Town That Can’t Stay Dead Facing Doom

MERCUR, Utah — This mining camp hidden deep in the Oquirrh Mountains has gone from ghost town to boom town and back so many times it’s earned a nickname: “The town that can’t stay dead.”

Soon, however, Mercur will get its final rest. Again.

On March 27, the last truckload of gold-laced ore will be hauled out of the Barrick Mercur pit mine, 35 miles southwest of Salt Lake City in Tooele County. Another chapter in the long but sporadic life of what was once Utah’s second largest city will come to a close.

“Even after the mining stops, there will always be a Mercur,” says Clay Landa, vice president and general manager of the Barrick Mercur Gold Mine. “Mercur has turned into not just a place to go to work, but an institution, part of the community and a part of history.”

While mining will cease at a spot that has produced more than 2.5 million ounces of gold since 1871, the mill at Mercur will continue to run until late next year, processing tailings piles left by miners a century ago.

By the year 2002, the buildings will be gone, with four of the five pits backfilled, contoured and planted with native grasses as part of a company-funded $20-million reclamation project. The Manning Canyon road over the mountains will be reopened and public access to Bureau of Land Management property at Mercur will be restored.

There will be few, if any, signs that this was once a bustling city that produced a two-term governor, breakthroughs in mining technology and what was reported as some of the best homemade whiskey in Utah.

The reason for the final demise of Mercur is that the “economic” gold deposit in the ground here has finally been exhausted. The grade of ore now being scraped from the bottom of a pit where Mercur’s Main Street once passed over is so low that it is no longer feasible to keep operating.

“We’re at the bottom of the cookie jar,” says Walt Schubert, the mine-safety coordinator since 1983, while standing near a section of freshly blasted rock in the bottom of the pit. “Everybody always knew we’d get to the end, but now that it’s here, well, reality sets in.”

As many as 250 people worked at Mercur in 1995 and 1996, but since the mine moved into closure and reclamation phases, 96 employees have left for other jobs and 41 have transferred to other Barrick properties out of state. There are currently 103 miners employed at Mercur, but only 10 will be out of a job at the end of the month. The bulk of the employees work at the mill.

“Most of the employees affected are retirees at the end of their careers, are secondary breadwinners or do not want to relocate,” Landa says.

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Known locally for its philanthropy--Barrick Mercur has doled out over $1 million in college scholarships to local students and funded construction of a science lab at the high school in Tooele--the company plans to endow the Mercur Foundation to continue support of community projects after the mine is gone.

Mercur’s visitor center and museum, which hosts 7,500 people each summer, will be relocated to neighboring Ophir. An endowment will be created to allow the town to operate the museum.

New additions to the Mercur museum are unearthed regularly as Barrick’s pit mine uncovers the old, round-timbered mine shafts tunneled over a century ago.

“No matter where we dig, it seems like the old timers were always there first,” Schubert says. “We’ve found everything you can imagine, from a miner’s shirt with a map in the pocket to a wheelbarrow with 13 sticks of dynamite in it. There were cave-ins that trapped miners back then, but so far, we haven’t found any remnants.”

One of the most curious finds from old Mercur is a locked safe about the size of a hotel-room refrigerator. Nobody knows what’s inside.

“I’ve turned it on its side and can’t hear any [gold] bars clanking around, but you never know,” says Schubert, a former county sheriff who frequently gives tours of the mine. “We always joke that we should get Geraldo here to open it up.”

Few towns have had such a long boom-and-bust legacy as Mercur. It came to life in the 1860s when soldiers discovered silver ore in the narrow canyon south of what is now the town of Tooele. A prospector’s $80,000 strike brought a rush of miners, gamblers and saloon-keepers, erecting a small town in the gulch. A million dollars of silver later, it was over. The town was vacant by 1880.

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A Bavarian miner thought he found ore containing mercury in 1882 and filed a claim, giving the town its name. Instead of mercury, assayers determined the Mercur ore contained microscopic particles of gold. Invisible to the naked eye, the gold was impossible to extract by methods available at the time--panning or amalgamating--although numerous dreamers tried.

But in 1893, a process to extract gold through cyanide leaching was developed and Mercur boomed. The fortress-like Golden Gate mill overlooked the homes of 12,000 residents and a sprawling business district, with hotels, eateries, banks, two newspapers, five churches and 27 saloons.

Water was scarce and expensive--50-cents a barrel--so sidehill whiskey stills provided the drink of choice. The Salt Lake and Mercur Railroad delivered people and parcels daily over the torturous Oquirrh range, making 26 complete circles in a mere 11 miles, earning the honor of “crookedest railroad in the U.S.”

“The train brought in the fine fashions of the 1890s, the china and all that was available at the time,” says Dale Berge, a now-retired Brigham Young University professor who conducted extensive archeological and historical studies on Mercur in the mid 1980s. “They [Mercur residents] were modern and up to date in one sense, but because of the terrain and environment, living there was hard.”

George H. Dern came to the Mercur mine in 1894 as a 22-year-old bookkeeper, worked his way up to management and developed a “roasting” technique to better separate gold from the ore. After serving in the state Senate, Dern was elected Utah’s governor in 1924 and 1928 before his appointment as secretary of war in 1933. He once reminisced that he and anyone who had ever lived in Mercur would considered it “the happiest days of my life.”

Community pride was such that town leaders decided to incorporate Mercur on the same day Utah became a state, Jan. 6, 1896. But before the big event, a fire broke out and gutted the community. Although there wasn’t much of a town left after the smoke cleared, Mercur incorporated anyway and rebuilding began.

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One morning in June 1902, someone spotted smoke curling out of a window in the Preble Hotel. Mercur was burning again. By nightfall, all that was left standing in the entire town were a few brick walls.

Mercur was never rebuilt and on March 30, 1913, the last rail car of gold ore, decked out with red, white and blue bunting, was taken from the mine.

In 1934, Mercur was resurrected by discovery of a rich gold claim. A handful of employees moved their families into shacks in the canyon until the outbreak of World War II forced the mine closure in 1942.

Getty began exploration in the 1970s, finding enough color in the rock to warrant construction of a new $100 million gold extraction mill. Mining resumed in April 1982.

Barrick Gold Corp., at the time a little-known Canadian mining company, bought the Mercur mine in 1985 from Texaco, which had acquired Getty, for $40 million.

“When we started up this mine, the geologists said it would last 15 years,” says Landa, the current mine manager. “One guy even wrote ‘Spring 1997’ on a blackboard and never erased it to remind people how long the reserve would last. They were right on.”