Re: Burning the Shennadoah ore Dock

All this is gone, having been removed by the Sunnyside Mine, and the local contractor was Jim Melcher, who has his business in the Animas Air Park in Durango (they built the body for the Silver Vista). This was the old Silverton Hardware building directly in back of the ore dump and over head crane that straddled the tracks. The crane is a very simplified version of the one the D&RGW had in Alamosa. The Sunnyside used the warehouse building for storing reagents used in ore milling, and that included cyanide. The building and ore dock were in bad condition, and there was never any question of trying to preserve this structure because of the stuff that had been stored inside for many years. I recall the dry chemicals on the floor were an inch or more in depth and it was a little spooky walking in there. The mine shut down in 1991, and I don't remember when Melcher bulldozed these structures. The structure was considered hazardous, so all the debris was trucked up to the tailings pond below the Mayflower Mill and was buried in the middle of the pond along with vast amounts of other material the mine cleaned up.