I live near Galena, IL, which also part of a tri-state (IL, IA, WI) which itself is part of the Driftless Area. Our mineral and mining boom started in the 1820s and I think was much reduced by the 1860s. Mining was so important in our area that Galena's post office also served as a port of entry for migrant workers from Europe, and Wisconsin's first capital was nearby in the mining town of Belmont. The Mississippi River made the mining boom possible.
I grew up in Joplin, MO which is part of this mining area. The remnants of that industry have left this region highly polluted. Much of the soil in these towns is contaminated and some places like Picher, OK have been declared superfund sites. Picher is a ghost town now, completely abandoned.
The tailings from the mining operations are referred to as “chat” and were deposited into massive piles of small rock. We would play in these “chat piles” as a kid. Probably exposing ourselves to heavy amounts of lead and zinc dust.
The mines themselves were sometimes filled with water which became swimming holes.
Joplin has a decent sized population (50k) so much remediation has happend over the decades. Our lawn and many others in town were stripped down several inches and replaced. The chat piles mysteriously disappeared one year and the swimming holes have been filled.
Myself and my father have always complained of having memory issues. It could be genetic but I’m convinced it’s lead poisoning.
Same here; grew up in Joplin before escaping to move to California in 1988.
It was wild growing up in that area with the chat piles hundreds of feet tall towering over these little towns.
When I was in high school the drinking age across the state border in Kansas was 18 so every weekend we'd all go over to the night clubs in Galena.
For folks interested in such things, Joplin has a Mineral Museum in Schifferdecker Park that has tons of info and exhibits on the mining that went on in this area. Has some pretty impressive (and massive) mineral samples, too. It's worth checking out if you're ever in the area.
> It was wild growing up in that area with the chat piles hundreds of feet tall towering over these little towns.
Especially when the area is extremely flat. Town I lived in (near, but not, Galena), the only places it was possible to snow-sled were man-made, with the only publicly-accessible one being the banks of the sole road overpass for miles around (I wanna say it went over railroad tracks? But it might have been another highway, regardless it had a remarkably long ramp-up to the actual part where it crossed over the other thing, and that left plenty of space for sledding) or if you happened to own land with coal mining strip-pits that still had the huge tailings/overburden pile, like you mention, and had the brush cleared from part of it.
Those kinds of things are practically the only hills of any kind in some counties in the region. Just outside any of those towns you can look down grid-straight rural roads that disappear into the horizon, and it's not hard to find them. It is flat. (Joplin area, slightly less so) Like, it's flat for Kansas. Many other parts of the state are, relatively speaking, blessed with great altitudinal diversity. Not that part.
It's a bit more south-of-Springfield than SE Kansas (or even Joplin) but the film Winter's Bone kinda felt like visiting home. All those familiar, scraggly trees. They really nail the feel of (a particular, more rural-leaning experience of) the area (I think it was actually filmed in Southern Missouri, so that makes sense, but the cinematographic "eye" of the movie really conveys it, too)
(Incidentally, if there's one thing to do in the very-flat part of Kansas that anyone who finds themselves remotely nearby should detour for, it's the Kansas Cosmosphere, somewhat West of the part otherwise under discussion but still the ultra-flat zone. It might be my favorite space exploration museum, and yes, I've been to most of the big ones in the US. It's shockingly good for being so far from basically anything else worth traveling for. If you have kids, hit the nearby Sedgwick County zoo, too, it's nothing special but it's alright and as long as you're there, why not. Area also has a state park built around some sand dunes left by retreating glaciers, which is kinda neat, though the park's a bit weak mostly due to just about everything outdoors being a really ugly in the region and the key feature of the park covering only a small area, and I make that judgement as someone who still feels weirdly at-peace and like things are correct when I visit, but like objectively it's really goddamn ugly, you gotta search to find anything natural that's as pleasant to look at as just your average view out a window many places, and if you turn around to look the other way you're probably back to ugly)
There used to be a big chat pile called Snowball on the north side of Joplin near the old Eagle-Picher smelter. I once saw someone fly off the top of that in a hang glider.
My grandfather on my mom's side was a miner in the lead mines. Or so I've been told; I don't remember him as he died when I was a baby. My grandmother lived near Snowball in what is best called a shack. No indoor plumbing; had to use a outhouse. She did have a telephone, although it was a party-line; you had to check the line was clear before using it.
So, yeah, that move Winter's Bone captured the feel of the area and the effects of systemic poverty really well.
I really appreciate you highlighting exactly how exceptionally flat Kansas is. I've never thought of a place as flat for Kansas, now I'll pay more attention when driving through it. I was already startled by how far horizons seem in Kansas.
Lots of the central-eastern portion of the state is the beautiful Flint Hills area, which is obviously… hilly. Much of I-70 (the main route across the state east-west) features long horizons but lots of low hills in the distance. The West, central, and southwestern parts have the slowly but consistently rolling, low hills of something like the film The Wind or the famous painting Christina’s World (the one with the girl on late summer or early fall green-and-tan grass, looking away from the viewer toward a white farmhouse up a low hill). They’re all much flatter than much of the country, but they’re not flat flat. They’re not Central Nevada flat.
