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welcome to another special edition of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains
on I'm standing in front of the stamp mill which is located at the
Superstition Mountain Museum and today we're gonna be talking with Larry
Hedrick you have a little bit to do with this stamp mill that we're sitting in
front of at the Superstition Mountain Museum why don't you tell us a little
bit about it the history and how you got involved you know I've always heard the
truth is stranger than fiction and how this stamp mill came about the donation
of this stamp mill was one of the most unusual things that a person could think
of it came out of the blue in fact it was the result of another donation that
brought about this one when a fledgling museum that doesn't have a museum is
they can't expect to get money from any money so we were very active in pursuing
donations and I had made arrangements with Phelps Dodge to meet with other
people down into headquarters in Phoenix and they informed us that they were
tearing down the the reduction mill down at Douglas and they
called the fellow that was in charge of the operation down there and told them
we were coming and we went down and selected the stuff that we wanted then
we put together a convoy of two flatbed semi's and a big box truck and I notified
all the papers in Tucson and Phoenix and the TV stations and even Bill Liberton
because I had done some things with th Arizona road and he went with us on this
trip well however it works that was reprinted by one of the newspapers in
the Albuquerque newspaper since my name was mentioned Mr. Joseph Jones called me
at home one night and he told me that he had a 20 stamp mill that he'd like to
donate to us so one of the board members Ed Seaford had a light plane and he took
the president Clay Worst who was who owns a gold mine and myself to
Albuquerque and he run us up about 3/4 of the way to Santa Fe up to
the 8,000 foot level the Hermeniz Forest and there was a town of Bland and we
surveyed the whole operation and looked the mill over and reported back to the
board what we thought
Larry it's amazing that you got this here now I know
there's I think about four other Mills here in Arizona that are in various
degrees of being able to work but this one is a fully functioning stamp mill
how did you get it here and working for the longest time what kind of equipment
it would take to tear that building down and get this stuff out of there but we
were in the process of making a deal with Goldfield ghost town with Bob Schust
about locating our Museum at Goldfield and they were gonna supply us with a
shell building in fact we were the only third business that was that came to Goldfield
and we of course had to do all the interior the electric the sheetrock and
everything but he needed lumber so we made the deal that he got all the lumber
that didn't have anything to do with the stamp mill and we got the stamp mill
How did you move this thing there again he had a front-end loader and that was the
only piece of equipment that we had to complete this entire operation
Hank Brown again a fella that has been involved with the museum for a long time
and was on the Douglass trip and many other trips he was the independent
trucker we made a contract with him to do all the hauling he made five one
thousand mile round trips bringing the stamp mill over there and and some of
the lumber which mostly was loaded on a separate trailer and we spent 28 days
taking this mill down and the most amazing thing about it was absolutely
nobody got hurt not even a pulled fingernail I did throw
a disc out the second day but I there was nothing you could do but keep going
and the teardown was was complete and in of course when we got back over to Goldfield
Bob put the stamp mill up at goldfield
and it stayed there until we found this property and after the property was
found and it was the museum was being built Hank Brown and I again alone moved
the stamp mill tore down it goldfield and brought it down over here
and put it back up just the two of us and what's the boom trucks
about three
weeks I guess after we were done I got another cone phone call from Mr. Jones
and his first words is he says Larry he says if Smithsonian was here. Oh!
