Howdy y'all, I haven't posted here in awhile but ive been keeping an eye on the forum. The area I live in (Northwest Georgia) was a huge iron mining area until about the 1930's. The mines shut down because of the depression and never reopened. I have a piece of property on the mountain that contains outcroppings of ore. I found an old mining journal about 1905 I think, that stated the ore from my location is about 51-57% iron. So my questions are is this worth developing and how should I proceed with development?

_________________
May all those who have gone before us have a carbide lamp with an eternal flame.

First ! Find a market for the ore.

_________________
I don't have all the answers.
I don't even know all the questions!

That may be the hard part. There aren't any smelters around here. They were all small bloomerys when the mines were running.

_________________
May all those who have gone before us have a carbide lamp with an eternal flame.

You could set up a small smelting operation yourself, and cater to local blacksmiths, or take up smithing as a hobby, using your own steel, therefore saving money on iron you would have to buy!

My suggestion is find out if you even own the mineral rights. If so, sell them. Market to companies that have the tools and methods of selling or working with ore already in place. They come on your land, do whatever you specify (ie improve roadway, drill new well if water is contaminated) and in turn you let them mine your property. If it's not a lot of ore, then there won't be any interest. A simple Craigslist listing is all you need, scouts find these things. My guess is it's not worth doing yourself other than for fun, and there also may be little industrial interest. But it won't hurt to find out.

_________________
jdr

It's important to make the distinction between selling and leasing mineral rights to a third party. If you sell them outright, you will only receive income from a single sale, whatever you've determined that price to be at the time. If the operation becomes extremely successful, or the price of iron goes up, you will not receive any royalties or further compensation, except perhaps to repair damage to structures or from subsidences caused by mining beneath your land. On the other hand, leasing the mineral rights will allow you the opportunity to obtain a streaming income for the life of the operation. And because you still own the mineral rights, you can even pass them on to your heirs, who may continue to benefit. There are pros and cons for each and the laws regarding the rights of both parties vary from state to state.

Is there any evidence of prospecting on your land from when the ore was sampled in 1905? I would be curious to know why it was not developed from this time until the depression. Have you consulted any geologic maps or traced the orebody to any previously developed mines?

_________________
"If you thought old, abandoned mines were only in the west, then you haven't been to IronMiners.com!"

I dont really have any idea why this was never developed other than this ridge is smaller and slightly farther east than the mountain where most of the earlier mining took place.

_________________
May all those who have gone before us have a carbide lamp with an eternal flame.

While you know you had mining activity on the property, why was it abandoned? Generally operations are abandoned when it is no longer profitable to extract the ore. Many of the larger operations would have been abandoned if the costs for extracting the ore was too high. If the cost for operating pumps (due to a deep operation) is high combined with taxes, wages, other extraction costs, there may be no way to make money on it.

How developed is the properly? Is this an open pit mine or was it mined underground? Does it have shafts or adits? Do you know how deep they are? Is there ore still remaining near the surface? A lot of this comes into factor when determining how easy it is to extract the ore.

Miner Greg

_________________
May all those who have gone before us have a carbide lamp with an eternal flame.

I think that you forgot to say what you were going to after the quotation from Miner Greg.

No, my response got put in the quotation for some reason. What I was trying to say was that there has not been any mining on my piece of property.

_________________
May all those who have gone before us have a carbide lamp with an eternal flame.

I see that now. That is weird.