Video: 2024-10-17 - Ghost Towns of Nevada County with Bernie Zimmerman (52 minutes)

Full Transcript of the Video:

Are you ready to start? Ready to roll? Normally, I thank people for a kind introduction. I think I'll now thank him for not telling more bad jokes. Okay, so, as Dan mentioned, I chair the Nevada County Historical Landmarks Commission, and a number of our commissioners are actually here too. And the commission was created in 1969 by the Board of Supervisors to help promote and preserve Nevada County history and talk a little bit more. The only problem is I can't see these buttons. There it is. That's our website, and if you go on to NevadaCountyLandmarks. com you can learn probably more than you'd like to know about us, but if you click on those buttons off to the right, there's a link that'll take you to all of the landmarks in the county that we've been involved in to get a lot more historical information about it. Now, I'm also wearing another hat tonight, both literally and figuratively. Until my term expired in June 30th of this year, I was a trustee of the Nevada Cemetery District. There's a strong link between ghost towns and cemeteries. When the towns were in their heyday, most of them established a cemetery. When they ghosted, those cemeteries were no longer being maintained, they were being vandalized, and in 1942, at the request of some local clergy, the voters of Nevada County created the Nevada Cemetery District. That's our website. It's not a county agency. It's an independent special district governs itself by a five-member board of trustees. There's at least one vacancy if any of you are interested in becoming trustees of the cemetery district. Talk to me afterwards. Now, the cemetery district was created to preserve and protect the county's historic cemeteries. We operate 27 cemeteries. If you click on that button, you'll get a list of them. About half of those are historic cemeteries, but about half of the historic cemeteries still accept internments and cremations. You can get more information on the website, or you can just contact them directly. Now, if you were here last month, I told you that this would be a joint presentation with Chris Ward, who is also a trustee of the cemetery district. We actually had proposed this program for April of this year, but it kept getting moved. Chris is not here tonight, so the presentation is going to focus more on the towns and a little bit less on the cemeteries. If you're interested in learning more about the cemeteries, I have two suggestions. That's Chris's book, Cemetery of the Western Sierra, and that is the Fine and Grave website. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but especially you can see here, cemetery location, if you went to a cemetery, you know, French Corral, California, you'll be taken there, and you can see who all is buried there to the extent they know, pictures of the monuments, and that sort of thing. Now, one of the things the Landmarks Commission does is it screens applications to register landmarks that makes recommendations to the Board of Supervisors. They're the ones who ultimately decide whether to designate something as a historical landmark. Now, one of the other things we do is we promote a history through our publication exploring Nevada County, which is a guide to the approximately 250 historical landmarks in the county. This is a picture of the cover of our paperback. There are two versions, paperback, which is on sale back there for $20. There's also an electronic version. We changed those covers pretty regularly. If you're comfortable with iPads and iPhones and tablets and things like that, it's available from Apple or Amazon for $7. 99, and the electronic version contains a lot more information because we have hypertext links to maps, to Wikipedia articles, to other historical sources. We can give you information about how to connect with the electronic version. I've given a prior presentation to this group on this book, so unless anybody has any questions, all I can tell you is that there are a few copies available for sale back there. But I've recently published another book, which is Ghost Towns of Nevada County, and that's what I'm going to talk about. Now, the book tells the history of 38 ghost towns in Nevada County. So what is a ghost town? If any of you went to the Root Center last month when they had their book sale, if you had gone to the history table, you would have seen a very thick book called Ghost Towns of the West. And if you'd opened that up to the California section, there were two ghost towns. One was Grass Valley. Guess what the other one was? Nevada City. So by the definition of those authors, almost all of us are living in a ghost town. I didn't go there. For my book, I decided that a ghost town would be a place that was once recognized as a settled community and that had at least one commercial or community establishment, a store, a hotel, a post office, a church, something like that, and had since lost its population and most of it, but had certainly lost any establishments that it had. So places such as North San