Benjamin has a light school schedule and has been visiting us in Silicon Valley. The weekend he visited I decided we should check out the site of California's "quick silver" mining site, near San Jose. Quick silver is also known as mercury and I've always been warned it's very bad for you. What I didn't know is that quick silver was used to separate gold from ore, so was vital to the California Gold Rush. For a time, New Almaden (named after it's Spanish sister city Almaden) supplied all the quick silver for the West. The indigeneous tribes knew of the bright red cinnibar stone that contains quick silver, but used it for paint. It wasn't until 1824 that a Mexican, Secundino Robles, connected the cinnibar to the precious metal contained inside. And then it was a few more years until mining started.
A big beautiful mansion was built in 1854 for the mine manager and his family, but also to impress potential investors, who were wined and dined in this stately revival-style home. Today it contains a free museum (but please donate), open on weekends.
Half the house is a recreation of the original elegant interior, with soaring ceiling and colorful wall paper. The photos will clue you in to the elegance.
The other half of the house is devoted to the miners, who worked 10 hours a day six days a week deep underground. Each miner brought three candles with him, and a metal candleholder he would hammer into the rock. Two candles were to light his work space and one was to warm his lunch, carried in a metal tin. He was either moving wheelbarrels of cinnabar rocks (which are incredibly heavy - I tested this myself) or holding a pick or hammering the pick. Hours of hard labor. Then men went down a lift that held 5 men cheek to jowl in a little box. No nice elevator walls.
The mining manager encouraged the miners to marry, and so developed little towns up top full of families. There was a Spanish town, mostly Mexicans, and an English town, which contained a lot of miners from Cornwall, England. Chinese workers also were in the area, but did not work in the mines. They didn't have the EEOC back then; everything was separated by ethnicity. But having said that, there were also three churches, a company store, a community hall, a clinic and doctor, and schools. As mines went in the 1800s, it was a decent place to be.
Nearby is the New Almaden park, where you can see old mining equipment and try turning some gears.
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