Introduction
Mining Towns aren’t too
dissimilar from towns today. A lot of similar buildings go into making a town.
You need a place for miners to live, which are normally known as worker cabins,
and you need regular homes too. You also need a general store and schools for
the children. However, there are a few buildings that are unique to a mining
town. These are the mining office, mine entrance, and mining chute.
Types of Buildings
The mine office is where all
the paperwork was done. This building is not too dissimilar from normal
offices, but it was generally located close to the mine. Most other office type
buildings are in a downtown setting. The mine was off on the edge of town
located near mountains or mineral rich soil. The mine entrance may have had a
small building that you entered before going into the mine, or the entrance
could just be open air. The ones with a building sometimes had an elevator
system on the inside to go down into the ground instead of walking into a more
cave like mine.
The mining chute was a very
important structure in mining towns. The town needed a way to process the
minerals and metals out of the rock so they could ship it. This was the whole
job of the mining chute. It would crush the ore in one part and then smelt the
metal out in a different part. This allowed for things such as copper to be
transported in a metal form instead of an ore form. The reason this is
important is each piece of ore did not produce much copper, so by shipping the
copper pre-removed from the ore it allowed for more to be shipped.
Conclusion
Mining towns also had
railroad buildings to transport things, which not all towns had. Outside of a
few buildings, mining towns were really similar to other small towns of their
time. Click on mining town buildings for more details.
