Samson Mining Museum

Samson is a silver mine in the Upper Harz. It is part of the Mines of Rammelsberg and Historic Town of Goslar World Heritage site. The mine began at the end of the Middle Ages and expanded from 1521. It closed in 1910 but reopened as a museum as long ago as 1950.

Visitors go to the wooden pithead building and into the mine. Underground they see the rope-operated drift and a wooden hoist wheel powered by a 12-metre diameter waterwheel to carry miners down the shaft. Water was taken to the wheel by the Rehberger ditch of the Upper Harz water management system. The hoist is demonstrated and still used to carry maintenance staff down to hydro-electric plants installed deeper underground in the early twentieth-century. On the surface is the wooden winding drum and waterwheel and the Catharina Neufang gallery which shows the work of sixteenth-century miners. A museum contains models, documents, geological samples and artefacts related to mining in the region, and another museum is concerned with canaries and their use to warn miners of bad air.