We have featured a good amount of hoist ruins on this site. For the most part these have been mind-numbingly similar, from the “H” shape right down to the metal rods. What a pleasant surprise for us when we arrived at the hoist engine house for the #2 shaft and found the walls still standing, at least most of them. The only other hoist house with walls we had found thus far was at Mohawk #6 (although there was 1 wall still standing at Centennial #2), so this was a nice treat.

A sign out front of the structure warns of the dangerous walls, a caution well-advised to follow. After all, these walls are over a century and a half in age and its surprising at all that they still stand yet today. We cautiously enter the building from the west side, which is the side facing the #2 shaft. The wall on this side was gone, undoubtedly destroyed to remove the hoist inside. Walking inside we leaped over a deep ditch which sat just inside the walls. These were once used as access corridors to the bottom of the hoist and the hoist foundation itself, the wood floor having rotted away long ago. Inside we find the familiar sights, except this is not an “H” shape but instead an “E” shape (similar to what we found at Osceola #3 – but larger). Now for a few details…

While simply a utilitarian structure, the building was a step above any similar structure built today. Besides the slate-gray poor rocks which make up the majority of the structure, there was accents of red brick and sandstone, as see in the doorway here.

The large amount of windows (a must before electric lighting) have similar headers. Two layers of red-brick set on an arch are held in place by wooden planks as seen here. The filling below the arches seem a little less refined then the rest of the masonry work, which makes me wonder if this filling and the wood planks were added later in the buildings life – perhaps as a means to allow for smaller windows. All the windows share the feature, so it might have been original.

This basement window shares the same header style as well, only it seems they paid a little more detail to the arch, adding a third layer of smaller bricks along the inside. The filler rocks here below the arch seem more original, so this might be the way the building was designed to look.

What makes a hoist building a hoist building: a red brick cap and a series of metal rods. Most of the cap here on the foundation has been either removed or destroyed over the years. The rods are intact but are missing the tell-tale wooden boxes that should surround them.

More pretty pictures of metal rods to add to our collection….

An interesting note here. The brick cap on this foundation is laid with the bricks on their sides, instead of on their backs. This is the first time I remember seeing this. I had actually used the appearance of bricks laid the same way at Hecla as a sign that the ruin was not a hoist ruin. I guess it could have been. (although there was other reasons in that case that made me think it was not a hoist)

to be continued…