Vieille Montagne

Vieille Montagne is the name of a former zinc mine in Kelmis (La Calamine), a town in Belgium between Liège and Aachen. The mine's name is French for "the old mountain", and this is also reflected in its German name, Altenberg (earlier, Alten Galmei-Berg). The mine was once a bone of contention between Prussia on the one side and the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (later Belgium) on the other, that resulted in a piece of land that became the territory of Neutral Moresnet.

After he developed an original refining process, Jean-Jacques Dony received a decree from the Napoleonic authorities in 1806, allowing him to mine the zinc ore deposit at La Vieille Montagne near Liege. At that time, the area belonged to the French département of the Ourthe. After Napoleon's defeat, in 1816 the département was divided between Prussia, the Netherlands and the neutral zone of Neu-Moresnet which contained the zinc mine. The "Société des Mines et Fonderies de Zinc de la Vieille Montagne" was created in 1837, after the independence of Belgium (which took over the Dutch claim to the neutral zone). The Belgian mine continued its operation until the end of the nineteenth century, when a workforce of 300 produced 8,500 ton of crude zinc annually.

The company opened a second zinc mine in Zinkgruvan in Sweden, which is still in operation. It also ran a harbour in Åmmeberg to ship the zinc. The ore was shipped to another affiliate in Balen, Belgium.

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