Juan or the town of Washington are not ghost towns. They're not in this book because they have at least one commercial establishment and actually each one of them still has a post office. So in this part of the county, most of the ghost towns are former mining communities, many of which started a rapid decline following the 1884 Sawyer decision, which banned the discharge of mining debris into rivers and creeks. The book contains some introductory material, which I call Mining 101, such as an explanation of what led to the Sawyer decision. It also has screen maps, which show you where all the various ghost towns are in the county, and it has about 75 photographs or other images, many of which are some of which you'll see here tonight. Each chapter is the history of a different town. So the first ghost town I'm going to talk about is U-Bet, where I live. It's located on the chocolate footage, which is between Steep Hollow and Greenhorn Creek, about 12, 13 miles from here, a lot less if you're a flying pro. When I moved there about 45 years ago, I became intrigued by its name and talking to some of my neighbors, especially Dave Comstock, who was no stranger to this group and has written so much about local history. I learned that in the 1850s, actually 1857, if I remember correctly, when the dickens in the town of Wallupa were becoming exhausted, the miners moved north about a half a mile to work on some fresh diggers. Lazarus Beard, one of the miners, opened a saloon in the new town and the miners met there to decide what to call the town. Every time they would suggest a name and they would ask Lazarus what he thought of it, he would say U-Bet, which was his favorite expression. So after a while, some names and quite a bit of drink, somebody said, why don't we just call it U-Bet? And they turned to Lazarus and you'll never guess what he said. So U-Bet was a fairly substantial town in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century. It had hundreds of people. It had stores, hotels, saloons, a schoolhouse, all those good things. This is a sketch out of the Townsend and West history of really kind of main street in U-Bet. This would have been approximately at the intersection of Red Dog Road and Lowell Hill Road. So up at the top is the Fox and Cloudman store. That was probably the largest store in town. And right here, these are all family homes of Mr. Fox and Mr. Cloudman. If you go to the Grass Valley Museum, you'll find that they have a Cloudman room, which sort of reconstructs the bedroom in the Cloudman house with a lot of furniture and other pieces that were donated by the Cloudman descendants. So by the turn of the last century, the town had started to creep a little bit north, partly as a result of fires in the Oldburn Park town, and partly people wanted to be closer to the tickets. So this is a picture of U-Bet around the turn of the last century. By then, it even had a telephone line. According to local lore, when the mining inspectors came to see if there was still hydraulic mining, this is after the Sawyer decision, they had to cross Greenhorn Creek. And somebody was stationed at the creek to, and then would telephone up to U-Bet to warn the miners that the inspectors were coming so they could turn off the water before the inspectors arrived. It also had its own railroad. Whoops. This is an insulator. When my wife and I moved after, we were walking across our property, and we found this along with long lengths of wire. It also had, as I started to say, a railroad. Okay. Charles Kitts, a name some of you may know, owned a lot of timber land along the Greenhorn Creek, and he built a mill right at the intersection of Little Missouri and the Greenhorn Creek. It's actually located right at the base of our property, but across the Missouri. And to haul his timber to the U-Bet station of the narrow-gauge railroad, he built a railroad along Greenhorn Creek. This is the trestle that crosses the Greenhorn Creek. It's not as fancy as what you might, you've seen pictures of what the trestles looked like on the narrow-gauge, but, you know, it was our trestle. And the railroad ran for about 20 years until basically he'd locked out all the land that he owned. The living in a ghost town, not talking about crash-velling, but that city, it can be a little eerie, especially when we first got there. And at home one day, it was the same when we were crossing our property and we found the remains of the telephone line. Because when we got there, we were basically living off the grid, we were paying appliances, a generator. We communicated by CV radio. But a hundred years earlier, we were four miles from the paved road, a hundred years earlier when we had a railroad right at the corner of our property, we would have had a telephone. You know, you felt like you were sort of living in a time warp. There is really nothing much left of the town. This was the last older building. I think this dates, or dated from the beginning of the 19th century. It was torn down. It was kind of a home store, stagecoach stop, all those things. It was torn down by the county about 20 