Your historian is Ms.
Doris Platt, supervisor of elementary school at
his faculty of Wisconsin.
Here to tell you about Cornish minors in
Wisconsin is Ms.
Platt. Hello boys and girls.
When the Cornish and English and Welch minors heard about
the rich zinc and lead mines in Wisconsin, they were
eager to come to America.
In the early 1800s, the tin and the lead in the English
mines started to diminish and there wasn't much more.
The men needed money and they had also heard that in America
you could be your own master.
You didn't have to work for someone else.
Perhaps you could even own your own mine.
And so in the 1830s, the Cornish miners started to come
by hundreds and by thousands to Southwest Wisconsin.
But before they came, there had been many others already mining.
He's in 80s.
Had done their own...
Perhaps a deer or a buck for scraping.
They had carried the ore out of
the mines on deer skins.
And they had smelted ore by lighting simple fires and
just letting the ore run off in troughs into the ground.
Then Julian Debuk came to that part of the country.
He's the one for whom Debuk Iowa was named.
And he learned how to mine and smelt from the Indians.
And they loved him.
And they said, "It's quite alright
for you to mine, but we don't want anyone else in here."
But of course there were other white men coming.
In 1823, Moses Meeker came from Cincinnati.
Moses Meeker was a paint manufacturer and he was looking
for white lead for his paint.
He came with about 30 men and women and children
to what is now Galena, which is over in Illinois
country, and started to mine.
Do you know what lead is used for?
Well, it's used for white lead and paint.
It's used for printer's type and
for weights and for chaff.
And especially, of course, with the Indian wars
coming up, that was most important.
It was also used for pewter in making dishes.
He found so much lead in Wisconsin that he settled
down and stayed there and he never went back to Cincinnati.
He found that even though log cabin owners didn't paint
their houses, those who owned board houses eventually did.
At first paint was considered rather frivolous, but after
awhile it became the thing to do to paint your house.
Another man who came to the mines was Henry Dodge.
And he came in 1827.
He was a lot younger than
he looks in this picture.
He brought his wife and nine children and some Negro
slaves. When slaves came to Wisconsin, they usually
received their freedom and merely worked his servants and
were paid for their duties.
Dodge was bound.
The Indians weren't going to chase him away,
even though they protested.
He set up a regular stockade and
his 150 miners had plenty of ammunition and plenty of guns
and they weren't chased away.
Another early miner, this time a young looking one, was
Billy Hamilton, the son of Alexander Hamilton, who came
to Wyoming in Lafayette County and stayed there until the
gold rush when he went west.
Still another man was John Roundtree of Plattville.
His man liked him because he lived
right in the tents with him and worked just as hard as they did.
And still one more was Henry Grascio, who founded Grascio's
Grove, a down near Schelsberg.
All these men came and worked their own mines because
lead mining was becoming an important new industry.
And when it was mined, then of course there was the
problem of carrying it away.
And sometimes it was carried in flat boats, down the
Mississippi to New Orleans, and sometimes carried overland
in heavy, clumsy ox carts, a two lake Michigan, or perhaps
to even a nearer place, like the shot tower at Helena.
Now how did the men get this material out of the mines?
Sometimes they did it with very simple methods like a windlass.
A windlass was a method of winding up a rope, sending
down a bucket underground, and pulling up the ore.
And two men could work one.
They could both wind and pull and
heave by themselves.
Sometimes horses or oxen were used, and
they would bring the ore above ground and try to grind it out
until it was separated from the other material that it was with.
When the ore had been brought above ground, it was sometimes
smelted right nearby, and sometimes carried to a place
like the shot tower at Helena to be made into lead shot.
You can see the remains of the tower at shot tower State Park
today on the Wisconsin River.
It wasn't a very tall tower, it was just a little house, and
the lead was carried there and put into the top of the tower.
Now here is a sort of a ladle that was used in
making shot.
This is called a bullet pouring ladle.
The molten lead, which was like a liquid, was placed in this
little ladle or dipper, and then it was poured out of the
spot, dropped by drop slowly.
And then it fell through the long shaft down to
the river, and as it fell, it took on around shape.
When it hit the cool water below, it sometimes flattened
out, and very often the bullets were not very much
of the same size or shape.
They were uneven.
Many of them could not be used at all.
Now this ladle that I showed you before was used for
grating lead and grating shot.
Very tiny little pieces would fall through these holes, and
the larger ones were saved.
So at the shot tower, the molten metal fell through and was made
into bullets.
A lot of them were used in the Winnebago War.
Here is another ladle that was used to dip up the molten
metal and to pour it into moles.
And very often these moles were called pigs,
you perhaps have heard that.
They weighed about 70 pounds of piece.
And a ton of lead ore might bring as much as
$14, and sometimes even $18.
Here is a piece of metal.
