Tailings from llie mine fell of Ihe vanished village of Ore Knob.
Iron Hammermen
lion «hoy
опер
made
iron: coppor mines may
be reopened.
By IIAKIIY GAbMHVAY
There used lo be a village of 5011
people at Ore Knob, but now there’,
just a hole in the ground. It's some
hole. loo — 1(H) feci deep— and prop¬
erly guarded now by a wire fence.
But there may soon be another vil¬
lage on the Ashe hillside, where several
million pound' of fine copper was
mined in the last century. Nipissing
Mines, a company which made history
in silver mining, has an option on the
Ore Knob property, and mining jour¬
nals report plans to develop the new
holdings soon.
If it does, the initial enterprise prob¬
ably would call for a crew of about
250 miners, with expansion to follow
if the price of copper and the rich¬
ness of the mine warrants it.
Owned by I.assifvr
Ore Knob is now owned by Rob¬
ert G. Lassiter, a Granville citizen with
a surprising zeal for digging into the
ground.
His Ore Knob properly has a long
history. Strangely enough, it first was
mined for iron, not copper, by a
Frenchman named Meredith Ballou.
He found the iron ore was so "badly
adulterated with copper." that the ven¬
ture was abandoned. M. Ballou couldn’t
eat the rind because there was too
much watermelon.
Then, about four years before the
Civil War. according to Arthur, the
Buckhannon Company of Virginia
bought the mine from Jesse Reeves and
went after the copper, hauling the ore
to Wythcville, Va., by ox-wagons.
Heyday
The largest operations were by the
Clayton Company, a Maryland con¬
cern and under management of John
Dent machinery modern for that day
was installed, including a smelter. This
period covered the years 1X73 to 1X84.
and Ore Knob had a boom town, with
a cosmopolitan population drawn from
mining communities far away.
The descending price of copper di¬
minished enthusiasm, but some mining
continued until about 1886. It is said
that this was the first place in North
Carolina where copper was made from
the ore and refined up to the Lake
Superior grade. "Bricks” of copper,
weighing a pound each, were hauled
by wagon 60 miles to Marion. Va..
and some sources say from 10 to 12
million pounds were shipped in this
way.
In 1916 the shafts were dc-watcrcd
but development was prevented by
World War I.
Copper also has been mined at Cop¬
per Knob in the Gap Creek section.
It appears that Ashe really has a
rich possibility in the copper deposits.
Exhaustive geophysical tests show the
occurrence and character arc quite sim¬
ilar to the Ducktown (Tcnn.) deposits,
which are being mined profitably with
a much smaller content of copper.
According to the Northern Miner.
July. 1954 issue, the current explora¬
tions now being done by Nipissing re¬
veal a quarter mile of ore averaging
3.15 per cent copper, carrying about
a million tons of ore. By comparison,
the same company in Vermont is profit¬
ably mining ore which yields only 1.55
to 1 .65 per cent copper, and this mine
in June made a profit of $25.000.
The Ore Knob ore contains also
gold, silver, cobalt and nickel, and a
mining engineer in 1953 said that these
could be recovered in the refining
process.
The Mining Journal says the prop¬
erty has been obtained for a cash price
of $150,000, but the transaction was
not confirmed as completed in Ashe
recently. The same property sold in
1848 for eleven dollars.
Nipissing is owned by Ventures, Ltd.,
described as the largest mining com¬
pany in the world
Iron Industry
The iron industry inaugurates! by
Meredith Ballou had a long, yet little-
remembered life in Ashe. Helton Creek
was the scene of much of the activity.
I he Harbard Bloontcry Forge, built in
1X07 at the mouth of Helton, washed
away ten years later. Then the Helton
Forge was built in 1829 and a freshet
took it away in 1858; another was built
in 1802 downstream, and then the
30
THE STATE. AUOUST 28. 1954