Royal John Mine and Mill, New Mill and Tailings, Royal John Mine Road, approximately 10 miles north of intersection with New Mexico Route 61, San Lorenzo

Source document Quoted word for word from HAER NM-35-A. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

The Royal John Mine and Mill complex is on the west slope of the Black Range in the Gila National Forest. Off Highway 61, near Faywood, New Mexico, is Royal John Mine Road. The road is approximately 12 miles long, and the Mine and Mill are located at the end. It is within the boundaries of Township 17 South, Range 9 West, and includes parts of Sections 8, 9, 16, and 17. Date of Construction: Designer: Unknown. Builder: The builder of the New Mill is ASARCO.

Source document Quoted word for word from HAER NM-35-A. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

Erin Edwards Royal John Mine and Mill, New Mill and Tailings HAER No. NM-35-A Page 2 LOCATION AND TOPOGRAPHY: The New Mill is located on the east side of Royal John Mine Road, at the terminus of the road in the mining area. It is south of the Old Mill and Mine. The road is unpaved, and has been subjected to periodic washouts due to heavy rains and flooding. The general area is littered with various pieces of equipment, processing and hauling gear, assorted machine parts and pipes, and mostly modern-day litter. It is unclear which of the equipment, gear, and machinery are original to the site, as the owner frequents flea markets and antique shows to collect mining ephemera.

The New Mill is located in a clearing of pine and juniper trees, on a relatively flat piece of land, with tailings and a hillside touching the rear (east elevation) of the building. HISTORY OF THE NEW MILL: In early Henry H. Rogers, John D. Rockefeller, and Adolph and Leonard Lewisohn organized the United Metals Selling Company as a means of unifying the copper industry and controlling the international price of copper. However, they also understood that lead-silver smelters produced substantial amounts of copper-matte during their routine operations, and if they could not control the copper production by the silver-lead smelters, they would never be able to control the price of copper internationally.

The solution was to offer to pay for the consolidation of the smelting firms nationally, and in return they wanted a contract to be able to sell the copper the smelters produced. Additionally, they liked the idea of combining all of the silver-lead smelters to control the price of silver and lead. ASARCO was then founded the next year in When the company began, ASARCO controlled about two thirds of the smelting capabilities in the United States, but ASARCO did not control M. Guggenheim s Sons, which was owned and operated by Meyer Guggenheim and his sons Isaac, Daniel, Murry, Solomon Robert, and Simon (John) (Fell In M. Guggenheim s Sons merged into ASARCO, and the new ASARCO became the premier mining company in the world.

The merger included Guggenheim s smelters in Colorado, the Perth Amboy copper refinery in New Jersey, and lead and copper smelters in Chihuahua, San Royal John Mine and Mill, New Mill and Tailings HAER No. NM-35-A Page 3 Luis Potosi, and Monterrey, Mexico. Later that year, ASARCO also acquired five mines in Mexico (ASARCO.com For the next several decades, ASARCO continued to grow and diversify, and continued to seek out new sources of ore.

In ASARCO started to acquire stock on the United States Zinc Company, acquired a contract with the National Lead Company to sell lead, and purchased the rights to all silver-lead ores in Coeur d Alene, Idaho (Hast In ASARCO purchased property in Arizona, and opened smelters in El Paso, Texas, and Hayden, Arizona (ASARCO.com In they built a zinc smelter in Amarillo, Texas. In they began operating in Chile (Hast In ASARCO constructed a zinc refinery plant in Amarillo, Texas (ASARCO.com This era of growth led to the construction of the New Mill at the Royal John Mine. The Royal John Mine was operated by ASARCO from to early in its attempt to find new sources of ore.

During this time, ASARCO completed various upgrades to the area, including refurbishing the Old Mill and constructing the New Mill to house newly installed power and concentrating equipment. The New Mill is currently used as the only mill on the property and shelters the current owner s mining and processing equipment (Soule McDonald The New Mill is a simple, industrial, two-story, steel-framed building, laid in a rectangular plan that is clad and roofed in corrugated aluminum (Figure 1). The apex of the roof holds a raised ventilation shaft with wood-framed louvers for ventilation. All of the exterior cladding and roofing has been replaced since the building was constructed; however, the replacement cladding is compatible with what was originally used.

The roofing system is composed of a series of steel king trusses. In the southern half of the interior, there is a second-story platform currently used for storage. The New Mill was constructed using standardized plans, building materials, and components that ASARCO had manufactured off-site, and that were transported to Royal John, and assembled on-site. The layout and appearance of the Hayden, Arizona, mill is similar to the roof line of the New Mill, but the New Mill is smaller in scale. It appears that standard components were used, but tailored to fit the site and environment of each building that ASARCO Royal John Mine and Mill, New Mill and Tailings HAER No. NM-35-A Page 4 constructed.

