{"product_id":"antique-philadelphia-copper-mines-photograph-early-1900s","title":"Antique Philadelphia Copper Mines Photograph | Early 1900s","description":"\u003cp\u003eHere we have a genuine piece of Southwestern mining history, a large-format silver gelatin photograph, circa 1907 to 1909, documenting the works of the Philadelphia Copper Mines Company in the Orogrande district of the Jarilla Mountains, Otero County, New Mexico Territory. It comes housed in its original ebonized wood frame with a deep black presentation mat, gold-embossed at the base: PHILADELPHIA COPPER MINES COMPANY, INCORPORATED.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is not a pretty postcard of a mountain. This is the real thing. The raw open-cut workings, the timber ore-sorting trestle, the great gray spoil piles tumbling down a high-desert hillside. And if you look long enough into the shadow of the ore house, you’ll find him: the silhouette of a man in a broad-brimmed hat, standing among the timbers, caught mid-shift and half-dissolved by a slow exposure. A worker who has been standing in that doorway for about a hundred and seventeen years now.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere’s the story it’s hiding. In June of 1904, a six-and-a-half-ounce gold nugget turned up in a dry-wash on the Little Joe Claim, and a newspaperman christened the strike “oro grande,” big gold. The boom was on. The trouble was water: there wasn’t any. So the smelter men ran a pipeline fifty miles to the Sacramento River, finished it in 1907, and pumped half a million gallons a day into the desert to feed the dream. The smelter was blown in that November. It ran about six months. By May of 1908 it was cold, the ore having never quite matched the promises. The El Paso and Southwestern Railroad brought the investors in, and in time it carried the disappointment back out.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Philadelphia Copper Mines Company was one of the smaller players riding that bubble. Incorporated, optimistic, and now so thoroughly vanished from the record that this framed photograph may be one of the last things on earth still carrying its name in gold leaf. A company worker even turns up in a 1909 El Paso newspaper, drowned in the Rio Grande at seventeen. These were real men, in a real camp, chasing real copper, for a company that mostly exists now as the embossing on this mat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe company name and El Paso connection are documented, and the Orogrande district records list a “Philadelphia” claim consistent with this operation. We’ve tied it together through the geology surveys, the territorial corporate context, and the 1909 press. Strong, verifiable circumstantial provenance rather than a single deed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe old historical mining photograph came out of an old collector’s estate up in Wisconsin, the kind of quiet, decades-deep collection where the good, strange things go to wait. It is heavy, atmospheric, and unrepeatable: industrial documentary photography from a Territorial-era copper camp that boomed and busted before New Mexico was even a state.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe old mining photograph measures about 22 1\/2” wide by 18 1\/2” tall. The photograph and frame shows honest age and wear consistent with its years. Scuffs, a little loss, the patina of a piece that has hung on walls since Taft was president. The photograph itself remains rich and deep. Please see all pics as they are part of the description. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI ship FedEx to street addresses in the continental USA only (no PO Boxes). Free shipping on the rare piece of American mining history. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith the mysterious dude peering out of the shadows, the official company documentation elevates the the epic vernacular.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mad Van Antiques","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43126401957965,"sku":null,"price":750.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0116\/3637\/5610\/files\/IMG_2630.jpg?v=1781458418","url":"https:\/\/madvanantiques.com\/products\/antique-philadelphia-copper-mines-photograph-early-1900s","provider":"Mad Van Antiques","version":"1.0","type":"link"}