Welcome to my collection of mining artifacts. My name is Hal Post and I’ve been collecting mineral specimens, mining books and most recently mining artifacts for over 20 years. I’ve added descriptive text and a little history to each of my artifacts so I hope you enjoy the pics and perhaps find them educational as well. I love old mining supply catalogues so I will continue to add scans of mining items from these catalogues as they become available. If you have comments or questions, like the site or don't like the site, or have some suggestions to make it better, please let me know with an email. Thanks and Enjoy!
Check out some of my favorite early photos of Colorado and Utah mining history. These photos are from the USGS photo library coming from the early (1880s to 1920s) USGS studies conducted by such icons as Emmons, Spurr, Cross, Lindgren and Ransome. Some of these photos found their way into early USGS professional papers, monographs and bulletins but most did not.
NEW! I recently came across several mining weekly publications covering the period from 1874 to 1915. With names that include The Colliery Engineer (1915), Engineering and Mining Journal (1874 and 1914), Mines and Minerals (1901), Mines and Mining (1907), Mining Reporter (1905) and Mining Science (1908), there were a lot of mining journals to choose from during this time. They are full of mining equipment ads so I've added selected scans from each. Some of the files are pretty large so expect some time to download them. I've noted some of my favorites with each publication but there are plenty to choose from. I think the best of the bunch is a really neat ad for the elusive and desirable Kelly candlestick in the 1907 Mines and Mining. It's the only ad I've ever seen for this beautiful stick direct from the inventor and manufacturer B. F. Kelly of Salt Lake City. Have fun checking them out.
NEW! Several very nice carbide cap lamps are the newest additions to my site. These include a Scoby duplex-style patent lamp, a nickel-plated Pocahontas, an early AutoLite with the incused marking on top, a very early Victor (non-Justrite) and a Guy's Dropper Squarelite cap lamp. Other newer items include an all brass Gill's Sons Star oil wick lamp and a beautiful Blende lamp (in the new Miscellaneous Lamps section). The Blende lamp was used in the Saxon Erzgebirge silver mining region of Germany for over 150 years. I hope you like the site and find it as interesting as I do in putting it together.
Some of my picture files are getting quite large so I've changed the display format somewhat to hopefully improve navigating around the site. Holding the cursor over the thumbnail will identify the pic and clicking on it will display the full size photo and additional information about the item. You can now return to the main page without the irritating backing through the pics. I hope this makes it a little easier to use my site.
NEW! I've also added a new category below titled Mining History. I collect mining books so I thought I'd share selected image scans of some of my favorite obscure out-of-copyright titles covering mines, miners and their history. The initial installment included mines of the ghost town of Granite, Montana in its heyday, mining scenes of turn-of-the-century Georgetown, Colorado and neat photos of the mines of the Cripple Creek district taken during a train trip on the Short Line to Cripple Creek around 1910. I've recently acquired two very rare first editions of the Colorado Mining Directories for 1879 and 1883. I've scanned advertising sections from both of these volumes and added them to the new category. It's very interesting to see what Colorado businesses serving the mining industry were around at those times. But the true treasure of these two volumes is the list and description of all the mines, mining and milling companies throughout Colorado for those years.
Here are photos from past mining shows. I've added new photos from the 2010 Tucson Mining Show that was just completed. I'm also a mineral collector so I thought some of you would like to see some photos from the 2010 Tucson Mineral Show at the Inn Suites Hotel that feature a few of my favorite dealers.
2008 Sutter Creek Show
2008 Tucson Show
2009 Tucson Show
2009 Ouray Pre-Show
2009 Ouray Show
2009 Johnstown Show
2009 Socorro Symposium Room Crawl
2010 Tucson Mineral Show
2010 Tucson Mining Show
All content on this site copyright Hal Post 2007