Mine Shafts and Memories: Lead Mining in Bonne Terre, Missouri

Since my hiking boots surrendered to the inflexible nature of sandstone two weeks ago and since, in the meantime, one of the two steel water heaters in our home succumbed to the effects of oxidation, the chances of me getting out in the field on a georun are slim for a while due to “budgetary constraints.”  That being the case, I’m falling back on some other topics I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while, including the following bit of family history and its interweaving with the story of lead mining in the Midwest.

Bonne Terre, Missouri, was a “company town” from the start and remained so until the early 1960s.  The French settlers of the area discovered the lead deposits of what is now St. Francois County early on, beginning early surface digging by the mid-1700s. Shallow surface mining continued until the end of the Civil War, after which the lead deposits began to be developed in earnest.  In 1864, the St. Joseph Lead Co. was incorporated and began operations, almost exclusively surface mining until the invention of the diamond drill in 1869.  The new drills allowing hard-rock mining at depth, and between 1869 and 1900 St. Joseph expanded their holdings by developing new tracts and buying up smaller extent mines. With the completion of the Mississippi River and Bonne Terre Railroad in 1890 and a link to a new company smelter at Herculaneum 30 miles away, Bonne Terre became a new shipping and processing hub for a host of mines in the region now known as the Old Lead Belt.  By the turn of the century, they were the largest lead producers in southeastern Missouri, with company headquarters in Bonne Terre.  As the mines, mills, and support industries grew, so did the population; a company history cites a population of over five thousand by 1904.

(Image courtesy Missouri Geological Survey)

    

According to a 2008 USGS report on the Southeast Missouri Lead District, the ore which gave the Old Lead Belt its name was found primarily between 100-300 feet below the surface in the heavily dolomitic Bonneterre Formation and the upper layers of the underlying Lamotte Sandstone. The orebodies, themselves, were often spread laterally for hundreds of feet and vertically up to two hundred feet.  The primary ore was galena (PbS, lead (II) sulfide), a beautiful, dense ore some samples of which helped foster in me an early sense of wonder at what the Earth produces.  The galena deposits of southeastern Missouri are still the greatest concentration known and are still being mined, although the deposits in the “Old” Lead Belt (including Bonne Terre) are long since “played out” in terms of commercial production.  Now the action is to the southwest in the Viburnum Trend, or “New Lead Belt,” and what remains in towns like Bonne Terre, Flat River, Desloge, and Park Hills are museums and fading memories. 

Trapeze mining in the Bonne Terre mine, 1917. (Photo courtesy of Rootsweb)

About the year 1897 a young man of mixed stock was born to an impoverished family near Flat River, Missouri.  At a young age, he was “farmed out” to neighbors to work for his food and lodging which kept him alive until his mid-teens, when he strode into the Bonne Terre offices of the St. Joseph Lead Company and signed on to work the mines.  He would spend the next 40 years of his life doing so, seeing in the meantime the transition from mule-power to electric trams, the coming of the “St. Joe Shovel,” and all manner of other changes.  His name was Edgar Lindsey, and he was my great-grandfather, a hard, taciturn man who led a hard life tearing ore out of the ground. 

 

I grew up on the edge of Pennsylvania’s great anthracite fields, so images and stories out of the mines were always part of the history of my region.  Lead mining is done under different conditions and requires different skills, but looking at the photos from the Bonne Terre mine under operation I have no doubt it produced a similar breed of man.  One of the few stories that came down from Edgar was an account of a common amusement among the miners: it seems that the mules which pulled the ore-carts were often very flatulent due to the hay which formed the backbone of their diet.  The miners often enjoyed holding a match behind their backsides when they cut loose, sending a brief gout of flame behind---Edgar once related that he singed off his own eyebrows during a particularly explosive episode. 

Mule-towed ore cart in the Bonne Terre mine (Photo courtesy of Rootsweb)

Although Edgar died in 1976 when I was but ten years old, he left a minor legacy which is now in my possession, and which is quite valuable to me.  Below is a section of core sample which he carried out of the mine with him.  

I believe this sample to be of the Bonneterre Formation, but it is impossible to be more precise without damaging the sample and I am unwilling to do that.

