A little more light shed on Sunny Corner

Followers of this blog and friends will know of my on-going involvement with the Sunny Corner mining site. I thought I had pretty much mined all the Australian newspapers for relevant information. Imagine my surprise when I  found an article in Australian Town and Country Journal 23 Mar 1895: 31 on the mines at Sunny Corner.

Then I found it was illustrated!

Then I realised that apart from the Sunny Corner mine there was a rare illustration of the Silver King mine as well.

This is the Sunny Corner Mine

This is the Silver King Mine

The Silver King image gives a really good sense of where the processing plant was located in the landscape.

It is exciting to be surprised by discoveries like this.

Sunny Corner plan

Following on from my earlier post here is a plan of the Sunny Corner site.

Sunny despite the rain

Well after several days solid work (spread out over 6 months) I have finished the search of the Digitised Australian Newspapers for information regarding the Sunny Corner Silver mine. I have clipped the information into a MS Word document which is 111 pages and has 63,959 words! Supporting this is another smaller document on Mitchell’s Creek (the name Sunny Corner had prior to silver being discovered) plus two largish files of Mines Department Records. Downloaded from DIGS.

There was an earlier history of Sunny Corner by Vicki Powys published in 1989 (Powys 1989). It is an excellent historical study. However since Powys research, the on-line revolution has arrived. So much hitherto hidden or difficult to research information has become available on-line.

When I did my first research in late 2008 I had access to Powys book and the Mines Department Records (via DIGS). The digital Australian Newspapers project was only just beginning meaning that I got some accounts of Sunny Corners that were reprinted in the Courier Mail. Last year, when I started this current research, I decided to search the digitised Australian Newspapers systematically and comprehensively as hundreds of papers had been added. Notable among these were the Sydney Morning Herald, the Town and Country Journal and the Bathurst Free Press which covered Sunny Corner.

Newspapers have been available for historians for many years but the difficulty has always been the immense task of systematically searching the newspapers for items of interest to a particular topic. The searchable Australian Newspapers allows a detailed searching of available newspapers so that general topics such as “silver smelting” can be searched as well as “Sunny Corner” or more specifically individuals like “John LaMonte”. This tool has transformed historical research by allowing a more systematic search across a number of publications in seconds.

Supporting such research is also the invaluable Google and the less known Internet Archive which contains numerous on-line copies of old manuals on arcane topics but which tell much about the process of silver smelting and other methods of processing silver-lead and zinc ore prior to the invention of froth floatation.

The Challenge

The challenge now is to turn these words into some form of understanding of Sunny Corner and the mining that occurred there in a reasonable number of words without getting bogged down in the detail.

Tramway at Sunny Corner

Some of you may know that over the last two years I have been doing some work on the former Sunny Corner mining site. Last week I was on site doing some archaeological recording prior to remediation works. While recording the lower edge of the earthworks forming the Open Roasting Pit (where the ore was roasted to make it more suitable for smelting) I came across these remains.

(yes that is the correct slope!)

Care full examination revealed these to be two timbers held apart by metal rod on top of a metal frame with a bit of rail that again keeps the rails apart at a set gauge.

Here is a detail of the metal frame with the rail “in situ”.

Not much is known about how the open roasting pits worked but from the remains it seems that a small tramway network was used to move the ore and presumably firewood around.

Not much has survived since c1889 when the Mine closed. Presumably all the good bits were salvaged for reuse elsewhere while these pieces were thrown over the edge to rust.

Because I had a sub-metre GPS with me, I can tell you that the remains are located at

Northing    6303672.578
Easting    769197.279

GPS_Height    1095.101

I imagine that this form of tramway construction would have allowed the easy realignment of the tramway during the process of roasting the ore.