Simple four-room worker cottages like this one provided basic accommodations for miners. This well-preserved example, built circa 1890, retains its original footprint, wood windows and doors, and lapped wood siding. It originally included two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and an outhouse near the alley. Life for miners was often rough. John B. Kelly, in residence from 1898 to 1900, was badly beaten and left for dead following a night of drinking in September 1898. John’s friends found him alive in a prospect hole with serious head injuries and a fractured collar bone. In 1902, miner Michael Reed, his wife Mary, and their two children moved here. The Reeds had three more children and, in 1912, were hosting two boarders when Michael died of tuberculosis. Then, in 1914, Mary died of diabetes. Initially, Michael’s sister Mary Casey cared for the children and rented this house to other miners. By the mid-1920s she and the Reed children had returned to live here and at No. 12 next door. The oldest sibling, Thomas Reed and his wife Agnes, lived here from 1934 to 1971.
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