Carreau de Sainte-Fontaine, Mining headframe in Saint-Avold (Moselle)

The Carreau de Sainte-Fontaine is a former mining site in Saint-Avold featuring a distinctive steel headframe built in 1954. The structure has an uncommon design with two pairs of pulley mechanisms positioned on each side of a central independent frame, engineered to serve a double-compartment shaft system.

The shaft began coal extraction in 1908 under the name Puits Waldemar-Müller and operated until 1972. After reopening briefly between 1976 and 1979, the site closed permanently in 1986, with the headframe having been rebuilt in 1954 as a modernized structure.

The name Sainte-Fontaine refers to a spring, and the shaft was first named Waldemar-Müller when sinking began in January 1908. The 1954 headframe served a double-compartment extraction shaft, and the site is now maintained as a mining monument; its portal frame was listed as a monument historique on 22 October 1992.

The headframe stands outdoors in the Merle valley, now called the Vallée du Charbon, in Saint-Avold. It is a tall red steel structure with worn, rusty paint, visible from the surrounding ground; the site is maintained. No visitor facilities or guided tours are documented in the sources, so plan to view it from outside.

The headframe is a portico type, with two pairs of rakers on each side of an independent front square, serving a double-compartment extraction shaft. The source states it is the only one of its kind in the Lorraine Basin, with just three comparable examples known in Nord-Pas-de-Calais.