Mining Towns

Mining towns have existed since antiquity. In the United States, their heyday lasted from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, but they continue to thrive in places as diverse as Canada, Russia, Chile, and South Africa. The term town suggests some permanence: enough mineral resources to repay long-term investment in mine development and town building, which, in turn, suggests why mine towns tend to be dominated by one or several mining corporations (mining operations are also sometimes state-owned). Ownership is likely to be absentee, represented locally by hired managers and professionals—superintendents, engineers, and foremen. Since minerals must be extracted in place, mining towns are often in inaccessible mountainous or desert landscapes; companies might have to invest in roads or railroads to get the mining population and equipment in and the ores out. The towns often fill available building space on steep hill-sides and narrow ravines, crowded around the mines and ore processors. Hastily and cheaply built in close quarters, nineteenth-century mining towns were frequently consumed by fire. Richer, more stable towns may be rebuilt in brick and stone. Industrial noise—the pounding of stamp mills, or the rumble of ore or coal trains—is a constant.

Corporate society is hierarchical. Mining towns have often been sharply stratified by occupation, ethnicity, and race, with a few members of privileged nationalities or classes acting as superintendents, engineers, and foremen overseeing large numbers of common miners and laborers. In the United States, miners were recruited from among recent immigrants—the Irish, Italians, Slovaks, or Mexicans—or displaced Appalachian or African American farmers. The towns were usually segregated into separate ethnic and racial neighborhoods, with the lowest-ranking minority living in the worst locations near mine dumps or railroad yards. As the middle classes were more likely to live in families and the rank-and-file miners and laborers were often young, single males, sharp lines were drawn between family neighborhoods and the saloons and brothels that catered to the mine workforce. Red-light [Page 925]districts commonly adjoined the areas inhabited by the most despised minority. Congested downtowns were carefully kept apart from nearby disreputable districts. Isolated populations were dependent on local suppliers, single miners especially so. The churches of the elite and the firehouses and clubhouses where middle-class males gathered shared downtown space with large merchandisers and hotels. Ethnic stores and churches were located in their groups' neighborhoods.

Apartheid-era South Africa maintained, by law, an extreme form of this segregation. White miners enjoyed a monopoly on skilled jobs and lived in subsidized housing, while migrant black mine laborers lived in carefully disciplined, all-male company barracks.

Mining towns have often been noted for violence; fighting between drinking, gambling young men is tolerated if it remains confined to the setaside districts. A boom-or-bust mineral economy and miners' resistance to wage cuts or demands for better conditions may lead to larger-scale violence; attempts to organize unions and strikes have led to “mine wars” in many mining districts.

Mineral resources are finite; unless a mining town can find a new economic base, it will eventually die. Towns can survive as governmental or merchandising centers, or, more recently, as tourist attractions. But mining leaves scars, and town sites remain marked by a stripped landscape, mine dumps, or slag heaps.

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