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The road to this site starts off good but gets rockier the closer you get. You can really see the effects of landslides and rock falls as you are constantly dodging rocks on the road. The road is nearly impassable as you get close to the mine. Several buildings still stand here, and the ruins- clinging to the sides of the canyon-- are worth carefully exploring. We did find this link to a movie of a guy exploring inside the mine. Would not recommend going into old mines, and certainly wouldn't recommend going into one alone, but he did, and here is his movie. By the way, he talks about the mining of tungsten and then says they found scheelite and started mining that. Scheelite is a tungsten ore.

PRODUCTION FROM 1925-1944 TOTALLED 1, 049,714 TONS OF ORE WITH AN AVERAGE GRADE OF 1.17% WO3, YIELDING 1,100,773 UNITS WO3. FROM 1944 TO 1958, PRODUCTION TOTALLED 2,073,565 TONS OF ORE GRADING 042% WO3, FOR A TOTAL YIELD OF 685,365 UNITS WO3. THE SHARP DROP IN ORE GRADE WAS DUE TO A CHANGE FROM MINING THE RICHER ORE OF THE STANK AND HUMBOLDT ORE BODIES TO THE LOWER GRADE SUTTON ORE BODIES IN 1944 AND THE ADDITION OF LARGE LOW-GRADE TONNAGES FROM OPEN PITS IN THE 1950'S WHICH AVERAGED 0.22-0. 25% WO3. THE TOTAL RECORDED PRODUCTION FROM THE MILL CITY DISTRICT MINES FOR THE PRODUCTIVE YEAR BETWEEN 1917 AND 1958 WAS 3,258,135 TONS OF ORE YIELDING ABOUT 2.2 MILLION UNITS OF WO3. IN 1982, GENERAL ELECTRIC ANNOUNCED 13-15 YEARS WORTH OF ORE RESERVES AT THE MILL CITY MINES, WHICH WERE NOT DEPLETED BEFORE THEY CLOSED OPERATIONS IN OCTOBER OF THAT YEAR.

Other USGS Reports for mines in the Tungsten area include: Baker Workings; Florence Group; Humboldt-Springer; Mill City Tungsten; Orphan Workings; Sutton; Tom Cat; Uncle Sam. According to excerpts from these USGS Reports, many of these mines were interconnected. For example, the Baker Working was connected to the Sutton Mine. An excerpt from the Humboldt-Springer Mine Report reads "The Humboldt mine is part of the Nevada-Massachusetts Co. workings. This mine is connected to the Springer at the 300-ft level." Etc.

In Pershing County, the town of Tungsten anchored the mining district in which the Nevada-Massachusetts Company was the largest corporate owner of tungsten mines and mills. By 1927, the company was the principal producer of tungsten in the country and would hold this position well into the 1950's. The accompanying town of Tungsten was the second largest community in Pershing County. According to a brief history penned by Donald Segerstrom whose family ran the company, Tungsten consisted of "a post office, general store, large single-men's boarding house, elementary school, community hall, library, service station and more than 110 one-family dwellings." The White Pine towns of Tungsten and Tungstonia were never as large as Pershing's Tungsten. After the nearby mines and mills were closed in the late 1950's, Tungsten became "the youngest ghost town in Nevada," according to the Reno Gazette-Journal. When the area was revived in 1981, according to the Reno newspaper, the town did not reappear. Instead, miners and their families lived in nearby Imlay or commuted from Winnemucca.

In the 20th century, the demand for tungsten was driven mostly by the country's military activities during the two world wars and in eastern Asia. The primary domestic use was in incandescent lighting; tungsten is still found in light bulbs, although it is being rapidly replaced by LED. Advertisements for tungsten lights were common in Ely and Tonopah newspapers throughout the 1910's and could be found in the Reno Evening Gazette as late as May 1992. By the turn into the 21st century, Nevada newspapers carried ads for golf clubs strengthened with tungsten.

When demand was high, prices would rise and so would the number of tungsten discoveries. Nevada newspapers reported major discoveries near Goldfield in 1905, Round Mountain in 1907 and heralded it as the next big thing for Tonopah in 1907. Discoveries continued across the state. By 1988, the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology published a bulletin about the 375 deposits known to be in this state. According to Frances Church Lincoln, Nevada's primary mineral contributions during World War I were tungste antimony, manganese. During that time, Nevada produced 1,785 tons of tungsten from operations in Churchill, Mineral, Humboldt (Pershing), Nye, and White Pine Counties. Tungsten concentrates were valued at $3,650,485, roughly $88 million today. According to annual production statistics compiled by USGS, Nevada produced about one-fourth of the country's total. Most was used domestically and supplemented by international imports. According to USGS statistics, international production already far exceeded U.S. production by 1905, and since then, the U.S. contribution to world production has remained relatively minimal. Small though it may be by international comparison, the U.S. production of tungsten has depended heavily on Nevada. By 1918, Nevada produced one-third of the country's tungsten and was the second largest producer behind Colorado. At that point, most of Nevada's ore came from the Eugene Mountains in what is now called Pershing County. (Pershing was the last county created by the Nevada Legislature. It was carved from Humboldt County in 1919.) Prices crashed after 1918 but efforts to revitalize began in 1924 in Pershing, Lincoln, and Mineral Counties. By the 1930's, war in Europe was driving a demand that continued to grow through the World War II period and into the Korean War era. Nevada was the country's major producer of tungsten. In particular, the Nevada-Massachusetts Company at Tungsten in Pershing County was the largest individual source of tungsten in the U.S. for many years. Nevada did not produce much gold or silver during World War II. In 1942, the Federal Government demanded that precious metal mines be closed across the country in an attempt to push mining efforts toward industrial minerals. In Humboldt County, the Getchell Mine near Golconda fortunately discovered a tungsten ore body next to its gold ore body; as a result, Getchell was the only Nevada mine that could commercially produce gold during World War II. Nevada was the leading tungsten-producing state in the nation during the 1940's and again in the 1950's. In 1951, production increased 90 percent over the previous year mostly due to the adaptation of open-pit mining methods. Previously, scheelite and huebnerite veins were mined through underground tunnels and shafts. Government purchases also stimulated the demand for tungsten, and Nevada was the largest tungsten-producing state in the country from 1953 through 1955 with more than 30 operations. In 1954, Nevada's mineral wealth came primarily from copper and tungsten production. Tungsten was just over $20 million, which is roughly $240 million today.

The last major tungsten mine was shut down in 1958, according to a 1964 publication. But never say "never again" in Nevada mining. Newspaper searches found numerous references to related mining activity after 1964. At the end of 1979, as Nevada entered a new decade, the President of the Nevada Mining Association, Robert Warren, announced Nevada's latest "mining renaissance" with the expected opening of 15 new operations producing "tungsten, molybdenum, silver, gold, and uranium."