The Story of Lookout Mountain’s Mercury Mine
The Mother Lode Mine
Tucked into the northern slope of Lookout Mountain, just above Canyon Creek, the Mother Lode Mine holds the kind of gritty history that shaped early industry in the Ochoco Mountains. Like many mining ventures of the era, it started with gold fever. In 1899, a prospector named H.S. Cram tried his luck with gold and copper—but what he found instead was cinnabar, the scarlet-red ore that’s the primary source of mercury.
By 1901, the American Almaden Quicksilver & Gold Mining Company had been formed to mine the site, and a Scott furnace was built to extract mercury. When cinnabar is crushed and heated, mercury vapor rises off the rock and condenses into liquid metal—drained into iron-lined containers known as “flasks.” Each flask weighed about 76 pounds, and over the course of its lifetime, the Mother Lode Mine produced 352 of them.
Throughout the 20th century, the mine passed through several hands and company names. At its peak in the 1930s and 1940s, bulldozers scraped the hillsides, furnaces fired day and night, and men worked the underground adits—horizontal tunnels bored into the mountain, stretching over 3,000 feet in total. The Gilkey Brothers even built a new processing plant during World War II, hoping to extract value from low-grade ore.
Mercury was an essential substance at the time, used for everything from thermometers and barometers to dental fillings, antiseptics, and even children’s laxatives. The Ochoco Mountains held scattered pockets of cinnabar, and the Mother Lode Mine became one of the region’s largest producers. But as awareness of mercury’s toxicity grew, its everyday uses dwindled. Most mines in the area, including the Mother Lode, began to wind down by the 1950s.
Still, operations flickered back to life now and then. In 1960, a 50-ton-per-day Herreshoff furnace was installed, and in 1986, mining officially ended. But the story didn’t end there. In the mid-1990s, the site came under scrutiny for environmental contamination. Mercury tailings and furnace remains had left their mark on the land. Cleanup efforts were eventually undertaken to address the damage.
Today, the old furnace still stands as a quiet sentinel on Lookout Mountain—one of the last relics of a time when mercury was king, and men chased red rock through the rugged Ochoco hills in search of liquid silver.