was at least 1,000 feet of relief and probably quite a bit more than that. Those, over the years, were eroded by various forces. They were weathered down into the outcrops of Baraboo quartzite that you see today. Devil’s Lake is probably the most classic of the outcrops. And this Baraboo quartzite is good stuff. It’s very old, very tough rock.

It’s been quarried for many, many years at North Freedom. If you see this characteristic pinkish rock used as railroad ballast along railroad right of ways, that’s the so-called pink lady rock that’s been quarried at North Freedom for many years. It’s very old, very tough rock. The formations which used to overlie that Baraboo quartzite were pretty much stripped away by erosional forces and glaciation. But, the thing is you’ve got this syncline, and it has a bilge in it, and it sort of trapped those overlying formations right in this area. So, they’re kind of preserved there, but they’ve disappeared everywhere else. They’ve just been ground away, washed away and so on and so forth. What color is the Baraboo quartzite? Anybody know? Red. I heard a red. Reddish purple.

What does that indicate to you? Iron, yeah, there’s iron up there somewhere. And sure enough, there’s actually iron formation. By the way, iron is everywhere. Iron is everywhere through the Midwest, through the world, everywhere. The question is how rich is the iron? Is it economic? It turns out that in one of these bilge formations, if you want to call it that, is a thing called the freedom dolomite and adjacent to that freedom dolomite is a pretty thick, pretty rich iron formation. All right… that’s trapped in the synclinal basin. Now, small deposits of that, small outcrops of that were discovered in mine pretty early on primarily for use as pigment in paint. You want to know why Wisconsin barns are painted red? (audience laughing) Iron pigment paint is extremely durable.

It’s extremely cheap. There are several places in Wisconsin where iron paint was manufactured. This was one. There’s another over near Iron Ridge. That ring a bell? Do you know where I’m talking about? Between here and Hartford. Know where Hartford is? There’s a little place called Iron Ridge. There’s a place called Mayville. They tried to smelt the iron over there, but it turned out to be very brittle iron, so it wasn’t useful for that, but they sure did make a lot of paint. But, anyway, they were mining for paint up here as early as the 1880s.

All right, let me recover my cursor here. Now… some other people had bigger ideas for Baraboo iron. They started prospecting for higher-grade ores in about 1887, but it was a little on the disorganized side. What you’re looking at here is a steam drill. Steam drilling, core drilling, was pioneered by a chap by the name of Longyear. Long story, I won’t get into it, in the Minnesota iron ranges. This a Longyear type core drill. Right around the turn of the last century, 1900, a chap from Minnesota by the name of G.W. La Rue brought down his steam drills, core drills, and crews and began prospecting deeper for richer ores.

And they found it, and it wasn’t all that deep. It was within the first three hundred, 400 feet from surface which is important when you’re talking economics. They were greatly encouraged by this, and La Rue and his partners formed an outfit called the Sauk County Land and Mining Company. And they called it that because obviously they had acquired land that had rich mineral deposits underneath it. And they soon started reporting finding deposits of greater than 50% ore, which is, you know, iron is not like gold. You’re not going to make a huge amount of money out of it. So, the richer it is, the more economic it is to develop. So, when they said, “We’ve got ore here that’s better than 50% iron,” antennae went out. The other thing that worked in their favor is the Chicago Northwestern Railroad already had rails into this area.

So, the combination of La Rue’s finds and rail service made it seem like almost a sure thing. And there was great excitement and the boom was on. La Rue and his cohorts immediately began leasing land for mineral development around the area. One of the first to take him up on it was an outfit called Deering Harvester out of Chicago. They manufactured farm equipment, and we’ll get into that in a minute. They were looking for a fairly nearby source of iron ore that they could take to Chicago and smelt into iron for their farm implements, to manufacture their farm implements. They formed, and they like, they, I mean Deering Harvester, formed the Illinois Mining Company in 1901. And they came up and they started doing some drilling of their own. By that time, they had merged and acquired some other businesses and were known as International Harvester.

That should ring a bell with you. They finally leased land for a mine in 1903. About the same time as this– And by the way, I should move on to the next slide here. That’s not working. There we go. All right. Okay, very good. About the same time, the Iroquois Iron Company, which was also affiliated with a Chicago steel mill, acquired some property about a mile away. And they also leased that land, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute.

So, anyway, after a couple of false starts, the Illinois mine reached its final configuration. And you can see here the headframe on the Illinois mine and there’s some rails in it that kind of go down. Oops, I’m not tracking them very well. They go down on an angle about like that. They sank a 400-foot shaft that went down about a 60-degree angle into the ground. So, this is not a minor operation. As you can see, there was fairly substantial investment in infrastructure. And the mine was pretty deep, 400 feet. Now, this picture was taken circa 1907, so this is actually fairly late in the mine’s life and it’s pretty mature in this image.

This is a schematic cross-section of the mine. You can see the 60-degree incline shaft. It goes down to a crosscut at the 300, and the plan view there shows the crosscut at the 300-foot level which goes out into the ore formation. And then, they proceeded east and west along the ore formation stoping it out and removing it and hoisting it to surface. They also went down to the 400-foot level. Drove a similar crosscut into the ore body. They had to go a little farther, and stoped east and west and removed the ore. Now, the 400-foot level was a little thicker, but the ore was slightly lower grade. But, that’ll give you a general idea how the mine was laid out.

