Lost Treasure Online News Letter Vol. X issue 22

[Ed - QUICKSILVER(appletree)]

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December

Vol. X

Issue 22



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TH'ers News


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Mining Museum Celebrates Major Donations of Time, Talent and Treasure
LEAD - When guests come to the Black Hills Mining Museum this year they will have a designated place to park.
For the last couple of years patrons at the museum have been forced to park along the street, or in the Main Street parking garage. But thanks to several donations of time, talent and treasure the museum will be able to open its parking lot again this spring.
In 2005 the city of Lead shut down the museum's parking lot, as it was not considered to be structurally sound. Recently, a large group of volunteers banded together to fix one of its biggest commodities. In Lead, parking is at a premium, and mining museum board member Wayne Paananen said they are very excited about the improvement.
Individuals that contributed to the parking lot work include Golden Reward Mining Company, Homestake Mining Company, Wharf Resources, Alan Aker of Nemo Forest Timber Products, Tim Meiner, and Jerry Pontious. All of these entities helped stabilize the lot underneath, and will be sealing it this spring.
Lance Redinger of Lance Engineering in Spearfish also donated all of the engineering work for the project. He also donated his time to supervise the work to make sure it would be done according to required standards.
While the museum has much to celebrate with the new parking lot, Paananen said there is still much work to be done. The non-profit museum relies on membership dollars, donations and gift shop sales to operate, and winters are always slow for museum tourism. To help offset the slow season, Paananen said fundraisers are necessary. A recent chili feed helped raise some funds, and there could be more events on the horizon.
“To continue our growth its imperative that we hold fundraisers and that kind of thing,” he said.
Now that the parking lot is completed, Paananen said the museum board can focus on improvements to the facility. As the only museum in the state that is an associate member of the Smithsonian Institute, the quality of the displays is first-class, he said. But some improvements the board has already celebrated include restoring the historical theater in the facility, so museum patrons can once again enjoy a video about Lead's mining heritage. Another upgrade to be addressed in the future includes adding better items to the museum gift shop.
“That will provide a great opportunity to increase our annual gross income,” Paananen said. “A lot of money comes from gift shops, so we want to upgrade and enlarge the number of products we have available there.”
Additionally, Paananen reported that the board is going to establish an advisory board for museum members. This board will be instrumental in organizing and planning future enhancements and fundraisers for the museum that helps tell the story of Lead. Ultimately, Paananen said the museum board also hopes to bring in a professional marketing firm to develop a plan for drawing more people into the museum.
The Black Hills Mining Museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. For more information about the facility call 584-1605.
Courtesy of http://www.bhpioneer.com

Pieces of the Past
The restoration of a Jacksonville home uncovers artifacts
When Jacksonville resident Carol Knapp began digging a new foundation for her century-old home, little did she know she'd find pieces of history in the earth waiting to tell their story.
Bits of fine china, an old comb, a tin opium box lid, a bone toothbrush handle. All weave a tale of the people who once lived on a patch of ground that's now the 300 block of South Oregon Street.
"It's not so much a particular thing that strikes you as it is finding these little bits and pieces and imagining what the people were like who were here," said Carol Knapp.
Contractor Jay Treiger, who specializes in historic renovations, has dug 31/2; to 4 feet deep on the back side of the home so he can install a French drain and build a foundation to prevent dry rot that now plagues part of the house.
"I just thought it would be a shame to lose a part of history if there's a way to help preserve it and learn a little bit more about the area," Knapp said. She received a city historic preservation grant to help plan the work.
"It's really cool that Carol made a consistent amount of effort to contact people and have an archaeologist work with her and find how best to approach this," said Chelsea Rose, who has worked on archaeology projects in Jacksonville.
Rose volunteered her services and has found Southern Oregon University students who will help catalog the pieces.
The year the house was built remains uncertain, with some traditions saying as early as 1867. The 600-square-foot home definitely dates from the 1890s and can be seen in pioneer Peter Britt's photographs. Over the years, the house grew to nearly 900 square feet.
Early history and images suggest that Chinese miners camped or had shanties in the area.
"It's right behind First Street and Rich Gulch, where a lot of the first mining was going on," said Rose.
Workers were unearthing random bits until they hit one corner with a much heavier concentration, suggesting an old well or outhouse. Digging has been halted in that area to allow for more thorough examination.
Discoveries range from minute glass and china pieces to older clay marbles, glass marbles, keys, rice bowls and a children's toy plastic iron that Knapp estimates came from the 1950s. Animal bones, likely discarded by cooks, also have emerged. Those can be analyzed at the University of Oregon, Rose explained.
"We can find out if it's pork, beef or lamb and what kind of cut they were eating, which will reveal how they were doing financially," said Rose. "In tighter years, you'd expect more neck roasts and stew cuts."
Rose says artifacts from Knapp's home now number in the upper hundreds and they will be taken to an SOU archaeology laboratory. After analysis, they will be returned to Knapp, who plans to display some of them.
Knapp had learned a bit about her home, which she bought in 1978, from a woman who lived there during the 1890s as a young child. Gertrude Easterling, who died in 1998 at the age of 108, was the daughter of Otto Biede, the town's tinsmith.
Easterling told Knapp about her father crafting design work for the front porch and recalled seeing scorched doors, indication of a fire. Later, when working in the attic, Knapp came across scorched timbers along with a lot of old bricks she suspects remained from a dismantled chimney.
Jacksonville Historic Preservation Officer L. Scott Clay praised Knapp's handling of her newfound treasure.
"It's a very respectful sort of stewardship approach to managing her property," he said.
"Anything subsurface that is 75 years or older is supposed to be reported to the state Historic Preservation Office," said Clay. But he suspects many backyard projects don't get reported.
Rose, a graduate student in anthropology at Sonoma State University, plans to write an article on the discoveries and the house's history.
"The big, flashy houses get a lot of attention," Rose said. "The little houses reflect the families and working class and they often get overlooked."
Courtesy of http://www.mailtribune.com