This has zinc and lead in it all together, and it's
quite a heavy piece of metal.
When the Cornish miners came to America, they found many mines
deserted. The quick working Yankees had taken off the lead
and zinc at the very surface of the land, and they had gone on.
But the miners from Cornwall were willing to work.
They were willing to dig far down into
the earth to work on ore that was very hard instead of soft.
And they had devised a new way of lighting a fuse and blasting,
so they had plenty of time to escape.
They had what was called a slow match, and they could
light it and then run back and get out of the way and blast.
So they were able to work many of the mines that the earlier
men had left untouched.
And as the miners worked, they found
a great deal of very good heavy Galena limestone, and they
built their houses out of it.
Today, we can go to Mineral Point, a Cornish town in
southern Wisconsin, and see some of the houses that
the Cornish miners built.
These houses were made of Galena limestone, which was about 20
inches thick, so you can see they had nice cool houses in
the summer.
In fact, sometimes they were almost too damp.
When the limestone is new and soft, it's easily cut, and
after it's dried, it's rather hard to work.
You can walk down Shake Rags Street in Mineral
Point down the valley for two or three blocks, and see house
after house, with beautifully furnished and finished limestone
on the front, and then in backward doesn't show very much.
You'll find it quite rough, and you also will see a few
houses that were made of logs and chinked together.
Would you like to see what some of the
miners wore on their holidays?
We have a couple of dolls here.
These actually are Welch dolls, and they are
made of wood like puppets.
And if you remember the old mother goose rhyme about,
as I was going to St.
Ives, this is just the sort of a
hat that a Cornish or Welch lady might have been wearing.
Now the dress that the miner has on here is a little fancy.
This is a holiday dress, but his hat
is about the same.
The miners would have worn coveralls made
of bed ticking and thick quilted jackets called wamasis to keep
warm, and a sort of a blouse or a shirt in which they could keep
their lunch in their pockets, so that they wouldn't have to
go very far away if they wanted to sit down on the ground and
eat their lunch near the mines.
Well, these were Welch dolls, as I said, but the Cornish would
have worn just about the same thing.
Something else that the men would have worn into the
mines was perhaps a candle on their hat to light their way.
I have a candle that they might have worn here.
This could be stuck into the side of the
mine and to a piece of fire clay it was called, or it might
have been hooked over a rock or in the miners' hat so that
he could see what he was doing.
Let's take a look at the cross section of a lead mine
so that you can see what it might have looked like.
The lead mine shows the men working on top of a hill, and
there are some men with a windlass, and they're working
on the windlass, and they're turning it, and they're letting
down a bucket into the mine.
This bucket happens to contain a man.
It might also contain the tools that he was working
with, or it might contain the ore when it's finally
pulled up again to the top.
You will notice that he too is wearing a little
lantern in his hat.
Then down below you see more men working in a tunnel, and
you see some of the limestone that they have used in their
houses to build their houses, and you see the men working
with their picks and their gads and their shovels trying to
find a very rich vein of ore.
Finally, of course, they were working for perhaps a dollar a
day, sometimes only 25 cents a day, but they worked very hard.
It was no eight hour day.
It was perhaps 12 hours or even 14.
Shall we take a look now down into a Cornish lead mine, where
Dave McNamara and Charlie Knox of our museum are pretending
that they are Cornish miners.
They're working away, looking for the valuable ore.
One of them, Dave, who is nearest to you, has the pickaxe
in his hand, and on his head he's wearing a hat that has
on it the little lantern.
It looks like a tiny teapot or a little picture, and this
would have fuel oil in it, and he could wear this in a very
dark part of the mine that was low and narrow, and it would
still give him a little light so he could see what he's doing.
He's using the pickaxe and Charlie is using a probe.
The probe is a long, narrow instrument, and he's trying
to find a good vein of ore, whether it's zinc or lead.
You remember, perhaps, that even today the Schell'sburg paper
is called the pick and gad, or the miners, and now Charlie is
holding a gad or a reamer, and when he's found a good vein of
ore, he will use this to pull off some of the surface rocks so
he can find what's down below.
If lunchtime came and the men were far from home, as
I've said, they might reach into their blouse pockets or
their jacket pockets, and pull out their lunch, and what
do you suppose it would be?
Well, it would be a cornish pasty.
Now a pasty is a sort of a meat pie, a sort of a
whole meal in one, because it would contain vegetables and
potatoes and meat, and then the pie crust was clapped
together and all baked so that when it came time for lunch,
the men could just do it.
They would reach in their pockets and pull
out their seven-course meal and have it to eat.
When night came, though, or if they lived very near
home, because after all, in mineral point, the mines
were very near the houses.
Perhaps they were called to dinner by someone shaking a rag.
You remember that I told you we have this delightful
street, in mineral point, called Shake Rag Street.
