Encyclopedia Dubuque
"Encyclopedia Dubuque is the online authority for all things Dubuque, written by the people who know the city best.”
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Affiliated with the Local History Network of the State Historical Society of Iowa, and the Iowa Museum Association.
YAVAPAI ONYX MINING CORPORATION
YAVAPAI ONYX MINING CORPORATION. Mining and Manufacturing company. Beginning in 1924 with a small group of employees on Rhomberg Avenue, the company grew rapidly to employ eighty people in the manufacture of onyx gear shift balls and special order items for churches, lamp manufacturers, and furniture and cabinet producers. By 1926, the company employed sixty workers in Dubuque and twenty more in the onyx mines in Arizona. The company owned twenty-one patented mining claims covering four hundred acres in Yavapai County, the only commercially valuable deposit of onyx in the United States. In July 1926 the company was one of a select few to participate in the Eucharistic Congress in Chicago where it exhibited such items as candle sticks, pedestals, a holy water font, and crucifixes made entirely of onyx.
The company moved to Dyersville in 1926 and announced a $75,000 plant expansion in Dyersville and at its Arizona properties. Despite the publicity and early hopes, the plant was closed during the fall of 1928. Small-scale onyx production continued for at least the next eleven years under different managements.