The Jessie Mine and Mill

The Jessie Mine and Mill. . Look carefully on the hillside above the wooden mill structure, and you can see the remains of as many as seven mine openings. These portals (or adits) led into the vast underground network of the Jessie (as seen on the map), one of the largest mine and mill complexes in the Breckenridge area. , During its heyday from the late 1880s through the early 1900s, the Jessie buzzed with hardy miners, who used drilling and blasting techniques originally developed in Cornwall, England. Men hauled the blasted ore to the surface and then transported it to the stamp mill (the large wooden structure in front of you) via a gravity-powered cable tramway from the Glenwood tunnel, one of the mine openings on the hillside above the mill. , Built in 1893-94, the stamp mill crushed large chunks of "run-of-mine" ore, breaking it down into sand-sized particles. The stamps, 800-pound piston-like pieces of iron-pounded the ore with an up-and-down motion. Only the wooden shafts that housed the stamps and storage bins remain. The photograph of the mill (taken in the 1890s) shows the full scale of the building far larger than what is left today.