And let’s see if I can make this work. Up here is where that headframe and shaft was located in the image. The ore was a soft red hematite. It was easy to mine, and reportedly it smelted very well. International Harvester was pleased. Now, at its peak, this mine was operating 24/7, three shifts a day. There were 200 employees. They were Finnish, German, Swedish and Englishmen, mostly Cornishmen. I don’t know if you know about the connection of Cornwall and Cornishmen to mining, but it’s a very close one. It was a very busy place. Tami will show you some images I think that show you the string town of miners’ housing that grew up just to the south of the mine. The mine had a hotel onsite. It was a big operation and it was well-financed by International Harvester. In mid-1904, the mine was shipping about four of these 40-ton railcars of ore to Chicago for smelting. And by the end of that year, they were already increasing their production to between five and 12 of those carloads per day, so that was a fairly hefty tonnage considering the practices that were used which was largely hand mining at that time. It was not heavily mechanized. This was purely pick, shovel, dynamite, and the strength of men’s backs. This was a photograph of the mine’s very first shipment in 1904.

You can see it went out with some ballyhoo. (laughter) And again, these are the tracks that are used today by the Mid-Continent Museum. So, there’s some real connection. You can also see that La Rue was a fairly booming little community at that time. They had platted this community out for immense growth. Of course, it never happened, but they had it platted. Well, the fact of the matter is despite the ballyhoo, despite the labor, despite the production, they never made a penny on this mine. It was basically a loser. And they applied their best efforts, both technologically and in terms of dedicated labor, but it just did not work out.

By 1908, operations were suspended, and the mine never reopened. Existing ore, however, was continued to be sold off the stockpiles until about 1916 when it was essentially depleted. By 1925, every stick of that structure, every stick of the equipment or every bit of the equipment, every stick of the structure had either been removed or repurposed. It was gone. The site basically was indistinguishable as a mine. Now, the Iroquois Mining Company that I mentioned a moment ago began erecting buildings and sinking a shaft in 1903. Now, they were targeting an ore body that was quite deep, about 500 feet, but it had shown up in drill cores, exploration drill cores as 63% ore. I mean, it really looked good. However, the company had difficulties with financing, and also some engineering problems.

So, they suspended operations by the end of 1904, and the project lay dormant for four years. In March of 1908, the Oliver Mining Company which was a subsidiary of United States Steel, acquired the whole property, the whole shootin’ match and they renamed it the Iroquois Mine and they revived the project with substantial financial backing which their predecessor just didn’t have. And that money built a really thoroughly modern stone and brick powerhouse. Big brick smokestack that you see here. A substantial steel headframe that you can see in the background along with a loading trestle that ran across at right angles. A major ore bin for holding raw ore that came up from underground, and they built an absolutely spectacular residence for their mine superintendent. By the way, that is the only structure I know of that has survived. It was removed from the site and it’s been relocated in rural Sauk County and can still be seen today. But, I kind of got ahead of myself here a little bit.

You have to note the scale and sophistication of what’s going on here at this mine site. I mean, it really mirrored the mining practice of Northern Minnesota and Upper Michigan where the mining was extremely high-tech. And everything was the best that money could buy. Quite different from the lead and zinc mines in Southwestern Wisconsin which were much smaller and by comparison, basically primitive. It’s quite a contrast. The Baraboo Republic reported in November 1909, and I’m going to quote it now. And this is in reference to the Iroquois Mine. “All improvements being made about the place are of a permanent character and indicate that the ore under the ground is a vast extent and will require years to bring to the surface.” Well, (chuckling) that was wasn’t the way it turned out. Continuous difficulties from the start.

The Oliver Company abruptly stopped operations in May of 1914, and within months, had dismantled and completely removed everything you see here. Everything was gone. So much for permanent. Well, just across the road from the Illinois mine that we looked at first, Captain C.T. Roberts, who was the last superintendent at the Illinois mine before it closed, later opened a small short live mine that bore his name. We’re gonna be talking more about this mine. And if you look in the background there, you can see the inactive Illinois headframe. So, it’s very close. It’s just across the road. And the connection between C.T. Roberts, this mine and the Illinois mine is an interesting connection that we are going to explore a little bit later.

Now, I also want to briefly mention the last and largest of the Baraboo Range iron mines. This is the Cahoon mine. And it was an outlier. It was not in the North Freedom-La Rue area. This one was actually almost within the city limits of Baraboo. It was opened by Pittsburgh Steel and coal investors in 1911. And it operated on two shifts, almost continuously until 1919. And the shaft was sunk to 400 feet, and it had extensive multiple levels running east and west. Now, although the mining ended at the Cahoon in 1919, there was huge stockpiles of iron ore just below the mine, and there was continuous shipment of that ore until 1925.

