Pass Mining Company Records, 1858-2002

The Pass Mine was the collective and common name for the mining operations carried on by the Pass Mining Company on sixteen contiguous mining claims located high in the mountains near the town of Hailey, Idaho. The region was known as the Wood River mining district, notable for its silver production. The company was incorporated in New Jersey by Eastern investors in 1892. It purchased several pre-existing claims and patented several others itself. Together they covered approximately 200 surface acres of land. The mine's most productive years were the few years immediately following the company's incorporation, when Horace K. Thurber, a New York businessman, came to Idaho to oversee its operations in person. After Thurber's death in 1899, operations were sporadic and production sparse. The company was deeply in debt to Thurber's widow, Nancy Thurber, who had financed much of the company's work. In partial repayment of that debt, she assumed ownership of most company stock. In her will, she left her shares mainly to her husband's nieces and nephews, as she and Horace K. Thurber had no children themselves. Several generations of siblings and cousins, most of whom lived on the East coast, kept the corporation alive and held onto the property in the vain hope of reviving the mine and gaining value for their shares. Leading those efforts were longtime company president Henry Aplington (1852-1934), who was married to one of Horace Thurber's nieces; Aplington's son, Henry W. Aplington (1881-1972), his successor as company president; and the latter's son-in-law, Robert S. Harper (1916-2009), also company president. Finally, in 1994, after any hope for the mine had long faded, company president Robert S. Harper donated the corporation's stock, its surviving records, and associated papers to the Boise State University Foundation. The foundation dissolved the corporation and sold the property for its real estate value in 2001, applying the proceeds to its scholarship funds. An environmental assessment made soon after Boise State University acquired the property (in Box 9) summarizes historical, geological, and environmental information about the mine and contains color photos of the property and the remains of the mine as of 1995.

Biographical Sketches

Horace K. Thurber (1828-1899) Before coming to Idaho, Horace Kingsley Thurber made his mark in business in the wholesale grocery trade in New York. His firm, H.K. and F.B. Thurber & Company (later Thurber, Whyland & Company) conducted an international trade from its headquarters on Reade Street in lower Manhattan, with branch offices in London and Bordeaux. In 1884, after two decades in the trade, Thurber retired from active participation in the affairs of the company and began, instead, focusing on Western investments. Among those investments were ranches and cattle companies in several states. Two of those were the El Capitan Land and Cattle Company and the Lea Cattle Company, both of which he incorporated with Captain Joseph C. Lea and others in New Mexico in 1885. Gene M. Gressley, in his book Bankers and Cattlemen (1966), quotes liberally from Thurber's letters to Joseph C. Lea (held in a private collection), documenting well Thurber's active interest in the management of those New Mexico business interests. Gressley portrays a close relationship between the two men, yet frustration on Thurber's part over what he considered Lea's lavish spending and unending pleas for more investment capital. Ultimately, Thurber's New Mexico investments proved unprofitable. Lea's biographer, Elvis E. Fleming, declared that Thurber earned "the dubious distinction of being one of the biggest financial losers in the cattle-grazing business." (p. 150) After his death Thurber's widow assumed ownership of his New Mexico assets and recovered more in a lawsuit against the Lea Cattle Company. It remained for the mangers of her estate to finally liquidate those holdings.

Throughout the 1880s, Thurber maintained his residence in New York City but moved West in 1893, following severe financial losses during the Panic of 1893. In reporting on a civil suit against Thurber in New York in January 1894, the New York Times asked in a headline, "Where does H.K. Thurber Live?" The answer in the story from Thurber's attorney was Fort Worth, Texas. Thurber was a founder, officer, and investor in the Texas and Pacific Coal Company and evidently moved there to be close to that business as well as to the New Mexico cattle interests. The coal company's main site of operations, 75 miles west of Fort Worth, was originally called Coalville, but soon became known as Thurber. Its rich history as a "company town" and one of the largest coal producers in Texas is chronicled in the New Handbook of Texas. Thurber himself became somewhat of a celebrity in Fort Worth. Acccording to the Fort Worth Morning Register, he built "at the town bearing his name a handsome residence [and] furnished it elegantly." The newspaper also reported his narrow escape, with his wife, from a second story window when the famous Arlington House hotel in nearby Arlington, Texas, burned down.

