Leaving the old Delaware fissure behind we continued on down the road towards the Conglomerate Mine – known today for being home to the Delaware Mine tours. After only a short walk down said road we discovered a rather impressive rock wall standing tall alongside the road in a grove of trees. The wall was from the gable end of a rather large structure – most of which we couldn’t discern from the trees that surrounded it. It was only the sheer hight of the gabled wall itself that allowed it to stand apart from the adjacent landscape – and created a rather impressive monument in its own right. Of course we had to move in closer to investigate.

As we got closer we could tell that the wall was part of a long narrow structure which stretched back into the brush in front of us with the wall in front of us sitting at the building’s west end. The wall on this end was about two and half stories in height – its peak punctuated with the large double window seen here. The window that topped by a red-brick arch which provided a bit of class to an otherwise plain structure.

At ground level sat another opening, this one looking more like a very small doorway then a window. The opening featured a rather robust wood jam and another red-brick arched header.

Turning the corner we made our way along the building’s south side, fighting our way through rather thick brush all the while. There were no opening on this side of the building, save a few notches that were cut out of the wall’s top. The building was long, and all we could see ahead of us was an apparently unending wall of rock. But we finally came to yet another corner, and turned it to come face to face with the building’s east wall.

Here the wall was much shorter then its eastern brother – no doubt the result of a change in topography. While the east end looked to be nearly two and a half stories high, this end lost a story along the way and was only one and a half in height. Also different was that this wall was home to a full sized door, topped by its own red-brick archway.

Before heading through the door we get a closer look at the red-brick arch, apparently held in place by a piece of wood placed underneath it.

Once we made it inside we turned around to take another look at the wall we had just come through, this time with the benefit of the sun at our backs.

Inside the walls we find what looks to have once been another window perched along the structures south wall.

Where we were standing at the building’s east end the floor was dirt, but moving west the floor began to descend like a swimming pool until it had dropped a half dozen feet or so by the time it reached the building’s opposite end – causing the wall on that side of the building to be another story higher then this end. Between here and there ran this narrow rock wall – which cut the building directly down its middle.

At first I thought this wall was some type of machine foundation, but closer examination revealed a lack of any iron bolts or fasteners. Looking around I noticed a pair of similar looking ledges running along both of the structures traverse walls, running parallel to this central wall. It was then that I realized that I was simply looking at supports for the building’s floor. Thanks to that gentle slope upon which the building was built (the same slope that causes its west end to be a story taller then its east end), the floor had to be supported up above the grade by these rocky ledges and walls.

Here’s a look at the building’s north wall, showcasing one of those ledges that once supported the floor running along the wall’s base. This means that the small doorway we found down at the building’s west end was an opening into the building’s crawlspace – which would have ran below the level of this floor.

With most of the building’s west end overgrown with trees and brush, we made our way back to its east end and out the large opening that had been smashed through the building’s north-west corner and found ourselves only a few feet from the nearby road. We looked back to take this final departing shot of the building – a building’s whose identity was up to some debate. Its narrow and long footprint combined with its rock construction seemed to suggest it’s identity as either a dry, machine shop, blacksmith shop or warehouse. A general lack of windows and doors would seem to rule out the dry, and the wood planked floor would rule out a blacksmith shop (which generally had dirt floors). So that leaves either a warehouse or a machine shop. We wouldn’t know which one until getting back home to do a little research.

Turns out the building was a warehouse. A quick look at the Sanborn maps of the site revel this particular structure to be the Conglomerate Mine’s warehouse – a one story stone building 100 feet in length and 40 feet in width. (I’ve marked it on the old photo of the mine seen above) With our arrival to the warehouse we’ve officially entered the Conglomerate Mine’s surface plant – a sprawling complex of warehouses, shops, offices and other industrial structures that were lavishly built for a mine that made no money and mined very little copper. But thanks to the Conglomerate’s young age and its foolish habit of wasting money on grand stone buildings there’s still a lot left of the old mine still around today to see. This warehouse is only the tip of the iceberg….

To Be Continued…