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Show The Story of Garfield The Garfield smelter, wnlch troats approximately one-third of nation's copper output Is one of country's leading reduction plants and one of Utah's (jreatest Industries. (Editor's Note : This is the first of a series of eight rlcles titled "The Story of Garfield.") Garfield, Utah, situated on the north point of the Oquirrh range of mountains virtually in the shadow of historic Black Rock on the Southern South-ern shore of Great Salt Lake, was named after James A. Garfield, twentieth President of the United Essentially a smelter community, Garfield constitutes one of Utah's industrial communities supported by the smelting works of the American Snselting and Refining Company, which today is pouring approximately approxi-mately one-third of the nation's copper into the war effort. Treating Treat-ing production of the world's largest open-cut copper mine, Utah Copper, together with other ores, the Garfield Gar-field plant is one of the world's largest copper smelters. Organized in 1S99, the American Smelting and Refining company first erected a smelter at Murray, Utah, and then acquired a number of smaller smelters operating in Salt Lake valley. With development of the Utah Copper ore body the Garfield plant was constructed in 1905 and equipped with six rever-beratory rever-beratory furnaces and three copper blast furnaces, together with necessary neces-sary roasters and copper converters. With the advent of flotation and the depletion of high-grade direct eopper smelting ores, copper blast furnace practice was abandoned in favor of reverberatory smelting. Improvement in the reverberatory smelting practice, together with the advent of basic lined converters, expanded the production that could be economically treated in a copper cop-per plant and today the Garfield smelter not only reduces copper concentrates but also handles a large tonnage of low-grade sulphide concentrates and crude sulphide ores, together with tonnages of silicious gold-silver ores. The smooth, precision-lake operations opera-tions at Garfield causes one to almost al-most overlook the magnitude of the plant, and the industry k represents in Utah. As an example, average yearly figures show that 1.500,000 tons of ore and concentrates are smelted at the Garfield and Murray plants of the American Smelting & Refining company. This tonnage originates in Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Nev-ada, Idaho and California, bringing Utah closer to the West as a smelting smelt-ing center. In smelting this ore 5.800,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas are consumed. A total of $3,100,000 is paid out in wages and salaries to approximately approxi-mately 1,200 workers. Expenditures for supplies and equipment amount to $2,000,000, and $2,500,000 is paid to railroads for freight on ores and supplies. (Succeeding articles in "The Story of Garfield" series will appear in this publication.) |