Information

This mill opened in 1886, one year after the arrival of the railway in Runcorn. Its main market was New Zealand. The operations were described in a newspaper article in 1888: “The bones are first crushed by being passed through toothed rollers, and then they pass into a disintegrator, which [has] an external drum in which beaters revolve at the speed of 2500 revolutions per minute. The broken bones fall from the crushing rollers into this drum and then are broken into absolute powder by the frightful thrashing they get from these steel-beaters… Stout screens form the internal covering of the beaters, and according to their closeness of mesh depends the fineness of the crushed bones, for every particle of bone is retained and rebeaten round and round until it is small enough to pass out through the screen. At the Runcorn mills only the fine dust is prepared, unless a larger size is stipulated for… The bonedust after leaving the disintegrator is conveyed to a board-floored shed, where it is spread out to dry and cool; it is then put up in convenient-sized bags of 112lb. weight when filled. The usual output is about 10 tons per week.”

Citations

Brisbane Courier, 5 May 1888; Weatherill Directory, Queensland, 1892, p. 298.

Image Citations

Advertisement for Clazy, Main and Smith Bone-mills. The Queenslander, 15 February 1890.

Map References

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