Cobalt Silver Rush - Decline

Decline

World War I made labour hard to come by, and by 1917 most of the mines had closed due to a lack of men to work them. Instead, the small number of workers available were put to work using new extraction methods to work the tailings, which required far fewer people to keep in operation. At the end of the war Cobalt had a population of about 7,000. In 1918, in spite of the problems, 10,000 tons of silver were shipped.

As the best veins were mined out the cost of extracting silver from the Cobalt area made it increasingly unprofitable. By the 1922 many of the smaller mines were closed, when the Great Fire of 1922 swept through the area. Most of the veins ended less than 300 feet (91 m) below the surface, limiting the total amount of silver in the area. The stock market crash of 1929 led to a major devaluation in metal prices, rendering even the deeper mines unprofitable. The LaRose closed in 1930, and by 1932 only the Nipissing Mine and a few smaller operations were still working. All of these were closed by 1937.

In the World War II era and immediately thereafter, cobalt became a valuable mineral in its own right, and a number of operations opened to process the tailings again, this time for the cobalt. Increasing silver values and better mining processes started to make the area profitable, and the 1950s saw a brief resugence of mining. Most of these closed by the 1970s, and the few remaining ones by the early 1980s.