The Black Butte Mine in Cottage Grove, OR

A video produced in collaboration with the EPA, the London School in Cottage Grove, OR and the Superfund Research Program at Oregon State University. The video shares the history of the Black Butte Mine site in Cottage Grove, OR. The video is used for educational purposes and includes a student worksheet on the project web page: superfund.orego...

[@gordonpeet1194]

My mother's family used to live on Black Butte Road in the 1920's and my uncle, Nathen Edwards, wrote this memory in January 2013: "Black Butte is a mountain at the end of the road. At that time and until sometime after the depression hit, it was a mercury mine. While visiting there one time they had a shortage of flasks and mercury was sitting around in wash tubs. I couldn’t reach bottom, only get my arm in about half-way to the elbow. A cast iron scale weight floated half in/out." My mother talked of the miners letting them play with the quicksilver.

[@psychosneighbor1509]

Used to eat lots of catfish from CGR as a kid in the early 80's. I'm still here. Anyway, I heard much later on that there were high levels of mercury in the lake and just learned today where it came from. Interesting. Thanks.

[@maxwellwoodhouse2908]

This is very interesting, it’s cool to know Oregon mercury was used extensively in both world wars, mercury fulminate or whatever, in blasting caps. I wonder if bullets use it in primers as well? Washington and I believe Oregon uranium was refined into plutonium that was used in the bombing of Japan. And now , Oregon has the most standing timber in the United States, such a rich place. Hopefully it will be preserved, and healed from all the damage we’ve done to it. The Willamette valley is a land flowing with milk , honey , weed and delicious cheeses.

[@tracykeen2726]

The Willamette Valley is my homeland and used to have such a beautiful abundance of large old growth trees until Labor Day 2020 when we had extremely bad wildfire that our horrible Governor at the time refused to let firefighters fight

[@oregongoldhunter]

Thank you for video!!! Please do more about Bohemia mining history

[@OregonStateSuperfund]

We have just added closed captions to this video.

[@londonbellman8054]

This is incredibly dull , thank you.

[@RobertGadfly]

Can a person get access to the site to take photos?

[@ryos251]

Isnt Black Butte in Bend , Oregon ?