National Mining Hall of Fame welcomes six inductees

Six pioneers of the American mining industry will be inducted into the National Mining Hall of Fame in Leadville, Colo., at a ceremony on Sept. 13.

The six are George Argall, Jr., John Campion, James Gerstley, Charles Nailler, Edwin Pennebaker Russell Wood

All 179 members of the National Mining Hall are represented by engraved photographs and biographical sketches at the institution’s Leadville headquarters.

Thomas Falkie, chairman of the Hall of Fame’s board of governors, will conduct the induction ceremonies at the Museum Convention Center. The keynote speaker will be Rex Loesby, founder and president of Sierra Minerals.

George Argall, Jr. – (1913-2002)

George Argall, Jr., was a technical mining editor and publisher who began his career in 1950 as editor of Mining World and World Mining.

From 1963 to 1968, he was both editor and publisher of World Mining and lived in Brussels, Belgium. Upon returning to San Francisco in 1974, he was appointed editor of a new publication, World Coal.

In the 1970s, Argall became the first trade publisher to branch into industry conferences, staging a series of mining symposia in the U.S., Canada, England, Luxembourg, Holland, Mexico, Australia and China.

In 1978, Argall became one of the first mining engineers to enter China. His mine planning and development symposium in Beijing in 1980 was attended by 1,000 Chinese engineers, and he went on to publish a Chinese edition of World Mining/World Coal.

Argall graduated from the Colorado School of Mines as an engineer in 1935 and spent his early years working in precious and base metal mines in California, Nevada and Colorado. From 1942 to 1944, he worked for Reconstruction Finance in Denver; as supervising engineer, he examined mines to see if they required development financing for the war effort.

In 1944, he joined the Civil Engineer Corps of the U.S. Navy, better known as the “Seabees.” He later became a government officer in the navy, serving in Japan and South Korea.

John Campion – (1849-1917)

John Campion, widely known as “Leadville Johnny,” amassed a fortune in mining. What set him apart was that he used a lot of his money to promote cultural activities.

Campion was born in small town on Prince Edward Island and moved with his parents to California in 1862. He began his mining career as a prospector in the western U.S. and made a name for himself by discovering the White Pine silver mine in Nevada.

He later owned the Pioche-Phoenix Mining Co. there, but relocated in 1879 to Leadville and formed Iron Hill Consolidated Mining.

He quickly mastered the geology of the Leadville district, owning and developing various producing properties, which he named after animals. The most famous was the Ibex property, which would later include the prolific Little Johnny mine.

Little Johnny had been developed in 1879 at the height of Leadville’s silver boom, but by the late 1880s, the mine was petering out — or it seemed.

Campion acquired Little Johnny in 1890 and rolled it into his Ibex property. In 1893, a dramatic fall in silver prices sank Leadville into a depression. That same year, Campion hired J.J. Brown as superintendent of Little Johnny and invested $30,000 in a drilling program.

Brown discovered large deposits of high-grade gold-copper ore, and within a year Little Johnny was paying its investors $1 million annually. It wasn’t long before exploration heated up in the new Leadville gold belt.

Key to the revival was the use of new machinery and mining methods that allowed Campion to find and operate deep, lower-grade mines.

He was a founder of the Denver Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science) and donated a collection of 600 native gold specimens to the institution in 1900. He also transfered his valuable collection of books to what is now the Denver Public Library.

James Gerstley (1907-)

James Gerstley brought financial acumen, diplomatic skills, and management expertise to United States Borax & Chemical and its predecessor, Pacific Coast Borax (PCB), during the Great Depression and through to 1961.

PCB was originally a subsidiary of London-based Borax Consolidated, which had offices throughout Europe and South America. Born in England, Gerstley started with PCB in 1933 as an assistant to the president. He became a U.S. citizen in 1938 and rose to the position of president of PCB in 1950.

In 1933, PCB was a small company that mined sodium borate from a rich underground mine in Boron, Calif. In the U.S., PCB refined the sodium borate to produce borax and boric acid, including the famous 20 Mule Team Borax, 20 Mule Team Borax soap chips, and Boraxo, a powdered hand soap.

The advent of the Second World War cut PCB off from large markets in Germany, Holland, France and Austria. When the U.S. entered the war, many household products were rationed, and soap became scarce.

Gerstley stopped production of 20 Mule Team Borax Soap Chips, which contained 85% soap and 15% borax, and ordered that soap be used only to make boraxo, which contained 15% soap and 85% borax.

The demand for boraxo became so great that PCB was able to sell its entire production and offset most of its export losses.

In the late 1940s, Gerstley instituted the Death Valley Days television show, which promoted PCB products. The show featured Ronald Reagan, who appeared as the “Old Ranger.”

In the 1950s, Gerstley fought off a takeover bid and raised enough funds to transfer all U.S. assets of its London-based parent company to PCB. In 1956, he merged PCB with U.S. Potash Co. to form U.S. Borax & Chemical Co., over which he presided. In 1957, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

In the 1950s, Gerstley led the conversion of the Boron underground mine to an open-pit operation. A new refinery was built nearby, and a research lab was established in Alameda, Calif. These facilities all became operational in 1957, at the same time that a new mineral discovered at Boron was dubbed Gerstleyite, in honour of Gerstley.

