Morphett’s pumping and winding engine houses, Burra, South Australia © Sharron Schwartz


The Cornish have been mining for thousands of years, first winning tin from stream beds, and then following mineralised outcrops into the side of cliffs and hills. By the eighteenth century, as Britain began her inexorable rise as the world’s foremost industrial power, the Cornish had mastered deep lode (underground) mining via shafts and ensured a constant supply of the minerals, particularly copper, required to fuel the British industrial machine. The silicon valley of its day, Cornwall was a region at the vanguard of mining engineering and cutting edge technology and gave the world the high pressure Cornish steam engine, a veritable behemoth of the industrial landscape. Accommodated in its characteristic masonry house, these engines came to mark strange and exotic vistas worldwide, enabling deep lode mining on every habitable continent. As the British hard rock mining industry began to gather pace in the mid-1700s, so the first trickle of mineworkers began leaving Cornwall, a migration stream of the highly skilled. Initially, they moved within Britain and Ireland developing various mineral prospects, although a group inspected copper deposits near Lake Superior in 1766. But it was an 1814 transatlantic agreement, the first of its kind, spearheaded by engineer, Richard Trevithick, to supply high pressure Cornish steam engines to unwater abandoned silver mines high in the Peruvian Andes that was pivotal. Although later condemned as a failure, for Trevithick returned to Cornwall penniless, he had nonetheless facilitated the dawn of the industrial revolution in Latin America, began a process of Cornish labour migration and created a fertile seed bed from whence Cornwall’s reputation as a hard rock mining and engineering centre of excellence would flourish in the decades to follow.


Indeed, the mining boom of the mid-1820s cemented this reputation, as Cornish mineworkers took ships with their equipment for British financed mining enterprises across to the newly independent countries of Latin America. At a time when the Cornish copper mining industry was at its zenith, they could only be enticed overseas with offers of fabulously high wages and instant promotion. One of the earliest expatriate Cornish communities – Real del Monte in Mexico - dates from this time. In the 1830s the copper mines of the Caribbean were attracting Cornish attention and the lead regions of the Upper Mid West in the United States were drawing in thousands more who settled towns like Mineral Point, Wisconsin. From there, and from the mining fields of South and Central America, the Cornish rushed to California when placer (alluvial or stream) gold was discovered in 1848. Mining the famous ‘Mother Lode’ was only made possible by the application of Cornish pumping technology and towns soon mushroomed along its length including Grass Valley, a Cornish hot spot for most of the nineteenth century.


For more information please visit www.cornishmining.org.uk/mycornwall


Hughes Engine House, Moonta, South Australia © Sharron Schwartz


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