Gold Dredge #8

The very last stop of the land cruise was at Gold Dredge #8 which was designed and built by the Bethlehem Steel Shipbuilding Division in Pennsylvania.  This dredge is called a "bucket line" or "ladder dredge".  The dredge is built upon a barge platform and floats along and employs a vertical post anchoring system to hold it in place to enable the buckets to dig into the earth in front of the dredge up to a depth in the ground of 28 feet.  

The dredge has a total of 68 buckets of 6 cubic feet capacity each.   The machine was powered by a 150 horsepower electric motor.  Since it moved slowly it basically used a humongous extension cord to deliver electric power to the barge which was moved and extended as the dredge advanced.

The "monster gold pan" in front of the dredge is strictly an ornament to show the primitive device used initially for gold panning.

The basic concept of the dredge employed the removal of earth and its transfer to an elaborate weir system which employed running water to separate gold from the rest of the material on the basis of differences in specific gravity.   Other tricks such as the use of mercury to combine with the gold particles to form an amalgam was also a part of the dredge design intending to leave no gold particle left behind...to the extent that was imaginable.

This particular dredge operated between 1928 and 1959.  Dredges of this design were sometimes moved during winter months by sliding them over the snow covered ground with teams of bull dozers attached to the barge.