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Collection: Directories and Documents > Historical Clippings
Historical Clippings Book (HC-12) (520 pages)
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Page: of 520
The products of which could help carry a family over lean periods.
The only mention of farming in the Omega area is the following
from the Nevada Daily Gazette of April 24, 1869.
"John Clark has set out a mulberry plantation on Diamond Creek
for the purpose of embarking in the silk worm raising business’
Houses were nearly all one-room cabins, hurried affairs of rough
boards and battens and not intended for permanent dwellings. A low
wood-burning stove took up space at one end of the room, serving for
cooking, heating and melting buckets of snow in winter for domestic
water supply. The oven, when not in use for baking the weekly supply
of bread was filled with green or wet wood, drying, to feed the fire.
Back of the stove was a stack of wood waiting it's turn to go into the
oven. A coal 9il(kerosene) lamp, on an oil skin covered, rough board
table, three or four chairs or benches, a bed or two, was just about
the limit of furniture.
In the early years of Omega the uncertainty of the seasons in the
California mountains, was very confusing to the ndwty initiated miners.
A letter writer, in the fall of the 1850's, complains:
"The miners here have not laid in their wintr supplies, the merchants have but little stock on hand, there is not a pound of flour or
butter to be bought in Omega. The storm found most of the people with
empty wood sheds and to get wood out of a dnow bank and then to make a
fire of the same is of all things tring to a man's patience’
Currency was always very scarce in Omega, “and small change none*
Only the post office insisted on coin for services. In the saloons it
was"H pinch from your poke" for each drink and the use of gold scales
in the stores. This shortage was partly overcome by a credit system
called Tickillicleanup(Tick until I clean up).
In 1878 the South Yuba Canal Company stretched a telephone line
184 miles long, covering all points on their ditch system, including
Omega. Being a private line, no connections could be made over it to
other than ditch stations. In January 1895 the town was hooked up to
the outer world with a line four-miles long to Towle Bros. saw-mill at
Steep Hollow. Here messages could be switched to the railroad line
running to Dutch Flat.
In mostbf it's years Omega had a brass band, a banjo club, baseball team, a Masonic Lodge, a Sonsof fPemperance Lodge and a weekly
dancing school. In winter the usual card games in a mining camp went
on around-the-clock, in the saloons. As late as 1860 fights to be put
on between a dog and a bear cub were advertised to take place.
The only mention of a church is from a copy of an old Catholic Register: "The Omega Church is attended every three-months’ Services were
most likely held in the school house or at some private home, as there
is no mention of a church in the town by the Nevada City newspapers of
that time.
In 1858 Omega, nicknamed Delirium Tremens, with whiskey in the
saloons at 12% cents a glasg or one-dollar a gallon--bring your own jug-—
had the dubious honor of being the first town in thg Washington Mining
District to take care of it's inebriated citizens, when an old log house
was converted into a jail.
Medical attention was provided by a doctor from Washington, when
one was located there, who would hike over the trail from that town.
Page 3.