In the 400 block of Main Street in Park City there is a modest pocket park where the Oak Saloon once stood. In a corner of the park you’ll find the bronze statue of a miner, lamp in his right hand, examining what appears to be a section of drill core.
The statue is a tribute to all those who worked — and sometimes gave their lives — underground for more than a century, prying silver, lead and zinc from veins in the rock; veins that supplied the lifeblood of Park City.
The man who agreed, reluctantly, to model for sculptor Peter Fillerup in the summer of 1999 was not your typical Park City miner. James Ivers III, known as Jim, spent most of his career working above ground. But you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone who better represented the city’s mining heritage. You could say it was in his blood.
To understand Jim, you have to go back two generations to the early 1880s, when his grandfather, the first James Ivers, went to work as a blacksmith for the old Daly Mine. James Ivers I later opened a stable on Main Street (where the Egyptian Theatre now stands) and won the contract to haul ore via horse and wagon straight down Woodside Gulch from the new Silver King Mine. It was a harrowing way to make a living.
“My dad tells me that he [James Ivers I] would lose about a team [of horses] a week coming down that steep grade,” Jim once told me.
James Ivers I saved enough money — with the help of his wife, Bridget — to buy a substantial interest in the Silver King. He went on to serve on the mine’s board of directors, on the Park City Council, and in the Utah Legislature.
His son, James Ivers II, learned mining from the underground up, mucking and drilling in a couple of small mines in Idaho and Nevada. He succeeded his father on the board of directors of the Silver King and went on to serve as the mine’s president and general manager. He and his wife Grace had nine children, including Jim.
At age 14, Jim delivered food and supplies by horse and wagon to men staking mine claims in the mountains above Park City. By age 16, he was working in the Silver King Mine’s company store on Main Street. At age 18, he was helping to set timbers in the mine. When he was 31, he was the Silver King’s chief engineer. And by age 50, he was president of United Park City Mines (UPCM), guiding the fortunes of Park City’s major mines and UPCM’s new Treasure Mountains (now Park City Mountain) resort.
Jim was an altruistic, modest, soft-spoken man with an astounding knowledge of the Silver King, and mining in general. I first learned to appreciate him in the spring of 1987, when he gave me a tour of the Silver King Mine’s boardinghouse (now the Mid-Mountain Lodge) — which was threatened with demolition — showing me where he had worked as the mine’s chief engineer 40 years earlier. Later that year the building was moved up the mountain to a spot near the Pioneer chairlift, where it remains today as a rest stop for skiers.
I later learned that his passion for mining had also taken him other places: to graduate school at Columbia University; to the M.A. Hanna Company in Michigan’s iron-ore district; and to Washington, D.C., where he served as a mining consultant to the Department of the Interior during the Eisenhower administration.
I also learned, though not from Jim, that during World War II he had used his engineering background as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps, supervising the reconstruction of damaged Spitfire fighter planes in Great Britain, Africa and Europe. His many decorations included the Legion of Merit.
In his later years, after stepping down from United Park City Mines in 1969, Jim returned to his career as a mining consultant. But every summer you would find him — if you could find him — in the wilds of central Idaho, pursuing what his family called his “personal holy grail” at the Lost Packer Mine, a small family-owned gold-and-copper mine in the Challis National Forest.
I asked his son, James Ivers IV, if the mine was a labor of love.
“A labor of optimism,” he replied.
“In the more than 30 years he spent chasing this dream, he imparted his wisdom, his love of tradition, boundless generosity, and a true passion for the endeavor to countless people who either worked or visited the remote mountain property,” his family wrote in his obituary in May 2000.
Among the beneficiaries of Jim’s boundless generosity were several generations of parishioners at Park City’s Saint Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church. Look for that story in next week’s Way We Were installment.
David Hampshire is a Park City Museum researcher.