Big Brutus

Big Brutus is a Bucyrus-Erie 1850-B electric shovel that the Pittsburg & Midway Coal Mining Company bought in 1962 for $6.5 million. It came to West Mineral on 150 railroad cars and was put together on site. It stands 16 stories tall and weighs 11 million pounds, with a 150-foot boom and a dipper that held 90 cubic yards, enough, the museum says, to fill three railroad cars. Its top speed was .22 miles an hour. Its job was to strip off 20 to 69 feet of earth and rock and lay bare the shallow coal seams beneath, which smaller machines then dug out.

It worked until 1974, when the coal here no longer paid to mine, and it was too big to move, so it stayed where it stopped. P&M donated it in 1984, and it opened as a museum and miners' memorial in 1985. Engineers made it a regional historic mechanical engineering landmark in 1987, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018. It was never the largest shovel ever built, but it is the largest still standing.

Around it lies the ground that shovels like it made. The Mined Land Wildlife Area takes in 15,000 acres of stripped land gone back to grass, woodlots and long water-filled pits, now stocked with bass. Visitors walk a self-guided tour of the machine and the visitor center's exhibits, and the site has tent and RV camping by reservation.