Mercur — Tooele County

Source: Tom Ashworth's Prospectors Cache (tomashworth.com / Mike Higbee / 49erMike). Author: Tom Ashworth. Original page: tooele_ut.shtml. State index: https://web.archive.org/web/20040830075749/http://www.tomashworth.com/goldloc.shtml Area: Mercur. Map coordinates are an approximate county centroid — not a precise claim site. Mercur is no longer on maps, but in 1902 about 12,00 people lived here. It is reached from Route 36 South of Tooele a short distance South of route 73 turnoff east to Ophir. The Camp Floyd (Mercur) district, is 55 miles southwest of Salt Lake City and had a total production of 1,115,000 gold ounces. The Mercur, Delamar, Geyser-Marion, Sacramento, Sunshine, Overland, Daisy and La Cigale mines all were very productive. Mercur was totally destroyed by fire and was Utah's only all gold mining city and was considered to be one of the world's greatest gold camps, surpassed in its heyday only by Goldfeild, Nevada. Here is where the cyanide process was first introduced into North America. The enormous settling basins are spectacular, as are the sky scraping tailing piles within the old townsite. The first long distance power transmission line (from Provo) ever developed to that time was brought in to run the giant mills. In Sunshine Canyon, the ghost camp of Sunshine had many mines as well. On the Western side of Oquirrh Range the old camp of West Dip had many mine too.