DateA Short History of the Bodie Foundry
In the active days of mining in Bodie, if you had a piece of mining machinery break down and a replacement part was needed, you would have to order the part from Virginia City or Carson City, Nevada, or San Francisco, California. With any luck you might receive the replacement part within a couple of weeks or more and with riches to be dug out of the ground, who wants to shut down their operation and wait for two or more weeks? A local foundry was needed. Wells and Kilpatrick decided to fill that need, and had the Bodie Foundry built. It was capable of casting anything from small gun parts to large mine wheels. The foundry employed 12 to 18 men as machinists, blacksmiths, and pattern makers. Wells and Kilpatrick decided to install the best machinery and make the foundry a first class operation.
In 1880, Charlie Potter, his brother William Potter, and Norton Pierce were faced with a large amount of slag that had flowed out the cupola furnace and pooled on the floor of the Molding Shop threatening to set fire to the building. Norton Pierce threw a bucket of water on the molten slag, rather than on the floor around the slag, and when the cold water hit the red hot iron, it suddenly chilled the surface, trapping the gases within the mass of slag. The result was an explosion that blew out the side of the Molding Shop and started a number of small fires. The blast was heard all over Bodie. The small fires were quickly put out and the three men, who had been blown about 30 feet, suffered only some minor cuts and bruises.
The foundry was destroyed by fire the following year, and a new foundry was up and running by 1884 at the same location. The foundry closed for business sometime in the early 1900s when the mining and milling around Bodie were in a decline.
Today, the foundry is gone and the area has been filled in by the winter rains. Only a couple of drawings and a newspaper article or two attest to approximately where the foundry had been, and what it had looked like. Google maps give only some misty clues as to the actual location. Various old maps locate the foundry south of Bodie on the west side of the road to Bridgeport and west of the Noonday workings on Silver Hill. I found a write-up in the Bodie Morning News, reproduced in Michael H. Piatt’s book, Bodie, The Mines Are Looking Well, North Bay, 2003. This book provided a lot of the dimensional data and a good drawing of the North and West sides of the foundry.
I have provided my plans for the Machine and Pattern Shop in this issue of the GAZETTE. In the September/October 2021 issue I will have plans for the Foundry building.