But, that is the end of iron mining in Sauk County. I mentioned earlier that the Illinois mine had a couple of false starts before settling in on that 400-foot 60-degree incline. I’m going to talk just a little bit about that. Initially, they tried sinking vertical shafts directly from the surface down to the iron ore body as you can sort of see here. You can see how different the incline was. The incline went down at the angle and they had to drive crosscuts to reach the iron ore. Their original intent was to sink a vertical shaft straight down from the surface and hit the ore body right at the top. Well, they tried two of these vertical shafts, but abandoned both of them before reaching the ore, at least so far as we know before reaching the ore. We don’t really know why they abandoned that and went to the other.

Although, it was about coincidental with the arrival of Captain C.T. Roberts who came down from Crystal Falls, Michigan. And he said, “We’re going to sink the incline shaft,” and they did. Now, here’s an image of one of those early vertical-shaft sinking attempts. And you can see in the foreground, a nice set of steam boilers and a hoist. And in the background, a very crude temporary headframe. And the headframe is nothing more than a scaffold that holds a sheave wheel that the hoist rope goes over so that you can hoist straight up and down the shaft. Now, I want to digress just a little bit here and talk a little bit about shaft sinking circa turn of the last century, because this is going to play a little part in Tami’s story, more than a little part. This is a drawing from a roughly 1908, 1909 mining treatise of a shaft-sinking operation. Now, steam power was big at the turn of the last century.

Industry of any kind, mining included, relied entirely on steam for power. Compressed air was just starting to come in, mostly for drilling, but power was steam. Now, this is the shaft way over here on the right. I’m doing a terrible job by this. This is the shaft going down to water, and you see a device down here at the bottom of the shaft, and that is a pump. In the vernacular of the mining industry, that was called a sinking pump. They’re sinking the shaft, and to keep the mine dry so they can work on it as they go deeper and deeper, they have a portable pump that goes down on a hoist. It’s like a sump pump. Hmm. And they run this to the bottom of the shaft and pump the water out of the sump, or the bottom of the shaft.

The problem with steam power though is it does not hold its energy for great distances. So, this pump did not have a sufficient capacity to raise that water all the way to surface. What they did was they excavated a pocket off the side of the shaft partway down, built a sump into the floor of that pocket and put in a much larger pumping engine at that level. What that allowed them to do is use the sinking pump to raise the water to the sump in that pumping station, and the more powerful pump would then pump that water to surface. So, it was essentially a two-stage pumping operation. Everybody bored now? (audience laughing) (man speaking off-microphone) Yeah. (laughing) Very good, yes. Anyway, this is another picture of a typical sinking pump of that era. And I’m showing this to you only as a teaser for what is to come. All right.

What killed the mines? Water. Okay? All of these mines were under water, all right. We’re going to look at this diagram here again. You see this whole formation here. Up here is glacial drift. This is just stuff deposited by departing glaciers. But, this formation right here which overlies all of the iron formation in this district is called the Potsdam Sandstone. It’s a very porous sandstone, and it is saturated just like a sponge. So, if you try to work under the Potsdam Sandstone, water comes down and down and down and tries to flood you out. There’s a lot of water in 400 vertical feet of this porous rock.

All right. So, they had to pump continuously to stay ahead of that water. In the Illinois mine, 2,600 gallons per minute. That costs dollars, a lot of dollars. And of course, what that did was went to the bottom line, and it made the Baraboo iron ores less economic than certain others. Now, the Sauk Iroquois Mine also was very wet, and that created another foreseen problem. Their ore, as you recall, 63% ore looked really good on those drill cores. But, when they got underground, they found that that iron ore was so saturated it was literally sweating water. And it was like red mud. When mined, became what one reporter called “a pasty mess”. It was difficult to handle. It was difficult to process. The Sauk Mine also had to deal with pumping water, and they had to extract 6 and 1/2 million gallons a day out of that mine to keep it dry. It required 13 underground pumps to do that. So, that’ll give you a notion of the scale. I want to give you a notion of just how wet it was, and it can be gleaned from an account of the mine’s closure. In the July 25th, 1914 edition of Mining and Engineering World. I know it’s difficult to read.

This vividly describes the battle with water, and I’ll read you just a bit of it. “Because with the machinery stopped, the mine was sure to be inundated within a few hours. Great care and the greatest of expedition were required to recover the equipment too valuable to abandon. A bulkhead was constructed, bolts were loosened and other preparations were made to get the pumps out of the mine in quick order one at a time once the hoisting was started. So well did the plans work out that only two small machines were left in the workings. The last pump taken out was in operation until within a few minutes of time when slung in its chains it was taken to the surface. The bulkhead, seven feet in height, was engulfed so quickly, the men barely had time to escape the rising flood.”