years ago as a hazard and as a nuisance. What is left is a lot of scarred land. This is what the New Bed Dickens, which were reputed to be the second largest in the county, this is what they looked like in the 1950s. If you go there today, much of that scarred land has been filled in by little pines and manzanitas and so on. Nature is reclaiming itself. And there is a historic cemetery. The oldest graves in the Yubet Cemetery date from the 1860s. Yubet ghosted around World War II, and the burials resumed in the 1980s. And oddly, while the cemetery district operates the cemetery, it does not own the land. A number of our cemeteries are on Forest Service land or BLM land. This one is on private property. And it's part of a large parcel that changed hands a few years ago, and the district still hasn't worked out an agreement with the new owners. So I think right now there are no burials, but there were some up until a few years ago. So I started with the town, which is the last in the book, Yubet. And now I'm going to go to Alpha, the first town in the book, and Omega, which would have been the last town had I written the book in Greek, which you and I are both glad I didn't do. These towns were located about three miles southeast of the town of Washington, separated by Scotchman's Creek. Alpha was on the west side and Omega was on the east side, about a mile apart. They were founded in the early 1850s. Alpha, are you ready for this, was originally named Hell Out for Noon. And Omega was originally named Delirium Tremens. I think they have been much better off going to Lazarus Beard for a name. Nobody seems to know how they got those names, but they changed them very quickly to the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet to symbolize the fact that they thought they were on each end of a long vein of gold-bearing ore, which actually geologists later determined that that vein went all the way to Relief Hill, so it was more than a mile long. Alpha thrived for about ten years, but its diggings quickly played out. And by the early 1960s, it was already pretty much a ghost town. I think there were one or two people still living there. There are now no readily visible remains of Alpha. This is what it looked like in the 1950s. This is what it looked like when I went there a couple of years ago. In a way, it's much nicer, and you can see what Mother Nature does. But even as Alpha declined, what happened was that many of the residents just crossed the creek and moved to Omega. And that town continued well into the 20th century. A couple of interesting things about these towns. One of the leading families at Alpha, who later moved to Omega, were the Wixens. He was a doctor of the Justices of the Peace. He owned a local hotel and so on. Now, you may not know him, but you probably know his daughter Emma. And under what name would you know her? Emma Nevada. The Alpha Nightingale, who performed throughout Europe and the United States. So I mentioned earlier that many of these towns ghosted after the Sawyer decision. But Omega did not, as I say, really continued well into the 20th century. Now, why? Because the Omega Water and Mining Company, which owned the principal mine, decided to resist the decision. It continued hydraulic mining, which resulted in a series of contempt decisions and escalating fines handed down by the federal judges. Now, one of the things that they did was they used Chinese miners to continue hydraulic mining. The miners were routinely arrested, taken to jail in Marysville and fined $500, which they couldn't pay, so they languished in jail. Apparently, the mine owner had told them that because they were not named in the injunction, what they were doing was not illegal. Eventually, the fines and contempt citations sort of won out, and they built a restraining dam. You probably noticed a number of ponds and what have you around the county that are basically tailing dams or restraining dams. One of the ways you could continue to mine legally after the Sawyer decision, and then there was the Kamineti Act, which sort of put that into law, was if you built a pond to contain your tailings. Englebrite Lake was originally designed to do that. So, anyway, they built a pond and eventually Sui Chong, a leading citizen of the town of Washington, took over operation of the mine and he ran it successfully up until around the time of World War I. Now, Omega is one of the few towns that still has about a half a dozen old buildings still standing. Whoops, I don't have to be there. That's one of them. That was about two years ago or so. Whether it's still standing or not, I don't know. And it has a historic cemetery, which is very well maintained, though it no longer accepts internments. It's actually quite a small cemetery. So, moving on to French Corral, which is located on Pleasant Valley Road, a few miles east or probably northeast of Bridgeport, like much of the San Juan Ridge, it was originally inhabited by the Nisanon. The ridge was then settled by French settlers. It got its name in 1849 when a Frenchman built a mule corral on the site and the town sort of