Thurber stayed in Texas for only a few years before moving on to Idaho, where he took up residence in the mining town of Hailey. He had purchased several mining claims there as early as 1892. Those claims became the core of the Pass Mining Company's holdings. While resident in Idaho he managed the Pass Mine and other nearby mines until his death on July 20, 1899 at the age of seventy-one. He never recovered from his financial reverses in 1893. In a news story reporting his death, the Idaho Statesman (Boise) commented, "His business interests are so involved…that it is believed he did not have a dollar to call his own when he died. All his Hailey mining interests were in his wife's name." Nevertheless, he was held in high personal regard. His funeral in Hailey was attended by numerous Idaho dignitaries. Reflecting on his life and career, the New York Tribune wrote, "There are few men in New York who had more or warmer friends, or who were more respected in the business world." He was buried in his hometown of Delhi, New York.

Sources: News reports on his death in the Idaho Statesman and New York Tribune, July 22, 1899, and Fort Worth Morning Register, August 2, 1899.

"H.K. Thurber Explains," New York Herald, September 20, 1893. An interview on his financial situation.

Gressley, Gene M. Bankers and Cattlemen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. HD9433.U5W38

Fleming, Elvis E. Captain Joseph C. Lea: From Confederate Guerilla to New Mexico Patriarch. Las Cruces: Yucca Tree Press, 2001. F804.R84

Biographical sketch of his brother, Francis Beattie Thurber, in The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. 22.

Nancy McLaughry Thurber (1831-1916) Nancy McLaughry was born in 1831 and grew up in Delhi, New York, also the hometown of her husband, Horace K. Thurber. They married in the early 1850s and moved together to New York City where he pursued the wholesale grocery trade and amassed quite a fortune. Between 1879 and 1882 Horace Thurber transferred $200,000 into an account in his wife's name, which proved to be a financial lifeline for them when he lost his fortune years later. Her independent fortune financed his subsequent investments and much of the work of the Pass Mining Company. She moved with her husband to Texas and then to Idaho in the 1890s and was there when he died in 1899. After Horace Thurber's death, his creditors came after her assets, but the New York State Supreme Court ruled that as Horace Thurber had been a "rich man" at the time of the transfer, there was no fraud on their part (Box 10, Folder 24) and she was not liable for his business debts. She returned to New York City soon after his death and died there in 1916.

Unlike later generations of the family, Nancy Thurber held little hope that the Pass Mine would ever be productive again. In 1911 she wrote to Henry Aplington, her nephew by marriage and president of the company, "I wish Peter [Hakie] might do something with the mine, but have little hope—think we may as well forget it. It will not trouble me much to do that" (Box 12, Folder 3). At the time of her death she owned 599 of 1000 shares of the Pass Mining Company stock, which were then distributed amongst her heirs. She also owned quite a bit of real estate in New Mexico and mining properties in Nevada. Her heirs formed the Thurber Estate Corporation to manage and liquidate these other assets. That was not completed until the 1960s. Henry Aplington and later his son Henry W. Aplington were presidents of the Thurber Estate Corporation and conducted most of its business.

Henry Aplington (1852-1934) Henry Aplington's long association with the Thurber family began in 1877 when he married Horace K. Thurber's niece Sophronia Webster. They both grew up in Polo, Illinois, a town founded by Aplington's father, Zenas Aplington. A historical marker in front of the Aplington home in Polo chronicles Abraham Lincoln's two-night stay with young Henry's family in 1856. Henry Aplington studied the law and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1875. Soon thereafter he and Sophronia Webster were married. The couple moved to Iowa, where Aplington practiced law for a few years. They did not stay in the Midwest long, however. They moved to New York City, and Henry was admitted to the New York bar in 1883. There is little documentation in the collection regarding the nature of Aplington's law practice in New York save for his legal work for Horace K. Thurber and other Thurber relatives. During his first several years in New York, he worked out of the same building on Reade Street that housed the Thurber grocery firm. In 1893 he became one of the trustees managing Horace K. Thurber's assets, including his New Mexico cattle interests. His work in that behalf necessitated trips to the Southwest. He also worked along with Thurber on his Idaho mining projects. Aplington was one of the original stockholders of the Pass Mining Company in 1892. He became president of the company in 1893 and visited the mine at least once in 1895. He also served as a director or the G.V.B. Mining Company, which operated the Red Elephant group of mines near Hailey in the 1890s. He leased the G.V.B. properties to operate himself in 1897, but the venture was not a successful one. It ended in a flurry of litigation. When Horace K. Thurber died in 1899 Aplington represented his estate and likewise was one of the executors of the estate of Thurber's wife, Nancy Thurber. He was the president of the Thurber Estate Corporation, formed to manage her estate for her heirs. It is his long stewardship of the Pass Mining Company as its president until his death that is best represented in the collection. After operations ceased with the death of Horace Thurber, Aplington sought out and negotiated with potential lessees, communicated with stockholders, paid the taxes himself, and tried to keep the venture alive. He died in 1934 and was buried in his hometown of Polo, Illinois.

