Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 January 1919 — WOMAN BOSSES MINE [ARTICLE]

WOMAN BOSSES MINE

Heads Corporation Controlled Entirely by Her Sex. Operates Garnet Mine In" Alaska and Lead, Zinc and Silver Minea in Arizona. New York. —From the far West there now comes tp us the lady miner, Miss Anna Durkee, organizer and controlling element of a $1,000,000 corporation run entirely by women. Miss Durkee operates a garnet mine in southern Alaska and lead, zinc and silver mines in Arizona. She is the largest indivld&hl mine owner in the Oatman district of Arizona, and the most widely known woman in the mining world! It was while she was in Alaska seven years ago, investigating a proposition tn copper,-that Miss Durkee first became interested in a garnet mine, was given an option on it and finally took it over in the name of a corporation which had a board of 15 women directors. * ' ' At the beginning the mine did not seem to amount to a great deal, but as Miss Durkee began to develop the first claim with which the corporation started, veins were discovered opening out ihevery direction, and as the work continued the. amazing fact dawned that the entire mountain was a gigantic mine of the beautiful crystals, with ledges of garnets extending from the sea level to a distance of 3,600 feet up the mountain side. But the'greatest value of the deposit consists in a by-product of garnet waste, discovered by Miss Durkee, who passed two years in a chemical laboratory working it out. 'She had

observed that garnets when milled did not fuse with iron or brass, and following this up, she discovered a new use for the waste garnet, of which there were hundreds of thousands of tons. ‘Ground to a certain mesh and put through a secret process the waste garnet makes a separating powder valuable in foundry work,” she stated. The garnets of Miss Durkee’s mine are of the finest variety, almandines. Because of their beauty and hardness, geologists have given them the name of “precious garnets.”