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Volume 065-3 - July 2011 (6 pages)
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Page: of 6
A Tour of the North Star Mining
and Pelton Wheel Museum
by Robert S. Shoemaker
North Star Museum Director
D URING JULY 2010 A BATCH OF HISTORICAL PAPERS
arrived at the Searls Library, and with them was a copy
of the front page and page 3 of the Nevada County Citizen
(a short-lived newspaper), notated as Vol. 1, No. 5, Nevada
City, Wednesday, November 11, 1959. The lead story that
day was Largest Pelton Wheel About to Be Scrapped.
With the story were two interesting photographs. The
first was of the finishing of the roof of the powerhouse over
the 30-foot Pelton wheel in 1898 and the second was an
1895 photograph of the earlier 18-foot wheel, in place but
still covered with canvas from the Pelton foundry in San
Francisco. These photos had not been known before (and
are of too poor quality to reproduce here).
The Pelton wheel story starts back 1895 when Arthur De
Wint Foote, a civil engineer, was brought to Grass Valley
to design and construct a hydroelectric plant for the North
Star Mining Company to furnish power to the recently acquired Massachusetts Hill and Stockbridge properties. Because commercial production of electricity was only a very
few years old, Mr. Foote investigated several new power
plants in the Midwest and returned, convinced that electricity could not be relied on and would not be safe to use
underground. Instead he decided on the development and
construction of a compressed-air plant. The compressed
air would be generated with a water-driven Pelton wheel
and would be used with the existing steam engines in place
of steam made by burning wood—over 40 years of burning wood had pretty well denuded the forests around Grass
Valley and Nevada City.
y >
Nevada Gounty Historical Society
Bulletin
_— 65 NUMBER 3 JULY 2011 ,
Lester Pelton, a millwright and mechanic in Camptonville, had patented his water wheel in 1881, and a number
of them were operating in mills and for hoists, but not for
making compressed air. He had already moved his manufacturing facility from Allan’s Machine Shop and Foundry
in Nevada City to San Francisco, where it operated until
after World War II.
Water wheels had been known even in biblical times, but
even the best of them in 1880 extracted only 50 percent of
the power available from the water. Pelton’s wheels had a
divider in each bucket that directed water sideways so none
of it would bounce backwards and hit the back of the next
bucket in line. His wheels were over 90 percent efficient,
and because of that were later responsible for the hydroelectric industry of the world. Nowadays these machines
are called turbines. The first cast-iron Pelton wheel was
two feet in diameter and powered some of the machines in
Allan’s shop for several years—it is now on display at the
North Star Mining and Pelton Wheel Museum.
Foote’s plan called for a 2.5-mile extension of the Grass
Valley Water Company’s 22-inch pipeline from a reservoir
to the Empire Mine. The extension from the mine was a
riveted pipe 20 inches in diameter and over 7,000 feet long.
It ran to a power house situated on the banks of Wolf Creek.
The water had a total head of 775 feet and the water presBi
bertttaits
ss
(Left) Roof under construction to cover the giant
Pelton wheel at the North Star power house.
(Below) Unique two-bucket design of Pelton wheels
made them more efficient than other water wheels.