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Mines/United States

Picher (Tri-State district)

Picher (Tri-State district), United States. Closed, underground, mining zinc, lead.

Why Picher (Tri-State district) is famous

Mining spread to Picher 1904 to 1908 and the largest ore strike came in 1913. Peak employment was 11,187 men in 1924. The district gave more than half of First World War zinc and 45 percent of lead. Most mines closed in the 1960s and Eagle-Picher ended in 1967, leaving the Tar Creek Superfund site.1,2

Story cards

What kind of deposit

Mississippi Valley-type (MVT) lead-zinc

Picher (Tri-State district) today

Where zinc is mined todayWhere lead is mined todayMining in United States

Where next

Mines

Same kind of depositTarnowskie Gory lead-silver-zinc mineLead-zinc in limestone: Silesia's heritage site and Picher, where jobs peaked at 11,187 in 1924.3ExamplesKabwe (Broken Hill) lead mineLead legacies: Kabwe closed in 1994. Picher's district gave 45 per cent of First World War lead.4

Deposit types

An example ofMississippi Valley-type (MVT) lead-zincPicher (Tri-State district) belongs to the mississippi valley-type family of deposits.5

Sources

  1. Tri-State Mining District and Picher Oklahoma Historical Society
  2. Wikidata entity Q2844779
  3. Wikidata item Q48841031 (Tarnowskie Gory WHS) Wikidata (CC0)
  4. Zambia: tackle lead poisoning at former mine (27 July 2021) Human Rights Watch
  5. Mineral Deposit Models for Resource Assessment, Chapter A: A Deposit Model for Mississippi Valley-Type Lead-Zinc Ores (SIR 2010-5070-A) US Geological Survey

From the Prospector Trails mining history dataset: each fact links to the source it was checked against. Figures are as the source gives them, in the money of their day. Not investment advice.

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Cover photos from Wikimedia Commons: Froth flotation and tailings by Nina111955, CC BY-SA 4.0; Ball mills and SAG mills by photosmith2011, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0. Pictures: NASA's ASTER Shows Brazilian City After Dam Disaster, NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team (Public domain (NASA media, no copyright)).