A sepia toned black and white postcard of the Oliver Shaft. The front caption on the upper left reads “Oliver Shaft (Calumet-Arizona). Bisbee, Arizona” The postcard is unused and was published by the Albertype Company, Brooklyn-New York. Willard Brown collection.

The Oliver shaft was sunk by the Calumet & Arizona Mining company in 1903. It had a 4-compartment shaft and was sunk to the depth of 1600 feet. The upper sections of the mine had high grade oxidized ores that contained 7 percent copper with smaller amounts of gold and silver and the lower levels had rich sulfides. Large bodies of oxide and sulfide ores existed at the 950 to 1350 levels. The Oliver shaft shared a tunnel with the Irish Mag, and it was equipped with an electric tram for hauling ore. The shaft was equipped with a 600-gal Nordberg electric pump and an electric hoist. The Oliver Shaft was not free of its own share of fatal accidents. On April 21st 1909, two men lost their lives in separate incidents. In the first, a Slavonic miner named Lee Guraservich was one of nine men being hoisted up in a three-compartment cage. Between the 1,000- and 800-foot levels, Guraservich slipped out and was caught between a hoisting cage and timbering. The second was Matt Arola, who was struck with a rock at the 1150-foot level. In eleven years the ore supply was dwindling had diminished and during the slump in 1914 the Oliver shaft was shut down, only to reopen on a far smaller scale summer of 1915. After World War I, the price of copper in slipped from 22 to 18 cents. The Calumet & Arizona Mining company shut down the exhausted Oliver Shaft on February 5th, 1919.

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