Walking dragline one step closer to final stop
Sep. 30—SCAMMON, Kan. — A walking dragline idled in Cherokee County for decades is one step closer to becoming a roadside attraction in Southeast Kansas.
Workers with Tilton and Sons House Moving, of Carthage, and Ozark Crane, of Joplin, lowered the 112-foot main dragline boom from about 50 feet in the air to the ground Monday.
Wendell Wilkinson, the man who donated the dragline to the Miners Hall Museum in Franklin two years ago, said he was tense while it was being lowered and relieved afterward.
"One time when my dad was operating it and they were in business, the cables broke and they dropped the boom," Wilkinson recounted. "I think it was maybe dumping on the spoils, and so it dropped on the spoils, and it was like when you take spaghetti and throw it on the floor. We were just a small company, and my dad was just sick about it. We found a company in Treece or in Picher (Oklahoma). He came and looked at it, and he was an engineer, and he said, 'We can put that back together.' That saved us because it would have cost thousands of dollars to replace."
Phyllis Bitner, chairwoman of the Miners Hall Museum board of trustees said this was a milestone day for the museum and the dragline. It will eventually rest at the museum at the corner of U.S. Highway 69 and Kansas Highway 47 in Franklin.
"We keep talking about it, and we do a little bit here and a little prep work there," Bitner said. " ... We expect now the process will start moving fairly quickly, and we're hoping in the next two months to have it all moved up to the corner. Then begins the lengthy process of how we're going to preserve it, restoration and things like that."
The Wilkinson family has donated other steam shovels and draglines left over from the family's mining days to places such as the Crawford County Historical Museum in Pittsburg and Big Brutus in eastern Cherokee County.
Bitner said the museum is still working on the final resting site to prepare it for the dragline's arrival.
"The engineers have come in and done the core drilling, and the base for the dragline is laid, and that's good because now it's had a lot of time to settle," Bitner said. "It was very deep that they had do dig down and layer so many different kinds of rock. They're working on the parking lot. It's not finished. The gravel is down, but it will be covered with either blacktop or concrete."
The Page Dragline weighs about 500,000 pounds, or about 250 tons, with a boom that's 110 feet tall. It moves on two giant feet that lift the dragline's body up slightly and move it forward or back.
It's much smaller than the more famous Big Brutus shovel in western Cherokee County that weighs 5,500 tons and has a boom that's 160 feet tall.
The dragline is one of only two examples of this model of dragline left in the United States. The Wilkinson Coal Co., established in 1917 to work the coal seams of Southeastern Kansas, brought the dragline to Cherokee County in 1953.
Wendell Wilkinson said his father, Jack Wilkinson, bought the machine from a mine in Louisiana and had it shipped by rail to Scammon and moved it in pieces by truck to a spot near the corner of U.S. Highway 69 and Star Valley Road, about a mile northwest of where it sits now.
It was used to mine first coal and then clay from 1953 to 1979. Because it was too big to move and too old to be useful, it was left parked in the spot where it pulled up its last shovelful of clay.
Bitner said the museum received about $587,500 from Kansas Department of Tourism, the Patterson Family Foundation and the local John U. Parolo Educational Trust to move the dragline.
While that money is sufficient to move the machine, the museum still has plans to restore it on-site. That will take more donations from the public.
Bitner said interested donors can call the museum at 620-347-4220 or email com.
