Driving through the fields of West Mineral, Kansas, it’s hard to miss Big Brutus. What’s Big Brutus? A massive Bucyrus-Erie model 1850-B electric shovel that stands 16 stories tall, weighs over 11 million pounds and definitely lives up to its name.
The largest electric shovel still in existence, Big Brutus, which is now a museum, sits inoperable after only 11 years of mining. Built on site in 1962 by the Bucyrus-Erie company, the shovel was originally constructed to run for 25 to 30 years. Its purpose was to remove what’s known as overburden, or materials like rock and soil that cover a coal seam. This allowed smaller equipment to get in and extract the coal. The machine dug a variety of depths, reaching around 69 feet, and had a top speed of just over .2 miles per hour.
In 1974, Big Brutus was retired after the Environmental Protection Agency found the quality of coal in West Mineral wasn’t what it should be.
“The EPA came in and the coal quality was not where they wanted it to be in this area,” says Cindy Morris, the executive director of the Big Brutus museum and memorial. “It ran totally electric, and the electric cost got to be significant enough that it wasn’t worth keeping it operational.”
It was too expensive to dismantle the giant, so they parked the electric shovel in one of the fields and left it where it stood. It then sat idle just 10 miles from where it was built.
However, a few years later, former miners, their families and members of the community had the novel idea of turning the behemoth into a museum. The Pittsburg and Midway Coal Mining Company, the entity that owned Big Brutus, donated it, and in 1985 it was dedicated as a museum. In 2018, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The land around it has deep holes and pits, now filled with water, from where Big Brutus once dug. From a perch on the shovel’s top, visitors can survey the area and see where Big Brutus used to drive and dig.
The dinosaur rests as a reminder of the mining era and continues to support the town around it. “I think the community still thinks of it is an asset because it brings in around 25,000 people to this area every year,” Morris says.
