Cornish Pump

When the E. P. Allis Company of Milwaukee built this pump in 1890-91 it was heralded as the nation’s largest steam-driven pumping engine. On January 3, 1893, the massive engine, designed by Edwin C. Reynolds, began lifting two hundred tons of water per minute at “D” shaft of the Chapin Iron Mine. In 1896 underground conditions shifted the engine out of alignment and it was dismantled. The Oliver Iron Mining Company purchased and rebuilt it at shaft “C” of the Ludington Mine in 1907. It dewatered the combined Chapin, Ludington, and Hamilton mines until 1914, when it was replaced by electric pumps. Patterned after similar pumps used in tin mines in Cornwall, England, the Cornish Pump boasts a flywheel forty feet in diameter, which weighs 160 tons and averaged ten revolutions per minute. The pump was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.