The Mineral Museum is located in an old lecture hall on the campus of Montana Tech in Butte. The was originally the Montana School of Mines and so it is not surprising that the exhibits in the Mineral Museum includes displays of minerals from various mines.
Minerals are natural chemical substances. The mineral gold, for example, is made up of just one element (a single type of atom), while quartz is made up of two elements, silicon and oxygen.
The Black Pine Mine
The Black Pine Mine, located 12 miles northwest of Philipsburg, Montana, was discovered in 1882 and operated until 2000. The mine was operated primary as a silver mine (producing 174,863,770 grams of silver) as well as gold (93,310 grams), copper (4,843,459 metric tons), lead (117,934 metric tons), zinc (12,247 metric tons), antimony, and silica. Shown below are some of the mineral specimens from the mine which are on display in the Mineral Museum on the campus of Montana Tech in Butte.
The Bunker Hill Mine
The Bunker Hill Mine is located the Coeur d’Alene District of Northern Idaho. It produced over 3 billion dollars worth of lead-zinc-silver ores.
According to the display:
“With a grubstake of one burro and $18.75 worth of flour, bacon, and beans, Noah Kellogg came to the Silver Valley prospecting in 1885. His burro wandered and Kellogg finally found him grazing on the hillside above what is now the town of Wardner. Kellogg sampled the outcroppings on the hillside and found them to be rich in lead-silver-zinc ore. Such was the discovery of the Bunker Hill Mine, named after the famous Revolutionary War battle.”
The Bunker Hill mine has over 100 miles of underground workings and has reached a depth of more than a mile.