Mining Museum Exhibits

Buildings

The Paymaster's Shack, a modest building with a big history (14116 Valles Mines School Road 63087) where payroll was kept for the miners both working for the Company or on their own leased digs and selling their lead to the Company. Jesse James blew our safe in that building but never robbed the train. His hideout cave lies a few miles due East.

The General Store, Inside, historic photos, ledgers, artifacts, and documents from the 1800's forward. Many local residents or their descendants have donated their family portraits, Kodaks, and work pictures of times past. Former Valles Mines residents and their families now live all over the world and we try to track them. You never know who you might meet here. Recent visitors came from New Zealand and England.

The General Store Collection Inside, mining tools and artifacts from the days of brute force, before Black & Decker. They had explosives and drilled with star drills and sledge hammers, then packed the holes with explosives, first black powder then decades later, dynamite. Imagine hand mining on your back all day, eventually two hundred years later using some steam tools. "The men were bulls!"

The Core House Solid rock cores preserved from our Diamond Drill prospecting operations and logged in maps under your feet (Click here for the drill log of the Artesian Well). By the way, the Missouri Dept of Resources keeps all the logs of all the wells going down into the earth here in the "Well Drillers Section". Look your own well up sometime. The "Land Survey" section keeps surveys of where a well is drilled.

The Artesian Well In 1911, the steam powered Diamond Core Drill [pictured] struck an underground river making the Artesian Well you can drink from today at the foot of the hill where the Museum stands. It still flows today.