Germania
Mine

Come Adit From Below!

GeoCache GC1G7DX

  Mining engineer Louis Weston Powell had an eye for copper properties, which led him from Bisbee to the area of Courtland. Acting as an agent of the Calumet and Arizona, he bought several properties, and arranged options and bonds on mineral rights. In all, he picked up 23 claims in the Courtland area.

In April of 1908, the Calumet and Arizona bonded the Germania claim from its owners, and it became the primary Courtland mine worked by the C & A. By January of 1909, the Germania shaft was down more than 300 feet. The find was so rich that the ore dumps were twice the size of the waste dump.

  By Summer 1909, the main shaft (pictured at left) had been dug to nearly 500 feet, at which point it encountered the same problem that all the area mines had: water, water, water. The pumps necessary to draw the water out of the shafts and tunnels at that depth needed a greater power supply. New boilers were brought in and installed, and the steam-driven pumps created enough suction to draw the water up and out of the mine shafts. For safety's sake, boilers were housed in their own buildings, with concrete floors. The concrete floor of the Germania's boiler building (picture at left) was shared with the April Fool mine, and can still be found across the creek to the southwest, near the April Fool mine shaft.

  There are three openings at the Germania mine: 1) the upper adit; 2) the main vertical shaft; and 3) the lower adit.  If you are standing at the GeoCache, then the opening you are looking at is the lowest of the three openings, called the "lower adit" (pronounced "add-it"). An adit was a horizontal tunnel which was used for ventilation or drainage. The middle opening (on the hill above you) is the main vertical shaft, which delivered miners to their tunnels and which also brought up buckets of ore. Just above the main shaft is a third opening, the upper adit, which in the Germania's case served as the entry for the ventilation blower. Air was blown into the Germania through the upper adit into all parts of the mine. There were multiple reasons for large-scale ventilation, some of them having to do with safety and comfort, and some of them to do with the way mining worked.

  Miners would be either single-jack (one man, holding both hammer and chisel), double-jack teams (one with the chisel and one (or two) men with hammers). Later, steam powered "widow-maker" drills were used. All three of these techniques were utilized to drill 1.5 inch holes in the rock, in a specific pattern, to a specific depth, and and at specific angles. Once the holes were drilled, sticks of dynamite were slipped into the holes, with different lengths of fuse precisely cut to create a particular blast timing pattern. Current-day people might think that a stick or two of dynamite would pulverize the rock and send it flying everywhere, but that's only true in the movies. In fact, the rock usually absorbs most of the shock, and the first dynamite blasts only cracked and shattered the rock in place. Thus, several carefully planned blasts were necessary to blow the ore out into the drift (tunnel) and make it retrievable.

  The first blast was always the "cut hole" (red locations, deep and angled in like a pyramid), which made a crater in the center of the rock face. Then the "relievers" (yellow locations, more shallow and angled out) would compress the surrounding rock into the center cut hole. Finally, the "lifters" (green locations, deep and angled out) would launch the entire collection out of the hole onto the drift floor, where it would be accessible for removal. The interval between each set of blasts was usually just seconds apart, sometimes even less.

  These blasts would be set off at the end of each working shift, when the miners (except for the blaster) were safely above ground. The blaster would shout "Fire in the hole!" and light the fuses. Then he would walk quickly (never running...a stumble could be deadly!) to a place which was safe from flying rock, and would count the blasts. He would mark on a chalkboard the number of blasts (so the next shift could be prepared for any unexploded charges), and exit the mine.

  If there was only one shift, the miners would come back the next day and haul out the ore through the main shaft in a giant bucket. If there were multiple shifts of miners (as in the Germania), the blowers would blow out all the smoke and dust between shifts, enabling the next shift of miners to go down and haul out the ore. Then they would drill the next set of holes, exit the mine, blast the dynamite, and the process would repeat. Adding mechanical blowers allowed the mine to operate multiple shifts, even 24 hours a day.

  The lower adit (the one you can see from this GeoCache site) was where the steam-driven pump sucked water from the depths of the mine and dumped it out into the creek bed just below. The point was not to empty the sump of all water, but just to keep the working levels dry.

  The Germania mine shipped about 100 tons of ore per day, delivering it via the El Paso and South Western railroad (EP&SW) to the smelter in Douglas. Exploring deep into the shaft produced little new copper, and it was found that most of the copper existed in a horizontal belt at about the 260 foot level. So the area below 260 feet was largely abandoned and allowed to flood, and horizontal shafts (called drifts) were dug in all directions to find the copper. Eventually the tunnels of the Germania connected with those of the April Fool (south, across the creek), the Maid of Sunshine (west, nearer the road), and even the Mary mine (the Great Western Copper Company's mine way up on the top of one of the hills behind the jailhouse). These tunnels were called cross-connects, and allowed for better underground access, transportation, and ventilation.

  In the end, the rich ores were a trick of nature. Somewhere in the geological past, a big block of rich ore-bearing rock was shifted into the Courtland area. Once that block was depleted, copper was harder and harder to find in Courtland. By February 1910, the C & A suspended its operation on the nearby April Fool mine, and moved some equipment north, across the creek to focus on the Germania. It also allowed its other options on the nearby Leadville mines to lapse. Miners were put out of work, and economic decline followed. Stores were closed, companies went bankrupt, and people moved away in droves.

  Occasionally, some optimistic engineer or company executive would start mining the area again, but never on the same scale as the 1908-1910 period. The C & A company re-opened its Germania shaft in January 1913, on a much smaller scale. But at the end of 1913, the price of copper plummeted once again, causing producers to cut production. The C & A closed its Courtland mines in December 1913, and moved the machinery elsewhere.

  As a mining town, Courtland's heyday was over. However, the town still held on as a supply town to the nearby ranches and farms, with an occasional spark in the mining industry feeding faint hopes of a revival. The railroads discontinued service in July of 1933, and the rails were removed by the end of that year.

  The shafts, drifts, cross-connects, and adits of the Germania have not been used since 1913. It is unwise in the extreme to enter an adit or to lean too far over the opening of a vertical shaft. Timbers have long since rotted away, and the ground beneath one's feet is nowhere near as solid as it may seem. In particular, some vertical shafts in the area look like filled-in craters, and one might be tempted to examine them more closely. But the rock that holds up that dirt is not stable, and can give way under the pressure of just one person's weight. That is why many of these shafts are fenced off with barbed wire.