Iron Mountain and the World's Biggest Steam Pump
Wisconsin
Iron Mountain sits on the Menominee Iron Range, and at its heart was the Chapin Mine, one of the richest iron ore deposits in the world. The problem was water. The Chapin shafts cut through shifting quicksand saturated with groundwater, and by eighteen ninety-three the mine needed an extraordinary solution.
Engineers installed a giant steam pumping engine, built by the E. P. Allis Company and modeled on the Cornish pumps that miners from Cornwall, England, had pioneered for draining deep shafts.
The engine could lift about thirty-four hundred gallons of water per minute. It worked so well that the Chapin kept producing for decades. Today the engine stands in the Cornish Pump and Mining Museum in Iron Mountain, the largest standing steam-driven pumping engine ever built in the United States.
It fills a room the size of a small warehouse.