The bachelors, or the men, would shake this rag, maybe it was
a dish towel or a dish cloth or a piece of sheet, because
it first just bachelors came, or married men who'd left their
families behind until they found out whether they were
going to make any money or not.
Then when the ladies came, they took over the job of
cooking and shaking the rag and calling the men to dinner.
Now we see what a carnage table, dinner table might look
like. This of course would be only if the ladies had brought
some of their lovely china and some of their silverware
with them when they came.
This is a red table cloth that's actually red and was a great
favorite with the carnage men.
They brought their bone-handled forks and knives, which they
used for eating, and this wear is all English iron stone wear.
It has decorations of flowers or pictures of buildings on it,
the cup and saucer, the same sort of thing, and the great
big tea pot because they did love to have their tea and also
the drinking goblet of glass.
In addition to a pasty for supper, they might have
had some saffron cake.
Saffron you know was made the flavoring and the color was
made from the crocus flower.
The crocus was brought up to England long ago by the
Spanish and the Phoenicians, and the carnage men liked it.
They liked their saffron cake with currants and raisins
and lemons, and they had it especially for parties.
And they also liked to have scalded cream or clotted
cream to eat on fresh fruit if they could have it.
They didn't eat that every day.
That was just once in a while.
Many of the carnage expressions have long since been gone,
but I'd like to tell you just a couple of them.
You know the carnage are the ones who like to have giants
in their fairy tales.
They are the ones who gave us the story
of Jack and the Beanstalk.
I'm sure that you've all read that sometime or other.
And another thing they gave us was
Pixies, and perhaps you were talking about Pixies yesterday.
When a person was Pixie Layden, he was said to be
lost, and to find himself, he had to wear some article of
clothing turned wrong side out.
So when you saw someone with a stocking seam showing you might
say, "Are you Pixie Layden Medir?"
meaning, "Are you lost?"
Another expression that they had was the word "Ball B-A-L"
for "Mine."
And the "Ball" maidens were the little girls
who worked in the mines.
Just the little girls of eight or ten years old, who separated
the tin or the lead from the rest of the material, the dirt
and the debris in the mine.
They made about eight cents a day, and they
worked long, long hours.
But many a fine woman who became a Carnish man's wife
had been a ball maiden when she was a little girl, and it
helped out in her own house.
Some of the other expressions and things that the
Carnish gave us were the symbols of our state.
You know when miners came up from Illinois, they
usually came for the summer, then they went home in the
fall, and they received the nickname of suckers,
which are little fish that swim up north in the summer,
and then go back to their native streams when it gets cold.
But some of our miners didn't go home in the wintertime.
They stayed and burrowed into little holes in the hillside,
and they gave our state its nickname, the Badger State.
I imagine that many of you haven't seen a real
Badger. We don't have very many in Wisconsin.
We really didn't get our nickname because our state
was overrun with Badgers.
But some of these miners who didn't take time to build
a house, but who were eager to work and to stay there,
gave our state its nickname.
Now our first territorial seal in 1836 merely showed
an arm with a pickaxe in it and a big pile of minerals
standing in front of it.
Our second territorial seal had a farmer and a sailor
and one little pickaxe.
And finally, later on, in 1848, we established our
real seal and shield on our state flag, and here it is.
This is the flag of Wisconsin, and we find the miner here
on one side, the little lantern in his hat and his
pickaxe in one hand, with a sailor on the other side.
And here are the miners pick and shovel, and then the
little Badger on top.
So we have all these things as
memories of the mining days.
After the Cornish had been in Wisconsin for about 20
years, a good many of them left for California for the
gold rush, about half of them.
The rest of them decided that maybe they could become farmers.
Would you like to see a picture of Dodgeville in 1859?
It's not overrun with lead wagons.
It has farm wagons in it, because
most of the miners had changed.
They had changed to farming.
And if you owned a piece of the Wisconsin Western mining
company stock, and this is a certificate of it, you
would find that it was not worth so much in 1858, as it
had been worth much earlier.
There are a few mines left today.
This was one near mineral point.
We have a few of them that are over a
hundred years old, and have been in operation all the time.
But again, there aren't too many of them left.
Most of the lead and the zinc has gone.
Are there any of you in school who have Scandinavian
blood in your veins?
Next week, we're going to talk about the Scandinavians, and
maybe you'd like to take a nationality poll, and find
out if any of your ancestors came from Norway, or Sweden,
or Denmark, or Finland.
Do you suppose you could find out about that?
We'll talk about the Scandinavians
next week.
Until then, goodbye boys and girls.
Historic Platt is your historian on this series of
programs, Pioneer Wisconsin, authentic pictures of life in
the early days of our state.
This platt is supervisor of elementary school services for
the Wisconsin State Historical Society.
Pioneer Wisconsin is a presentation of the
Wisconsin School of the Year.
[Music]