What Went into Mining Towns

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.