grew up around the corral. It was not only a mining town, but it was also an agricultural town. Many of the early vineyards in the county were planted in that area. We actually had quite a thriving grape and wine industry in the 1870s and so on. We were one of the largest producers of wine in the country, believe it or not. The town, this is what it looked like in the 1860s, had a population of about 3 to 400. A few interesting things about the town. It was at the end of the world's first long-distance telephone line, which ran from French Corral to French Lake. There was a lot of French up on the ridge. The line was built in 1878 by the Milton Mining Company, which operated many of the mines up on the ridge, to allow it to improve communications about the release of water from flumes and ditches for the mines. There's really an early example of what we now call on-demand supply. When a mine needed water, they would telephone it up to French Lake and they would get some release. Here's a picture of one of the original telephone poles, which is still standing a few miles outside of French Corral. They still exist on private property. The telephone instrument, the original telephone instrument, is now in the Smithsonian Museum. If you go to French Corral, you will see a historic building. It's the only one remaining in French Corral that I'm aware of. Even though it says that it was a Wells Fargo express office, I don't know if you can read that. It wasn't. We actually worked this out with Wells Fargo, who was interested to know that they had an express office they didn't know about. The real express office was about 100 yards east of this building, really about where the marker is for the long-distance telephone line. This building, as far as we can tell, was just a store and the sign, we believe, was put up about 30 or 40 years ago in an effort to boost its sale. It didn't sell then. It came back on the market earlier this year. I don't know if anybody here bought it. I'm told it was on the market for $245,000. If you had bought it, this is what you wouldn't have gotten. That's the interior of the building. Now, the French Corral also has a historic cemetery, which still accepts some limited interns. Now, another of my favorites is Cherokee, which is located on the San Juan Ridge, about four and a half miles east of Highway 49. It was founded in 1850 by some Cherokee Indians. Before the California Gold Rush, the gold mining center of the United States was actually in Georgia and it's built up into North Carolina a bit too. Before, they were forcibly removed in the 1830s by what is now commonly called the Trail of Tears. The Cherokee were experienced miners and several of them wound up in California. They wound up on the San Juan Ridge and they gave the town its name around 1850. In the 1850s, Cherokee was probably the most active mining center on the ridge. It had two hotels. It had saloons. It had a doctor, a drugstore. It had its own newspaper. What more could you ask for? This is Main Street. Basically, today Tyler Foot Road. Over here, you can see Kernos Hotel, which is one of the two big hotels in town. One of the things that I find interesting about Cherokee is that it had four names. The locals always stuck with Cherokee, which was the original name. But when a post office arrived in 1855, since there was already another California post office named Cherokee, I think those Indians got around, the name was changed to Patterson in honor of a local citizen. Now, the post office closed around the turn of the last century and reopened briefly in 1910 under the name Melrose, which was the name of the hometown of Massachusetts of the then postmaster. Now, a few years later, the name of the town has changed to Tyler. No one seems to know why. But if you drive up to Cherokee, and if you go highway 49 and turn right on Tyler Foot Road, you'll see a sign that tells you that Tyler is, I forget where this is, four and a half miles away. So officially, I guess, it's still Tyler. Small town, lots of names. The old school house is still there. It's owned by a family in the Bay Area, and they kind of use it as a family retreat compound and so on. And the beautiful historic cemetery is still there, and it still accepts burials. So there's one thing about ghost towns that may not have a lot of buildings left, but if there is one, it may sometimes be the school house. There were 68 school, one room school houses built in Nevada County in the second half of the 19th century. Now, by half of them are still there. Many of them have been converted into private residences, and many of them have been converted into community centers. This one is a private residence. So ghost towns probably have a cemetery, may have a school house. Relief Hill is another interesting ghost town. It's located midway between North Bloomfield and the Malikov State Park and the town of Washington. It's actually a road that goes between them. It was originally a Nissanan settlement. There are two stories about how it got its name. One is that it was the spot where the Donner Rescue Party met some of the