Preparing Homestake for a new life as a physics lab has inadvertently brought the mine's history out of the dark caverns and into the spotlight. When the NSF announced it was choosing Homestake for DUSEL back in 2007, they gave Carolyn Webber, assistant director of the Black Hills' historical Adams Museum, one year to get all the archives out of the mine.
Those archives included cabinets full of survey maps, engineering drawings, frontier law records, geology records and more than 15,000 photos spanning the years from 1878 to 2001.
Webber and her colleagues saw the exodus from the mine as an opportunity to build a museum, preserving and presenting the mine's colorful history.
"It's the 126 year old history of one of the longest, deepest, longest operating mines in the western hemisphere," she said. "People want to see them. Our whole goal is access."
Images: Lisa Grossman/Wired.com
Backlink: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/wp-content/gallery/sanford-lab/adams-cupboards.jpg
