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Industry on the Quantico Creek
Today, the Pyrite Mine trail leads you to a peaceful, open expanse above the
banks of the Quantico Creek. However, from 1889 to 1920 the area you view from
the boardwalk was busy with the sights, sounds, and smells of mining. The Cabin
Branch Pyrite Mine employed residents of the villages of Batestown and Hickory
Ridge, and the ‘fool’s gold’ that miners brought to the surface was processed
into sulfuric acid and used in making soap, fertilizer, and gunpowder. During
the years it operated, the Cabin Branch mine supplied more than 200,000 long
tons (a long ton is 2,400 pounds) of pyrite for industry in the United States.
Why Mine Pyrite?
The soils of Virginia contain many important minerals and ores, including iron
sulfite, or pyrite (FeS2). Sometimes called ‘fool’s gold’ for its gold-like
luster, pyrite is a very common mineral, found in such places as Spain, Peru,
Russia, South Africa, and the United States. The name “pyrite” comes from a
Greek term, pyrites lithos, “stone which strikes fire.”
Sulfur, the source of sulfuric acid, was an important industrial mineral at the turn of the twentieth century, with the United States its heaviest importer. Through advances in chemistry, sulfur became an important part of making paper, vulcanized rubber, medicines, and explosives. Pyrite provided the most cost-efficient source of sulfur. It was “roasted” to extract sulfuric acid, which was then used in many applications. Later technologies also enabled industry to recover sulfur from oil and natural gas. Pyrite was strategically important; while the U.S. military fought in the First World War (1917-1918), miners at the Cabin Branch mine were exempted from military conscription. The price of pyrite rose and fell with demand, from $4.64 per long ton in 1916 to $15.75 per long ton in 1917, before falling at war’s end.
Bringing Pyrite to the Surface
The toil of miners fed industrial hunger for pyrite and sulfuric acid. At the
peak of operations at the Cabin Branch mine in the 1910s, between 200 and 300
men worked for the Cabin Branch Mining Company or its 1916 successor, the American
Agricultural Chemical Company.
Miners reached the ore through shafts dug from the surface to the rock face more than 1,000 feet below. They found pyrite in bands that were 14 to 18 feet thick. At the Cabin Branch mine, miners did not use picks to extract ore. Instead, they used dynamite. Miners worked in crews consisting of a driller, who bored holes for dynamite; a powderman, who carried and set the dynamite; muckers, who loaded ore into wagons; and timbermen, who built wooden supports for the mine roof. Blasters supervised the process and were paid by the distance progressed per day. Wagons took the ore to the shaft, where it was loaded onto a “skip” and brought to the surface. It was then crushed, sorted by size, and taken by a narrow-gauge railroad to barges on the Potomac.
Working in the Depths of the Earth
Mining pyrite was dark, dirty, and dangerous. Miners labored in two or three
shifts a day for six days a week, with only the light from lamps on their heads
to guide their work. Shifts were usually ten hours long, and miners might only
see the sun on Sundays. They ate lunch underground. Miners had to be alert while
working with dynamite and other dangerous substances. “Lots of people got killed
in there,” remembered locomotive engineer John Kendell in 1973. Kendell was
seriously injured when one of the narrow-gauge trains that hauled pyrite ore
to the Potomac River derailed in an accident that may have been racially motivated.
He became a night watchman after his recovery.
Miners’ children also worked; they were paid 50 cents per day to sort crushed pyrite ore into piles by size. Pyrite miners’ incomes varied, ranging from $3.50 to $4.25 per day in 1920. In addition to facing low wages, miners received some of their pay in the form of scrip – coupons valid only to purchase products at inflated prices in the company store. That year, miners went on strike – or threatened to strike – for a wage increase of 50 cents per day. The mine superintendent refused to increase wages and closed the mine instead.
Hickory Ridge and Batestown: Supporting the Mine
Mine employees did not suffer long commutes to work. Most lived close to the
mine in the communities of Batestown and Hickory Ridge. While African-Americans
and whites both worked in the Cabin Branch mine, it was a segregated place of
employment.
The village of Batestown, on today’s Mine Road, was an African-American community, established near where a family of freed slaves bought land and settled. Hickory Ridge was a nearby community of whites and blacks that developed with the Cabin Branch mine. Residents in both communities relied on water from streams or wells and did not have indoor plumbing or electricity.
Between 1889 and 1920, many of the men in Batestown and Hickory Ridge worked in the mine. After the mine closed, some local residents moved to Pennsylvania to work in its coal mines, while others stayed, continued to work their small farms, and found jobs in the Cabin Branch area for the local railroad or at nearby shipyards and military bases. Most properties in Hickory Ridge became part of Prince William Forest Park, while Batestown lives on along Mine Road.
Prince William Forest Park and Reclaiming the Pyrite Mine Site
After its closure in 1920, the Cabin Branch mine lay dormant. By the 1930s,
many of its seventy buildings were gone. Local residents or Civilian Conservation
Corps enrollees recycled building materials in their own homes or camps. Mine
waste became a base for park roads. Although the mine no longer operated, sulfuric
acid and metal sulfates from waste piles leeched into the soil and the Quantico
Creek, keeping all but the hardiest species from growing and making the water
as acidic as vinegar.
In 1995, the National Park Service and the state of Virginia reclaimed the mine. New channels diverted surface water from disturbed areas. Waste piles were mixed with lime to reduce their acidity and moved. Mineshafts were excavated to a depth of twenty feet and capped with concrete seals. Clean soil was added, and over 5,000 trees and shrubs were planted to encourage the reestablishment of a hardwood forest. Today, the part of the Quantico Creek flowing by the Cabin Branch mine is much cleaner and safer, protecting the park’s resources.
Click here for a downloadable brochure.
