Ruth:

 > paid by the county for various work done, one fella "repaired hematite
 > road" and was paid $100.00 to do this.  Question, what is/was hematite?
 > That seemed to be a lot of money in those days, even for road repair.

$100? That haint hardly nothin' considerin' you gotta feed them mules 
grain when you work 'em so hard as to scrape and grade the flinty gravel 
they got along there. I can say, from personal experience, that it was 
worth every penny cause he done a good job on that road--it was still 
holding up into the 1980s.

"hematite road" is the name of the road, not what the road is made of. 
My wife's father, Harvey, was a lead-smelting engineer and they lived in 
Festus, Mo, and when we visited them in the 1980s we walked down along 
Hematite Road to see an old log cabin there just south of Crystal Crick. 
As you can imagine Harvey was into minerals and also enjoyed history. 
That part of Missouri is "highly mineralized" as those in that trade 
say, that's why Harvey was there designing, building and operating the 
huge and fantastic lead smelting operation (six 15' diameter caldrons of 
liquid lead/silver and all the associated industrial complex and 
enviornmental fallout, all the management and workers drove old jalopys 
to the plant because the continuous acidic precipitate from the air 
disolved auto paint within three days and corroded away the sheetmetal 
in three years.) Anyway, back to Hematite Road, so named because in 
through that neck of the woods you can find the larger dark gray shiny 
hematite crystals any place you stick a shovel into the ground. Back in 
the 19th century these "gems" were popular in jewlery, so the local 
folks supplemented their meager income sifting the soil for hematite 
crystals. The presences of the hematite did not go unnoticed by the 
commercial geologists and shortly after heavy deposits of lead/silver 
ore were discovered. The metal mining and smelting industry set up shop 
to exploit the resource  there and elsewhere in Mo--still operating in 
the 1980s.

John
by hammer and hand great works do stand
by pen and thought best words are wrought


John Leeke, American Preservationeer
Historic HomeWorks
26 Higgins St.
Portland, ME  04103
207 773-2306
[log in to unmask]
www.HistoricHomeWorks.com

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