The window frames in the building are made of milled lumber, as is the only remaining doorway frame on the south elevation. The main entrance door, on the west elevation, no longer has any doors to seal the building. Hewn timbers form a foundation or terrace at the northeast corner, and the foundation of the northeast, east, and south elevations are all constructed of poured concrete, with the wood form outlines still visible. The west (front) elevation is partially clad in corrugated aluminum, with substantial portions of the exterior cladding missing. The roof is clad with a mix of new and old corrugated aluminum. The roof ventilation louver panels are in place, with original louvers still in the north and south panels. There is no front door.

The south elevation contains three bays, with one wood-framed doorway and two wood-framed windows. There is a third window hanging from the exterior of the building, but is unclear where that window came from or if it is original to the building. Sections of the aluminum cladding are missing from this elevation. The adjacent hillside and tailings cover the bottom of the building at the southeast corner. The east (rear) elevation is mostly made up of the poured concrete foundation, which serves as a retaining wall for the hillside and tailings behind the building. The retaining wall is approximately 15 feet high. Portions of the aluminum siding are missing, and there are no doors or windows.

Three wood- framed ventilation louver panels are still in place at the roof line, with the southern panel still holding the original wood louvers. The north elevation has no windows or doors, and most of the aluminum siding is missing, leaving this portion of the building open to the environment. Tailings obscure the northeast corner of the building. This is the elevation where all of the mining processing equipment resides in the interior. NO FUMAR/SMOKING is spray-painted on the interior, west-facing wall and is visible from the outside.

Of note, there is also cursive writing on one of the steel I-beams at the northeast corner of the building which reads ASARCO Mining Co., Santa Rita, Assorted trash, furniture, and equipment, including an assay furnace on the second-story platform, are located inside the building. The building remains operational and is used by the current mine claim holders. Remediation at this site entails the removal of the tailings that have accumulated at the northeast, Royal John Mine and Mill, New Mill and Tailings HAER No. NM-35-A Page 5 east, and southeast corners of the building.

All of the tailings will be removed to a location by the West Cut, and the hillside will be excavated and consolidated (Email from Wendy Sutton, USFS Mining and concentrating the ore are the only processes done on-site at the New Mill (Figure 2). The equipment housed inside the New Mill is new, and not original to the building. At the north elevation, outside the building, is a large coarse ore bin, into which the raw ore is placed via a metal-framed conveyor belt. The conveyor belt is approximately 25 feet long, and is angled at about 45 degrees. The belt brings the football-sized ore inside the building into a steel ore bin that feeds the ore by gravity into the jaw crusher. The crusher is labeled with an imprint that reads Universal Crusher Co. Pat d. Cedar Rapids IA USA .

It is unclear how old the jaw crusher is, but the Universal Engineering Corporation was founded in As the ore is crushed into smaller pieces, it is fed onto another conveyor belt that spans the length of the north elevation, and is ultimately dropped into the fine ore bin, and then into another crusher that crushes the ore further to baseball size or smaller. The ore then goes through the ball mill/vibration mill which crushes the ore into fine particles. The crushed ore then goes into the flotation tank, which separates the zinc/lead from the crushed ore. The tailings are then removed from the bottom of the flotation tank and pushed down a steel trough into a disposal bin.

The rudimentary equipment inside the New Mill is sufficient for current purposes of the Royal John Mine; however, at larger facilities, milling is more advanced. The open-pit Mission mine, owned by ASARCO and located in Tucson, Arizona, is an excellent example of modern mining. The Mission mine is 2.5 miles long, 1.5 miles wide, and feet deep (ASARCO.com At the Mission mine, the ore is exposed through controlled explosions. As there are several kinds of ore that naturally occur in Arizona, each truckload of ore is sorted by what properties the ore has. Ore that ASARCO is not currently processing is sent to storage hills for future use.

If the extracted ore is judged to be the right kind of ore, it is hauled to the primary crusher, a seven-story underground crusher that crushes the ore to baseball-sized pieces. Ore is then piled up for use in the semi-autogenous grinding mills (SAG Mills). SAG Mills are used to crush the baseball-sized pieces of ore into gravel size; using 5-inch steel balls that roll around inside the SAG Mill, breaking apart the rock. Occasionally, the steel balls will break during the operation of the SAG Mill, so the gravel, once crushed is sent by conveyor belt Royal John Mine and Mill, New Mill and Tailings HAER No. NM-35-A Page 6 through a magnet that removes all steel pieces. The conveyor belt then takes the gravel into the mill and into the ball mills.

