The mining of brown iron ore, which occurs here as lens-shaped inclusions in a Middle Devonian shale-limestone series, began around 1800 and ended in the mid-1860s.
10 years after the establishment of silver mining at St. Andreasberg (the Samson Pit, in 1910), the old mine was worked again by the firm of Ilseder Hütte based at Groß-Bülten near Peine as part of a national exploration programme.