- 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)