United States Mining Company 1899 (Utah mines) - 100 shares

Plain certificate for this historic company.  Issued and cancelled. Dated 1899. Measures approximately 10 x 7 inches.

In 1899 the United States Mining Company, later the United States Smelting, Refining, and Mining Company (USSRMCO), was organized, and in 1902 it completed its large smelter at Midvale. The ASARCO and USSRMCO plants, together with the International Smelting and Refining Company operation in Tooele, became giants on both a state and regional level in the consolidation of the smelting industry.

This corporation, which has its head offices in Boston and had a capitalization of $75,000,000, operated its various mines, mills and smelters under local titles. The company was incorporated in Maine for tax purposes like many of the era.

Its lead and copper mines at Bingham, Utah, were operated under the title of the United States Mining Company; its concentrator and lead and copper smelter at Bingham Junction, Utah, as the United States Smelting Company; its mines at Eureka, Utah, as the Centennial Eureka Mining Company, and the Bullion Beck & Champion Mining Company; its lime quarry as the United States Lime Company, and its Stores Department as the United States Stores Company.

At its smelting plant at Bingham Junction, near Salt Lake City, it received custom ores from all the inter-mountain States. It has developed at this plant its secret process for the handling 1 of smelter fumes, so that, while it daily treated from 1200 to 2000 tons of ore, its stacks are free from fumes or elements that are in any way damaging to vegetation. It made improvements in its method of concentrating ores by which it will separate, electro-statically, the zinc from the iron, thus effecting, by a new process, a large saving of zinc that heretofore has been wasted.

In addition to these Utah properties, the United States Company owned the Mammoth Copper Mining Co., which operated the Mammoth mines and copper smelter at Kennett, California; also the Richmond-Eureka Mining Co., of Eureka, Nevada. Its bullion output is shipped to its own refineries and smelters at Grasselli, Indiana, and Chrome, New Jersey, operating under the title of the United States Metals Refining Company. In Mexico the company operatesd in a vast territory, with mines and mills at Pachuca and Real del Monte, under the corporate title of the Compañia de Real del Monte y Pachuca.