Legacy Magazine

By Kevin Damstra

Fifty miles east of San Francisco, where the interior foothills of the Coast Range give way to the great Central Valley of California, two eras of California’s mining history come to life at Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve. Managed by the East Bay Regional Park District, this 6,000-acre park protects historic town sites, coal and sand mines, and a pioneer cemetery.

In the late 1800s, the coal mining town of Somerville was one of the largest towns in Contra Costa County, California. Photo courtesy Louis Stein collection.

From the 1860s through the turn of the 20th century, miners in the Mount Diablo Coal Field, once California’s largest coal-producing region, provided fuel for the young state’s growth. From the 1920s through the 1940s, another generation of miners removed over 188,000 tons of silica sand for glass production in Oakland, leaving behind a maze of approximately eight miles of massive underground rooms and supporting pillars. The park district is working to restore several aspects of these dynamic pieces of California’s past. For nearly 40 years, staff have focused on three areas of restoration: repairing the greatly vandalized pioneer Rose Hill Cemetery, opening the 1930s era Hazel-Atlas Silica Sand Mine for public tours, and maintaining the cultural landscape of the town sites through the management of vegetation that is non-native, though historically significant. Today, due to these restoration efforts, school groups and public visitors are able to explore the town sites, mines, and cemetery to discover clues to this nearly forgotten piece of history.

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Like a swarm of buzzing bees, the students disembark from their school bus. Even though most are from communities relatively close to the park, they have just entered a completely new world, and the questions begin with increasing urgency.

“Where are we? It seems like the middle of nowhere!”

“Is this really the bathroom?!”

“Why is there a cemetery up on that hill? Do we have to walk there?”

“Is that a COW?”

Slowly the naturalist begins to usher the students out of the parking lot and onto the trail to begin their exploration of the Somersville town site. During this journey of discovery, students will have the opportunity to learn about the area’s coal and silica- sand-mining history, including a tour of the 1930s-era Hazel-Atlas Mine. They will also investigate a former coal mining community and learn about the people who lived here. Although the students do not realize it, they will be interacting with three different restored historical settings today.

East Bay Regional Park District works to maintain the historic layout and vegetation of the Somersville town site, while allowing for modern park uses. Photo by Robert Kanagaki.

After a short hike to the Hazel-Atlas Mine, the group finds itself about to enter into an underground world. Before crossing the threshold, the naturalist explains that they will be exploring approximately 1,000 feet of the mine, and will have a chance to see what this mine could have looked like in the 1930s. Gradually, everyone’s eyes adjust to the illuminated sections of the mine. Wide-eyed, these students collect their hard hats and flashlights before following the naturalist further into the earth.

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The Hazel-Atlas Mining Museum grew out of a passion for and a desire to share the mines and their history with the public. In 1973, when the East Bay Regional Park District began acquiring the land that would become Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve, the district’s primary concern was to locate and close all the coal and sand mine openings on park property. For over 20 years, people from the area had come to the abandoned mines to explore, party, and even use them as a camping spot. Over the years conditions in the mines had deteriorated to the point that many had collapsed and some contained carbon dioxide gas. People were getting injured and even killed while exploring them.

Eventually, the idea was born to restore a portion of the Hazel-Atlas Mine into a representation of an underground silica sand mine from the 1930s. This would prove to be a daunting task. After the Hazel-Atlas Glass Company closed the sand mines in the 1940s, visitors to the site removed equipment and artifacts, leaving an empty maze of tunnels and pillars supporting the hillside above. Before the park district could use this mine as an interpretive site, it would need to build support timbers and work stations, locate and re-lay ore car tracks, and construct stairways and bridges to allow access through areas that had been mined. Staff and contractors, led by mine manager John Waters, would soon learn that this would be more complicated than they ever imagined.

Retired mine manager John Waters was the driving force behind restoring the Hazel-Atlas Mine and opening it for public tours. Photo courtesy EBRPD Archives.

The tunnels that riddled these hills presented many new challenges. First, the mine was mapped, structural safety was determined, and the location for the mining museum and underground visitor center was chosen. A plan was developed to routinely check structural integrity and air quality in the portions of the mine slated for public use. Finally, material accurate to a 1930s sand mining operation was acquired. Park district staff worked with state and federal mining offices to meet safety standards, and the restoration work began. In 1985, the Hazel-Atlas Mining Museum opened to the public for the first time. Over the years it has undergone renovations to continually meet safety standards and expand the tour route. Currently the museum averages 17,000 visitors annually.

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Close to 1,000 feet into this underground world, the students are staring up at the ceiling (called the “back” in a mine) 30 feet above their heads. The naturalist has already explained the mining techniques from the 1930s, even showing the students the type of machinery used. Now the group has to reverse direction and head out of the mine. Eventually, groups will be able to exit the mine through a second entrance one level down—alleviating the need to reverse direction. But today another class is waiting to come underground, and this group will continue their exploration on the surface.

Once outside, the naturalist explains that they will be leaving the sand-mining history behind and going further back in time—back to the late 19th century. This was the heyday of the Mount Diablo Coal Field. Miners who lived here dug hundreds of miles of workings while they removed four million tons of coal. The town of Somersville, in which the group is standing, filled the valley. The naturalist explains that during the late 19th century, nearly 1,000 people lived here, working, playing, worshiping, and dying. Somersville served as an important community in the Bay Area with schools, churches, community organizations, and even a baseball team.

