Granite Mountain Mine Memorial

A small open-air memorial on the hillside above Uptown, commemorating the 1917 Granite Mountain - Speculator fire. Interpretation panels lay out the events of that night and the labour struggles that followed; the memorial is a few hundred metres from the surviving headframe of the original mine.

The view from up here, looking down on the city and across at the Berkeley Pit, is one of the best in town. The memorial is open all year and free to visit.

things to do sight
A story
On 8 June 1917 a carbide lamp set fire to oily insulation in the Granite Mountain shaft, asphyxiating 168 miners before they could be evacuated — the deadliest hard-rock mine disaster in American history. The memorial is built on the mine site itself, and the names of the dead, mostly Irish, Italian, Finnish, and Slavic immigrants, are inscribed by nationality.

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