With its riches first located in 1859, Virginia City’s Chollar Mine (later the Chollar-Potosi) was one of the leading producers on the Comstock. Over the next 80 years, miners blasted and carted out some $17 million in gold and silver. The Nevada Mill was erected here in 1887 to process the Chollar ore. Today the mine is open for visitors.
Here are some of the details you may find after you click to go inside the mine:
Ore Bucket. The ore bucket was lowered into the vertical tunnel (shaft) to lift up the rock from below. The bucket could also be used to raise or lower the miners. A “head frame” with its wheels-and-cables mechanism controlled the travel of the bucket.
Philip Deidesheimer devised "square sets" of timber bracing, cubes that would provide support in the wide veins of the Comstock mines. Whole mountainsides along the Sierra were sacrificed to shore up the Comstock mines under Virginia City, which is even now supported by the long dead trees of a subterranean forest.