Gerstley retired as president of U.S. Borax & Chemical Co. in 1961 but remained on the board until 1972.

Charles Nailler – (1910-1981)

Charles Nailler was a driving force behind the massive improvement in underground coal productivity achieved at Consolidation Coal Co. (now Consol Energy) and throughout the U.S. coal industry from the 1940s to the 1960s. During this period, Nailler served as a division president for Consol and then as the company’s vice-president of operations.

Under Nailler’s direction, mine productivity doubled to more than 20 tons per day from 10 tons. Nailler helped develop off-track mining, continuous mining, and longwall mining.

As a mechanical engineer, he was interested in mining machinery, and contributed to the development of the Meyers-Whaley loading machine and the modern “borer-type” miner. He also developed the concept of continuous transportation systems.

After Nailler graduated from the Case Institute of Technology in Ohio in 1932, he joined the Hanna Coal Co., once a division of Consol. He eventually became mine superintendent and then general manager of mines. In 1946, he was transferred to Morgantown, W. Va., where he formed a subsidiary, Christopher Coal Co.

The new organization quickly became Consol’s largest and most profitable operation. In 1960, Consol reorganized its mines under a centralized headquarters, and Nailler was named vice-president of operations, with responsibility for all of Consol’s mining activities.

Charles Nailler not only left a legacy of improvements in mining machinery and mining systems: in recognition of his contributions to the coal industry, Consol named a mine after him in 1983.

Edwin Pennebaker (1902-1995)

Edwin Pennebaker was a no-nonsense, uncompromising geologist who worked at far-flung projects in the U.S., Africa, Australia and the Caribbean. He devised innovative exploration programs for porphyry copper, vein-pattern and stratabound ore deposits, and calculated reserve estimates for mine financing institutions.

Pennebaker was admir
ed for his thorough, insightful field reports, and he helped develop major mines in Nevada and Arizona. In Arizona, he worked in the Bisbee district and at the United Verde mine for Phelps Dodge, in the Miami district for Miami Copper Co., and at the Pima mine with Cyprus Mines. He also developed regional exploration programs for Consolidated Copper Mines in Arizona and New Mexico, for Homestake Mining in the Mojave Desert, and for Hecla Mining in Arizona and New Mexico.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Pennebaker travelled extensively in Africa, Australia, and the Caribbean, examining and mapping properties.

He began a long association with the Coeur d’Alene district in northern Idaho in the 1930s, studying such properties as Bunker Hill and Sunshine. He was a legal expert on the “Apex Law,” solving complex geologic structures in the Idaho area. In his later years, Pennebaker was a consulting engineer to Coeur d’Alene Mines and was a director of the company from 1975 to 1984 and director emeritus from 1985 to 1991.

Pennebaker graduated from the University of California College of Mines in 1924. He first worked was as a geologist at Cananea, Mexico, and then as chief geologist for Consolidated Copper Mines in Ely, Nev. In Nevada, he met his wife Catherine, a school teacher in Tonopah.

Pennebaker is a Legion of Honour member of the Society of Mining Engineers.

Russell Wood (1927-2001)

Russell Wood graduated from the Colorado School of Mines in 1949 as an engineer. In 1950, he became one of the first employees of the Colorado School of Mines Research Institute. From 1951 to 1960, he managed several uranium properties and was general manager and director for Standard Metals.

Wood moved on to the New Jersey Zinc Co., where he became senior vice-president, overseeing eight domestic mines, as well as operations in Thailand and Bolivia. In 1975, he launched Gold Fields Mining, a subsidiary of Consolidated Gold Fields, which operated mines in the U.S. and Canada. He was heavily involved in the early development of heap leaching for gold, which made it possible for a mine in New Mexico to reopen.

In 1979, Wood joined Louisiana Land and Exploration as a vice-president and became president of its Copper Range Co. subsidiary. When Louisiana Land dropped out of mining in 1984, Wood led the initiative to buy Copper Range and reopen its White Pine copper mine in Michigan. White Pine had been shut down for two years, owing to depressed copper prices and labour problems. Through his leadership and innovations, the company was revived and turned a profit. His reasoned approach in resolving labour problems was instrumental in increasing productivity by more than half. In 1986, he was named Michiganian of the Year by the Detroit News, and the Wall Street Journal later carried a front-page story on the success of the White Pine mine. In 1989, the partners sold Copper Range to Metall Mining.

Wood served as president of Asamera Minerals in the early 1990s, until illness forced him to return to his home in Colorado. He was appointed to the Colorado School of Mines board of trustees in 1981 and served for 15 years, including seven as president. Despite an 8-year term limit, the governor of Colorado saw fit to reappoint Wood for two more 4-year terms. He also taught as an adjunct professor at the school.

Wood was awarded the Melville F. Coolbaugh Memorial Award in 1993 in recognition of his contribution to the Colorado School of Mines.

He was also a founder and director of the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum, and a director of the Western Museum of Mining and Industry.