Souvenir Mining Spoons

Souvenir Mining Spoon Little Jonny Mine | SOUVENIR MINING SPOON LITTLE JONNY MINE LEADVILLE COLORADO - Sterling silver spoon, 5 9/16 in. long, embossed mining scene in bowl with marking LITTLE JONNY MINE LEADVILLE, COLO., front & back of the handle are decorative with a mule, miner and pick axes, marking COLORADO on handle, ca. 1900, back with sterling marking and hallmark H in a circle, weight 21 gms [Leadville CO is the highest incorporated city in the United States. A former silver mining town that lies near the headwaters of the Arkansas River in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, the city includes the Leadville Historic District, which preserves many historic structures and sites from Leadville's dynamic mining era. Gold was discovered in the area in late 1859, during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush. However the initial discovery, where California Gulch empties into the Arkansas River, was not rich enough to cause excitement. On April 26, 1860, Abe Lee made a rich discovery of placer gold in California Gulch, about a mile east of Leadville, and Oro City was founded at the new diggings. By July 1860, the town and surrounding area had a population of 10,000 and an estimated $2 million in gold was taken out of California Gulch and nearby Iowa Gulch by the end of the first summer. Within a few years the richest part of the placers had been exhausted, and the population of Oro City dwindled to only several hundred. However, in 1874 gold miners at Oro City discovered that the heavy sand that impeded their gold recovery was the lead mineral cerussite that carried a high content of silver. Prospectors traced the cerussite to its source, and by 1876, had discovered several lode silver-lead deposits. A number of silver mines were established on Iron Hill and Carbonate Hill, east of town. The city of Leadville was founded near the new silver deposits in 1877 by mine owners Horace Austin Warner Tabor and August Meyer, setting off the Colorado Silver Boom. By 1880, Leadville was one of the world's largest silver camps, with a population of over 40,000. The city's fortunes declined with the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893 which resulted in a drop in the price of silver. The Little Jonny was probably Leadville's richest mine. It also established two of the biggest names in Colorado mining, John F. Campion and James J. Brown. Campion was born in Prince Edward Island, Canada and moved with his parents to California in 1862. He began his mining career as a prospector in California and Nevada and at the age of 20 discovered the White Pine silver mine. He owned and developed the Pioche-Phoenix Mining Company in Nevada. In 1879, Campion transferred his activity to booming Leadville, Colorado, where he formed the Iron Hill Consolidated Mining Company, owning and developing a number of producing properties designated by animal names. Among these were the Bison, Reindeer, Elk, and, most famously, the Ibex, which came to include the prolific Little Jonny mine. The Little Jonny was developed in 1879 but by 1890 the mine seemed to be playing out. After Campion acquired the Little Jonny in 1890, consolidating it into his Ibex property, he hired James J. Brown as superintendent of the Little Jonny and invested $30,000 to find more ore at the mine. James J. Brown was born in 1854 in Waymart, PA the son of an Irish immigrant father and a schoolteacher mother. His mother provided his education and he left home when he was 23 heading west to the placer mines of the Dakotas. He ultimately ended up in Colorado after studying geology, ore deposits and mining techniques to become a better miner. He married Margaret "Molly" Tobin Brown in 1886 and located in Leadville. At the Little Jonny, Brown timbered through notoriously unstable ground that had stopped earlier miners by devising a method of using baled hay and timbers to stop the cave-ins and discovered large deposits of high-grade gold-copper ore. The grade of gold was so pure and the vein so wide that it was heralded as the then world's richest gold strike. Within a year, the Little Jonny was paying its investors $1 million per year and shipping 135 tons of gold ore per day. Brown was awarded 12,500 shares or 12.5% of stock and a seat on the board. The mine became the largest gold mine in the Leadville district. The Ibex Company and its owners John Campion, Byrd Page, A. V. Hunter and James Brown became extraordinarily wealthy. In 1894 the Browns moved to Denver to spend their fabulous wealth. His wife Molly Brown became quite famous as a survivor of the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, the Unsinkable Molly Brown. After World War I, the mining industry in Leadville began to decline due to low world metal prices and other factors. Ibex's Little Jonny Mine was one of the few mines that continued to operate throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Denver and Rio Grande closed their Ibex Branch line in 1944. John Campion among other notable accomplishments went on to become a founder of the Denver Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science) and the first President of its Board of Trustees. He built a great collection of some 600 native gold specimens and donated the collection to the Museum, where his collection is now the core of one of the world’s premier collections of native gold. As for Leadville, the last active mine in the district, the Black Cloud mine owned by ASARCO, closed in 1999.]

Original Image

Total images: 377 | Last update: 8/11/23 3:15 PM | Help