In 1916, just in time to help rescue the American steel industry for World War I production, a magnesite industry begins in Stevens County. Magnesite, a mineral related to marble, dolomite, and limestone, is needed for the lining of open-hearth steel furnaces, the steel-manufacturing technology used at the time. Previously, the United States imported it from Austria-Hungary and Greece, sources that become inaccessible because of the war. The federal government circulates an appeal to geologists throughout the nation to search for magnesite. The mineral is soon discovered in the Huckleberry Mountains just west of Chewelah in Stevens County, and several companies begin quarrying it. The largest and most successful, the Northwest Magnesite Company, builds a large plant just south of Chewelah for “deadburning” or “calcinating” the ore to reduce it to purer magnesite for shipment to the steel manufacturers of the East and Midwest. This company is crucial to steel production for two world wars as well as American industry. It will continue to operate until 1968 when new steel-manufacturing technologies will have eliminated the need for the type of magnesite produced in Stevens County.
Finding Magnesite and Transporting It
Through searching old geological reports and prospecting on the ground, geologists confirmed the existence of a “magnesite belt,” the Stensgar Dolomite Formation, extending 30 miles along the eastern side of the Huckleberry range and containing “all the known occurrences of magnesite in the county” (Buchanan, 38). Four major quarries were opened.
A key to the success of the Northwest Magnesite Company was its use of an aerial tramway for transporting chunks of magnesite from its quarry to its plant at Chewelah, south of Colville. A competitor, the American Mineral Production Company, had gone bankrupt building and maintaining a railroad, the Spokane Valley & Northern, the six miles from its quarry to a railhead at the town of Valley.
Northwest Magnesite’s aerial tramway, built by the Riblet Tramway Company of Spokane in 1917-1918, enabled quick and cheap transport of the raw material to the deadburning plant at Chewelah. The tramway cost only $60,000 to build and could move 1,200 tons a day for 50 cents per ton, a fraction of the cost of the competitor’s rail operation. Once reduced in bulk and weight, Northwest Magnesite’s ore was loaded onto the railcars on existing tracks alongside the plant for transport to distant steel mills.
From 1916 to 1968, the magnesite industry provided considerable employment for people in the Colville Valley, as well as a product essential to the steel industry. Now all that remains of the Northwest Magnesite Company plant are partially dismantled hulks of the former buildings along Highway 395 just south of Chewelah.
