Ore Crusher
The bunkhouse, blacksmith shop, and other structures at Plumas-Eureka State Park stand on a hill next to the Mohawk Mill. We tend to think of California gold miners in terms of grizzled guys panning for gold in streams, and that's how the California gold rush started out. But it didn't take long for somebody to figure out all that gold dust in the streams started out in rocks up in the hills. A group of nine miners found gold in the rock above this point on the slope of Eureka Peak on May 23, 1851, and before long various outfits had dug 30 miles of shafts into the mountain.
Once they got the rock out of the mountain, the job was to mimic what nature did, break the gold out of the rock and turn it to dust. They used a complicated, mechanized process depending on a series of machines like this, that crushed the rock into smaller and smaller chunks.
This ore crusher used to stand inside the Mohawk Mill a short distance up the hill, and was part of a much larger sequence of machines that could rip arms off in an instant. The Mohawk Mill is no longer structurally sound, though, so they moved the crusher down here.
Ore Crusher
The bunkhouse, blacksmith shop, and other structures at Plumas-Eureka State Park stand on a hill next to the Mohawk Mill. We tend to think of California gold miners in terms of grizzled guys panning for gold in streams, and that's how the California gold rush started out. But it didn't take long for somebody to figure out all that gold dust in the streams started out in rocks up in the hills. A group of nine miners found gold in the rock above this point on the slope of Eureka Peak on May 23, 1851, and before long various outfits had dug 30 miles of shafts into the mountain.
Once they got the rock out of the mountain, the job was to mimic what nature did, break the gold out of the rock and turn it to dust. They used a complicated, mechanized process depending on a series of machines like this, that crushed the rock into smaller and smaller chunks.
This ore crusher used to stand inside the Mohawk Mill a short distance up the hill, and was part of a much larger sequence of machines that could rip arms off in an instant. The Mohawk Mill is no longer structurally sound, though, so they moved the crusher down here.