Donner survivors who expressed their relief. The other story, and that's actually in some of the books, the other story which I believe, because I found it in a contemporaneous letter to the editor in a local paper, is that the original founders were far more prospecting in the area and they were not having much luck. They were about to give up and return back to Nevada City when one of them found gold and another one said, what a relief. So this is what the town looked like around the turn of the last century. I don't know if you can see it well. Right there is the cemetery. I was telling you about school houses. Don, I think I need some help. It's frozen. I'm not sure how that came around. Oh, there we go. Thank you. So that, that's a picture Chris Moore took a few years ago of the Relief Hill Schoolhouse. Is it still better? I don't know. There are still a few old buildings in Relief Hill. This is what it looked like at the turn of the last century. The problem is that, so you go out Relief Hill Road and about three or four miles from North Bloomfield, you'll come to a right hand turn. There's actually an old building right on the corner. What happened was, let me jump ahead and then I'll come back and answer your question. So another interesting thing, oh, this by the way, there's another picture Chris took. They were doing some restoration work on the cemetery. But that happened to me a few years ago because I haven't been able to get in there. And the reason for that is that the hydraulicking got so severe that it undermined many of the homes in the older part of the town. And so what happened was, and here's why, you can kind of see what the hydraulicking, there's all of them, it's about to slide into the dickens. So what they did is in the early part of the 20th century, they moved, a lot of the residents moved closer to Relief Hill Road, which is why there's still a few old buildings there. When we tried to go there a few years ago, there was a big chain across the road, so you can't drive down to the old town or the cemetery. And I tried to walk down there and I ran into a snarling dog. I think somebody's doing something down there that they probably shouldn't be doing. The Forest Service, which owns the property, has closed, they put the chain up because the road is washed out and they don't want anybody trying to get down there. I'm going to read you a quote from a history of the town. Husbands crazed with gold fever, watched the foundations from under their homes, and watched the houses fall into the river, while the lives and children ran from their homes, fleeing a certain death. That's why they moved closer to Relief Hill Road. And by the way, that was not only Relief Hill. Moore's Flak, a number of the other places up on the ridge, had this problem that eventually the miners would just be hydraulicking so close to the town that the homes would start to cave in. One of the most interesting to me places was Meadow Lake, which was founded as Summit City and changed its name when it was incorporated as a city. It's located in the high Sierra on the shores of Meadow Lake. And there is what it looked like in, well, 1866, I believe. At one point, it was Nevada County's third city, Truckee, not yet having been founded, let alone incorporated as a city. And the story of Meadow Lake is amazing. It's actually fascinating. It was the classic speculators bubble. It was Nevada County's South Sea bubble or Dutch Tulip bubble about 100 years or so later. Gold was discovered by its founder, Henry Hartley, who had been mining in that area for a few years. And after the word got out, thousands of people rushed in during the summer of 1865. The hype in the press was fantastic. For those of you who get the book, I've got some quotes in there as to what everybody thought of Meadow Lake. By 1866, the city had thousands of inhabitants. In fact, it may have been the largest city in Nevada County at one point during the summer of 1866. An organized town had been surveyed and laid out by speculators from Virginia City. A lot of the residents actually came that way because the mining in Virginia City area was starting to diminish. And the prices of lots grew astronomically into the thousands of dollars. What might have cost you $25 in 1965 cost you $2,500 in 1966. The town had stores, it had banks, it had its own newspaper, it had its mining exchange, if you can believe it or not, training in local stocks. But it imploded spectacularly. And after the winter of 1866, when people realized the reality of living at 7,300 feet, coupled with the fact that the gold, although present, was difficult to extract or to separate from the metals to which it was bound, they never really could solve that problem, though they kept trying, lots of chemists and people like that kept trying to come up with processes to unlock the Meadow Lake gold, it just never really happened. By 1867, it had become what I call a ghost city. And by 1872, the only person remaining there was the founder, Henry Hartley. Even his wife, I think, had left him by then. Hartley became known as the permit of Meadow