the Smithsonian what did they want he said well they contacted me five or six years
ago and they said they'd like to have the stamp now and I said they could have
it and I never heard from him again and when I read the story about you guys I
decided to give it to you he said they raised $50,000 to take it to Washington
DC and all I could say it's your little late
[laughter]
anyway the operation of putting
this all back together of course the first thing we did was I had to buy a
tractor or you know museum didn't have any money and there was a tractor
sitting about two miles south with a front loader on it and I bought a cannon
and a post hole digger and stuff that we needed for around here and we leveled
this area and built a little hill behind it because we had to have a wall behind
the stamp mill to attach to stabilize these uprights and so the first thing we
did was scoop all this out and build the hill on the back and then we built the
forms for all these cement pillars that the motor boxes are sitting on and we
build all the forms we use lots of rebar 3,500 pound test cement and the one on
the end that we were knew we were going to run was a little bit bigger than the
rest of them then we built the supports on the side
for the Timbers that held the uprights then we put the uprights on and then we
put the stamps up in there after we put the crossmember on top and finished it
up by making the roof and using two boom trucks we we raised and put the roof on
because we never had any intention of putting it in a building but it did need
some some protection from the elements mostly the Sun we were concerned about
so the roof was there just to take the worst part of the exposure to the Sun
and and protected so how come you never got it running
well we got it to this
point and at that point Apacheland movie ranch burnt down and we
were were donated the barn and the Audie Murphy barn and the Elvis chapel and we
were given 60 days to get it out of there and we had a lot of trouble with
that the weather was terrible and we lost about 30 days just due to weather
but we never got back to the stamp mill and after I left the museum these other
gentlemen come in and they actually got it running it was our intention to do
that but we didn't have an opportunity so is this stamp mill similar to the
ones that you'd find back in the day in Pinal City and Silver King
well the Stamp Mill was basically the same the operation for removing the gold.... was
entirely.....The Silver I should say it was entirely different
this was built on a hillside a very tall hillside and at the beginning they used
mules and pack panniers to bring the ore in which was on the third level and
there was an opening at the on the third level at one end of the building that
they could come in later they had tracks and or carts but that's why it started
with with mules and that would be dumped into a grizzly.
whoa a grizzly!
a grizzly
nothing but a set of bars a certain distance apart and only certain size ore
would fall through the bars and there be a guy or two there the bigger pieces
they smacked them with a sledgehammer to get them through the down to the fist
size that they needed to operate and then it went from the Grizzly into the
jaw crusher the jaw crusher there were several different types of jaw crushers
but mainly they had a stationary plate sometimes on both sides and the
eccentric wheel would crush the rocks as that that happened and from the from the
ore crusher it went into the distribution system that's behind each
one of these motor buckets and this lever you see down there would dump a
certain amount of ore the bottom of the or bucket each time
that operated and once this was crushed down from fish size to say pebble size
it would be pumped with water down to it had two ball mills however the ball
mills had been taken for scrap during World War II somebody managed to get him
out of there they were pretty large but they did and they also took a lot of
parts off the drive shafts and stuff the caps for the drive shaft for a scrap and
but anyway it went through two ball mills which virtually have crushed the
ore down to almost a powder and then that would run down to the cyanide tank
and the cyanide tank had a very unusual system on it you can see it over here
this is all cut down in size to about a quarter of what size they really were
but they had a direct current system electric system there in fact we even
found some of the light bulbs that they were using which were direct current and
this device was on top of each of the tanks and the needle here if it got if
the tanks the slurry got too thick it would go over and set off an alarm and
the guys working in the slurry tanks would then add water or whether they had
to to make that slurry just the right consistency so they were constantly
working on that down in a slurry thing and then using that pump over there
that's the actual pump they would pump up the it to the bullion room and then
over over behind here is the the device that they melted the gold down into bars
and this is the way this operated
this is a massive structure so what happened to
the other mill similar to this well I don't know exactly when they were torn
down I do know that they had a 20 stamp mill at Pinel City and I think the
name of it was Pinel City mill but it was leased by the Silver King mine they
didn't own it they just leased it and it was during the wars that after the wars
that the price of copper and silver dropped so much that they begin to
back off of the mining but they this Silver King must have purchased part of
the mill because they move ten of the stamps up to the actual mine site but I
can't I can't tell you what year that happened this is a massive structure so
what happened to the other mill similar to this well there's some of the
foundations or the foundation and we might be able to find them yeah but this
was the stamp mills were virtually the same
they weren't that much different there was one that Goldfield ghost town too
it was the method with which they reduced the ore and how they reclaim the silver
and gold out of it that was different up there they had amalgamation
tables and they used borax and some other things I mean or is different at
bland this was flour gold it was very fine and
only cyanide was used to get to extracted the gold well there you have
it didn't I tell you it's another special edition of mysteries of the
Superstition Mountains join us next time when we discover more about all those
mysteries happen in those mountains see you then
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