The second of Edgar’s legacies is these beautiful samples of galena which he, himself, brought up out of the mine during its operating years.  

 

These things are small enough, perhaps, but as a student of geology I find them priceless in their own way, especially since I know their provenance and the family history behind them.  Galena was one of the first minerals to draw my attention to rocks and their formation, and given the history of my family it’s not surprising.

 

I remember many things about Bonne Terre from when I was growing up in the 1970s.  Although I was born and raised in eastern Pennsylvania, I spent a number of summers in Missouri when my parents would head back there for a number of reasons, not the least of which was family.  I remember it chiefly as a small, hot, dry town filled with decaying remnants of its mining heyday which, as a kid, seem to have had a peculiar draw for me.  My maternal grandparents had a house on Oak St. which had a covered mine vent shaft in the vacant lot between it and the now-relict Turkey Creek.  I was always told to keep well-clear of such things which, of course, only increased my interest.  A few hundred yards away was the empty and unused depot of the Mississippi River and Bonne Terre Railroad, a beautiful building even in its dotage; in the other direction was a small lake formed from water pumped out of the mines during its operating days and which still served as the town’s water supply. Across the street from Edgar’s house was a tall, rusting steel vent pipe erupting from the pavement of the walkway, and dominating the town skyline from any direction was the huge “chat dump” of coarse sand tailings, along with the foundations of the conveyor system which once fed it. 

Post-card view of the chat dump, c. 1932. Note the conveyor system on the left side.

My mother and father both met and went to school in the old Bonne Terre High School which rested in the shadow of the dump, and on at least two occasions that I remember my sister and I scaled it with parental supervision (I also learned a hard and valuable lesson on the instability of sand dunes when a minor slide dropped me about ten feet, knocking the wind out of me).   

Finally, there was the mine, itself, now relegated to museum status complete with tours, although all but the uppermost level was long since flooded by a water-table which would not be denied. Twice in my memory I went down into the mine as a tourist, once in the mid-70s and once again in 1982 or so.  By the early 80s, the mine had been “discovered” by mine divers and makeshift platforms had been set up to accommodate them; sometime during that period even Jacques Cousteau and his team made a visit and dived it.  In the mid-70s, however, the mine was still just an old hole in the ground full of memories and rusting equipment, and the tour guides were all men who had worked the rock when it was still operating.  I have never had the heart of a spelunker, finding nothing but dark foreboding in the quiet, lightless spaces within the Earth, and touring the mine was no different.  Even in a “developed” space like a historic mine, I find the space geologically fascinating but also disquieting.  Nevertheless, it was quite an experience to go down into that mine knowing that my great-grandfather had spent most of his adult life there, and I came out with impressions and images that would stay with me.  The mine is now a world-class mine-diving site.

(Photo courtesy Bonne Terre Mine)

The great Bonne Terre chat dump survived into the new century, but dune migration and the EPA decided its fate; it was removed as a threat to property and a lead-contaminated environmental hazard by 2004.

 

The beautiful train depot was bought, lovingly restored, and now serves as a bed-and-breakfast.

My grandparents' house on Oak St. still stands, although the landscape of that whole neighborhood is radically altered.  I do not know if Edgar’s house still stands, but Edgar, his sons and his grandsons have all passed, some of them resting in the soil above the mine he once worked.

As for my family, a few distant members of the Lindsey side still reside in the Lead Belt.

Sources

“The History of St. Joe Lead Company”. St. Joe Headframe, Special Edition, Fall 1970.  St. Joe Minerals Corporation, Bonne Terre, MO. Retrieved 9/29/17 from http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mostfran/mine_history/stjoe_history.htm

Blackwell, Robert M.  Bonne Terre: The First Hundred Years.  Bonne Terre, MO: Bonne Terre Centennial Corporation, 1964

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Seeger, Cheryl M., History of Mining in the Southeast Missouri Lead District and Description of Mine Processes, Regulatory Controls, Environmental Effects, and Mine Facilities in the Viburnum Trend Subdistrict in Kleeschulte, M.J., ed., 2008, Hydrologic investigations concerning lead mining issues in southeastern Missouri: U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2008–5140, Chapter 1