So, I mean there are wet mines and there are wet mines. This was a wet mine. Well, water of a different sort also helped sound the death nail of the Baraboo iron mines, specifically the Great Lakes. The growing Great Lakes bulk carrier fleet made it feasible for the immense iron mines in Northern Minnesota and Upper Michigan to efficiently transport their ores down to the steel mills at the foot of the lakes. At first, the Baraboo ores could compete. They could be shipped to Chicago by rail for as little as $0.85 per ton. And initially, and accounting for docking charges, the maritime shipments of the northern ores cost nearly as much. So, the Baraboo mines were initially competitive, but as the size of the average laker, or ore boat, increased, and the cost of operating them started to go down, that advantage quickly flip-flopped. For example, as early as 1906, the Minnesota Mesabi Range ores were being delivered by boat at International Harvester’s dock. Fully a $0.45-per-ton advantage over the Illinois mine ores. The Baraboo ores just could not compete. In short, water destroyed these mines. But, in a sense, it also preserved them. They are today like sunken historic shipwrecks except they’re underground shipwrecks. And this is now where Tami is going to take you. Thank you. (audience applauding)

– So, if you give me a second here, I’m going to switch over the PowerPoint to mine here. So, this is now. So, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about how we got involved with this. We have a really active cave-diving community here in Wisconsin, which is kind of surprising to a lot of people. But, we have about 70 divers who are full cave-diver trained. So, it’s an awful lot of training. Not just your basic open-water training, but they learn to use technical diving equipment and they take many levels, many years of advanced training to be able to dive in caves. And so, normally, or typically, when people learn to cave dive, they dive in the Floridian Aquifer, or they go to Mexico and dive in the Cenotes there. But, when you’re stranded in Wisconsin, in the middle of winter, you start looking for any kind of water that you can dive in. So, we see my friend Jason here hiking through a corn field in Southwestern Wisconsin trying to find one of these mine sites. So, we started because I have an interest in caving and our familiarity with the Langenfelds, Mark and Lynn Langenfeld. We started asking them about a number of mine sites that they would know might still be open or accessible. And we started going through their collection of information that they had been gathering for a many number of years. And we’ve been pretty successful in talking to landowners and sharing information on what treasures they have on their properties.

So, with their help, we discovered one of the mines in the Baraboo Range. This is the Illinois mine, or the shaft entrance to the Illinois. And this was one of the early ones that we found around 2007 up there. So, granted, we had been looking at mines and working with the Langenfelds for almost 20 years. And this was kind of in the middle of our hunt for mines. And so, this is on the Pierce property. You see Dennis Pierce here and Keith Meverden who’s also in the audience. So, we’re looking at a three-compartment shaft which is the Illinois. Now, of course, Mark had been talking to you about the Illinois mine being one of the highest-producing mines in the Baraboo Range.

And this is really kind of an anomaly in their backyard. The Pierces had raised up the ground around where the shaft collar is here, and added a few railroad ties to prevent the wetland from taking over this area. And it really became an area for them to sit around and drink beers and party in their backyard. So, since the mine closed in 1908, that’s been the common thread with this shaft. There’s been a lot of trash dumped in it, so we found many generations of trash. We found farming equipment, which had been there. When we removed that, there were beer cans from many generations. And then, when you got on top of that, there were laptop computers and other indiscretions people wanted to hide by throwing them down the mineshaft. It took us about seven years to remove everything from this to be able to clear out what it was that we found.

And we did take a number of notes. This ends up being a three-compartment shaft. So, it’s basically a three-compartment elevator shaft and you’re in an area that’s enclosed for the most of it in each one of those individual segments which is five feet by four feet. So, it’s very enclosed. And if you think about this, the central area would really where the main elevator would run, and then there would be a switching manway which would move from one side to the other. So, if the elevator, or if the lift would break, they could come up on the ladders and it wouldn’t affect that. So, we have a couple interesting things that you can see in this drawing. And this is one of our early sketches that we did underwater. So, in that seven years of us– This was not like every day we would go up there with this.

This was very sporadic. But, we would go up, a group of four, five of us. We would drop down one of the shafts and pull up a great big bag of trash. And then, it would make the visibility and the clarity of the water mud. And so, then the next person would come down, and they would fill a bag of trash by feel. And by the time the fourth person was down there, they were having no fun. And then, it would take about a month for it to settle out, and then we would decide when we would want to go back up and try it all over again. And so, I lost a good number of buddies. And eventually, we got to the point where we could create something like this and see what we have.

But, you see, we’ve cleared it down to 130 feet. We know from the drawings that Mark was showing us earlier that this possibly could have gone as deep as 400 feet. So, what lie below? Did we hit a debris clog? Had we just needed to remove more? Had we hit the bottom? What is there? But, we see that there’s a chainfall that we find at 95 feet. There’s lagging which is spelled out in here. And I wanted to share a little video from my friend John Janzen who’s also in the audience here of what it looks like in the Illinois mine. So, they’ve now added fence around it. It looks a little bit like a cemetery, but that was to prevent the grandchildren from falling into the open shaft. I know. So you see that it’s much nicer than the trash pit that it was seven years prior.

You can see it’s very clean. We’ve spent a lot of time knocking a lot of the debris off, or gathering it up and clearing it out. And you can see the lagging is open around the outside of the entire structure with the frames down the center. As we progressed deeper, and again, remember the Pierce family built this up higher to reinforce it. So, we get down into the actual mine, you start seeing ladders in the south side of the compartment here. And we’re going down in the center. And then, as we get down to about 40 feet, it closes in. And so, you need to be in either, you need to choose which side you’re in whether you’re in the central shaft or one side or the other. You also see coming in on the far side of the screen parts of the skip guides.