Henry Webster Aplington (1881-1972) Henry W. Aplington, son of Henry Aplington and Sophronia Webster Aplington, was born in New York City on February 12, 1881, and grew up on the isle of Manhattan. In 1895 he accompanied his parents to Idaho to see the Pass Mine and visit his great aunt and uncle, Nancy and Horace K. Thurber, a trip he chronicled in a short journal that is part of the collection (Box 12, Folder 22). A letter from Horace K. Thurber to young Henry's father (November 19, 1896) reveals that the elder Aplington was already planning a career in mining engineering for his son (Box 3, Folder 2), and Henry W. Aplington did indeed graduate from Columbia University with a degree in that field in 1903. He introduced his untitled thesis (in Box 12) as "a description of the methods of prospecting, development and mining employed in the hypothetical Argent mine, a lead-silver property" imagined to be near Hailey, Idaho. The Argent claim, not coincidentally, had been the most productive of the Pass Mining Company's properties during its flush years of the 1890s.

In his Columbia class Decennial Record (1913), Henry W. Aplington wrote, "For the first two and one-half years after graduation I did metallurgical and mining work, except a short time in railroad location. Since then I have been located in New York City, doing civil engineering work on the Hudson Tubes, with the Public Service Commission, and with the Bridge Department of the New York Central." Aplington would have a long career with the New York Central as a civil engineer, working for the railroad for more than thirty years. During most of that time he lived in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and family. He was married to Alice Platt in 1908. He inherited shares of Pass Mining Company stock from his great-aunt Nancy Thurber on her death in 1916 and became president of the company on his father's death in 1934. He came to Idaho to inspect the mine in 1937, but the debris of landslides prevented him from getting far enough up the mountain to actually see it. (He did get to see the new Sun Valley resort in nearby Ketchum, however, and waxed enthusiastic about it in a letter to T. Kennedy Stevenson several months later (Box 5, Folder 2)). Like his father before him, Henry W. Aplington personally assumed the responsibility of paying the taxes on the Idaho land and covering other company expenses during the years no income was realized from the mine, which was most of the time. As a trained mining, engineer, however, he actively corresponded with mining companies and other potential lessees about the Pass Mine, successfully negotiating several leases over the years, though with little monetary result. He was already in his eighties when he arranged the last lease. Henry Webster Aplington died in Brooklyn in 1972 and was succeeded as president of the company by his son in law, Robert S. Harper. He and his wife were both buried in Polo, Illinois, near his parents.

Robert S. Harper (1916-2008) Robert Schilling Harper was born in New York City in 1916. He was a graduate of Bates College (physics) and MIT (mechanical engineering). After serving with the U.S. Navy in World War II, he went to work for Geometric Tool Company in New Haven, Connecticut, and later Greenfield Tap and Die (GTD) in Greenfield, Connecticut. He was first vice-president and general manager of GTD when he retired in 1977. He married Henry W. Aplington's daughter, Alice Platt Aplington, in 1947 and succeeded his father-in-law as president of the Pass Mining Company on the latter's death in 1972. With the backing and assistance of the few Thurber family relatives who were still interested in the mine (notably Charles H. Todd, William T. Pullman, and his wife's sister, Sophronia Aplington Myron), he sought out other holders of company stock and was able to acquire enough shares himself to gain a controlling interest in the company. During the 1980s he leased the mine property to Exxon Minerals, providing enough income to pay the taxes and other expenses, though Exxon never actually did any mining on the site. In 1994, Harper transferred his controlling shares and the company's records to Boise State University, which sold the real estate and dissolved the corporation. Robert S. Harper died in 2008. His wife Alice Harper died in 2010. (Obituary in the Greenfield Recorder, January 30, 2008).

T. Kennedy Stevenson (1883-1970) Thomas Kennedy Stevenson, who practiced law in New York City for many years, was born in 1883 in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. He was the husband of Candace Thurber, one of Horace K. Thurber's nieces, and thus became involved with the Pass Mining Company, serving as a company officer for several decades. He played an active role in the company's decision making and conducted an active correspondence with other company officers. He died in 1970 in retirement in Vermont.