In the days when the Ely Mine in Vershire was at full operation, you would have smelled it long before you saw it: an acrid pungence of sulfur from the roasting beds where copperas ore was processed prior to smelting.
The smell hung in the air, over the general store and post office, the modest boarding houses and small single-family homes that lined the road in what was then called Copperfield.
The mine closed for good in the years before World War I and was designated an EPA superfund site in 2001. With reforestation over the course of the 20th century, the woods obscured the old cellar holes along the road, and closed in around the crumbling dam and, behind it, the dried up mill pond that once supplied water to both the mine and the village.
If you look at the ground near the mine along present-day Beanville Road, you can see where miners tossed aside thousands of glittery, rusty-looking pieces of slag, the by-product of the roasting and smelting of copperas.
With its road-less-traveled appearance, this stretch of Beanville Road isn’t the kind of place you’d associate with a short-lived but contentious labor struggle between miners and management that involved threats of blowing up the mine and the fear of violence.
Hidden beneath and behind the trees, shrubs and wildflowers, however, is just that.
A report in the July 13, 1883 Burlington Free Press summed up an existential dilemma. “Here, in the street of a quiet Vermont village, in a time of profound peace the country over, marched four companies of Vermont soldiers, armed not against foreign foe but against our own people and ready if necessary to shoot them down.”
The archetypal image of Vermont is of an agricultural Eden, old barns and farmhouses, and dairy cows and sheep on verdant hillsides.
That overlooks the state’s 19th- and early 20th-century industrial history, which includes the mining of copper and the extraction of marble, slate and granite. And with industry comes labor, and with labor comes, often, disputes between the bosses and the workers.
The Ely copper mine, operated by the Vermont Copper Mining Co., was no exception. In the summer of 1883, miners angry over months of non-payment confronted the mine owners and manager in an episode that’s come to be known as the Ely War. Think of it less as a war and more as a show-down that anticipated the decades of labor struggles to come.
“They were aggrieved and they didn’t have a plan. They seized explosives and claimed they were going to blow up the mine,” said Jim McDade, one of the heads of the West Fairlee Historical Society who has studied the history of the copper mine.
The Ely Mine in Vershire, the Elizabeth Mine in Strafford and the Eureka and Union mines in Corinth are part of a vein of copperas that stretches up the Appalachian chain from Georgia to Maine, McDade said.
Contrary to its name, copperas is another name for iron sulfur, which had numerous industrial applications in the 19th-century tanning and textile industries, according to From Copperas to Cleanup: The History of Vermont’s Elizabeth Copper Mine by industrial archaeologist Matt Kierstead. Early mine operators realized that they could also extract copper from copperas.
Kierstead writes that “Vermont’s thirty-mile-long ‘Copper Belt’ was the largest, most productive hard-rock underground metal mining district in New England.”
The Orange County mines produced almost 150 million pounds of copper used during the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, World Wars I and II and the Korean War, Kierstead writes.
The Vershire mine’s origin story begins with a possibly apocryphal story of a girl on a walk on a rainy day who sank into an unexpected hole in the ground. When she withdrew her feet they were a rusty orange, which alerted her father to the potential of some kind of valuable ore. By the 1850s, said McDade, trial shafts had been driven into the ground.
The mine went through different ownership, shut down for a time, reopened and by the 1870s it was a thriving enterprise, the only mine in Vermont to smelt copper on a large scale, rather than shipping it out of state, Kierstead writes.
Not only that, it was the largest 19th-century copper mine east of the Mississippi, according to a 2011 article by Ben Ford in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology.
By the 1880s the Ely Mine, named for owner and operator Smith Ely, employed around 400 miners, many of them immigrants from Cornwall, in England, which had the richest deposits of tin and copper in the British Isles and a long tradition of skilled mining labor. Immigrant Irish made up the rest of the Ely Mine’s labor force, McDade said.
The village of Copperfield sprang up to house the miners and their families. At its height, between 1,000 and 1,200 people lived there, and infrastructure was built to accommodate their needs.
A Methodist church for the Cornish; a Catholic church for the Irish. A night school, which children attended after working in the mines, said McDade. A post office, meat market, livery and a meeting hall that comprised both a hotel and the company store, according to Ford.
For entertainment and libation, miners went to Fairlee; Copperfield was a dry town, according to the wishes of teetotaler Smith Ely, McDade said.
Smith Ely’s grandson Ely Ely-Goddard, a treasurer with the company, erected in the middle of Copperfield a mansion which he called Elysium. With its cupola at the top, it brings to mind an all-seeing eye looking down at the workers below.
Miners suffered injuries on the job, but the biggest risk to their welfare, McDade said, came from typhus contracted from unclean drinking and bathing water, the inevitable consequence of placing privies right next to the stream that was the village’s water supply.
Then came trouble.
By the 1880s native copper (copper that didn’t have to be extracted from ore through roasting and smelting) had been found in quantity in Michigan and the mountain West. The price for copper from the Vermont mines dropped. Smith Ely was unable to pay his workers.
By July 1883, the miners had gone without paychecks for at least two months. Without money they were unable to pay for food. A posting by the company that informed the miners that, if they wanted to keep their jobs, they would have to take a sizable pay cut only incensed them, according to materials from the West Fairlee Historical Society.