So, these would have been the guides, they would have been greased, and then the platform or the elevator would have come up and down on these to bring workers down or to bring ore back up. There’s one of the skip guides there. And you can see it’s quite substantially built, so they put a lot investment into this particular shaft. And you see there’s still some particulate in the water that gets knocked down despite us and our best efforts. And John’s down at about 50 feet here looking up. He’s just down into the enclosed area, and he’s going to continue down in a second here. So, as he continues down. Now he’s in the area that’s enclosed in, and he’s looking down the elevator shaft. So, this is really an elevator shaft, and you’re going straight down with the skips on either side.

And this drops down to around the 100-foot level where it opens up again. You can see that it’s routed out on the one side. I would imagine that’s where there would have been a breaking mechanism to slow down the skip. So as we come down a little bit further. Again, this is about four feet by five foot wide. And he’s dropping through. So, you can imagine this was all filled with trash. So, each one of the three compartments. So, again, it’s a good number of times. So, here we are, we open up into this other area, and now you can access either side of the three-compartment shaft. And you can slip under the beams there and go into the other compartment and look in, or you can continue to drop down to the debris cone below. And you can see that some of the lagging has come free, so over the years, and if you look through that, you can either see that the rock wall has been gobbed behind it so they’ve thrown rock in behind it or you can see the raw rock walls. That is a hanger for one of the ladders that’s fallen and has since dropped down to the bottom. So, we had one of our divers get his fin caught in that little area and ended up abandoning it. And we had to go back about a month later and look for it. So, John now drops under the wall here, and he comes across this pump. Now, you imagine for seven years, we had no idea this pump was there ’cause it was completely covered with garbage. And so, it’s pretty unique.

This is actually a sinking pump, and it’s in place and it’s interesting that he’s so close to it. But, remember the shaft is four by five, and now he’s in the shaft with the pump and his monster camera. And so, that’s why you’re getting extremely closeup views. And you see the chainfall at the top– as he continues up the shaft– which is attached to one of the beams. So, then as the water level would have been depleted, they would have lowered the pump down, and then they would have been able to get more. We’ll come back to that mosaic in a minute. So, now he’s following up. He’s crossed over into the north side of the three-compartment shaft, and he’s continuing up. And as he comes up to about the 75-foot level, the lagging will stop and you see the flange at the end of a pipe which has been disconnected.

This goes into that pocket that Mark was talking about earlier that where the stage pumping machinery would have been. So, he heads back into this area, and again, you see the visibility in the water’s been disturbed because he went down the shaft before he came back up. And he’s going to head into this room following the pipe on the ceiling. And you can see that there are boards that are across the ceiling to prevent any loose rock from falling in on the workers. And as he gets all the way back into this room, you can see that there’s a false floor, or remnants of it. And this would have been where the sump would have been underneath, and they would have put the siphon to be able to suck up to go up to the surface. So, that’s the staged pumping room. So, I’m going to head on here and show you this is mosaic of the pump. Again, this is taken from images that John shot in his video.

And this is about 10 or 12 images which I’ve stitched together to give you an overall feeling of that pump. And going back to the drawing that Mark showed you earlier, it is this sinking pump which is here. And this remains all the way up to the connection going into this room which comes in and goes in here. And then, it’s disconnected at this point right here and the whole pumping mechanism has gone. So, they either removed it or re-utilized it somewhere else, keep that in mind.

– [Mark] Tami, you might want to get ’em a sense of how tall that pump is.

– Okay, so that pump is about 30 feet tall. So, it’s very, very long. So, and so and the siphon on the sinking pump is all the way at the bottom at 130 feet of water. So, and that still is extant at the site. Okay, so Mark had shown you this picture earlier of the Mid-Continent Gazette. This was one of the reference materials that we had with us when we were doing the initial exploration up there. And we got very excited about this publication. And most of it– The Mid-Continent Railroad is really run by volunteers. There are a lot of guys who are very interested in railroads. And so, on a side track of research, one of their volunteers named Don Ginter came up with all of this information on the mining, and then eventually it turned into this article in this Gazette. Mark was able to track down Don Ginter and he was in his 90s at the time. And he lived down just north of Beloit.

And he invited us to come to his house for a few hours and go through his collection of materials which he had gathered to put together the article. And so, he had no scanner or copying machine and we went there with cell phones and cameras and took as many pictures of all of this collection of stuff that he had that we could in the three hours we were there. And amongst them were a number of photographs really showing the extent of the Illinois mine. In fact, most of his collection was based around the Illinois mine, that was his interest. And it turned out that because there was so much information, there was such this common interest between Ginter, the interests of the Mid-Continent Railroad and the Pierce family, their plans were to make a park on the Pierce family property and to really tell the history of the Illinois mine there by creating trails and having interpretive signs. And to show where, you know, this full extent of operation which was here in at the Illinois mine, what it looked like today. However, most of it looked like foundations which are covered by snarls of wild weeds and overgrown shrubbery. So, Don Pierce then in his retirement, bought himself a skid loader and started removing a lot of this and cleaned up some of the foundations. This is actually, this area would have been where the powerhouse is.

