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Photographer: Michael Herrick
Taken: June 22, 2009
Caption: The Donkey Trail
Additional Description: Linking the Mines to the Manufacturing

Mine Hill’s Donkey Trail was built between 1865 and 1867 to link the iron mines to the smelting complex nearly a mile below via a narrow-gauge railway. At the mouth of the lower tunnel, workers cut the trail into the hillside. Further down the hill, they painstakingly built an elevated tramway of double fieldstone walls filled with smaller rubble. The resulting 6-foot-wide elevated platform helped keep the tracks at a level and steady grade.

A single 24-inch-gauge track was laid along the path. No records exist, but logic suggests that loaded ore carts would travel down the path with a brakeman slowing their progress. After the ore carts were unloaded at the roasting ovens, donkeys would pull the empty carts back up the hill into the mines.

Today, the Donkey Trail stands in remarkably good condition and serves as an excellent walking trail to the mines. It offers hikers glimpses of more than 25 species of hardwood trees that grow on Mine Hill and passes under majestic stands of hemlocks.
Submitted: July 5, 2009, by Michael Herrick of Southbury, Connecticut.
Database Locator Identification Number: p69557
File Size: 0.463 Megabytes

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