Ball mills are filled with a combination of gravel size ore and 3-inch steel balls, and the Ball Mills revolve the ore until it has been crushed to sand. At this point, the ore is ready to go into flotation tanks, which is where the desired mineral is removed from the crushed ore. The sandy ore is placed in a tank, along with lime, pine oil, salt, and water. Jets under the surface blow air into the tank, which causes a foamy layer to rise to the surface of the tank. Because there is pine oil in the mix the mineral particles, copper in this case, cling to the bubbles and float to the surface. At this point, the product goes to one of two places, either the tailings thickener or the filter plant.

The waste from the ore, the tailings, is removed from the tank and sent to a tailings thickener so that the tailings can be retained and further purified. The water from the tailings is recycled for future use at the mill. The bubbles with the adhered copper are sent to further flotation tanks, and then sent to a filter plant where most of the water is removed for recycling. At this point the copper concentrate is about 28 percent pure copper, and it is sent to one of two ASARCO smelter plants in the southwest. Once the copper concentrate reaches the smelter, it is blended with flux and blown with oxygen into a flash furnace. Because of the high heat, the flux is burned off releasing sulfur and iron trapped within the concentrated ore.

At this point the concentrated copper is 56 percent pure copper. At the converter furnace, the copper continues to burn off all of the remaining iron and sulfur over a 6-to-8 hour period, resulting in 98 percent pure copper. The next step is the anode furnace, in which natural gas is blown into the molten copper to remove any remaining oxygen or minerals, resulting in 99 percent pure copper. The copper is sent directly from the anode furnace to a set of molds that mold the copper into ingots that weigh 825 pounds. Those ingots are then sent to the ASARCO refinery in Amarillo, Texas. During the smelting in the furnaces, the burned-off sulfur is retained and sent to an acid plant that manufactures sulfuric acid.

That sulfuric acid is then sent by train to various manufacturers across the country. BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) ASARCO Company History. Electronic document. Royal John Mine and Mill, New Mill and Tailings HAER No. NM-35-A Page 7 Chipman, Donald E. Handbook of Texas Online, "Cabeza De Vaca, Alvar Nunez," accessed January 05, Chipman, Donald E. Handbook of Texas Online, "Seven Cities of Cibola," accessed January 05, Donoghue, David Handbook of Texas Online, "Coronado Expedition," accessed January 05, Fell, James E. Ores to Metals: The Rocky Mountain Smelting Industry. University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado. ForestHistory.Org. National Forests of the U.S.; digital document Gulf South Research Corporation.

Cultural Resources Survey of the Royal John Mine and Mill in Grant County, New Mexico. USDA Forest Service, Gila National Forest, New Mexico. Hast, Adele. International Directory of Company Histories, Volume 4. St. James Press, Chicago, Illinois. Heyl, Allen V., Allen Agnew, Erwin J. Lyons, and Charles H. Behre, Jr. The Geology of the Upper Mississippi Valley Zinc-Lead District. Geological Survey Professional Paper United States Government Printing Office, Washington, Huggard, Christopher J., and Terrence M. Humble Santa Rita del Cobre, A Copper Mining Community in New Mexico. University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado. Kinney, Geology and Ore Deposits of the Royal John area, Swartz District, Grant County, New Mexico: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report.

Kohout, Martin Donell Handbook of Texas Online, "Asarco," accessed January 05, Royal John Mine and Mill, New Mill and Tailings HAER No. NM-35-A Page 8 McDonald, Steven John Brief History of the Royal John Mine and Mill Site. Gila National Forest, Grant County, New Mexico. Simmons, Jerry. New Mexico Mining History. Albuquerque Gem and Mineral Club. Electronic document. Soule, Investigation of the Royal John Lead-Zinc Deposits, Grant County, New Mexico. U.S. Bureau of Mines Report of Investigations Sutton, Wendy. Email from Wendy Sutton, November 30, Sutton, Wendy. Email from Wendy Sutton, January 27, The American Presidency Project. 2016a Proclamation 432 Setting Apart as a Public Reservation Certain Public Lands in the Territory of New Mexico. Electronic document.

The American Presidency Project. Proclamation 582 - Enlargement of the Gila Forest Reserve, New Mexico. Electronic document. USDA Forest Service. Establishment and Modification of National Forest Boundaries and Natural Grasslands, A Chronological Record electronic document. %20to%202012.pdf USDA Forest Service. 2016a The Early Days: A Sourcebook of Southwestern Region History. Electronic document. USDA Forest Service. Gila National Forest. Electronic document. https://www.fs.usda.gov/gila. Visit Silver City. Gila National Forest. Digital document; Royal John Mine and Mill, New Mill and Tailings HAER No. NM-35-A Page 9 Figure 1 - The New Mill. Figure 2 - The New Mill Interior.