And they cleared a bunch of trails on their property too, and they had big vision for this property which never came to fruition. Amongst his collection that Ginter had was a number of blueprints, and we found those to be very valuable. This is the Illinois mine, and we see here this is the rail cut which goes along here. This would have been the main shaft where they’re referring to as the number 3 shaft. And then, the number 2 shaft here which is open and diving. We didn’t know where the number 1 shaft was, and that was really one of the things that we were going to go look for the next time we were out. Another thing within this collection which we found very interesting were plan view drawings of the crosscuts that were created by the mining engineers. So, we could see exactly where the drift was in reference to the shafts. Here’s number two.

And here’s number one, and they don’t connect at all with the underground working. So, as Mark had said earlier, in his drawing, it is very much a mystery as to what was going on. We have the railroad cut here with the main shaft. The 60-degree, sorry, we did it again. The 60-degree decline here, and then the crosscuts going into the ore body. But, we imagined that this would be, this line here, would have been one of the exploratory shafts when the original shafts or used later as a dewatering shaft. What’s also very interesting is that they show that similar line continues on the second level and going out. So, our question was if this is the de-watering shaft, or that shaft number 1 or shaft number 2, it’s coming all the way down to the first level. And the first level is here at about 300 feet.

So, we have over 300 foot of direct descent down that three-compartment shaft down into the ore body. And when was this drawing made? Had they then later connected this down to the fourth level at the 400 foot? So, these are questions that we had as divers. Where were we going? How deep did it actually go? Also, really interesting within the collection was a couple of random pictures which Mark has attributed to some of these vertical shafts, the number one and the number two which gave us a little bit more of a feeling. I think this is the number 2 shaft just because of the geological, the geology that’s in the background. So, from there we started on a treasure hunt, and we decided to go walk transects through the swamp and see if we can find the number 1 shaft. After many– This is Don Pierce, or Dennis Pierce, Don’s middle son. And he was all too eager to walk through and help us walk these transects and look for anything. We were vastly unsuccessful except for finding some holes that were spouting out water and that really is the story of the Illinois mine was that the pumps gave out and the La Rue Mines were flooded. So, come back to this Mid-Continent Railway Gazette for a number reasons.

You see that the photo on the front, it’s very compelling. And I mean, it says Robert’s Mine, North Freedom, Wisconsin. But if you read that publication, which I’ve read and combed through multiple times, it talks about the Illinois. It talks about the Iroquois, and it talks about the Cahoon. And the only mention of the Captain Roberts is the photo on the cover. So, I thought that I’d missed it, or I was sleeping or just inadequate in my following along but, there really isn’t anything on the Robert’s Mine. And so, it took a little bit of digging. And again, going through more pictures and more information within this Don Ginter collection, we found again, a few more photos of the Robert’s Mine. We see the buildings here with, again, Mark showed you with the Illinois in the background and the railcut, so we should be able to find this on the landscape by what remnants are there today.

We also had a number of clippings. You know, he actually clipped things out and pasted them into a scrapbook, bless him. And so, I copied a lot of these and put them onto a piece of paper and we set off on– this is Memorial Day weekend in 2014– to try to find the Captain Robert’s Mine armed with these four newspaper articles and a couple historic images. And so, we were driving down the highway into La Rue, and there was a guy cutting his lawn. And I thought that might be the right area. And we pulled over and we stopped, and it’s actually the gentleman in the back, which is the background with the white hat, which Greg Jorgeson here. And he and his wife had their camper pulled up for the weekend on this property, and they were trimming the weeds. And I said to him– I pulled over with my four pieces of paper and I said, “I don’t know if I’m crazy, but I think that there’s a mine on your property, or might have been and I’ve been doing this research on the Illinois mine across the street. Would there be a mine here? Do you know what I’m talking about?” Well, he said, “Oh, my goodness, you’re not going to believe what I have in my backyard.” And so, he walked us out there, and again, they have this fence which they’ve I guess oversold in Baraboo.

And he has this surrounding his hole in the ground. And he said, “Well, this, we’ve been trying to raise fish in this thing.” And he said, “But, we imagined it was a mine shaft.” And they really didn’t know what to, what was down there, but they were really willing to learn. And they wanted to know. He said to us, “So, do you think you can dive here today?” We’d already made arrangements to go diving over at the Pierce property. So, I said, “Well, we should go dive over there ’cause we already had talked to the landowner.” But, I said, “We’ll come over this afternoon.” He says, “Well, if you come back, we’re going to make you steak.” So, how could we say no?

And I don’t know if any of you are cavers or have gone out looking, trying to get on their prop. It never happens like this. But, I have a little bit of video from John Scoles which I want to show you of what it looks like underwater in their property. So, again, they didn’t spend the 100 years throwing trash down the Captain Robert’s. But you see this, we spent about two hours cleaning this out, and this is on the second day. And as he’s dropping down, this is the first time we’re dropping down with a camera and looking into the mine. And so, as he drops down to 75 feet, we see the pipes going into the room. And here is that stage de-watering pump which Mark hypothesizes may have been taken from the Illinois. The story is that when Captain Roberts, when they closed the Illinois in 1908, Captain Roberts didn’t believe the ore was done. And he obtained rights to the property across the road. And to drive his shaft, he had 23 men remain on to help him sink it. And he robbed power from the Illinois. Well, of course, he had the keys. So, and then, it took him a few months to get enough money and to build the buildings himself and to bring his own boiler in and be able to start mining on that property.

