McGill Smelter Site, Nevada

McGill is a former Kennecott mining company town, where a massive smelter operated for dozens of years, extracting copper, gold and silver from the pit across the valley at Ruth. The smelter, with its 750 foot smokestack, was torn down in the 1980s. Rows of small houses for workers remain, as well as a hillside row of larger houses, closer to the mill site. Several large-scale municipal buildings, schools, warehouses, labs, and other structures remain, all of which seem too big now for such a small town. Though most of the land in the area is still owned by Kennecott, today there is only one Kennecott employee on site. His job is to maintain the irrigation system for the grass on top of the tailings mound. The mound is close to four miles long, and extends for two and a half miles west of town, nearly filling the valley from east to west. It is invisible to most passers-by though, looking like some kind of natural landform, partially because of the continuous irrigation, which makes it look like agricultural land, and keeps dust down.

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