A $50,000 Concentrator Heads Down the Pend d'Oreille
Machinery for a 200-ton ore concentrator is bound for Metaline, shipped through Newport and floated downriver on a homemade lumber raft.
According to a report in the Spokesman-Review, work on the 200-ton concentrator of the Morning-Mammoth Concentrating Company will begin at Metaline, Wash., by May 1, and according to the terms of the contract it must be completed and in operation by October 1.
The Hallidie Machinery Company has taken the contract, and machinery is now being loaded at Denver. This will reach Newport within a short time, where a lumber raft containing sufficient sawed timbers, etc., for the erection of the mill will be constructed and freighted with the machinery down the Pend d'Oreille River to Metaline. The plant will cost $50,000 and the concentrator company guarantees to treat all the company's ore at 80 cents a ton.
“A lumber raft containing sufficient sawed timbers, etc., for the erection of the mill will be constructed and freighted with the machinery down the Pend d'Oreille River to Metaline.”
Before highways and heavy trucks, moving a mill to Metaline meant combining rail, river, and timber into one improvised supply chain. The concentrator promise—ore processed locally, jobs and freight through Newport—was the kind of industrial boosterism that could remake a river town or leave it with a costly white elephant. Modern debates over rural mining and infrastructure still turn on who pays for the mill and who bears the risk.
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