So, if he was going to be robbing power from them, why not take equipment that was left too? So, this may in fact be the pump that’s missing over in the Illinois. So, I’m swimming here. That’s me in the picture here, swimming forward of John Scoles. And I’m putting a guideline out, so that’s very typical in cave diving that you would run a guideline along so that if there are crosscut tunnels or you get lost or something happens. You can find your way back out. And so, as Mark was saying in his article that he read, there was basically, they had minutes to get out of the mine. I believe that, and I use this all the time. I say, “Oh, it’s a time capsule. These things are time capsules.” This is literally a time capsule. This was like run for– They left their tools in place.

There’s an ore cart, a single ore cart on the track with a pickax in it empty. And next to it stands a post drill which has the bit still in the bore hole, and bits remaining at the base of it. And you can see the compressed airline running to it. By the way, we discovered when we were looking at some of the video of this, that was a very, very early post drill. It was not run with water. It was only run with compressed air. So, that’s what they call, Marks calls the widow-maker. And so, here he is swimming down the tracks towards the end of the drift here. And as we’re coming into this area.

You can see I’m doing very specific kicks. These are used in cave diving to avoid stirring up the bottom, so I’m not doing the flutter kick. It’s a frog kick which throws the water up. And you can also see that I’m using a re-breather which doesn’t produce any bubbles, so there’s no percolation falling on me from the ceiling which is probably a good thing because I’m going into an area here which is framed off. And you see above it is logs which have been split and put at top to form a ceiling to keep the rock from falling down onto the miners or the carts which are below. And as I swim further, you see balanced along the wall here is a scaling bar, and the scaling bar would have been used to pry and ram the ceiling before the workers would go down to try to get the rock to come loose, so there wouldn’t be any accidents. And you can see the compressed air lines on either side of the tracks which are continuing in. And as we get all the way in here, there’s a candle holder on the wall here with some wire wrapped around it. I don’t believe that they had lighting, although they may have been attempting to put some in at some point.

But, we’ll see later on in this video that they actually did mine this by candle because there’s a number of tallow candles which are on the ceiling. I’m coming now to the end of the drift, and as I come down here, I’m going– You see that there are rail tracks which are set along the sides, spare ones, to be put down as they would continue mining. And I tie off my line and attach it to the end of the rail track because the tunnel goes no further. So, you can see that as I came out of the area too that was framed over the top, there had been a ceiling collapse or rockfall, and it’s uncertain whether the ceiling had broken off or they had used that scaling bar to drop the ceiling. And then, they were going to start cleaning that up, and in the process, the pump broke and the mine flooded. But, the one thing that we noticed when we were looking at the pump itself is that it had a toolbox which was set atop it with spare parts. And there was a toolbox alongside it as well which had tools which were sort of spewed out on the floor. So, I do believe that this was the story with this particular mine when it closed anyway was that they been working on that pump. And that and the auxiliary pump were not working at all, and they had a matter of minutes to escape.

So, as we’re heading back here again, you can see some of the rail tracks which are set alongside this to continue. And we go back to where the drill is, and the area that’s stoped out in this area here. It’s pretty amazing to think that this was mined only for a year and a half. And that they had this almost 160 feet of tunnel put in. So, pretty amazing. So, if you’re setting up an exhibit on what it looked like to mine in the Baraboo Range, this is pretty much it. You see tools stacked alongside, a shovel, pickax, another scaling bar. And as I head over this way, I’m going to signal to John to come and check out the tallow candles above me. See the compressed airline running in as we approach the shaft.

So, he’ll pan back up in a second here, and you’ll see a number of these tallow candles which these are all, you know, animal fat candles which are just scattered on the ceiling and left there. So, either a box broke loose, or they had a stack of them set there at the entrance or they were bringing them into the mine with them. As we come back into the shaft here too, he is going to go up the skip guides all the way to the surface. And you can see it’s a very different looking shaft because it only had about two hours of cleaning in. Well, again, not as many years of people throwing things into it, and it was not the party spot. So, we had the fortune in November of this year to have a visit from the 2017 Our World Underwater Rolex Scholar. So, her name is Leah Potts and she is here in the water. And she came to us, she wanted to have an experience in underwater archeology, but she could only come to Wisconsin in November. (audience laughing) So, but she came to us with– We weren’t going to take her on the Great Lakes because the gales of November and all that.

And we were– We do the exciting part usually in archeology of writing papers and cleaning up field equipment in November. So, we decided since she came to us with this unique set of skills, she was a cave diver, she knew how to dive with a re-breather, she’s using this recirculating device. And that we would try to go up and take a look at the Captain Roberts’ Mine here and see if we could survey this. So, I was put up to a challenge from my boss, the State Archeologist John Broihahn. He sent me an article which was from the SHA, the Society for Historic Archeology, saying that there was a lot of work that had been done on terrestrail sites, but not a whole lot that had continued underwater and looked at the underwater inundated workings of some of these mine sites. So, the person in the foreground here is Paul Reckner. He is with the Museum Archeology Program at the Wisconsin Historical Society. He’s terrestrial archeologist. He usually does DOT work when they’re moving a highway.