Accounts of the events of July 2 through July 8, 1883, were published in The Green Mountain Freeman (which dubbed it the “Vershire Affair”) and the Burlington Free Press (which ramped up the rhetoric by calling it the “Vershire War”).
The Freeman sympathized with the miners’ plight, although it took pains to point out a “crowd of ignorant men goaded by ill usage and hunger is very apt to be a very willing tool in the hands of the first communistic agitator that comes along.”
The Free Press described the town as “wofully (sic) shabby,” Elysium as “vulgar looking beyond belief,” the smelter as “hideous,” the odor from the smelter as “beastly” and the entire spot, stripped of all vegetation because of the mine, as the “most utterly God-forsaken in the whole world.”
Nonetheless, the reporter went on to describe the miners as “poor benighted souls whose wrongs had urged them into frenzy.”
A West Fairlee doctor, John Goodrich Henry, provided an eyewitness account in a letter to his fiancee in Massachusetts. On July 2, Henry wrote, the miners raided the company store and took everything they could find. They then marched en masse to West Fairlee to bring their grievances to Smith Ely, then in his 70s and sick in bed in a boarding house. They were prevented from seeing him initially, but he got out of bed to see them and explained that he was doing his best to raise the money to pay them.
Mid-week, Roswell Farnham, a former governor of Vermont and now the mine’s legal counsel, showed up with about one-fifth of what the miners were owed. They could have it, he told them, as long as they continued to process copper, in order to sell off the remaining ore.
They refused.
Instead a group of miners commandeered an ore wagon and drove it to the house of mine manager Francis Cazin, whom they regarded as never having operated in good faith. First they loaded all of his possessions onto the wagon; then they loaded him, and, in effect, ran him out of town — well, to West Fairlee from where Cazin decamped to what he judged to be the safer ground of Chelsea.
They also seized a number of West Fairlee businessmen, took them back to the mine, shut them in a room and “told them to find some way to pay them.” (The miners released them after a few hours.)
This was their ultimatum: Pay them by Saturday, July 7, or they would blow up the mine and the smelter.
“Never before had a Vermont town been in the hands of a mob which threatened to destroy everything with gunpowder and fire,” wrote the late Collamer Abbott, the 20th-century photographer famous for his pictures of the White River Valley and White River Junction who also made a close study of the Ely copper mine.
Now thoroughly alarmed, the townspeople and local sheriff appealed to Gov. John Barstow, who called in four companies of militia.
Arriving at the Ely train depot, which still stands on the Thetford-Fairlee line at 3 a.m. the troops marched to West Fairlee, reaching town by around 5 a.m. on Saturday, July 7. They had the element of surprise when they came into Copperfield, as most of the inhabitants, including the miners, were asleep.
The soldiers rounded up the suspected leaders of the insurrection and hauled them off to the Chelsea jail.
But because no property had been destroyed, and no one would testify against them, they were released, according to Abbott’s article about the Ely War, published in 1972 in the New England Galaxy Magazine.
Indeed once the militia saw how hungry the miners and their families were they shared their rations of cheese, crackers and canned beef with them, wrote the Burlington Free Press reporter on the scene.
Although the miners were eventually paid some of what they were owed, said McDade, they never received all of it. In the weeks after the peaceful resolution of the fracas, miners began leaving town and many of them, McDade said, headed west in search of mining work.
The mine never really recovered. In 1900, said McDade, the businessman and engineer George Westinghouse bought the mine and briefly conducted smelting experiments there, but he shut it down in 1907 and began auctioning off all the buildings.
The houses were taken apart: Some of them were reassembled elsewhere, but the rest were stripped down to their component parts and carted away for use. The stones and boulders that shored up the mine’s structures were also removed for use elsewhere.
The Methodist church was moved to South Vershire and then Vershire, where it is now the community building. The Catholic church, which underwent a number of iterations, from rooming house to laundromat, now stands empty at the intersection of Rte. 113 and Beanville Road in West Fairlee; it is painted blue and doesn’t resemble a church in the conventional sense.
One miner’s house took on a second life after it was moved to Lake Fairlee where it served eventually as an arts and crafts building for Camp Wyoda before being turned into the Cozy Nook, a hangout for camp counselors, McDade said. It then became an ice cream shop; it is now privately owned.
A farmer bought Elysium for $150 in 1907, when Westinghouse auctioned off the buildings, and moved it to a hillside on the north-east tip of Lake Fairlee, where it still stands as a private home.
Valley Quest, an educational arm of Vital Communities in White River Junction that sends people in search of historical and natural curiosities, features the mine’s dam and mill pond, which are just off Beanville Road, as one of its self-guided field trips.
But curiosity seekers are not encouraged to tramp around the mine itself because of the risk of injury, or worse. In July 2008, a Vershire man fell down one of the shafts and died.
What little remains of Copperfield is a potent reminder of how quickly vital components of a civilization and an industry can become cast-offs, how quickly they disappear from view. It is no longer even a point on a map.
“There were 1,100 people on the road here, and now there’s no one,” McDade said.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.