Lake and sometimes, I've been waiting for this one, the ghost of Meadow Lake. You can see his grave in the Meadow Lake Cemetery, which is, again, very well maintained by a family. They live in the trucking area, but they have a summer place there. A summer Meadow Lake, by the way, is maybe three months. If you want to go there, I wouldn't advise trying it before maybe late July. But the racichines are very good. There are stewards for the Meadow Lake Cemetery. They do a great job of maintaining it. So, let's see, Granitville. Okay, Granitville is located about five miles east of North Bloomfield and the Malikov State Park on the North Bloomfield Granite Drill Road. It's one of the oldest towns in the county, and we found it in 1850 as Eureka, which is a state motto, which means I found it or I've got it. A very popular name at that point to commemorate California's admission to the Union in 1850. Now, because there was another town in Plumas County called Eureka, this one is oftentimes referred to as Eureka South until, of course, the post office arrived. In 1867, it was changed to Granitville to distinguish it from all the other Eurekas. But many of the names of the towns in the Meadow County are really post office names. I mean, if you wondered why we have the North San Juan and North Bloomfield, it's because the post office didn't want to confuse people with another San Juan or another Bloomfield, so they just added North. Why is a red dog called Red Dog? Well, the miners at one point wanted to call it Brooklyn, but the post office thought that it would be confused with another Brooklyn. Red Dog. This is Granitville, as you can see, in 1867. In Plum in the 1850s and early 60s. Though, interestingly, its population would vacillate between a thousand or so in the winter when there was water from mining and maybe a few hundred in the summer when there was none. That all changed a lot with the arrival in the mid-1850s, late-1850s of a number of water ditches. A hundred down could probably tell us exactly which ones and when. The largest one was the Memphis race. I want to say that it was 1857, but I'm not certain. And that was water from the middle of Yuba. Granitville was a center for both hydraulic and hard rock mining, and it was also a transportation hub located on kind of the principal route across the Hennis Pass, at least one of them. The town diminished as mining diminished. Presently, it has a sort of skidsoid existence. According to the last census, the 2020 census, it has one permanent resident. It had a lot more when we visited there a few years ago, but during the summer, lots of people come back to their homes, and it has a big Fourth of July parade, which is a sort of seminal event, and the town has its own website, so you can always keep track of what's happening. You saw what it looked like in 1867. This is what it looked like around the beginning of the 20th century. This is the Golden State Hotel, which is kind of the center of town. That's where everything happened. There's a hotel. I believe this must be a Fourth of July celebration, just judging from all of the flags that are around. You can see all the folks standing on the steps of the hotel, I guess, waiting for the parade. This is Granville in 1950s, I think probably 1952. Now, if you want to know why there was only one permanent resident now, this is what Granville looks like in winter. That's the Golden State Hotel. You don't see an awful lot of people standing on the steps. This is its website, so if you're interested in the trip to Granville, the last five miles are on a gravel road, but it's pretty well graded. I would suggest that you check out the website and see what's going on during the summer. It also has a cemetery, which is still accepting internments. These are the table of contents. These are a list of all the many towns and histories that are in the book. Some of you have asked about some of them. This is page two. If anybody sees a town that they're particularly interested in, I'm going to stop soon and take questions and you can ask me, maybe I'll be able to answer them. The last thing, before I close, I'll just remind you that there are copies of Ghost Towns and Exploring Nevada County available for sale. My publisher is sitting all the way back there. $10 for Ghost Towns, $20 for Exploring Nevada County. All the proceeds are for the benefit of the Landmarks Commission. She can also give you information about how to download the electronic petition. You can download free PDFs of some of this material, as well as other material from Ubed Press. Ubed now has its own publishing company. There's our website up there. And I think I will now stop for questions. Anybody have any questions? Do you speak for a few minutes about the town of Wolf? Wolf, certainly. Do you live there? Yeah. Well, Wolf name and Wolf Creek, the kind of synonymous, that's where it's got its name from, it did have some mining, but it originally, I shouldn't say originally, it really became more of an agricultural town than a mining center. The main thing about Wolf is, to me, is its post office. I don't