Museum Annex
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Exhibit: 'Mineral Blossoms' (drusy quartz) and other local samples gathered
from our Mines and Works on the property.
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Exhibit: Windlass for hauling ore up out of a mineshaft
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Exhibit: An Ore Cart like the ones used in our Garotte Mines.
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Buildings
Core House #1 - The Paymaster's Shack, a modest building with a big
history (14116 Valles Mines School Road 63087)
where payroll was kept for the miners both working for the Company on their own leased digs and selling their lead to the Company.
Jesse James blew our safe in that building but never robbed the train. His hideout cave lies a few miles due East.
The Core House even today holds solid rock cores preserved from our Diamond Drill Prospecting operations
and logged into maps from under your feet (Click here to see the drill hole log of the
Artesian Well). The Missouri Dept of Natural Resources keeps all the logs of all the drill holes going down into the earth
in the "Well Drillers Section". You might try to look your own well up some time. The "Land Survey" section keeps surveys of where a
well is drilled. Or where miners worked their mines
See Also, 1914 Artesian Well, where a diamond core drill produced 6 drill sites
going down to 840 feet in search of the Viburnum Trend. The resulting cores are stored in this building.
The General Store Collection inside: historic photos, mining tools, ledgers, artifacts, and documents from the 1800's
forward. Many local residents or their descendants have donated their family portraits, Kodaks, and work pictures of times past. Former
Valles Mines residents and their families now live all over the world and we try to track them. You never know who you might meet here.
Recent visitors came from New Zealand and England.
From the days of brute force, before Black & Decker or even electricity. The store sold explosives and the miners drilled
using star drills and sledge hammers, packing the holes they had made with explosives (originally black powder,
then decades later, dynamite). Imagine hand mining all day lying on your back picking ore from the cave ceiling.
It took two hundred years before power drills were invented. "The men were bulls!"
The Artesian Well
In 1911, the steam powered Diamond Core Drill struck an underground river making the Artesian Well
start to flow at 75 gallons/minute. Still today, downhill from
the Museum, you can drink from it. While people originally came from as far away as Illinois to fill their
containers, we recently had visitors from New Zealand drive up one day. After seeing it on the
web, it was a "must-see" for them. And a must-drink" as they filled their RV's water tank at the Artesian.