Benton in the spring of 1956 was buzzing with the discovery of a uranium deposit by two Bloomsburg brothers, John and Felix Vagnoni. But before we get into that, lets refresh our memories of May 1956 in the upper Fishingcreek Valley. The Columbia County Farmers National Bank was flush with assets of $5,261,000 following the merger of the banks in Orangeville and Benton. The Benton Air Force Station, now the Job Corps Center on top of Red Rock Mountain, was preparing for an open house with special invitations extended to members of the Ground Observer Corps. The local high school “music supervisor,” “Professor” James Calkins, was preparing his students for the debut of the Benton Girls Chorus and the annual band concert. Maxwell House coffee was $.95 a “tin” at the IGA. The Holcombe Furniture Showroom was selling Flexalum aluminum awnings like hotcakes. Mother’s Day dinners served family style at the Log Cabin Inn, Jamison City, were booked. The hot-ticket item was the 1956 21” “Roll-A-Vision” Emerson full console television for $148 with no down payment. The set featured a “dyna-power chassis, aluminized picture and easy-glide wheels” in a “stunning-walnut finish cabinet.”
The tranquility of the area was disrupted by news of “a large uranium strike.” John Vagnoni, president of the North Mountain Mineral Development Company, made the announcement from the field office of the company in Bloomsburg. The announcement reported that the “rich deposit contains one of the highest uranium contents so far discovered in Pennsylvania.”
John Vagnoni graduated from Beaver Township high school in 1940. After high school, the brothers leased a coal mine and operated a breaker they called the “Tip Top.” They began salvaging coal with a power shovel from refuse banks, but demand for anthracite was starting to fall off and the project didn’t prove profitable. They then borrowed money from a relative and started building a $160,000 breaker. That project folded, half finished. They took their front-end loader, ditch-digging machine, air compressor and trucks to Montgomery County in 1953 and went into the excavating business.
During slow periods, Felix decided to excavate for zinc and heard about an abandoned copper mine in Sugarloaf Township. Felix found some rocks which he thought were “queer looking” and sent them to Harrisburg to be assayed. There wasn’t any zinc, but the copper oxide appeared promising. He was “low on funds” and his digging stopped until one morning he heard that uranium and copper were usually found together. Felix bought a “scintillator” and headed back for Fritz Hill and discovered that the hill was “hot.”
Bruce H. Fritz, a farmer, owned the land. The brothers “worked on him” until he leased them 60 acres, and they soon leased an additional five parcels totaling 300 acres. On January 3, the AEC reported that the sample contained .8% uranium, a higher grade of uranium than mined in Colorado. They did some core drilling at $4 a foot, but the weather was “miserable” and they soon had to give it up. They finally brought their front-end loader to clean out the old copper mine.
Vagnoni believed that there was enough high-grade uranium to make it profitable to ship it west or refine it locally. They gathered their drills, power shovels and sensitive instruments from Norristown and set out to prove they were right. They were on a high following the finding of not only uranium, but traces of copper, silver and vanadium. Suddenly the brothers were hell-bent to dig for copper—fifty years after that endeavor first went bust. These guys just wouldn’t give up. Each weekend, the brothers jumped in their cars and drove more than a hundred miles to their family homestead in Scotch Valley, Bloomsburg. They then drove to Fritz Hill where they politely fended off the wives of farmers from whom they leased the land who wanted to load them up with homemade food so they could keep up their strength.
Before the impact of the announcement sunk in locally, the Argus reported that “A local man worried about the finding of uranium. He felt that if the rain hit the rocks, the uranium might ‘wash into the creeks and spoil the fishing’.” It appears as though no one locally realized that uranium miners are chronically exposed to radon and its progeny, which cause lung cancer and may be associated with leukemia.
The uranium find was on 300 acres of land in Sugarloaf Township, extending into Fairmount Township, Luzerne County. Vagnoni reported that officials of the Atomic Energy Commission “inspected the location and confirmed assay reports of uranium content.” The AEC official refused to be identified, the Argus later explained, for “security reasons.” According to this unseen, unknown official, the ore contained 0.80% uranium oxide. “Deposits with 0.2% was considered marketable.” The company promised further investigation and development immediately and asked for assistance from El-Tronics Co., Mayfield, PA, a company that manufactured uranium-testing equipment, and geologists from Penn State University.
The Morning Press, in its edition of May 7, 1956, reported that Felix Vagnoni, vice-president of the development company, discovered the uranium in August 1955 while prospecting at the site of an abandoned copper mine. The uranium find came about 50 years after the copper mine craze swept the same area. Vagnoni’s father had been one of the men interested in the copper development.
The Vagnoni Brothers were not geologists. The primary occupation of the brothers was in the “contracting business” in Norristown and were “former coal operators near Bloomsburg.” Their concentration soon moved to developing the 300 acres of land in Sugarloaf Township under lease for uranium mining.
The Thursday Benton Argus for May 10 called the find “promising,” reporting that the brothers were attempting to find zinc when they stumbled on the uranium. Benton Burgess Karl Fritz was quoted as saying, “Everyone here is in a state of suspense. This could mean so much to our community.” The Argus column “Around the Town” reported that the West Creek Hunting club had “good prospects” for uranium.
The Sunday Independent noted that the Vagnoni Brothers did not know how much of uranium ore was “deposited in the land they control.” The brothers said that “extensive stripping and drilling operations” were to take place later in the month “in order to determine the extensiveness of the find.”
The Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin picked the story up in its June 10 edition on its “News and Views” page, sharing the story with an article about Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations. The uranium article was entitled “Dig those Vagnoni Brothers--They’re Crazy After Uranium.” And dig they did!
It would have taken hundreds of thousands of tons of uranium ore under the hilly ground of Fritz Hill to make uranium mining worthwhile. The only buyer of uranium in the United States was the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission and any ore purchased by the government would have to be shipped to Colorado or Utah for processing. Freight charges would have eaten up most of the profit. Setting up a mine to process it economically was virtually out of the question, even though the Vagnoni brothers claimed that the uranium was worth $150 a ton.
An accountant with a sharp pencil concluded that if the Vagnoni Brothers ore averaged only .2 %, it would not pay them to ship it no matter how much they had. Freight trains were estimated at $35 a ton and the estimate was $10 a ton to mine. That would be a loss of $13 a ton. The only way the brothers could make it work was to build a processing facility in Pennsylvania. If you think that fracking of natural gas drill sites isn’t popular today, consider what the processing of uranium in the local community would have been like in 1956. Were the brothers discouraged? Not much.
They spent their weekends pulling debris from the old copper mine, chipping away at rocks and listening to the clicks of a Geiger counter. Reports were that they worked 12-hour days, which when added to their 60-hour week with their excavating business in Norristown plus the hours it took with paperwork, made for a long week. John’s friends began calling him the “Uranium Kid.”
An AEC investigator told the brothers that the outcroppings were much like the ones found in Colorado. In the Colorado Plateau most of the deposits were found in fossil channels—sand bars—formerly beds of steams long since dried up.
The AEC employee said there was a question of its commercial viability. He asked the brothers to mark out the channels of ore by core drilling and excavating.
The chances to win on a losing proposition were nil. The brothers finally realized that there was no point in continuing and the uranium caper of 1956 came to an end.
For more on the relationship between uranium and cancer, head here.
We acknowledge the contribution of stories and the memorabilia of those mining days made by Betty Fritz Victory. Betty asked me to write about the uranium months ago and provided a number of source documents that had been in the family. I brought everything with me to Florida in October and November, but somehow being on vacation outweighed writing the article. I returned her material to Benton, and when I came back to Florida I brought it with me. I finally wrote the article.