South-central and southeastern Kansas are about that flat. Though with somewhat more trees.
[edit] I mean the remake of The Wind from a few years ago. I’ve never seen the original Lillian Gish film.
[edit edit] Further, those kinds of super-long views like you mentioned are actually kind of hard to come by on the really flat parts of Kansas. You need a little elevation (for the spot you're at) to get over obstructions like bushes, trees, barns, corn, et c, and that's what delivers those impressively-long views that vanish at the horizon in other parts of the state. That's why you need to find one of the (many) very-straight rural roads in the really flat parts of KS to see the "flat all the way to the horizon" effect. Or stand on the roof of a barn or something like that.
Somewhat OT but the band Chat Pile uses thematics of these industrial wastelands left behind as a backdrop along with stories of the lives effected. Great band with visceral and pointed lyrics. I'd start by listening to God's Country.
> The tailings from the mining operations are referred to as “chat” and were deposited into massive piles of small rock. We would play in these “chat piles” as a kid. Probably exposing ourselves to heavy amounts of lead and zinc dust.
I spent countless hours as a kid swimming in flooded coal mining strip pits, collecting fossils from those exact sorts of piles you mention (there's some cool shit there! They dig up so many layers so you get stuff separated by tens or hundreds of millions of years all accessible on the surface, shell fossils were extremely abundant and there were some sections full of fossil ferns of the same species more often associated with Illinois) and if I biked a couple miles down an arrow-straight road from our house, I could see an operating coal power plant in the distance, pumping nastiness into the air.
I’m about two hours SE of you. Towns around me include Lead Hill and Zinc. There’s also a road known locally as “Chemical Ranch Road” - it was one of the testing grounds for Agent Orange.
Cancer rates are significantly above baseline, especially neurological cancers.
I consulted in IT for ~10 years, and tried to take interesting jobs in interesting industries, after burning out in big healthcare. One of the more interesting gigs I took was working for a lead smelter!
They smelted all their lead from recycled materials, mostly batteries. That is why you get a relatively lot of money back for your used battery. They have ~15 customers and a LINE of more waiting if they could support the capacity.
I live near Galena, IL, which also part of a tri-state (IL, IA, WI) which itself is part of the Driftless Area. Our mineral and mining boom started in the 1820s and I think was much reduced by the 1860s. Mining was so important in our area that Galena's post office also served as a port of entry for migrant workers from Europe, and Wisconsin's first capital was nearby in the mining town of Belmont. The Mississippi River made the mining boom possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena,_Illinois
I grew up in Joplin, MO which is part of this mining area. The remnants of that industry have left this region highly polluted. Much of the soil in these towns is contaminated and some places like Picher, OK have been declared superfund sites. Picher is a ghost town now, completely abandoned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picher,_Oklahoma
The tailings from the mining operations are referred to as “chat” and were deposited into massive piles of small rock. We would play in these “chat piles” as a kid. Probably exposing ourselves to heavy amounts of lead and zinc dust.
The mines themselves were sometimes filled with water which became swimming holes.
Joplin has a decent sized population (50k) so much remediation has happend over the decades. Our lawn and many others in town were stripped down several inches and replaced. The chat piles mysteriously disappeared one year and the swimming holes have been filled.
Myself and my father have always complained of having memory issues. It could be genetic but I’m convinced it’s lead poisoning.
Same here; grew up in Joplin before escaping to move to California in 1988.
It was wild growing up in that area with the chat piles hundreds of feet tall towering over these little towns.
When I was in high school the drinking age across the state border in Kansas was 18 so every weekend we'd all go over to the night clubs in Galena.
For folks interested in such things, Joplin has a Mineral Museum in Schifferdecker Park that has tons of info and exhibits on the mining that went on in this area. Has some pretty impressive (and massive) mineral samples, too. It's worth checking out if you're ever in the area.
> It was wild growing up in that area with the chat piles hundreds of feet tall towering over these little towns.
Especially when the area is extremely flat. Town I lived in (near, but not, Galena), the only places it was possible to snow-sled were man-made, with the only publicly-accessible one being the banks of the sole road overpass for miles around (I wanna say it went over railroad tracks? But it might have been another highway, regardless it had a remarkably long ramp-up to the actual part where it crossed over the other thing, and that left plenty of space for sledding) or if you happened to own land with coal mining strip-pits that still had the huge tailings/overburden pile, like you mention, and had the brush cleared from part of it.
Those kinds of things are practically the only hills of any kind in some counties in the region. Just outside any of those towns you can look down grid-straight rural roads that disappear into the horizon, and it's not hard to find them. It is flat. (Joplin area, slightly less so) Like, it's flat for Kansas. Many other parts of the state are, relatively speaking, blessed with great altitudinal diversity. Not that part.