have, I can't show you the slides of it, but the post office was established in 1888. One of the pioneering families was the Swedes, and I'm sure a lot of folks here know, Gary is still around in the area. Don, unfortunately, passed away a few years ago. Don was kind of our contact for an awful lot of this. In 1869, William Sweet emigrated from Cornwall, and they eventually established themselves in the area. And in 1888, when the post office was established, one of William's sons, John Sweet, became postmaster. And here's a picture of the post office. I have a better one, but I don't have it here to show you. What's interesting is that John operated the post office from the living room of his ranch house. And Don actually used to have the old post office boxes and so on in his living room. And the post office became sort of a community center and John Sweet served as postmaster until February of 1940, reportedly the longest serving U. S. postmaster. If you want to know more, get the book. Yes, sir. I'm going to give you an update on that. Don Sweet passed away a few years ago, and his property is where they moved the post office to where his driveway was many years ago. Probably to preserve it a little bit. And then shortly thereafter, the property was put up for sale. It never sold, but somebody came around and decided to move the post office for a year. They made a purchase and I don't know if they took it apart, board by board by board. Both of us were owners and went somewhere out of our bar. So I don't know if that building was ever reassembled anywhere, but it's kind of us. I mean, those of us who lived in there, we always looked at that post office and understood some of the history there. I wonder where the town and the original post office was. The Suites did help to build a monument to identify someone. We did that. It became a historical landmark. The building you're referring to, which was across the street from the original post office, that building is still there. It's owned by a family whose name escapes me at the moment, but if you're interested, I can get it for you. That's where the original. Okay, if you look at the monument, you're facing the building where John Sweenat had the original post office. The building that you're talking about, which was across the road, that small building, was actually the second post office. It was built in, let's see, I think 1956. Yeah. By WB Suite. When WB Suite took over the post office from John, he built that building and then eventually moved it to where you know it. And then it disintegrated. We made an effort to try to. . . In fact, at one point, we had a sort of a commitment, I think, from the Nevada Union High School group to try to sort of restore it. And I don't think anything ever happened, and I know it's not there anymore. I don't know what happened to it. Anybody else? Yes. I saw on the list the most notable Iceland. Yes. Do you know about that? Okay, well, Iceland is on the other side of the Sierra, and Iceland was an ice farming community. Actually, you know, apart from mining and logging, ice farming was a big industry in Nevada County, and the second half, really from around 1860-70, through, I think, 1923. So Iceland was an example of a place where they had a pond which would freeze over. I think Iceland's been a pond that was created for that purpose. And then during the winters, it was a seasonal occupation, there was always a town there, but during the winter, lots of people would come up there just to cut the ice. Now, the way it worked was this. The reason for the dates are ice farming became popular, if I could use that term, in the late 1860s when the Transcontinental Railroad arrived, because obviously they didn't need the ice in Iceland. There was a large ice farm in Blue 10. What they needed to do was get it on the railroad and ship it back east, and what they would do is produce, especially fruits, would be packed in ice to be trans-shipped back east. And they did that. Chicago Park was a perfect example. You've probably seen the packing shed, which is a historical landmark in Chicago Park. Everybody in the Peirdale, Chicago Park area would ship their fruit from Chicago Park. It would go on the narrow gauge to Colfax, be trans-shipped on the Transcontinental. They would stop in places like Iceland and Polaris and some of the other bocas. There were a number of those towns. They would ice the produce, the fruits, and so on down and ship them back east. That was discontinued in, I think, 1923 because. . . Refrigeration. Refrigeration. Refrigerating cars. Bernie? The apple orchards at Lowell Hill? Yes. I have clippings that they shipped apples to Russia. To Russia? Okay. Is that like calls to Newcastle? I know that your apples were enormous. There are reports, believe it or not, of apples. Lowell Hill is one of their number of areas in Nevada County, which were well known for their apples. One of them was Lowell Hill. I think Sweden was another one. And they reputed to a bit like a pound and a half an apple. What can I say? Any other questions? Okay. Well, thank you all very much.