Video: Nevada County Ghost Towns Video with Bernie Zimmerman (16 minutes)

Full Transcript of the Video:

Good Court. Hi, I'm Grace Suarez, the publisher of UBET Press, and today I'll be talking to my most prolific author, Bernie Zimmerman, who has written his latest book, "Ghost Towns of Nevada County," recently published by UBET Press in ebook format. Bernie, tell us something about the book. Well, the name pretty much tells it all. The book tells the history of 18 Nevada County ghost towns. So what is a ghost town? Basically, I decided it would be a place that was once a settled community, but which has lost most or all of its population and buildings. They're all former mining communities, many of which started a rapid decline after the Sawyer decision of 1884. My definition excludes places such as North San Juan or the town of Washington, which still have an active town, which I defined as having at least one commercial establishment. The book contains some introductory material, which I sometimes call "Mining 101. " It also contains two maps, one of central Nevada County and one of western Nevada County, which shows you where all the ghost towns are. There are over 30 photographs and images sort of illustrate the book. Each town has a map link. If you click on it, you'll be taken to a Google map, which will show you where the town site is. What led you to write this book? Well, it all began over 40 years ago when we moved to Yuba. I became intrigued by the name, talked to some of my neighbors about it, and I was put on to Jerry Brady's book, Yuba gold fever. Jerry was born in the Yuba chalk bluff area in the 1930s when there was still a little bit of mining going on. After reading it, I became intrigued by the idea of living in a place which had once been a much larger place than it is now. Most of my life, I've lived in places that were regularly growing, but now I found myself in one that had, I guess what you'd call a relapse. I think you were with me the day we went walking around our property and discovered the remains of the old telephone line. Now we didn't have telephone service then, but they'd had it almost 100 years ago. So we were sort of living in a time warp. So how did that curiosity translate into the book? Well, I decided to try to find out why the town had disappeared and eventually wrote a history of the town. Trying to decide what to do with it, I went on to Wikipedia and the entry for Yuba press was very sparse for Yuba, for the town was very sparse, but there was an invitation to flesh it out. So I did that. Now in the process, if you go on to the Wikipedia page for say Yuba, you go to the bottom and you'll see a list of all the historic communities in Nevada County which Wikipedia has identified. Many of them I'd never heard of before, but they all had intriguing names like Gaujai or Democrat Hill or Blue Tent. So I decided to do some research on those places and eventually produced 18 histories, many of which are on Wikipedia. Then along came the pandemic, and with time in my hands, I decided to sort of stitch them together along with photographs and the other material that I created into this book. I figured it would be a convenient way to get all this history before people to help them understand about the county's past. So you mentioned that it was the names that got you interested in some of the places. Can you talk about some of these interesting names? Well, some of the town names are straightforward. They're named after the founder or some early pioneer. Birchville, for example, is named after Birch Atsid, a pioneer merchant. Remington Hill is named after Caleb Remington, pioneer miner and founder of the town. But others are more interesting. Gaujai, which I mentioned earlier, is properly called Hunt's Hill, the name of the founder. It got the name Gaujai after a fight between some of the local miners and some claim jumpers. During the fight, one of the miners had his eye gouged out, and that name stuck to the town. Blue Tent got its name because its first structure was a tent made out of blue denim, while Lupa got its name after a Nisanan chief whose tribe lived in the area. So then maybe we can look at some of the pages from the photographs that are in the book. Well, that's the cover, and that's a picture of Yubet, at least back in the days when it still had some buildings. Yubet got its name from the proprietor of the local saloon, whose favorite expression was Yubet. When the locals were in his saloon trying to come up with a name for the town, every time they would suggest a name, he would reply Yubet. So after spending a considerable amount of time in the saloon, they just decided to call it Yubet. That's a picture of a downtown Cherokee in the 1860s. Cherokee got its name from a band of Cherokee miners who were the first miners in the area, and they had mining experience from their ancestral home in Georgia, which many of you know was once a leading gold producer in the United States. Now the name is especially interesting because it was changed so frequently. I don't know of another town in the area that had four names. When the town got its post office in 1855, there was already another town called Cherokee in Butte County, and the post office wouldn't accept another Cherokee, so the name was changed to Patterson, which was the name of a local resident who was also the acting county clerk. Then after a while, around the turn of the last century, the post office was discontinued, and when it was reopened, it was named Melrose, which happened to be the hometown of the then postmaster Melrose, Massachusetts. Now for reasons that I haven't been able to figure out, in 1911 the name was changed to Tyler, and today if you drive to Cherokee and you turn onto Tyler Foote Road off of Highway 49, you'll see a directional sign, and it says Tyler, even though everybody has always called it Cherokee. In fact, the post office has impacted many of the names of our towns. For example, North was tagged onto