Last week the William Lawrence Saunders gold medal for distinguished service in mining* was awarded to James MacNaughton, president and general manager of Calumet & Hecla Consolidated Copper Co. of Michigan. Presentation was made by President Cornelius Francis Kelley of huge Anaconda Copper (no corporate kin to Calumet & Hecla) at the annual dinner of the American Institute of Mining & Metallurgical Engineers, convened in Manhattan to discuss mines, metals, men & methods.
Mr. MacNaughton’s achievement was to mine at a profit 3,000,000 tons annually of low-grade ore, averaging less than 1% copper, from the deepest mine in North America, the famed Conglomerate shaft which has passed a vertical depth of 5,000 ft. Such lean ore had never before been mined so far down. In open-pit mining, which means simply shoveling away a hill of exposed ore (as at Bingham, Utah), lodes down to 8/10 of 1% can be handled profitably. Deep-vein mining entails the cost of tunneling, drilling, blasting, hoisting, ventilating. Mining engineers consider Mr. MacNaughton’s achievement remarkable because his deep ore was only slightly higher than the lowest grade of surface ore mined anywhere in the U. S. Mr. MacNaughton had no great scientific tricks up his sleeve. Faced by the long, slow exhaustion of Michigan’s “Copper Country,” he took advantage of every piddling economy and operating short-cut he could think of.
The Conglomerate Mine is the only one now operated by C. & H., and in two or three years it too will be abandoned because the vein is running out. However, the company has other lodes which can be worked if copper prices improve.
Today Michigan’s Copper Country, on Lake Superior, looks desolate to visitors, gives the impression of having outworn its history. Beneath the birch, poplar and jackpine trees are innumerable outcroppings of lava, last traces of the volcano which brought up the rich copper lodes from the earth’s depths. Agriculture is stagnant, and the mining towns of Calumet, Houghton, Hubbell, Lake Linden, studded with company-built houses, have the melancholy look of semi-depopulation. But the streams near the stamping mills still run red with crushed ore rock.
Calumet & Hecla history goes back to a day before the Civil War when a surveyor named Edwin James Hulbert found a rich vein of copper lode called “conglomerate” because the ore was a cemented mass of pebbles containing pure copper. Hulbert recalled that Boston’s famed Naturalist Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz had visited the district, showed interest in scattered pieces of conglomerate. Hulbert hastened to Boston, enlisted such glittering names—Higginson, Hunnewell, Livermore, Agassiz, Quincy Adams Shaw, Horatio Bigelow—that his venture became known as the copper company with a Harvard accent. The first shaft was sunk in 1864, and the rich lode spread and deepened with every foot it slanted into the earth. Hecla Mining Co. paid its first dividend late in 1869, Calumet Mining Co. six months later. In 1871 the two were merged. Fifty years later C. & H. had yielded total dividends of $152,250,000—a return of 100 for 1 to the Boston stockholders on their original investment. But in 1907, when copper enjoyed one of its booms, the Michigan Copper Country was already on the down grade. Again during the War all the mines started up full blast. In 1929, as a last triumphant gasp, C. & H. made 90,000,000 lb. of copper. The rest is drabness. The 100,000,000 tons of ore remaining among the lava flows probably average no more than 1% copper. To the West are bigger companies with richer ores. And Canada, Chile and South Africa, with huge 3% and 4% ore-bodies close to the surface, are waiting for tariff walls to crack.
Same year Surveyor Hulbert sank his first shaft, last week’s Saunders Medalist was born to a miner in Ontario. Brought to the Michigan Copper Country in infancy, James MacNaughton started work at 11, carrying water on the C. & H. coal docks, was later a coal-weigher, then a switchman. He attended University of Michigan, went back to C. & H. a white-collar engineer. For ten years he managed Michigan’s richest iron mine, returned once more to C. & H. 33 years ago and has never left it since, rising by traditional stages to the presidency in 1926.
Another honor bestowed at last week’s meeting was the James Douglas medal for distinguished achievement in non-ferrous metallurgy, awarded to handsome, white-whiskered George Cameron Stone, 75, member of the Institute since 1880, retired since 1929 from New Jersey Zinc Co. Mr. Stone trooped all over the world keeping track of improvements in zinc metallurgy, held eight important patents of his own. As well known to art collectors as to metallurgists, he has one of the world’s finest collections of ancient armor and arms, especially Persian, has presented many a treasured piece to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
* Other recipients: Herbert Hoover (1928); John Hays Hammond (1929).
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