Elizabeth Mine

About the Elizabeth Mine

We steward a landscape where American industry, geology, and environmental renewal intersect. The Elizabeth Mine in Strafford, Vermont, began in 1793 as one of the nation’s first copper works — a hillside where farmers once roasted ore to make green copperas crystals for ink and dye. Over the next 160 years, it became a powerhouse of innovation, producing more than 100 million pounds of copper that helped wire the modern world.

But progress came at a price. When the mine closed in 1958, its tailings bled acid and heavy metals into the Ompompanoosuc River, creating one of Vermont’s most contaminated sites. The EPA’s $100 million Superfund cleanup, completed in 2021, stabilized the land, restored water quality, and turned a symbol of pollution into a model of reclamation.

Today, we protect this remarkable place — not as an artifact of extraction, but as a living classroom for conservation. Here, the hills that once fueled an industrial age now stand for something deeper: the power of restoration, and the long memory of the land itself.

Discover the rich history of the land below:

Hidden in the rolling hills of Strafford, Vermont, the Elizabeth Mine tells a story two centuries in the making — a story of discovery and industry, of environmental reckoning and renewal. Once among America’s oldest and most productive copper mines, it is now a landscape reclaimed, reminding us how human ingenuity and nature’s resilience can coexist, even after the hardest of lessons.

I. Discovery and the Copperas Years (1793–1830s)

In 1793, a farmer gathering maple sap on Copperas Hill noticed a streak of rust-colored rock that sparkled oddly in the light. He’d stumbled upon one of the largest sulfide ore deposits in New England. Within a few years, this curiosity became Vermont’s first chemical industry.

By 1809, investors had formed the Vermont Mineral Factory Company, producing “copperas” — iron sulfate crystals once prized for making dyes, inks, and disinfectants. It was, essentially, the art of boiling rocks. Workers roasted the ore in great heaps for weeks, flushed the piles with water, and coaxed out bright green crystals in wooden vats. The business was so novel that President James Monroe paid a visit in 1817 during his New England tour — a moment when Vermont’s forests smelled not of pine but of chemistry.

For decades, this primitive process defined the region’s first industrial boom. The people of Strafford became miners and alchemists, trading farm tools for furnace tongs. But beneath the copperas lay a far more lucrative secret: copper itself.

II. The Tyson Era (1830s–1900): Quakers with Dynamite

Enter Isaac Tyson Jr., a Baltimore Quaker with a knack for metallurgy and a tolerance for explosions. Tyson patented one of America’s earliest hot-blast copper furnaces and arrived in Strafford in the 1830s to tame the stubborn pyrrhotite ore that others couldn’t smelt profitably. His experiments — involving anthracite coal, water-cooled furnaces, and sheer willpower — made Elizabeth Mine one of the nation’s first large-scale copper smelting operations.

By the 1880s, Tyson’s sons, James and Jesse, had inherited the venture and officially formed the Elizabeth Mining Company, named for James’s wife. They brought industrial ambition — steam engines, shafts, and smelting furnaces along Sargent Brook — to what had once been a hillside of small roasting pits. The brothers invested heavily in infrastructure, even building the famous 1898 adit: a 1,340-foot horizontal tunnel that opened the ore body to modern mining methods.

The Tysons’ tenure was an era of both innovation and frustration. Their ore was rich in iron but poor in patience. Smelting it was a battle of chemistry — sulfur gases, slag, and molten copper fighting for equilibrium. Yet through trial and error, and with the help of engineers like William Glenn, the Tysons helped shape early American copper metallurgy. It’s no exaggeration to say that from these Vermont hillsides, lessons spread that informed copper refining nationwide.

By the turn of the century, however, the economics of mining — and a few too many financial panics — caught up with them. The Tyson family’s Quaker calm had met the volatility of global commodities. Mining paused, but the story of the land was far from over.

III. The Modern Mine (1900–1958): War, Industry, and Decline

In 1908, industrialist August Heckscher revived the mine, adding new mills, a hydroelectric plant in Sharon, and modern furnaces. The operations sputtered through the early 20th century until war returned — and with it, copper fever.

During World War II, the Vermont Copper Company reopened the mine on a massive scale. Between 1943 and 1958, over 3 million tons of ore were processed here, yielding more than 90 million pounds of copper. The mine ran day and night, its mills humming as American demand for copper — for telephones, power lines, and munitions — surged.

For the local community, the mine meant steady paychecks, roaring equipment, and the smell of sulfur on the wind. But when production ceased in February 1958, what remained was not prosperity — it was exposure. Thousands of tons of waste rock, open pits, and tailings heaps sat bare and toxic above the Ompompanoosuc River, slowly leaching acid into the watershed.

IV. The Reckoning (1970s–2000s): A River in Trouble

By the 1970s, the quiet hills around Copperas Hill were anything but clean. State and federal scientists found alarming levels of acidity and copper in nearby streams — more than 10,000 times the acceptable limit. The tailings dam was unstable, threatening to release a wave of acidic mud that could destroy homes and turn miles of the Connecticut River into a lifeless corridor.

In 2001, after extensive study, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) added the Elizabeth Mine to the National Priorities List, designating it a Superfund site — one of Vermont’s largest and most complex environmental cleanups.

The response was immense. Over the next two decades, EPA, the State of Vermont, and the community of Strafford undertook a $100 million, multi-phase remediation:

Phase 1 (2003–2010): Stabilized the tailings dam and diverted surface water to prevent catastrophic failure.
Phase 2 (2009–2021): Excavated and consolidated over 400,000 cubic yards of waste rock, capped tailings piles, restored streams, and built passive water treatment systems to remove iron and metals.
Phase 3 (2020–2021): Installed groundwater monitoring wells, sealed old adits, and established long-term performance tracking.

The work was so extensive that it took longer to clean up the mine than to operate it. But by 2021, construction was complete. The EPA declared the physical remediation finished; Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation (VTDEC) now monitors the site’s water and soil as nature slowly takes back its ground.

V. A Model for Renewal: The Solar Era

Even before the cleanup ended, local leaders saw an opportunity to write a different kind of story. On the adjacent parcel — the reclaimed tailings piles — the community partnered with the EPA and private developers to build the Elizabeth Mine Solar Project. Completed in 2016, the array’s 20,000 panels now produce 5 megawatts of clean energy, enough to power every home in Strafford.

It’s a striking contrast: a 19th-century copper mine reborn as a 21st-century solar field. The EPA even adjusted its final grading plan to keep the site flat and solar-ready — proof that restoration can be forward-thinking. While the solar field sits next door to our land, it represents the same philosophy that guides our stewardship: that even scarred ground can be turned toward the light.

VI. Today: From Industry to Ecology

We are now the stewards of this land — a landscape shaped by ambition, scarred by industry, and healed through science and cooperation. Our mission is to preserve it as both a living ecosystem and an open-air classroom, where the lessons of geology, history, and environmental restoration converge.

Here, the foundations of the 19th-century mills lie beside new growth of birch and pine. The rivers once stained with iron now host trout again. The air that once smelled of sulfur carries the scent of moss and soil. The Elizabeth Mine stands today not just as a remnant of American industrial history, but as a testament to what patient, collective action can restore.

It took 200 years to write this story — and every generation has left its mark. Ours, we hope, will be the chapter where the land finally rests.

The Elizabeth Mine: From Copper to Conservation