Today, there are no buildings and no residents, but there are clues that help us catch a glimpse of this vanishing past. It is these clues that the naturalist has asked our students to keep an eye out for. “Look for things that seem out of place; things that look like nature didn’t put them here.”

As the group hikes down into the valley the students begin to identify things that look out of place.

“I see a picnic table.”

“What about that sign board over there?”

Then, as if at once, the students cry out, “That! That giant pile of dirt!” A waste rock pile from the coal mining days now sits directly in front of the group. These are the rocks that the coal miners had to dig through to get down to the coal. They didn’t want to transport the waste rock far, so it was dumped near the mine.

After a quick exploration of the waste rock pile to discover the ingredients that make up the surrounding hills, the group continues the search for clues. Now that they know what to look for, many are seeing more subtle clues: scattered bricks from an old path and broken pottery unearthed by recent rains. Occasionally some begin to notice the depressions in the ground where buildings once stood. Even the trees are clues about the town’s past. Many were brought by town residents to California from previous places they had lived: black locust came from the central and eastern United States, pepper trees from South America, and tree of heaven from China.

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Across the country in recent years, park managers have taken to eradicating non-native, invasive plants found in parks. The East Bay Regional Park District is no exception to this; many of our parks have impressive eradication programs. In contrast, Black Diamond Mines has chosen to protect and even restore non-native, historically significant plantings within the town sites. Rangers are drafting a plan to remove the invasive tree of heaven growing outside the town sites, while simultaneously managing its growth within the town site as a historically significant species. In rare cases, such as in the cemetery, replacement trees have been planted in the exact location where an ancestor tree has died in order to restore the cultural landscaping of the site.

The Somersville town site is maintained in a natural state, allowing modern park use such as hiking and bike riding while restoring and preserving clues to the past. District staff works hard to protect resources like the historic trees, waste rock piles, historic features, and archaeological artifacts. Former building locations and mine sites serve as picnic areas and railroad beds as trails. The result of this effort is a landscape that is natural, yet maintains aspects of the past. Visitors interact daily with the history of this place, often without even thinking about it.

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A half-mile from the waste rock pile, we find our young scholars trudging up to Rose Hill Cemetery. This 160-foot climb seems almost unbearable for some of the students, and it gives them pause to learn that the town’s school used to sit just down from the cemetery. As the group enters, the naturalist tells them about the people who are buried here. Of the nearly 250 individuals interred here, more than half are children, many of whom died from diseases. Due to their expense, gravestones were often shared, while some people were buried with only a wooden grave marker, and others had no marker at all.

Each student is given a scavenger hunt sheet, and they spread out across the cemetery, scouring the stones for information. “Who was born in another country? Who is the youngest person buried in the cemetery? What do you think the carved designs (motifs) symbolize?” As these students explore the cemetery, they begin to develop a more personal connection to the people who lived, toiled, and died here. What these students do not realize is the amount of work and passion it has taken to restore the cemetery to its present condition.

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Prior to the park district’s acquisition of the land in 1973, the trail leading up to Rose Hill Cemetery was an unpaved county road winding through cattle country. The barbed-wire fence surrounding the cemetery deteriorated over time, allowing cattle access to the site. It is believed that many of the gravestones were broken by cattle rubbing up against them. As residents moved out of the coal field, fewer people remained to keep an eye on the cemetery and it became a magnet for vandals. Many gravestones were broken and nearly half disappeared. To make matters worse, the soil in the cemetery was sterilized to eliminate the need for mowing. This removed any erosion control on the hillside, and after heavy rainfalls the mud began to bury gravestones and gravesites.

In an effort to safeguard the gravestones, some individuals began securing them to the ground with concrete. It was this act of preservation that saved many of the gravestones, giving the park district much of what it would use in the ongoing restoration work. This work has been twofold. First, research is being done to locate gravesite locations as well as the identities and family stories of those interred here. This historical research, headed by supervising naturalist Traci Parent, is nearing a milestone as the culmination of 30 years of research will soon be published under the title Rose Hill: A Comprehensive History of a Pioneer Cemetery in the Mount Diablo Coal Field, restoring knowledge about the cemetery and those who make it their final resting place.

The second cemetery restoration effort is led by park rangers who are working to repair and restore vandalized gravestones. This can be extremely difficult since some of the stones were broken into multiple pieces, with many of the pieces missing. Park Ranger Doug Fowler leads the efforts to restore these gravestones. Following nationally recognized conservation standards, he and his coworkers have developed various methods for repairing these broken stones. Currently nearly 30 gravestones have been restored and more are in the works.

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With broad smiles on their contemplative faces, the students load back onto the bus to begin the trip home. Their field trip is over, but they have begun what may become a lifelong journey of discovery, as they connect modern life with the past that surrounds them. As the bus pulls away, a smile grows across the naturalist’s face; he knows that he will see some of those students again. Maybe they will bring their families to visit the mine. Perhaps they will become future volunteers. There is always the possibility that someday some of these students might become naturalists themselves. The bus disappears from sight and the naturalist turns back to regard this nearly forgotten landscape. There is much left to do, because the more we selectively restore the historic setting of Black Diamond Mines, the more those visiting strive to connect with the past.

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Kevin Damstra is a Naturalist with East Bay Regional Park District based at Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve. He can be reached by email at kdamstra@ebparks.org.