Cloaked in dust and frequented mostly by pigeons that roost on its upper catwalks, the old mill's most regular visitors now are the deer that sleep by day in surrounding thickets and graze by twilight in the tall grass that has grown over the long years since the last trainload of ore arrived.
"You could set your watch by the shift-change whistle," said Steve Barton, a longtime Midvale resident remembering a time when the United States Smelting Refining and Mining Co. employed as many as 1,500 men and was the economic mainstay of Midvale and surrounding communities.That was when the railroad ran through the heart of town, bringing rock by the hundred-ton to the mill, where its precious metals were separated by state-of-the-art technology that put the facility and its companion smelter on the cutting edge of ore refining.
At its peak in World War II, the mill ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
But the industry, which has local roots that date to the Civil War, kept step with the general competitive decline of America, and in 1958 the great smelter closed. By 1972, the mill had shut down too, 46 years after it was first fired up.
Sometime by the end of the month, the EPA will supervise demolition of the mill, and when it comes down, the best view in town will go with it. Through broken windows on the top floor, a few feet from a deep elevator shaft, vistas to the east take in Midvale and the Wasatch Mountains. To the west sit the big tailings piles and the distant Oquirrhs.
Evidence of past bustle is elsewhere. Bags of ore samples in a dank corner of an outbuilding, 1957 editions of a magazine called Chemical and Engineering News, bales of canvas bags that padded ore shipments and were usually later burned by workers who sifted gold dust from the ashes.
Dick Graeme, president and CEO of Mining Remedial Recovery Co., the Tuscon, Ariz., firm that owns the property, said the company for some time has been trying to get EPA clearance to raze the buildings "for health and safety reasons." The site is an attraction, he noted, for mischievous youngsters who try to find ways to penetrate the fence surrounding the site in order to explore the cavernous buildings inside.
The EPA is involved because the entire 270-acre parcel, commonly known as the Sharon Steel site because that's the name of a former owner, is one of the country's major Superfund sites, contaminated by heavy metals like lead and arsenic that pervades some 10 million tons of tailings.
On Monday, a handful of city employees toured the mill for probably the last time.
"It kind of takes you back," said City Recorder Christeen Pratt, who leafed through a 1951 calendar left behind on one of the upper floors.
"This was the coolest spot in town," said Charlie Joseph, standing in the breezy shade of a viaduct where the refined product was emptied from above into waiting rail cars. Joseph, a former truck driver, used to deliver ore to the mill.
Ralph S. Dunn, the 78-year-old president of the Midvale Historical Society Museum and a mill worker for 13 years in the 1940s and 1950s, said employees in those days could expect to make maybe $7 or $8 for a hot day's work, a considerable improvement of the typical $3.50 wage during the Great Depression.
"It was dusty and dirty in some parts . . . there was flue dust and arsenic, you had lead fumes coming from the furnaces down in the smelter," said Dunn. "We had to wear masks and in certain areas you had to wear certain clothes . . . Wherever you sweated it'd kind of burn cause there was an acid in it, and it would cause a burn if you didn't protect yourself."
Still, the work was never considered particularly hazardous, he said.
"Although a lot of men worked down there for years and years a lot of them never had too much of a problem."
Graeme said his company will donate certain pieces of equipment to a proposed city mining museum of between five and eight acres north of the mill site.
"There was an awful lot of it done there, and that - with the property - will give them a good start on recording what I think is an essential part of Utah history."