One of the joys of chasing down the history of Irish miners is you always know there are some you overlooked and it is wonderful to find some more. Such is the case with John J Ross and his son Will in the Wisconsin village of Linden. Linden is about 6 miles NW of Mineral…

The Irish Times had a brief article last week about the closure (and recent reopening) of the Bolinden owned Tara Mines lead zinc mine in County Meath. Apparently monies to the tune of 3.8Million Euro were provided to Bolinden by the Irish Government during the shutdown as part of a general EU sponsored support for…

CRH stock has been doing well since it changed its primary listing to the NYSE in 2024. It was added to the Standard and Poor’s 500 last week and currently trades at close to a 25 price to earnings ratio with a market capital now of over 82 billion dollars. They continue their acquisitions, announcing…

Oral historian Jane Bardall gave a wonderful talk titled ‘Stories of Miners in Mogollan, NM’ in the September Mining History Association monthly nuggets presentation. Mogollon is in the southwest of the state near the Arizona border and had mining for silver and gold from the late 1870s through WWII. Jane covered the mining in the…

St Barbara is considered the patron saint of miners and there is usually a little shrine to her at the entrance to underground mines in many (Catholic) parts of Europe. But the connection between St Barbara and mining is very tenuous and she is also the patron saint of artillerymen, naval gunners and explosive engineers!…

Saw lots of great papers in the last few days that I would like to explore in more detail. For me the best was Brian Buck of the Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History on ‘Raising the Daly-West Headframe’. The best link would be on their webpage parkcityhistory.org/mining/daly-west-headframe/. But their were many others. Brian Leech’s…