Dividend, Utah: The Company Town Named for a Silver Payout

Dividend was one of the best-planned mining camps in Utah and one of the quickest to vanish. It was built in the East Tintic Mountains by a single company on the strength of one deep silver-lead strike. Nearly everyone in town worked for that company, rented their house from it, shopped at its store and played on its ball team. When the mine closed, the company moved the houses away.

Few people know the town today, and many who do get its history wrong, often crediting the wrong company. This post sets out what the records support, flags the stories that lack a source, and explains why Dividend is a place to see from the road, if at all.

Raddatz bets on buried ore

The Tintic district was found in 1869 on its western slopes, around Eureka, Mammoth and Silver City, where ore-bearing limestone showed at the surface. The eastern side looked barren. A thick cover of volcanic rock hid the limestone, and prospectors passed it by for decades. Jesse Knight’s 1896 Humbug find showed that ore could lie under shallow cover, and prospectors John and August Bestelmeyer staked claims farther east.

In 1907 John Bestelmeyer brought the ground to Captain Emil J. Raddatz, a German-born mining man, and in October 1907 Raddatz incorporated the Tintic Standard Mining Company. For nearly a decade the company dug through volcanic rock without finding ore. By 1916 it had spent about $407,000, and a county history says Raddatz even mortgaged his Salt Lake City home for another $10,000 to keep going.

The strike came in 1916, below the 1,000- to 1,200-foot levels, where drifts broke through the cover into a large, rich replacement ore body of silver, lead and copper. Dividends began to flow, and one county history counts $1,651,067 paid out through 1921 and more than $19 million over the mine’s life.

A town built by one company

The camp was first called “Standard.” By September 1918 it was Dividend, with about 200 people, and a seventy-man boardinghouse had gone up in 1916. Tintic Standard owned the land, so it controlled the layout. By the early 1920s a resident recalled mining offices, hotels, a schoolhouse, an amusement hall, a barber shop, a pool hall and seventy-five private houses, with a sewer system in place of privies. The company rented the houses to its employees.

It also ran social life, through the Tintic Standard Club, dances and movies, a baseball field, a golf course, a shooting range and tennis courts. Churches were not built, but different denominations used company buildings. Miners included Cornish, English, Finnish, Italian and Mexican workers.

Wages and loyalty were tied to the company in another way. During the lean years before the strike, employees were sometimes paid partly in Tintic Standard stock, and the county history records one store employee being scolded for taking shares at five cents. This research found no major strike at Dividend; the company housed, paid and entertained its workers.

An early view of Dividend, with company houses in the foreground and the mine plant and headframe on the slope above. The date is not recorded.Original photo: Utah State Historical Society

Harold and the failed mill

To treat lower-grade ore, Tintic Standard built the Harold Reduction Mill in Goshen Valley in 1920–21, a chloridizing roast and brine-leach plant that cost about $580,000 and was reportedly named for Raddatz’s son. It treated roughly 200 tons a day by 1922 and employed about 25 men a shift. The process proved too costly for the varied ore, and the mill closed in 1925. After that the company shipped its ore by rail to smelters in the Salt Lake Valley. The Goshen Valley Railroad, a standard-gauge spur completed in 1919, carried it down to the main line.

The mine had other troubles. Deep workings met gases that displaced oxygen, and an underground fire in 1934 forced the company to seal off part of the lower levels. In 1921, neighboring Chief Consolidated’s Water Lily shaft set a sinking record of 427.5 feet in 31 days, a feat that sometimes gets credited to Dividend.

The 1921 robbery

The best-documented violent event in Dividend’s history happened on the evening of March 9, 1921, when robbers came into the town store. The county history, drawing on the press of the time, says Tintic Standard superintendent John Westerdahl, who was there at the time, was shot and killed, along with pool-hall owner L. P. Peterson, and that store owner John Manson and miner Jesus Fernandez were wounded. A manhunt followed across the Tintic range and Utah Valley.

Dismantled, not abandoned

Dividend did not burn or collapse. It was a single-industry town that lost its industry. The county history dates the mine’s closure to 1949, after about 34 years, and the National Park Service puts the town’s active period at roughly 1916–1947, so the late 1940s are the safest description of the wind-down. The post office is reported to have closed in 1951.

The company took the town apart rather than pay taxes on empty buildings. Houses were bought and moved to valley towns such as Elberta, Goshen, Santaquin, Payson and Springville. A resident later recalled buying her family’s house and moving it, then coming back to find plants covering the spot, with scarcely a road to show where it had stood. By the mid-1950s the wooden buildings were gone.

The Dividend site in 1975, with a concrete wall in the sagebrush, a mine dump on the slope and two tanks on the ridge above.Original photo: Utah State Historical Society

The old railroad grade at Dividend in 1975, with a few loose timbers left on the roadbed.Original photo: Utah State Historical Society

What is left

The best hard evidence is the National Park Service’s 1979 survey of Tintic. It found one town structure standing: the Miner’s Dry, a two-story wood-frame change house of about 1923. It was removed from the National Register in December 1991 along with several other Tintic mining structures. The federal notice does not say whether the building was demolished, collapsed or simply lost its integrity, so the delisting should not be read as proof that it was torn down.

What remains is a mining landscape: dumps, disturbed ground, roads, shaft sites, concrete and industrial footings, and traces of the railroad grade. A field report mentions mining ruins visible along Dividend Road, but this is an observation, not an archaeological inventory, and individual foundations should not be assigned to named town buildings. Several nearby sites often called Dividend ruins belong to other operations, such as the Chief lime kilns and the Water Lily shaft.

Timeline

Historic sites nearby

Further reading