Fishermen Find Ancient Boat
SOFIA, Bulgaria — A well-preserved ancient wooden dugout canoe has been discovered at the bottom of the Black Sea, scientists said Saturday.
The vessel was discovered by fishermen trailing nets along the sea bottom some 15 miles off the coast, said Dimitar Nedkov, head of the Archaeological Museum in the port city of Sozopol.
"The dugout is 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) long and 70 centimeters (27.5 inches) wide, and it is made most probably of oak," Nedkov told The Associated Press.
Bulgarian explorers have found four ancient vessels in remarkably good condition in the Black Sea, whose oxygen-depleted deep water preserves wrecks without the worm damage and deterioration that normally affects wooden vessels.
"Nowhere else can you find similar dugouts, as well as any kind of wooden vessels over 300 years old, because water rots the wood away," said Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of the National Museum of History. "In the Black Sea, however, there is dissolved hydrogen sulfide below a certain depth which preserves all organic materials."
Courtesy of http://www3.signonsandiego.com

Girding for a Meteoric Rise in Popularity
MARSDEN, SASK. - Marsden, a tiny Saskatchewan farming community that hugs the Alberta boundary, is preparing itself for a stampede of people hunting for prized cosmic treasure after several meteorites were recovered nearby.
"Yee-haw, they finally found something," Glenda Hankins, co-owner of the Marsden Hotel, said yesterday after it was revealed that two University of Calgary researchers were the first to locate valuable space rocks on top of a frozen pond late Thursday.
U of C planetary scientist Alan Hildebrand, who was involved in the successful search, estimates thousands more could be strewn over a debris field north of Marsden that is estimated to be as large as 20 square kilometres.
Locals have already dubbed it the Marsden Meteorite. The community of 275 people is about 250 kilometres northwest of Saskatoon.
The fragments were once part of an estimated 10-tonne meteoroid that broke up after falling into the Earth's atmosphere on Nov. 20.
Thousands of people from across the Prairies reported seeing a bright fireball streaking through the dark evening sky toward the ground. Several videos and photographs were captured and shown on newscasts around the world.
However, people in the Marsden area not only saw the fireball, which looked bright as a billion-watt light bulb, but many also heard and smelled it.
"It made a rumbling sound and it left a weird smell. This will sound funny, but it smelled like burning rock," Ms. Hankins explained. Even before the first pieces were found, she had created a special shooter for the hotel's bar called the Meteorite.
She expects a $10,000 reward being offered by U.S. meteorite collector Robert Haag for the first one-kilogram chunk of the space rock found will be a major draw.
There already might be a taker.
Alberta resident Les Johnson, 52, and his son, Tom, 13, found a large piece yesterday afternoon near the Battle River outside Marsden.
"It smells real funny. If you leave it in the truck too long, it stinks it up," he said, adding the meteorite weighs about 13 kilograms and is the size of a "real lumpy" human head.
Mr. Johnson, who runs an oil-field service company in Drayton Valley, Alta., which is about four hours northwest of Marsden, said he's still trying to figure out what to do with it. "I'm not sure right now. I might just keep it."
Technically, the meteorite belongs to the owner of the property where it was found. "I'm not even sure who owns the land. There was no house, just a field," he said.
Richard Herd, curator of the National Meteorite Collection of Canada in Ottawa, said the meteorite shower in western Saskatchewan has left space samples that are invaluable for ongoing research and a better understanding of the solar system.
"It's a piece of the puzzle, but it's our piece of the puzzle," Dr. Herd said, referring to the reward being offered. He said that by law, meteorites that fall in Canada are considered to be Canadian cultural property, and foreigners can not legally export them.
He said people who find meteorites and donate them to institutions such as universities or museums are eligible for government tax credits.
Dr. Herd said about 50,000 meteorite samples exist around the world.
Grant Jones, a farmer who owns land in the area where many more of the fragments are expected to be recovered, is already warning interested space rock collectors to ask for permission from property owners before setting out on their hunt.
"It's deer-hunting season. People better watch out or at least wear an orange hat or it could get messy out there," the 58-year-old said.
The largest meteorite shower in Canada occurred northeast of Edmonton near the town of Bruderheim in 1960. More than 700 fragments were recovered that together weighed 300 kilograms.
Courtesy of http://www.theglobeandmail.com
Farm Boys’ 70-year-old Stone-tool Find Etches Out Image of Area’s Earliest Visitors

