Zeehan Mine, Waiomu, Thames-Coromandel District, Waikato Region, New Zealandi

Regional Level Types
Zeehan Mine	Mine
Waiomu	- not defined -
Thames-Coromandel District	District
Waikato Region	Region
New Zealand	Country

Former gold mine. Worked from late 19th century to 1912.

The lease contained several small veins striking north or north-east, with a similar mineralogy to Monowai. (It is likely the species are much the same as Monowai, but have not been listed without specific reference to Zeehan). Free gold is found, and more associated with complex sulphides, enriched near fault fractures. The ore contains quartz, pyrite, galena, sphalerite, and chalcopyrite, which presented difficulties in extracting the gold-silver. Most of the ore came from a block on the upper two levels of finely crystalline sulphides and un-named alteration products.

The mine is a short distance north-west of the Monowai Mine, at the head of the Pohue Stream, with the battery site 500 metres downstream. Little more than foundations remain at the battery site, while the mine consists of an old adit, with waste rock down slope from it. All are in heavily forested, steep, difficult to access areas.

Early history was not found, apart from (Bell, 1912) referring to the Comstock syndicate. The Mount Zeehan Gold Mining Company controlled the mine in the early 20th Century, but was having trouble with the treatment process. The complex sulphide ore caused most of the gold-silver values to be lost to the tailings. The Complex Ore Refining Process was a company who had developed a treatment to deal with these sulphides, one of many at the time to prove unsuccessful. The Mount Zeehan Company folded in 1911 after it had purchased the necessary equipment from the Complex Ore Refining Process Limited only to find the process did not work.

The Zeehan Consolidated Company took over the mine in 1917, until it folded in 1927. Mindat pages are littered with unsuccessful mining ventures, and it is easy to forget the failure of these companies had real effects on the lives of people. They had often been lured by exaggerated reports in newspapers, misleading information given by promoters, complex financial products, a minor number of wildly successful mines held up as an example, and maybe witnessing friends and family investing and not wishing to miss out.

William Duncan was a farmer from Hamilton who invested in the Mount Zeehan Consolidated Company. He claimed he had been misled by the promoters. As an existing shareholder, he was encouraged to go into debt to take out debentures to keep the mine working, only to have it close less than one month later. The receivers moved in when he was unable to pay a quarterly installment for the now worthless shares he had agreed to buy from a securities company.

The Waiomo Sulphide Corporation conducted development work in 1929, then from 1930 to 1933 the Monowai Gold Copper and Lead Mining Company conducted more development work before going into liquidation.

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