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 Point in Iowa County and it has an active historical society. James Jewell put his 2021 presentation on the Ross Mine up on You Tube and it is well worth viewing.
Mineral Point is an area well known for its Cornish immigrant miners during the lead mining era (1827-1885) and the zinc mining era (1885-1925). John J Ross came there from Tyrone in 1839 at the age of 20 and mined lead for the next 10 years. In 1849 he went to California for the gold rush but returned inside a year and resumed lead mining and farming. This type of lifestyle was very typical of the miners of the Upper Mississippi Valley. It also characterized the Irish miners in Vinegar Hill near Galena, like the Furlong’s mentioned in the book. John J was a big farmer, with some 3,000 acres, prize cattle, a large vegetable garden and a vineyard. He loved to exhibit at the Mineral Point and Wisconsin State Fair.
He married Sarah Sproule who emigrated from Donegal in 1855 and they had three sons Will, Samuel and Charles. He continued to mine for most of his life forming a company with banker William T Henry in 1874 that mined a prospect near Linden and employed 150 miners at one point. His son Will (b 1857) joined him in the business after getting a degree from Lawrence College. John J also branched out into woodland property in northern Wisconsin and had a lumberyard in Mineral Point. He achieved a lot before passing away from pneumonia in 1889.
His son Will was a miner as well, but by 1885, the interest shifted to more valuable zinc. In the early 1900s, Will did some core drilling on the family farm and hit rich zones of ‘blackjack’, a rich zinc sulfide ore with varying amounts of pyrite. He sank a shaft and started a mine, then crushed and upgraded the ore by jigging or hand cobbing. The ore was sold to zinc smelters, usually the New Jersey Zinc Co in Mineral Point. The mine and mill generally employed about 45 total and was worked profitably from 1904-1918. Ore pricing fluctuated quite a bit and he had storage for about 2,000 tons of ore on site which allowed him to ride out some really low prices but it was low pricing that finally shut the mine in 1918. Jewell said it netted a profit of some $500,000 over its lifespan. After his wife passed away in 1919, he sold the mine and it was worked for a few more years in the twenties. Will continued to drill holes and look for another bonanza but the poor metal prices of the era did not help. He passed away in 1940
There were more Irish miners in the area and Iowa County historian Harold William Thorpe has listed some in this online blog. Early frontier peddler, Patrick O’Meara is reputed to have discovered the first lead in the Linden area in 1827, when it was still Michigan Territory. Other miners from 1840-1850 he listed were Francis McKenna, Martin and John Phelan form Kilkenny, Thomas Maguire and John Ferris. There was a Kennedy Zinc mine (it mined drybone or zinc carbonate) about 20 miles north in Highland, WI
