Elmer A. Jones worked for 41 years, from 1926 to 1967, for St. Joseph Lead Company in southeast Missouri. From 1953 to 1967, Elmer was Division Manager of St. Joe’s Southeast Missouri Operations. During that time, Elmer’s vision and management skills were of central importance to the discovery and development of St. Joe’s world-class New Lead Belt mines.
Modern, mechanized, trackless mining systems developed and applied by Elmer Jones and his technical team earned St. Joe’s New Lead Belt mines recognition as being among the most efficient, most productive, and safest in the world. The broad outlines of St. Joe’s mining systems had staying power. Very similar systems are found today in large underground mines around the world.
Throughout Elmer Jones’s career, he studied and applied evolving underground drilling, loading, and hauling technology to St. Joe mine production. Elmer documented this evolution in a series of technical papers published between 1947 and 1957: ”Mining Practice in Southeast Missouri” (1947); ”Development Work with Trackless Equipment” (1950;) ”Haulage System in St. Joseph Lead Co. Mines of Southeast Missouri” (1953); and “Mechanization at Indian Creek Mine of St. Joseph Lead Co.” (1957).
These publications and the demonstrated excellence of the mines Elmer Jones managed earned him widespread respect as an outstanding manager and mining engineer. When the Society of Mining Engineers (SME) was formed as a constituent society of AIME in 1957, Elmer Jones was elected SME’s first President. SME’s magazine, Mining Engineering, summed up Elmer Jones’s qualifications by saying, “He truly represents the miners of the Society.”
Elmer Jones’s lasting contributions to modern underground mining systems were not his only noteworthy achievements. As St. Joe’s Division Manager, Elmer’s guidance of and support for his geological staff was of central importance to discovery of the New Lead Belt. Earlier in his career, Elmer established mine surveying and mapping systems that set standards followed throughout the Missouri lead mines. When St. Joe acquired mines of other companies in the Old Lead Belt in the late 1920s and 1930s, Elmer Jones and another young engineer, Larry Casteel, applied these systems to newly acquired mines and developed a unified mine mapping system for all St. Joe mines.
In the late 1950s, Elmer Jones was appointed to St. Joe’s Board of Directors. Then, as on other occasions, he was offered promotion to the company’s head office in New York. He chose instead to stay close to the mines, mills, and communities of southeast Missouri.
Elmer and his wife, Celeste, raised three sons and a daughter in southeast Missouri. Elmer served for many years on the Board of Directors of the Bonne Terre, Missouri Hospital and as a member of the Bonne Terre School Board. He became a member of the St. Louis Council of Boy Scouts. Elmer Jones served his community and company well, and he remained a “Man of the Mines.”
