Lead has been called the richest 100 square miles on Earth. Over a period of 126 years, miners pulled more than 41 million ounces of gold and 9 million ounces of silver from the Homestake Mine, the largest mine in the western hemisphere. Prospectors began arriving in the Black Hills in the mid-1870s. Very quickly, “Lead City” was transformed into a thriving community built around the gold-mining industry. In the early mining years, miners hammered the rock with picks, their way lit with candlelight, and mushed mules pulling carts filled with ore. In later generations, miners broke the rock with pneumatic drills and powerful explosives, producing a seemingly limitless stream of riches.

In 1965, Dr. Ray Davis, a chemist from Brookhaven National Laboratory, built his solar neutrino experiment on the 4850 Level of Homestake Mine. His search for the elusive particle worked, but something was missing. He found only one-third of the neutrinos predicted, which led to the Solar Neutrino Problem and caused a flurry in the scientific world. Finally, in the late 1990s, scientists at SNOlab in Canada, discovered that neutrinos oscillate, or change, as they travel through space. Davis’s experiment only detected one kind. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 for his research.

In December 2001 Homestake mined its final ore and left behind more than 370 miles of tunnels from the surface to the 8,000-foot level. Today, those caverns house world-leading research that seeks to understand the riches of the universe.