He’ll go out ahead of time and make sure they’re not moving it on top of any important archeological sites. So, he came and helped us, and he surveyed a lot of the topside features. They’re not very exciting. You see this is their burn pit, which actually at one time in its life had been the powerhouse for the Captain Roberts. But, he discovered a lot of interesting things. You can see here the mining graffiti that was written into the foundation. I have no idea what that reads, but I’m hopeful that as we– This was only November when we collected this information that it’ll make sense in another couple months and we’ll be able to tell you what this means. Anybody tell, want to guess? No. (laughing) (woman speaking off-microphone) (laughing) Do you think that’s what it says?
– Yeah.

– Ah, good.(laughing) I see a whole lot of things. (laughing) So, again, we see here this unique and maybe first time where we have a terrestrial archeologist. This is Paul Reckner with the trimble walking the collar of the mine with my colleague Caitlin Zant below documenting the shaft. And so, so we were able to create a scaled drawing, a site plan of what we have underwater. And you can see that we’ve documented the entire drift. The shaft would have been here, and then the drift would continue on in this direction. You see two stopes which are associated with the site and this would’ve been the primary one. That probably is where they were initiating some crosscuts or had hoped to and then over on the far side here we have the pump room here where we think the two dewatering pumps would’ve been set. Above here we have in this area a vertical cross-section and we see as Mark had explained was typical in these mines to take the pressure off the pump is that they would have a stage pumping area. So we have here the regular dewatering pump on the bottom and we have this area here which would’ve been a staged area for pumping.

It may have been the first pumping as they were sinking the shaft or it may have been one that they had set up and were anticipating as they were continuing deeper because some of the articles that they had said they were going to 150 feet and this is in fact only at 75. So maybe they had anticipated coming halfway up to this point now and then putting another pump in here with the sump area beyond. So another thing Leah had in her toolbox was she had just come to us from Malta where she had learned some photogrammetry. So she had learned to take photos and create 3D models. So this is at a weird angle just so that you can get a full perspective of the ore car. But you can see it’s pretty nice. There’s a couple little errors in the model but you can’t see the wheels on the one side, it was too close to the pump but it gives you a pretty good idea of what that ore cart looks like and we were also able to create this model of the post drill. The program extrapolated the bore holes out on the backside of the image which is kind of interesting and you can see the post drill here set up and working. So you see the holes extrapolated in the back.

I think it’s kind of fun. So Paul Reckner’s able to finish his top side survey for us too and in doing so he acquired– So he surveyed where all the foundations were of the buildings that we could find. He figured out where the rail line had been, although there’s very little evidence of it on the surface. But as you see across the street it continues on and you go through the cut that comes into the Illinois mine and the property across the road. And that is still extant. So he went and obtained some LIDAR images from Sauk County and what’s very interesting is although we treat these as two separate sites, the Illinois and then the Captain Roberts across the street it’s kind of hard to separate sometimes because we see here is that railcut for the Illinois and you can see where it came then across the road and connected with the Captain Roberts. Here’s the shaft for the Captain Roberts which exists and the stream which comes out of it as it’s flowing into the wetland. But what we did with this is we went back to that blueprint that Don Ginter had and we superimposed the two and we know that we were in the number 2 shaft which lines up pretty well with this and this gave us, and we see the railcut here, and although this was produced in 1907 which was before the Captain Roberts was sunk, we can see then where the number 3 shaft is and then also we can go back and find out where number one is. So we put and we can line this up on Google Earth, X marks the spot, and we decided to go back but before we did, we came across some 1937 aerial photography also of Sauk County and we see some remnants in the landscape of where that number 1 shaft was.

So here’s your surprise, after tromping through that wetland, here it is. Isn’t it obvious? The number 1 shaft. So I drove up on the drive while Paul and Dennis were walking the wetland and I heard some whooping and hollering coming from out there and, “Help pull me out of this thing,” and as you can see with the flagging tape, those are the tie rods which would’ve held the corners of the hoist and so he’s now marking those in and John’s trying to see if he can drop down into it. But they found it merely by chance in walking out to the coordinate that they had gained, so that’s pretty fun. So in the upcoming months, we’re going to spend a little bit more time putting– We collected this data in November so it’s sort of amazing that we’re presenting on it now. So when you come to this presentation again, when we give it I don’t know where, it will probably be different and we’ll have a little bit more information to give you about what we find. Meantime, John wants to clear this up. This is his big plan, he’s here in the audience, so I’m gonna make fun of him, to clear this out and possibly see where this one goes. As the other shaft on the Illinois only went down to 130 feet before we hit the bottom, maybe this one is the one that goes down to the 300- or 400-foot level.

We’ll never know until we actually go, you know? So thank you, I hope those, we can put up another picture here.
(audience applause)