Mayflower Mine
history suspended in time#
Story by Scott Fetchenhier
Images courtesy San Juan County Historical Society.
All rights reserved.
From the well-preserved Mayflower Mill just north of Silverton, across the Animas River, and up into Arrastra Gulch, threads a still-standing aerial tramline, complete with swinging ore buckets suspended in time—all that remains of one of Silverton’s greatest mining operations of the 20th century.
The Mayflower Mine is actually a combination of three early-producing mines of the district—the Mayflower, North Star, and Shenandoah-Dives—that were consolidated into one by Kansas City investors and the visionary mining superintendent Charles Chase in 1926. Together they formed a juggernaut known as the Shenandoah-Dives Mining Company, which dominated the Silverton mining scene from 1927 until the end of the Korean War in 1953. From 1928 to 1947, the Mayflower produced over three million tons of ore containing 341,000 ounces of gold, 4.9 million ounces of silver and 34,000 tons of lead, zinc, and copper. The company built the 600-750 ton-per-day mill and 10,000 foot long tramline in 1929. Several buildings to support underground operations were built in Arrastra Gulch at the tram terminal and mine portal above, including a four-story boardinghouse.
Miners working at the Mayflower were treated well, with good housing, lots of food, steam heat, hot showers, working bathrooms, commissary, pool tables, and a reading room. The commissary was so well stocked that women from Silverton would often ride the tram up to the mine and shop at the company store.
The mine workings lie in a large shear or fracture zone that runs from Arrastra Gulch southeast to upper Cunningham Gulch. In some areas the shear zone is over 100 feet wide and contains several veins running within the zone. Three veins, the Mayflower, North Star, and the Morgan, were the biggest producers, with mining also occurring on smaller fractures. The main veins were six to ten feet wide and contained quartz, pyrite, galena, sphalerite, chalcopyrite, and small amounts of gold and silver. The mine workings are substantial, running almost 12,000 feet to the southeast, eventually connecting into some of the workings of the Highland Mary Mine in Cunningham Gulch.
A haulage and exploratory tunnel was also driven from the mine in the mid-1940s to the veins of the Silver Lake mining district—at one time a person could have walked from the Titusville mine on Kendall Mountain, through the Silver Lake mines, over to the Mayflower mine, and then on to the Highland Mary in Cunningham Gulch. Amazingly, there are over 3,000 feet of vertical workings on the vein, with the highest being at 13,000 feet in elevation.
The work, as in any mine, was dangerous, dirty, and wet. The ground, especially at the Mayflower, was heavily fractured, so miners had to watch for slabs and cave-ins. Even as late as the mid-1980s a miner was killed by the fall of bad ground in a lower exploratory tunnel. Bad ground aside, one of the biggest dangers at the mine was from
avalanches. One of the worst was the infamous St. Patrick’s Day slide of 1906 which killed twelve men at the Shenandoah-Dives mine in Dives Basin when the boardinghouse there was demolished by the slide.
Silverton was polarized by a strike at the mine in the summer of 1939. The Wage Hour Law passed the preceding year required overtime wages be paid beyond forty-four hours per week. Charles Chase, already working on a bare bones budget with low grade base metal ores, could not afford to pay overtime wages. He lowered the base wage so that even when overtime was paid, the pay averaged out to the same as before. Subsequent contract negotiations failed. The union struck for six weeks. After voting to form a new “company union,” company miners ran the union leaders and several union-supporting families out of town, leaving a sour taste in the mouths of many, that still continues to this day.
With the fall in metal prices after the Korean War, the Shenandoah-Dives Mining Company shut down in 1953. The mine was worked by lessors for several years, and then worked for a couple years by Standard Metals Corporation in the early 1960s.
The once-grand Mayflower boardinghouse burned down in the 1970s, and the upper tram terminal has collapsed into disrepair. The main tunnel has been blasted shut and the old dry room entrance blocked with cement. Huge open stopes still remain on the surface near Little Giant Peak, mute testimony to the hard work that went into this once-great mining operation.
Top, previous page: Miner stands by portal of Mayflower Mine.
Left, previous page: Aerial tram with mine in background.
Below: Miner dumps ore bucket in the mine.