San Juan and Bloomfield to distinguish them from another post office with a similar name. Names aside, what were some of your favorite towns? Well, one definitely was Meadow Lake, which was founded as Summit City and changed its name when it was incorporated as a city, and that's a picture of Meadow Lake, I believe in 1860, late '65 or '66. Now at one point, it was Nevada County's third city, Truckee not yet having been incorporated. Its story is amazing. It was the classic speculator's bubble, sort of a Nevada County's South Sea bubble. After gold was discovered by its founder, Henry Hartley, thousands of people rushed in during the summer of 1865. The hype and the press was fantastic, the richest diggings ever seen, that sort of thing. By 1866, the town had thousands of inhabitants. An organized town had actually been surveyed and laid out by some speculators from Virginia City. The prices of lots grew astronomically, which you could have bought for a few dollars in 1865. You had to pay thousands of dollars for in 1866. The town had its own banks. It even had a minor stock exchange, though it's never clear that there are any mining stocks to exchange. But it imploded spectacularly in the winter of 1866, when people began to realize the reality of living at 7,300 feet. In other words, they were snowed in for months at a time. The gold was there, but it proved to be very difficult to extract from the other elements in which it was bound. So by 1867, it had become a ghost city. And by 1872, much of the buildings had been destroyed, and the only person living there was the founder, Henry Hartley, who by then was called the Hermit of Meadow Lake. Okay, that's Relief Hill, or at least the Diggins at Relief Hill, another interesting town. Now, there are two stories about how it got its name. One is that was the spot where the party that went to relieve the Donner Party met up with some of the Donner survivors who expressed their relief. The other story, which I believe is more credible, because I found it in a letter to the editor of a local paper, is that the original founders of four young men who were prospecting in the area were not having much luck. And when they were about to give up and return to Nevada City, one of them found gold, whereupon another one shouted, "Relief!" The other interesting thing about Relief Hill is that the hydraulic-ing, which you can see in this picture, got so severe that it undermined some of the houses in the area, which then slid into the Diggins. Now, here's a quote from a historian. "Husbands, crazed with gold fever, washed the foundations from under their homes, and watched the houses fall into the river, while the wives and children ran from their homes, fleeing a certain death. " Little bello-dramatic. So you mentioned that one of the reasons you started your research was to determine why the towns became ghost towns. What did you find out? Well, that's a pretty broad topic, but I'll give you some generalizations. Many of these ghost towns reached their peak with the arrival of the large water ditches, and the arrival of hydraulic mining, which produced fortunes for the large companies like the Milton Mining Company or the Eureka Lake Company, which owned most of the mines, and a good living for those who worked in them. But hydraulic mining proved to be one of the country's first environmental disasters. As the hills, as you can see here in this picture of Relief Hill, were being washed away by the water coming down from the hills and going through the monitors and coming out at very high pressure. The debris that was left, which are known as slickens, were washing into the Yuba River or the Bear River, depending on where you were, and causing repeating flooding, especially around Marysville, where farms and pastures were covered by sort of a gray muck. So the farmers and ranchers filed suit, and eventually in 1884, federal judge Lorenzo Sawyer enjoined the discharge of debris into the Yuba River as a nuisance. This very quickly shut down most hydraulic mining, and many of the folks who lived in these mining towns moved. There were efforts to continue hydraulic mining by building containment ponds or dams, and the idea was you would trap the water behind the dam so it wouldn't go to get down into the Yuba River. In fact, Lake Engelbreich was designed as a giant containment pond. But those efforts were not very successful in terms of reviving mining. There were also efforts at drift mining and at hard rock mining with mixed results. Then World War I came along, and many of the remaining mines were closed for the war effort, and frankly, many hydraulic mines never reopened after the war. You intend to do more work in this area? Well, originally, I had thought about putting out the book after I had completed all of my research, which I figured would be about 30 to 40 towns. Well, the pandemic, unfortunately, has gone on longer than expected, so I've used the time to pretty much finish my research for the remaining ghost towns on the San Juan Ridge. I'm going to finish Chalk Bluff, probably two or three more towns, and then move on to the Washington area, and then look at the eastern part of the county where maybe the ghost towns were originally logging towns as opposed to mining towns. So there will be another edition of the book out, but probably not for a few years. Well, if our talk has whetted your appetite for the book, the good news is you can download it to your computer or iPad from Apple Books, and the even better news is that it is free. It's also available at www. ubetpress. com as a PDF if you don't happen to have an Apple, and you can also see there the electronic version, links to the electronic version of Exploring Nevada County. That's a guide to all the county's historical landmarks and our newest publication by Chuck Schimek over the Hennes Pass, Road Barons and Risk Takers, a must for anyone who wants to drive over the Hennes Pass. So thank you everyone for coming to our talk. Bye-bye.