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Show On the opposite side of Nada was that other pioneer mining and smelting operation west of Cedar City. Iron County gained its name from the vast ore deposit, biggest in the West with a mining potential of 300 million tons still remaining, in the Iron Springs district. There more than a century ago at Ironton the Mormon Church organized a mining-smelting project. But an odd chemical composition of the ore and competition with eastern iron after the UP Railroad reached Utah in 18 69 cut ore production for many years except for use in 1 "fluxing" in smelting lead, copper, zinc, silver and gold ores. When I attended high school in Cedar City in 1919, storekeepers exhibited magnetite so powerful they could hang chains six or more nails long from the rock. With iron filings the mineral served well for demonstrations of the invisible magic of "lines of force" in a physics class I took. My Cedar schoolmates included students from southeastern Nevada. Learning of my curiosity about the "Old Pioche Road" and Pioche they told me stories about their area. They said Pioche's "Treasure Hill" had been discovered during the Civil War but it had waited for a boom until '69. Then that rich mountain spawned a circle of mines that produced heavily, silver, lead, zinc and other metals. It still produces. 1 The Iron Springs deposit was exploited on a larger scale beginning in 1922-23. More than 78 million long tons of ore were, it is reported, shipped to "Ironton" near Provo in two decades. In World War II the government built the Geneva blast furnaces, also near Provo. Until 1961 the huge pits west of Cedar yielded over three million tons annually for the Geneva furnaces. Since then U.S. Steel, which had acquired the Geneva plant soon after the war, began to ship taconite pellets from a mine near Atlantic City, Wyoming, to Geneva. The Iron County production of ore for Geneva dropped to some two million tons a year. |