Kennedy Mine - II

The stamp mills were located behind the head frame and connected by a short elevated rail line. The stamp mills, as was the case also at the Empire mine, were driven by cam shafts as seen above.

Once the initial crushing of the rock was done, it was loaded into carts and moved along this set of rails to the stamp mills. Here the ore was crushed to sand consistency and the gold was chemically separated. It was this chemical separation that made this a real environmental hazard. In the image below, you will note that there is a bit of dip in the distant hill just above the rightmost railway support struts. It has a lone tall tree in it. This is the place where the Kennedy Tailing Wheels lifted the slurry over the hill into a holding pond.

One of the small buildings still on site has a display of the many news articles from the Argonaut Mine disaster. This mine was adjacent to the Kennedy and, in places, the mine shafts were relatively close. Thus, there was an attempt to tunnel from one to the other to save trapped miners. from Wikpedia we learn about the disaster,

On August 27, 1922, 47 miners, mostly immigrants from Italy, Spain, and Serbia, were trapped in a fire 4,650 feet (1,420 m) below ground. Other miners who had been near the surface poured water down the shaft in an attempt to put out the flames. By dawn, townspeople and other miners arrived to help, but it took two-and-a-half days for the fire to be extinguished.

Rescuers began re-opening tunnels from the Kennedy Mine which had been closed since an earlier fire in 1919. They were proceeding slowly, but hopes remained high until September 18, when a canary inserted beyond a bulkhead by oxygen-tank-equipped workers died. It took three weeks to reach the level at which the miners were trapped. None survived, and evidence indicated that they had all died within hours of the fire's breaking out. One of the bodies was not recovered until a year later. Most likely, water flushed down the shaft carrying his body further into the mine. Before his finding, newspapers had speculated he had fled the mine to start a new life.

On the display board below, you see the Serbian Church and the many caskets of the miners killed in the disaster

Below we see that restoration work continues, very slowly, on the head frame. I presume that the purpose is to be able to reopen this fenced off section to the public again.

As at the Empire Mine, everything possible had to built and maintained on site. The many machine tools in this area include drill presses, lathes and bits of other devices that helped keep the place operational.

I'm not entirely sure that this device is, but it is big and most likely really dangerous to operate.