(soft music) - At one point in time, this area just had all of these awesome mine buildings, mills and shaft houses and head frames, and these are the last remaining buildings.

The rest are gone.

They're all gone, and that to me is devastating, and so like when we look at this, it's like we have to get in here and do something with this.

(dramatic Western music) (flame whooshes) (birds chirp) First of all, you wanna watch your head 'cause you can see where the roof has fallen in.

(footsteps shuffle) And the wonderful thing about this mill is that all of these pieces of equipment are still here, and that's one of the things that makes this mill so unique.

It has all of its innards left inside of it.

So then we can really get a feel for what was going on here and what the daily operation was here.

Over here was where the major roof fall was.

This is all new this last two years here.

That just proves the point that like these buildings need to be saved.

They need to be restored.

They need to be shored up so that they last for another 100 years so that people who are interested in westward movement because of mining can experience them.

They're a public resource.

(pleasant guitar music) (hammer bangs) (tools whir and bang) - The mission of HistoriCorps is to get volunteers out to work on the public lands and work on these structures that have been neglected and are falling down and really need extra help.

So we come in and then, by using volunteer labor, we're really spreading the good word of historic preservation back into the community.

(muffled chatter) - In 2015, a friend of mine sent me an email and was like, "Hey, check out this cool group called HistoriCorps."

And my brain just went, "All of those mining buildings.

I could do this."

And looking at what HistoriCorps does, this is detailed historic restoration, and there's not just hundreds of people doing this anywhere, and so that's how we got into this partnership.

- We're gonna end up making this one a little shorter.

I've always had a love of mining, and I've always read voraciously about it, and when they offered me and asked if I would take on the project, in my head, I was like, "Yes yes, yes, yes, yes," and then tried to play it cool, like, "Let me talk to my wife and make sure that we can schedule everything," but the kid in me was like, "Absolutely we're gonna do this project 'cause I get to restore a mill," and it's always been something I've been interested in.

Then Josh, you're gonna snap it.

So a string will always be straight if it's stretched tight.

- Thank you.

- Scot is really great because he's super excited about teaching his craft and sharing his craft, and he has this vision, and then he can communicate that in a way that makes you feel empowered and like you can do the job.

(upbeat guitar music) - At this point, we're putting in new rafters, preparing for new roof sheathing to fill in the collapsed portion of the roof.

And so this week, I'm hoping to begin closing up the hole and then getting the roof redecked.

(tools buzz and whir) - Can you believe the roof is off of this?

Our original scope was to jack up the cabin and replace things, but once we started looking at how it was leaning and how everything was working out, it became apparent that we were gonna have to take the roof off, dismantle the cabin, label all the pieces.

So if you look on the walls, you can see these little silver tags.

The tags will tell us where the pieces go, and then we're gonna redo the foundation, and then we'll rebuild it.

(gentle pleasant music) (muffled chatter) (tools thud) (drill whirs) - One of the neatest parts about it is you do get the people that don't have any of the skills and the knowledge of how these things get done, but they have the drive and the desire to learn and to do, and once you put those skills in their hands and teach them how the tools work, they take off with it.

These people come to work.

They wanna work and they're involved, and it's just neat.

The hair stands up on the back of my neck when I talk about it.

(muffled chatter) (tools thump) (tools buzz) (muffled chatter) - [Man] This thing has to be shoved like that.

(tools buzz) - Our volunteers have made stunning progress, outstanding progress.

They continue to amaze me every day with how hard they work and how invested they are in a project that doesn't belong to them.

They have no actual personal investment in it, but they give their all to it, and we make amazing things happen.

That one is free, and so that was.

We've got a couple of the Huntington mills to move and we got the shaker table to move and the grinder, and yeah, the making the equipment work wasn't part of our work plan, but it was part of my work plan 'cause I just wanted to see it happen, so.

(bright music) We'll be leaving this building secure and weather tight.

We'll be leaving Miner's Delight able to withstand the winter without any detrimental effects in the anticipation of putting the roof on next season.

(muffled chatter) It's pretty amazing to be a part of the preservation of these places that otherwise might not get saved.

It gives me the chills to think that I get to be a part of saving these places and to bring them back to what they were for future generations.

- The whole point of saving a building like this is that the public gets to come out and experience a piece of their past and be a part of that experience.

You go through this stage of transformation with the building itself where it's a broken thing, right?

And then you put it all back together, and I'm super blown away by the work we did.