THE MINEVILLE-PORT HENRY MINE GROUP 



JAMES F. KEMP 



Location and distribution of the ore bodies. The largest and 

 most productive mines in New York at present are situated at 

 Mineville, 6 miles northwest of Port Henry on Lake Champlain. 

 Port Henry, the shipping point and the location of a blast furnace, 

 is the town most widely associated with the industry in the minds 

 of people in general, but the most important ore bodies really are 

 at the above mentioned distance from it. In former years a very 

 productive deposit was the basis of extensive operations at the 

 Cheever mine, 2 miles north of Port Henry and near the shore of 

 the lake. It is now being reopened with a view to magnetic con- 

 centration, but none the less the great center of ore production is 

 at Mineville. There are two companies actively engaged at the 

 latter place, Witherbee, Sherman & Co. Incorporated; and the 

 Port Henry Iron Ore Co. The total output of the former is esti- 

 mated at 15,000,000 tons, and, if to this is added the total ship- 

 ments of the latter, the entire yield of the ore bodies up to date can 

 not be less than 25,000,000 tons. There is no sign of exhaustion, 

 and thus the amount of iron originally present in these deposits 

 makes them rank well up among the great ore bodies of the 

 world. 



Besides the Cheever and the Mineville mines, there are several 

 other smaller openings in the same general area. Almost within 

 the limits of Port Henry itself is the Lee mine, a bed of somewhat 

 sulfurous ore, now long idle. On the west side of the ridge sepa- 

 rating Mineville from Lake Champlain and just at its foot is a series 

 of openings locally called the Pilfershire pits, also long idle. Again 

 just north of Port Henry, along the lake shore, according to the 

 report of E. Emmons on the Second District [p. 236, 1842] there is 

 a body of ore opened in his time as the Crag Harbor bed. Three or 

 four miles southwest from Port Henry is another pit, now aban- 

 doned but opened up first by Butler and Gillette and continued 

 under the name of the Essex Mining Co. 



All these localities are marked upon the accompanying map 

 [pi. 2], which is taken from the Port Henry and Elizabethtown 

 topographic sheets, issued by the United States Geological Survey, 

 the scale being 1 mile to the inch. Under the general name of 

 the Mineville group are included a number of openings which 



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