J. Calvin Campbell Sand Chrome Mine


Location: Nottingham County Park, West Nottingham. This is likely to be the John M. Campbell tract of 150 acres shown on Breou’s Atlas of 1883 which now forms the northwest part of Nottingham County Park. J. Calvin Campbell died in 1919. The placer operations were on Black Run.


Newspaper Clippings

Daily Local News
31st August 1918


Constable Harry Hall, of West Nottingham township, who had been in West Chester who has been in West Chester for the last week acting as a deputy sheriff, is a carpenter by trade, and has just about completed a big building for a power plant and cleaning arrangements for the Bellefonte Mining Company, which is about to reopen the old chrome mines on the J. Calvin Campbell farm, in said township. An up-to-date equipment of mining machinery will be installed and the real work on mining chrome will be completed. The company will reopen the shaft and go deeper and take out the mineral, which is mined with a mixture of good building sand.

The deposits will be washed and chrome deposits separated for marketable purpose. The process will be much like placer washing, done in the West for gold. The work will proceed on a large scale, if the expectations of the company are fulfilled.

Chrome today is more valuable and the methods for obtaining it greater than it was fifty years ago, when the old mines at the southern end of this and Lancaster counties were worked. Other mines, some in this and Lancaster county and Cecil county, Maryland, are to be reopened and worked.

Daily Local News
27th September 1918


Chrome Mining Brisk

The chrome miners on J. C. Campbell’s farm, West Nottingham, are busy, some expensive machinery being installed. In Reisler’s meadow, Elk township, machinery is also being put in. A number of men have been engaged on each operation.

Daily Local News
7th December 1918


The war demand for chrome has developed a number of old chrome mines and deposits in southern Chester county and several of the former have been reopened and worked. One of the largest plants, however, is being installed on the property of Calvin Campbell, in West Nottingham township between Fremont and Nottingham station. 

A corporation called the Dellfint Company, has erected a big building or mill, at that place and has installed boilers, engines, scoops, washers etc., to carry on the obtaining of chrome and preparing it for the market. Harry Hall, of Sylmar, who has during the week been acting as deputy for Sheriff Ortlip, has been made superintendent of the new plant and expects to start operations soon. 

The chrome deposits at this place are not mined or quarried, but scooped up from the creek etc. The rock and sand with the chrome is then carried up on shuts, run over breakers and riddles and finally dashed into pans, similar to those used in the placer gold washer plants in the West and the pure chrome separated. It is then dried and is ready for shipment. The company has motors for this and soon will be able to send large quantities to the markets for commercial use. The development of this industry will make us independent of the foreign article and give employment to a considerable number of persons. The Chester county chrome is superior, but the crude methods for getting it out and ready for use in former years handicapped the business. New methods and machinery will overcome this.


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Photographs by Mike Bertram, 5/10/2014