It's a bit more south-of-Springfield than SE Kansas (or even Joplin) but the film Winter's Bone kinda felt like visiting home. All those familiar, scraggly trees. They really nail the feel of (a particular, more rural-leaning experience of) the area (I think it was actually filmed in Southern Missouri, so that makes sense, but the cinematographic "eye" of the movie really conveys it, too)
(Incidentally, if there's one thing to do in the very-flat part of Kansas that anyone who finds themselves remotely nearby should detour for, it's the Kansas Cosmosphere, somewhat West of the part otherwise under discussion but still the ultra-flat zone. It might be my favorite space exploration museum, and yes, I've been to most of the big ones in the US. It's shockingly good for being so far from basically anything else worth traveling for. If you have kids, hit the nearby Sedgwick County zoo, too, it's nothing special but it's alright and as long as you're there, why not. Area also has a state park built around some sand dunes left by retreating glaciers, which is kinda neat, though the park's a bit weak mostly due to just about everything outdoors being a really ugly in the region and the key feature of the park covering only a small area, and I make that judgement as someone who still feels weirdly at-peace and like things are correct when I visit, but like objectively it's really goddamn ugly, you gotta search to find anything natural that's as pleasant to look at as just your average view out a window many places, and if you turn around to look the other way you're probably back to ugly)
There used to be a big chat pile called Snowball on the north side of Joplin near the old Eagle-Picher smelter. I once saw someone fly off the top of that in a hang glider.
My grandfather on my mom's side was a miner in the lead mines. Or so I've been told; I don't remember him as he died when I was a baby. My grandmother lived near Snowball in what is best called a shack. No indoor plumbing; had to use a outhouse. She did have a telephone, although it was a party-line; you had to check the line was clear before using it.
So, yeah, that move Winter's Bone captured the feel of the area and the effects of systemic poverty really well.
I really appreciate you highlighting exactly how exceptionally flat Kansas is. I've never thought of a place as flat for Kansas, now I'll pay more attention when driving through it. I was already startled by how far horizons seem in Kansas.
Lots of the central-eastern portion of the state is the beautiful Flint Hills area, which is obviously… hilly. Much of I-70 (the main route across the state east-west) features long horizons but lots of low hills in the distance. The West, central, and southwestern parts have the slowly but consistently rolling, low hills of something like the film The Wind or the famous painting Christina’s World (the one with the girl on late summer or early fall green-and-tan grass, looking away from the viewer toward a white farmhouse up a low hill). They’re all much flatter than much of the country, but they’re not flat flat. They’re not Central Nevada flat.
South-central and southeastern Kansas are about that flat. Though with somewhat more trees.
[edit] I mean the remake of The Wind from a few years ago. I’ve never seen the original Lillian Gish film.
[edit edit] Further, those kinds of super-long views like you mentioned are actually kind of hard to come by on the really flat parts of Kansas. You need a little elevation (for the spot you're at) to get over obstructions like bushes, trees, barns, corn, et c, and that's what delivers those impressively-long views that vanish at the horizon in other parts of the state. That's why you need to find one of the (many) very-straight rural roads in the really flat parts of KS to see the "flat all the way to the horizon" effect. Or stand on the roof of a barn or something like that.
Somewhat OT but the band Chat Pile uses thematics of these industrial wastelands left behind as a backdrop along with stories of the lives effected. Great band with visceral and pointed lyrics. I'd start by listening to God's Country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_Pile
https://chatpile.bandcamp.com/
I had no idea about the meaning of their name before this, thanks!
> The tailings from the mining operations are referred to as “chat” and were deposited into massive piles of small rock. We would play in these “chat piles” as a kid. Probably exposing ourselves to heavy amounts of lead and zinc dust.
I spent countless hours as a kid swimming in flooded coal mining strip pits, collecting fossils from those exact sorts of piles you mention (there's some cool shit there! They dig up so many layers so you get stuff separated by tens or hundreds of millions of years all accessible on the surface, shell fossils were extremely abundant and there were some sections full of fossil ferns of the same species more often associated with Illinois) and if I biked a couple miles down an arrow-straight road from our house, I could see an operating coal power plant in the distance, pumping nastiness into the air.
I reckon cancer's in my future. Whoops.
I’m about two hours SE of you. Towns around me include Lead Hill and Zinc. There’s also a road known locally as “Chemical Ranch Road” - it was one of the testing grounds for Agent Orange.
Cancer rates are significantly above baseline, especially neurological cancers.
I consulted in IT for ~10 years, and tried to take interesting jobs in interesting industries, after burning out in big healthcare. One of the more interesting gigs I took was working for a lead smelter!
They smelted all their lead from recycled materials, mostly batteries. That is why you get a relatively lot of money back for your used battery. They have ~15 customers and a LINE of more waiting if they could support the capacity.
Was a fun job, loved walking through the plant.
Who exactly is buying lead from a lead smelter these days, battery and ammo manufacturers?
There's a billion lead acid batteries out there which are conceivably infinitely recyclable
Saw the Bonnie Clide one on that site, damn she had her finger on the trigger shotty pointing at his gut, he don't pay no mind, eyes locked onto hers.
With a name like Galena it’s no wonder they found lead there! /ducks