In 1927, a latter-day prospector named Harry Springer was traipsing around the Paradise Range in central Nevada, looking for gold. He came across some mysterious crystalline rocks, fine-grained and slightly soapy to the touch. He knew what they weren't: They looked different than quartz, lacked the weight of barium, and were grayer than diatomite. But he didn't know what they were.
It turned out that Springer's find was brucite and magnesite, two minerals that transformed Nevada from a strictly raw-materials producer into a major manufacturer.
A few years later, a small brucite mine went into operation in Cottonwood Canyon on the west slope of the Paradise Range. It limped along for nearly a decade, mining enough brucite, which at that time was used as a furnace additive to retard flames in steelmaking, to eke out a living for the miners who'd paid Springer a pittance for his find.
In the early 1940s, only four years after the completion of Hoover Dam, the Germans began raining terror down on England in the form of bombs whose incendiary properties were attributed to magnesium, at the time a little-known metal. In addition, lightweight magnesium was found in various components of downed German aircraft. Within a year, Allied engineers and scientists had analyzed the qualities of this metal and geologists, including some from Basic Magnesium Inc. (BMI), located in Ohio, went on a hunt for magnesite in the U.S.
They found it at the brucite site in central Nevada -- roughly 70 million tons of commercial-grade magnesite ore. The company immediately began to develop the mine, building the town of Gabbs to house its mine workers. (Gabbs is 75 miles northwest of Tonopah. The big store there, Dummar's Groceries, is owned by the family of Melvin Dummar, the man who contested Howard Hughes' will to the tune of $100 million.)
Since vast amounts of electrical power are required to process magnesium, a location halfway between Hoover Dam and Las Vegas was selected for the magnesium-processing plant, 300 miles from the mine, but only 15 miles east of Hoover Dam and its cheap abundant power. In September 1941, construction commenced on the massive Basic Magnesium factory. More than 10,000 workers spent only a few months erecting the plant, the company town, and the transportation systems necessary to aid the war effort. By early 1942, 5,000 people lived in "Basic," and by 1943, 16 million pounds of magnesium had been produced, for use in aircraft fuselages and engine housings and explosives. By 1944, so much magnesium had been shipped from Basic that there was a surplus; with the war winding down, the plant was closed.
For the next few years, the heavy-metal town shrunk, almost to nothing. But then the government agreed to turn over the property and facilities to the state. The town, renamed to honor Albert Henderson, a local politician and judge who was pivotal in the takeover negotiations, received a new lease on life. By the early 1950s, the huge manufacturing complex had been subdivided to accommodate smaller private industry and by the 1980s, Henderson claimed more than half of the entire state's nontourist industry output.
