The heritage might be rusting mining machinery at the bottom of a canyon, a steam engine chuffing in a Sierra Nevada pine forest, or a grand house weathering in the Virginia City wind. Wherever memories linger, I seek out and document the story.
Usually what’s left is not that grand. The miners and their camp followers took everything they could as they hurried to the next big strike, leaving behind ghost towns populated only by empty shacks and memories. Occasionally a haunting artifact lingers half buried in the sand; a child’s doll, a worn shoe, or a broken plate from a families treasured china set.
It did not take much to get a miner through a high mountain winter in the central Sierras: a roof stout enough to hold up under twenty feet of snow, and a door small enough to keep out inquisitive grizzly bears.
Two gamblers play their hands in the historic Winkler’s cabin in the mohave desert. The cabin was destroyed in a fire in 2006, a reminder that all relics are worth documenting today.
If you were a steam engine operator, your world revolved around two things, water pressure, and water level. If the first got too high, or the second got too low, you were in big trouble.
Adaptation was critical to success as machines moved from the steam age to the electrical age. This appears to be a modern metal lathe, and it is one, too, with one big difference: It is powered by steam.
Three coffee cans fastened together become a barber pole. But if your customers move on the next town, your barbershop will be the first economic victim.
Not a pretty place to end up in, but many people did. The graveyard at Virginia City has the graves of a few gunfighters or gamblers who died violent deaths, but mostly the graves contain children who succumbed to diseases or young women who died during childbirth. In recent years the gate has been replaced by one more modern, but less photogenic.
Some gold towns lingered on well into the twentieth century, as this post WWII classic car attests in Virginia City, Montana.
A detail of an abandoned passenger rail car in Virginia City, Montana. First into the mining camps were prospectors who traveled cross country on foot or on mule back. Rough roads were developed for wagon traffic. When the railroad arrived, businessmen and travelers poured into the town.
For decades, lumber mills burned sawdust and waste wood in wigwams like this. When the old growth forests had been destroyed, the remaining trees became too valuable to waste and the wigwams were abandoned.
Sometimes it doesn’t take more than a corrugated sheet iron shack and a can of spray paint to start a gold mine. Want to invest in this one?
Irrigation in the Sierra Foothills enabled fruit growing, which required early processing machines like this apple corer and peeler.
Before Welding, metal was joined in the field using fire heated rivets, hammered tight by blacksmiths hammers.
A mad scientists torture instrument? This is an ingenious and highly complicated apple corer from the orchard town of Newcastle, California.
At an altitude of 8,000 feet the summers are short and cold in Bodie. A major luxury in this house is the attached greenhouse, which perhaps allowed the owner to grow a few tomatoes or squash during the brief summer.
A centrifugal speed regulator more than a hundred years old still functions perfectly at the Phillips Mill. Notice the cans of oil they keep handy.
1951 Chevy truck grill.
In an earlier age, explosives were a daily tool of farmers and miners. A common sense warning on this building was the only safety warning anyone needed.
Detail of a water powered electrical generator at the old powerhouse in Folsom, California, a gateway town to the gold fields. Activated in 1905, Folsom was the largest generator of electricity in the nation until the Niagara Falls plant came on line six months later.
A maze of pipes whose purpose was known only to the operator confound modern engineering standards at the Folsom plant.
For many years, the dancing and entertainment flourished at the Forest City dance hall. Probably the renowned celebrity Lola Montez, who lived in nearby Nevada City entertained here. Then the mines closed and the doors of the dance hall closed as well.
Relics of family life displayed at the Sundstrum Museum in Forest City
Even though it was probably built in a pre-electric era, this grinding wheel has all the attributes of a modern machine. Note that it is both gear and chain driven, which develops a smooth, fast rate of rotation.
Bryce Canyon? No,this eroded landscape is entirely man made, the result of hydraulic gold mining more than a hundred and twenty five years ago in the central Sierra. The destructive practice was outlawed in 1880.
Mining towns dried up when all the minerals were extracted. Sometimes the minerals would remain, but a big drop in the price of gold or silver could close a town as well. When that happened, plants would shut down overnight, people would leave in a hurry, and heavy equipment was abandoned in place.
Three views of Pelton Wheels. Pelton was a mining camp tinkerer in Camptonville, California, who in 1870 developed a revolutionary improvement in water wheel that made possible the generation of electricity from falling water. His basic design is still in use today.
This what is left of the road to Panamint City. The road was blasted from the cliffs and the rubble was used to form the roadbed. When the camp went bust and the road was no longer maintained, flash floods washed the roadbed material down the canyon, leaving only a gap in the rocks.
Every machine you see here, the metal lathe, mill and press are powered by a steam engine at the Philipps Brothers mill in northern California.
Gary Hendrix operates a cutoff saw at the family mill. The saw is entirely steam powered.
For over a hundred years, the Philipps Family sat around this stove which heated the machine shop. Looks like they were partial to Red Velvet Tobacco.
They’re everywhere, the ravens. Sometimes referred to as rats with wings, they prosper throughout the west. Here one built a six foot tall nest in an abandoned mining building.
If you were two hundred miles from the nearest town and needed a metal lathe, you’d better be a jack of all trades. Here, deep in the mohave desert, a sewing machine was converted to just such a purpose.
Two windmills provide redundant sources of water in the mohave desert, where to run out of water is to die.
Most of the privys in Bodie are separate from the houses, usually located in the backyard a few feet downwind from the back door. At the doctors house, however, the privy was attached to the house so patients could have access to a toilet. Couldn’t have smelled very good.
What was the first luxury item you hauled into a mining camp? A bathtub, of course. Then, when the gold ran out and everyone fled to the next strike, the bathtub might be too heavy to carry along.
Detail of the Alta Powerhouse. This is the original penstock which carried high pressure water from the forebay, located on the ridge above the powerhouse to the Pelton wheel.