EYOTA, Minn. - In the late 1930s, Adolph Schumann was plowing a corn field on his family’s Olmsted County farm when he hit a rock.
Riding on the moldboard plow behind his team of horses, the teenager was close enough to the soil to see what he had unearthed. It looked like an arrowhead. And there were more.
Adolph came back with his younger brother, Alfred, and they filled a gunny sack.
It was a cache of stone tools left behind 12,000 years earlier by the land’s first inhabitants, one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in the region.
The boys would be old men before anyone knew the significance of their find.
Around 10,000 B.C., at the end of the last ice age, North America’s first settlers made their way from Siberia across the Bering Strait. Within a few hundred years, they had covered most of the continent.
Wooly mammoths, long-horned bison and 400-pound beavers roamed the tundra landscape left behind by retreating glaciers.
Little is known about those people, but archaeologists believe they were nomadic hunter-gatherers, moving in groups of 25 or so, using spear points, knives and other tools flaked from hard “sugar quartz” sand stone found in only a few places in this area. One such outcrop was near Black River Falls.
There, archaeologists discovered, people chipped out rough tool blanks that could later be shaped for specific uses. They carried these stone forms on their hunting forays and buried caches they could return to as they needed to retool.
On a knoll above the creek that would eventually be called the Middle Fork of the Whitewater River, a band of hunters stashed about 20 pounds of stone tools ? tools they had carried nearly 100 miles through rugged bluff country, across a raging Mississippi River that was still carving out its valley as it drained vast glacial lakes.
They never returned to claim them.
Over the years, the Schumann boys found more artifacts in their field, and added them to the sack.
Adolph went off to war, Al to college. When they came home, Al worked the home farm, and Adolph bought one down the road.
Neither gave much thought to the pile of rocks until one day in the mid 1960s, when Al read a newspaper story in which an expert said there were no Indian artifacts found in Olmsted County.
“I called him up and said, ?Hell, I’ve got a gunny sack full.’”
Schumann brought the sack to the Olmsted County Historical Society, where the artifacts were cataloged and added to the collection.
They sat on a shelf for more than 40 years before anyone noticed.
In 2007, a University of Wisconsin-Milwakuee graduate student named Andy Bloedorn landed a summer internship at the historical society. His job was to inventory the collection.
On his second week, Bloedorn came across a cardboard box. On the side, in magic marker, was written “sugar quartz specimens.”
“I knew that sugar quartz was pretty important material throughout prehistory,” said the 31-year-old Winona resident. “I looked inside, and my jaw kind of dropped.”
There were 65 pieces, all from the same site.
Bloedorn, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, sent some photos to Robert “Ernie” Boszhardt, the regional archaeologist for the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center at UW-L.
Boszhardt knew right away what he was seeing.
“These are 12,000-years-old,” he said.
To be sure, they had the pieces analyzed by lithic experts.
Dillon Carr, a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University who did his undergraduate work at UW-L, helped confirm the find. He calls it “spectacular.”
The Schumann cache is now part of the Native American collection at the History Center of Olmsted County, where it is on display. It is a time capsule, one of only about 20 from that period found in North America, and likely the oldest in this region.
“I don’t think anybody knew how significant they were,” said museum curator Karl Wolf.
As much as the Schumann cache reveals, it also raises questions.
Some of the pieces were heat-fractured, others tinted by red ochre, suggesting they were left in a ritual.
“What does that mean?” Boszhardt asks. “Why would anybody do that?”
Boszhardt hopes to get a grant so that archaeologists can properly excavate the site.
These days Adolph Schumann is 88. Al is 84, and the farm belongs to his son. But they can still point out the spot where they found the tools.
Both marvel at their connection to prehistoric people.
“A person wonders how this stone - how did that get transferred this far?” Adolph said. “How did they travel, how did they know where they were going?” The Schumann cache of Paleo-Indian stone tools is part of the Native American collection at the History Center of Olmsted County in Rochester, Minn., where they are on display. To learn more about the prehistoric settlers of the Upper Mississippi River Valley, check out “Twelve Millennia” by UW-La Crosse professor James Theler and Robert Boszhardt of the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center. Courtesy of http://www.lacrossetribune.com