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Chipman Mine in Newbury
It is new news to most that the local area in which we live in was once in contribution to America's mining industry. There are several sites around essex county where anyone willing to go for an off trail hike through the woods can get to and witness this part of our local history. From personal experience, these areas are tricky to find as the local mining trend occured around the later end of the 1800s. Because of this, the areas that were mined are now very overgrown.
I visited a few mining sites around the area to get a look at these places myself as an action piece for this project. The first site i visited was the Chipman Silver mine in Newbury, Ma. The old mine ruins are located about a half mile into the woods behind the Scotland Hights subdivision. I could tell i was getting closer to the main site when i began to see random pipes sticking out of the ground in places and rock shavings strewn about. I kept going in the right direction and ended up in a 20by20 yard pit of shail shavings and in the middle a hole with water filled in untill about 5 feet below the main elevation. I found out that this hole was extremely deep when i took a veryh long stick that i found and threw in it there vertically. The stick was roughly 10 feet long, and it went all the way under, stayed down for a little and bobbed back up to the surface. Around the rock pit there were a few weathered structures made out of rocks and concrete that i couldnt really fit a purpose into. In some spots i could identify possible foundations that have since been filled with decaying leaves and sticks. The area surrounding the site used to be completely cleared for miles according to the old pictures. It is now in a reasonably dense forest and the youthful trees tell its past of being once a field.