HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF THE UPPER MOJAVE DESERT

Vol. 20 No. 8 October 2005
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OCTOBER MEETING: PHOTOGRAPHIC PRESERVATION AND IDENTIFICATION

Members of the Historical Society will have an opportunity to bring their old photographs to discuss with Erin Brasfield, an expert in photo preservation, at the October meeting. The meeting will take place on Tuesday, October 18, 2005, at 7:30 PM at the Maturango Museum.

Photographs are a unique and effective way of documenting the past. But they can also be fragile records, and often photographs are inadvertently damaged or destroyed. Additionally, the details of the subject of photographs can be misplaced or forgotten, and the information contained in them lost, perhaps forever. Erin's program will cover the basic information for preserving family and community photographs. She will discuss types of photographs, processing, storage, display, labeling, handling, identification, and environmental concerns. She may bring copies of photographs from Manzanar National Historic Site to share.

Members are welcome to bring some of their own photographs and discuss how they relate to the community and area history. Another aspect of the program will be how to date and localize photographs using clues like hairstyles, cars, and houses.

Erin Brasfield has just moved into a new position as Park Guide at the Manzanar NHS after a previous job at the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. She has a BA in History and a MA in History with a concentration in Public History from the University of Western Georgia. Previous professional experiences cover a variety of cultural resource documentation and interpretation/education work and projects.
Be sure to come to your Society's October meeting to help welcome Erin to California.

The HSUMD meets on the third Tuesday of the month. All are welcome to attend. For more information on this or future meetings call Historical Society President, Bill Nevins, at 375-4764.
Andrew Sound

NEW BOARD MEMBER

During the summer, Charlotte Paulsen and her husband moved out of the community so she resigned from the board of the Historical Society. Mary Ash was selected by the board to replace Charlotte and her appointment was confirmed at the September general meeting of the Society. Her biographical sketch will appear in the November newsletter.

Our expenses have been increasing in the past few years and regretfully we now find it necessary to increase our dues. Dues are our principal source of income. Accordingly, dues payments for calendar year 2006 will be increased to $20.00 for family memberships and to $30.00 for business memberships effectively immediately.

In prior years, members have been reminded of dues payments by notices appearing in this newsletter; we have not issued a formal billing statement. In practice, receipt of payments has been spread out over a period of several months with some members paying twice.

In mid-January, 2006, we will be issuing a billing statement to those who have not already paid their dues for CY 2006. Some members have been in the habit of paying before the new year begins and we encourage continuance of this practice since it will save billing costs. Payments received from new members and others after 1 July 2005 and before 5 October 2005 will be honored as full payments for CY 2006.
Fred Weals

WE'VE DISCONTINUED OUR PHONE SERVICE

As a cost reducing measure, we have discontinued the phone service to our office. If you want to reach us by phone, call any one of our board members using the listing on the back page of this newsletter, or send an e-mail.

The phone company considered our office a business, charging us for commercial phone service, a rate much higher than for a residential phone. Our main use of the phone line had been for internet access so we converted to a cable service at no additional cost.

MATURANGO JUNCTION

We will have a booth Saturday. October 18, at the Junction. Please visit us there

HISTORICAL ARTICLE

(Following is an article prepared by our great local historian member, John Di Pol, drawn from his library of history books. Ed).

THE LOST CEMENT MINE

What....another "lost mine" story? Well....not quite. Other stories, like "the Lost Gunsight" or "the Lost Goler", all had a known discoverer; a person, or persons who found the lode, gathered samples and staggered into camp, or town, but could not recall nor relocate the specific location. The "Lost Cement" was different; its origin was not a story, but a legend, or more accurately: legends. The most generally accepted of these, but never corroborated, is of two men, struggling up the eastern Sierra in 1857, in dire straits, found a ledge of reddish cement impregnated with nuggets and flakes of gold in the vicinity of the headwaters of the Owens River. They loaded up with heavy samples and continued west. One expired enroute, the other shucked the samples of the cement and continued to the mining camp of Millerton, where he collapsed and was unable to recall the specific location of his lode. Fragments of the gold-ladened cement were found in his pockets. A variation: both men (same men or from a different immigrant party?) arrived at the camp. One became very ill and continued to San Francisco to see a Dr. Randall. He paid for Randall's services by drawing a location map of the cement ledge. Randall then financed a search expedition in 1861.

The story of the Lost Cement is the aftermath of the legend: the exploration of the

eastern Sierra region by search parties in the 1860s, 1870s and beyond and the resultant findings of rich (and some not so rich) deposits of Dogtown, Mammoth City, Lundy Canyon, Bodie, and many others.

The story of the Lost Cement and its aftermath is preserved in the files of the San Francisco Daily Evening Post in an article written in 1879 by the paper's mining correspondent James W. A. Wright. The noted historian Richard E. Lingenfelter found the article while researching the paper's archives and in 1960 arranged to have it published by Dawson's Book Shop in a limited edition of 200 copies under the title The Cement Hunters. Next to impossible to easily find (the book, that is.)

But all is not lost. Genny Smith, author and publisher of guide books of the Mammoth Sierra and the Owens Valley plus others, has reprinted the Dawson edition, with new material consisting of three historic maps, additional notes and Mark Twain's full account of the Cement Mine. Smith's book was published in 1984 with the title The Lost Cement Mine which may still be available in selected book shops. It is a handsome book, softback but exceedingly well done, 94 pages with appendix.

Wright's article is a gold mine (no pun intended!!) of information of the life and timesin the Eastern Sierra of that era. He does a thorough job of describing the efforts of the cement hunters and goes into many facets of the development and settlement of the eastern Sierra with much information not usually found in the later popular histories. For example: The names Deadman Summit, Deadman Creek, Deadman Rest Area, all on Hwy 395. I'm sure many of you readers have passed through enroute to Carson City, Reno. Wright describes, in interesting detail, the origin of the appellation "Deadman."

Oh, Mark Twain. In his book Roughing It, published in 1872, he devotes the entire Chapter XXXVII to the "Whiteman Cement Mine." (Whiteman was an early cement hunter). Humorously written, classic Twain. Of course, it caused a spurt in cement hunters.

Lingenfelter says it best in his preface to the Dawson, 1960 edition: "No one ever found the 'Lost Cement' and with the turn of the century the searchers have grown fewer and fewer--and today there are nearly none. But all in all, the legend of the 'Lost Cement' has done well by many of those who sought it and it has done its part in the development of the eastern slope. Yet the Cement itself can never be found, for that is the way of 'lost mines' and that is what makes them lost."

Ref.: THE LOST CEMENT MINE, Genny Smith Ed., 1984