A little stroll through the past at the old dump

[tamrock]

East of me is a place that was once a location of where the folks who lived in area chucked away all there junk. Walking around I get a sense this place was used as a place to discard the no longer wanted for a span 1890s to around the 1970s. Some of artifacts are before my time and other items I recall from my time.

The one item I put in my pocket was an old coal miners in & out brass tag. I had one when I worked in the mine and you simply called them your 'brass'. They still use them in some of the mines and I generally get a visitors brass when I do work underground at some of the mines I visit. Some mines use an RFID system now that tracks your movement in & out and around the workings as you pass by a reader that logs your movement on a computer.

Check In - Check Out Board
When a miner enters the mine he places his brass tag on the "In Board". When he leaves the mine he moves the tag to the "Out Board".

The brass tag bears the miner's social security number which matches a second tag riveted to his mine belt. This is used for position identification in case of a catastrophe.

The system allows people on the surface to know who is underground at any given time.

 

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[Old Dude]

Thanks for the " brass " info. Lots of neat history in mining. Our local mining was coal. One of my bucket list metal detecting finds are their store tokens they used to buy items from the company store. It's still on my list, lol.

 

[bill_wabo]

A token would be on my list, its a cool little piece of history.

 

[tamrock]

I bought my house here in Lafayette Colorado in 1989. The last of the coal mines in the area shut down in the 1970s. There are a few old site's left where I can still find old relics of those days. One thing I collected is this old leather belt and 1940s MSA miner's hat. When I bought my house my neighbor was an old fella named Ed. He and I would talk about mining, as I was a hardrock miner in Leadville who was laid off in 1983. Ed worked at the last mine open in this area. When it shut down due to a fire I think, he then went to Price, Utah for a time before he finally retired. Old Ed had the black lung disease and he died maybe around 1992 I'm thinking. His sister and only direct relative had an estate sale and I purchased Ed's cap and mine belt there. Ed was a true blue UMW coal miner and a person of a bygone era. I asked my local museum if they'd like it, but they said they've got so much stuff they can't add anymore. They told me of a fella wanting to put a collection together in the town of Superior Colorado that's not far from here and was once a coal town, but now is consumed with urban sprawl and a gigantic mall of Costco, Super Target and many other shops and restaurants. Still I have the eye to find a little of what once was in this area of massive expansion and wonder how much longer it'll be, before the big earth movers come in and erase more of it off the surface of the past?

 

[winslow]

Nice eyeball finds! I like trying to restore those old cast iron stove parts to their original luster.

Old dumps are a lot of fun ... probably most on this forum would agree ... others world think we're a bit kooky!

 

[tamrock]

Nice eyeball finds! I like trying to restore those old cast iron stove parts to their original luster.

Old dumps are a lot of fun ... probably most on this forum would agree ... others world think we're a bit kooky!

I was always fascinated going to the local dump with my dad in Illinois. You'd see rats moving in around the smoldering piles of burnt rubage. I recall fella's would be out there with 22 rifes and pistols shooting the rats for sport. Seem like once a month my dad would take me to this little town barber for my haircut. It was a great old place where these two barbers cut your hair down to a quarter inch, as I had now say in the style of haircut I was getting. They had mounted pheasant, geese, duck and other critters all over the shop. One time we went the guy who cut my hair had his foot all bandaged up and I remember my dad and the other barber joking and laughing about what happened to that barber. He was out shooting rats at the dump with a pistol and ended falling and shot the side of the arch of his foot and the bullet came out his little toe. Some how I remember I didn't think that was all so funny, but all the other fellas that always hung around did.

 

[tamrock]

Nice eyeball finds! I like trying to restore those old cast iron stove parts to their original luster.

Old dumps are a lot of fun ... probably most on this forum would agree ... others world think we're a bit kooky!

I just may lug that thing home. I thought about how one could repurpose it in some way? I drug this part of an old iron bed out of there some time ago.