Cleaning up the desk-top
It’s a wintry day. Nowhere to be, not much to do. It’s a good time to tend to that pile of odds and sods that has collected on the corner of my desk.
The books have been reshelved. Assorted pages and photos are now in folders and filed away. A good portion went straight to the recycle bin – it was worth keeping at one point, but not any longer.
The rest is in a much smaller stack to be scanned – or, as is the case with this random clipping, to share with you.
Odds ‘n Sods and Glory Holes
One of the clippings from my stash was a report from the November 17, 1983 edition of The Northern Miner. The page was saved because of the news about Agnico-Eagle’s agreement with Milner Consolidated Silver Mines in Gowganda.
But that wasn’t why I kept the clipping. It was the partial story on the reverse that interested me.
“Odds ‘n Sods and Glory Holes” was a regular feature in the mining magazine, and Cobalt’s Jake Koza wrote this column. Unfortunately, the last few paragraphs are missing, but I think what remains stands on its own.
Cleaning up on gold
by Jack Koza
The recent spate of publicity regarding Dome Mines $18.7-million gold cleanup brought back fond memories of my experiences in the gold cleanup business.
During the middle 1930s, I worked for Northern Metal Company, a scrap metal concern operated in Cobalt by my late father, and my late brother-in-law Harry Korson. Every year, we would gather up most of the scrap metal produced by the operating mines in the north. Most of the operating mines in those days, of course, were gold mines. We would then ship the various kinds of scrap to the steel mills in Hamilton, with the exception of ball mill liners.
Ball mill liners were made of quote “white” or “hard” iron at the Cobalt Foundry, or from manganese steel at Joliet. Neither of these materials was acceptable for blast furnace feed, so over the years, large piles of used ball mill liners accumulated in our yard.
In the late 30s, an old-time miner and a mill hand by the name of Ernest Hartling approached us with a proposition. Would we allow him to set up a facility in a corner of our yard to grind a thin layer off the backs of all our mill liners, chisel out the bolt holes, and finally immerse the liners in an acid bath for a period of time? He would do all the work and we would split the gold recovered.
We agreed to Mr. Hartley’s proposal, and we’re very pleasantly surprised with the lucrative results. Indeed, we weren’t the only ones surprised. Our first shipment of gold resulted in a visit from the OPP high grade Squad, curious as to the source of our windfall.
