Quincy Reclamation Plant

Early stamp methodology was a very simple and archaic one – nothing more than a simple process of smashing rock down into small pieces and sorting out the copper. Everything that remained would then be dumped into tailing ponds as waste. In the Copper Country the largest of these tailing ponds was Torch Lake, where no less than five mines dumped millions of tons of waste rock into its depths. Unfortunately, these waste tailings often contained a great deal of copper which the jigs and wash tables of the mills failed to remove. Copper that ended up in Torch Lake.

Before we could even reach the reclamation plant’s ruins themselves we stumbled across some very mysterious artifacts in the stamp sands nearby. It looked to be a box – or crate – which was partially buried in the sands. A series of flat boards in varying states of decay sat across its top face. Sprinkled across those boards were a collection of iron bolts and brackets, which were no longer holding on to anything. As strange as the crate was by itself, the true mystery was the line of identical crates that accompanied it.

After having been sucked up from the lake bottom by the dredge, stamp sands were then sent down along the pontoon line to shore to began the reclamation process. From our vantage point out near the old pontoon line we could see in the distance the bleached white remains of the mill that performed that reclamation, now surrounded by the vast stamp sands it once processed. As we got closer we noticed that the sands had parted in front of the ruins, creating a small pond. Most interesting of all was what sat right smack dab in the middle of the pond – a rail bridge.

The Quincy Reclamation Plant was in fact two plants in one. The main plant sat up on shore, and was home to the series of ball mills, Wilfley tables, and floatation tanks used in the actual reclamation process. Responsibility for getting the stamp sands to that plant belonged to a second building known as the Shore Plant. As its name suggests, this building sat up along the shore and was home to the stationary suction pump and attached swing bridge used to suck up the deposited sands from shore. From there the recovered sands would then be loaded onto an elevated conveyor and carried inland to the reclamation plant itself. It was the shore plant remains that we’ll take a look at first.

The revolution in milling technology finally arrived to the Copper Country by the 1920’s. Through the adaption of three new methods – grinding, floatation, and leaching – mine companies were finally able to gain a greater efficiency in their mills. Quickly mine companies adapted these new technologies to their existing stamp mills and built new mills to recover the copper they had previously allowed to slip through their fingers. These new mills – known as Reclamation Plants – would account for most of the regions copper production for the next forty years.

In addition to the leaching and floatation processes a typical reclamation plant utilized two other types of machines in its efforts to reclaim lost copper – Ball Mills and Wilfley Tables. Wilfley tables were a local favorite in the Lake Superior copper region, and were already installed in most stamp mills. In the Reclamation plant these machines served in the same capacity as they did at the mills – they were used to separate the fine particles of copper from the sands. The main difference being the size of particles these tables were able to tackle, much finer and smaller then those at the mills. (For more about Wilfley Tables, check out my previous post on the subject HERE) Reducing the stamp sands down to this fine composition was the job of the Ball Mills.