Abandoned Mines of NH - Mud Mine

There are treasures hidden within our mountains, places you're never going to learn about from some tourist map you pick up at one of our welcome centers. To find the kind of wonders I'm speaking of, you must dig deep - spending lots of time in both books and in woods. This was the case with the Mud Mine of western New Hampshire, which came to me through a 1914 research paper on geological locations within the United States.

Opened in 1883 and later purchased by General Electric - a company involved in a surprisingly large number of our state's mines - within two years the Mud Mine was producing a whopping 90% of all the sheet mica shipping out of New England. These were some real glory years for the mine, but they we also short-lived. In the late 1880s, cheap mica imports from both Canada and India drastically reduced the demand for domestic product, and by the early 1900s workers were reduced to scavenging through the dump piles for previously discarded sheets. Soon after, a massive cave-in buried over 1,000 feet of tunnel, and by the time of this 1914 report the Mud Mine had been closed for several years.

I located this mine in the summer of 2017, and having been such a large operation I found plenty of mining remnants before locating what's left of the mine itself. One of the first cool finds was the piece of equipment below. Somewhere in my archives is a video of me excitedly pointing out the mining rail engine I had just found, and it wasn't until after filming that I took a closer look and realized it was actually a very old compressor on wheels. For now anyways, I'm going to leave that video in my bloopers bin.

Mother Nature was not a fan of the Mud Mine. Not only did she destroy the mine by collapsing it, she punctuated the fun by dropping a couple trees down right through the middle of the worker's cabin, slicing it in half.

It was past this debris and through a long cut in the rocks that a small opening peeked up from the bottom of the cliff face, which turned out to be an entrance to what I believe is the only remaining tunnel at this site.

I got a little dirty crawling through, but once inside it opened plenty large enough for me to stand upright in.

As I started walking, it also became evident why they called this place the "mud" mine.

There was only the one tunnel to explore, with no turnoffs or decisions to make. Just keep walking until you have nowhere left to go. Before leaving I placed an old french coin at the end of the tunnel, my own little marker to see if anyone would come along after me and find it. Between a rusted out Jeep and an old couch frame I'd found outside, it seemed at least a few locals visited this place every now and then.

A year later I returned to the Mud Mine with friends, both to show them the location and to more thoroughly explore it myself.

Inside the tunnel I found my coin right where I'd left it the previous year. Maybe nobody had been in here since that time, or maybe they had been but just hadn't seen it. I grabbed a few more coins - foreign coins are super cheap on Ebay, $20 bought me enough for a year's worth of exploring - and placed them in what I felt were the most obvious locations. My hope is that someone will find them someday, and that they'll know about this blog post and write to tell me. It's a long shot, but it has happened to me before.

The Mud Mine was a nice surprise, in that everything I had read described the place as inaccessible following the collapse. Maybe a hundred years ago that was even the case. But there is a natural slope within the tunnel that almost seems to "pour" the mud deeper into the mine, causing it to pile up in the back. I could imagine that over time this erosion has allowed the small opening I found to peek through. Four stories of tunnels made up the original mine, and although three of them are buried and lost forever, it was a great success - and a great day out with friends - to find and be able to explore this topmost tunnel.

Photo by John Egolf