110° Magazine-East County Living

Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve is located on more than 5,000 acres of what is, perhaps, the most beautiful part of East County. It is one of 60 parks administered by the East Bay Regional Park District.

Traci Parent has been a long-time researcher of the interesting and dramatic history of this park, as well as a witness to the timeless natural beauty of those East County hills.

A Job Interpreting Paradise
Traci has been working at the park for almost 26 years, beginning as a summer intern in 1977. That fall she was hired as an interpreter in the first portion of the mines that was just then being opened up to the public.

Two years later, in September of 1979, Traci applied for the opening of Naturalist, eventually working her way up to the position of Supervising Naturalist, in charge of the Regional Parks Educational Program. Three naturalists conduct programs in the local parks; Traci is responsible for the Interpretive Programs, especially in Black Diamond Park.

When she first began working for the park, Tracy says that she had the opportunity to meet some of the people who actually worked in the coal mines. The old timers told her a lot of things about those old days. Some of them were awfully funny.

Sometimes a story from one of the old-timers would be both funny and awful at the same time. For example, Jack Lougher, the son of a former Somersville resident, retold a story his dad told him. When his dad was a boy, according to the story, he would catch the coal train down to the Delta, and spend a hot summer afternoon swimming in the river. After he finished his swim, Jack told Traci, his dad said that he would catch the train, riding one of the empty coal cars back through the canyon to Somersville.

The amusing and awful part of the story is that the little boy didn’t want his Mom to know he had been swimming in the river. He said that he would jump into one of the cisterns and rinse the river’s dirt off himself in the same water that served as a source for residents’ drinking and cooking water.

That story is over a century old, but the mental picture of that kid taking a bath in the water that other people would later drink and cook with still has the power to amuse and disgust at the same time.

A Beautiful and Turbulent Resting Place
Traci says that she has been interested in Rose Hill Cemetery, located at the top of a knob overlooking the old town of Somersville, for 26 years. Her first project as a summer intern was to conduct an inventory of the gravestones in the cemetery. She’s continues to this day to research the cemetery.

Cemeteries are always fascinating places to begin research on the distant past. Studying the Rose Hill gravesites provides tiny snapshots of the lives of people who are long gone. Traci has augmented her study of the people in the cemetery by such things as talking to survivors who remember the stories of the people buried there and by researching their obituaries in the newspapers.

One thing cemeteries reveal even to the most casual visitor is that in the old days people died from a lot of causes. In particular, children died of disease. By comparing dates on various tombstones, it is obvious that during some years disease and plague would sweep through the community like a sickle in the hand of some awful reaper, often including the youngest members of the community in its grim harvest.

Gone and Now
Often Forgotten
The cemetery was given the name Rose Hill long after the mines and towns were gone. After the town closed, the subsequent owner of the land gave the hill to his daughter, Emma Rose, who retained the land in her possession for many years. The name Rose Hill came from that woman.

The oldest markers currently in the cemetery date back to 1865. Research into the people interred in the cemetery is limited by the fact that over the years the property has been physically wracked by vandals. Heartless people have broken the grave markers and, in a number of cases, have actually stolen the gravestones.

Another problem with tracking the people buried in Rose Hill is that the Black Diamond company kept all its records in its corporate offices in San Francisco. The records remained in those offices until 1906 when the earthquake and subsequent fire swept much of old San Francisco into oblivion, including the official records of the Black Diamond Mines and Rose Hill Cemetery.

Trying to Call Back the Old Days
Traci Parent has been passionately pursuing a quest to reconstruct the records of the cemetery as completely as possible. Her research has been helped by the fact that she has in her possession eight separate lists, the earliest dating back to 1922. They were compiled by various individuals who, for one reason or another, made a record of the markers and inscriptions in the cemetery.
She has also studied old photographs of the grave sites and has spoken with a number of residents. Some of this work makes her feel like a detective trying to solve a mystery, compiling various pieces of “evidence,” and fitting the pieces together in appropriate ways.

Traci conducted her original research into the cemetery, in part, by interviewing local people who remembered stories about the residents who were buried there. When she first began studying the cemetery, Traci says that she met people with actual living memories of the old days and personally remembered some of the individuals interred there.

For example, one woman told of three small children, family members, who were buried long ago in the cemetery. The woman described a fence that had been erected around the children’s grave sites. All physical evidence of the fence and the grave sites themselves long ago passed into oblivion. However, the subsequent year a person came into the Black Diamond Park’s office with an old photograph of the cemetery that clearly showed that long-missing fence and helped them verify exactly where those three people were buried.

Reconstructing the Past One Story at a Time
Traci says that she continues to research the cemetery and the towns that once occupied the Black Diamond Mines area by talking with the descendants of those residents. Every two years the staff of the Park hosts a picnic for descendants of early residents. These occasions serve as times for sharing information with each other. During these events she often learns things she never knew before.

Technology has finally come to assist in the cemetery research. Traci says that a year ago the entire site was scanned with ground-penetrating radar to help locate graves, gravestones, pieces of fence, etc. She is still waiting for the final results of that survey.

Traci says that she also manages an orphan gravestone program. A few years ago they actually recovered Walter E. Clair’s tombstone. She knew about Walter from church records. He died after being kicked in the head by a horse when he was only five years old. She said they picked the stone up from the place where it had been exiled all these years, and were excited to get it back.

Traci says that she is always anxious to get any information or artifacts about the cemetery or the area. If anybody has anything that can be returned to the cemetery, Traci said that she maintains a no-questions-asked policy.

Black Diamond Mines
I spoke with mining superintendent, John Waters, who has been personally involved with the underground mines at the Black Diamond Regional Park since 1974. His efforts to reconstruct, even in a conceptual way, the hundreds of miles of mine shafts that were excavated on park property have been hampered by a lack of firsthand information from the people who did the original work.

A few months ago John was talking with somebody about this problem and was told that the man who had been in charge of the sand mines lived nearby. When he asked for contact information, he was told that the man had died the year before. John said that he really regretted that an opportunity to learn some important things had been within his grasp for nearly 30 years only to slip through his fingers at the last moment.

John said that he had spoken directly with only one person who had ever actually gone into one of the coal mines while it was still being worked. The man had been the son of one of the miners and told him that his dad had once taken him underground when he was still a young boy. Later, as a young man, he had visited one of the sand mines while it was being operated. That was the closest he ever came to a firsthand experience.

The man was the farmer who had been contracted in 1930 to build the road to the entrance to the Hazel Atlas Mine. He was elderly when John spoke with him, but he still vividly recalled what the mine had been like. He was able to verify with John that the general impression he had in that long-ago experience matched the impression he gets from the current reconstruction.

A Passion and a
Profession
John said that he has been interested in geology since living in a mining camp in Colorado while studying at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In his earliest classes he became fascinated by the intersection of geology and technology represented by underground mining. He says that studying geological formations and working out the underlying conceptual problems in dealing with the stresses involved, so that materials can be handled safely without bringing tons of rock down on your head, is an exciting and challenging proposition.

John said that working with underground mines requires Sherlock Holmes-like skills and becoming adept at discovering solutions to problems with a minimum number of clues. You have to be able to look at a few fracture lines here, a stressed area there, and figure out what’s going on in the enormous mass of surrounding material that you aren’t able to see. He is constantly fascinated by such challenges!

A World Underground
At Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve John and his crew are opening up an underground world in East County. He has been personally working on the project right from the beginning. Starting in 1974 he was part of the Planning and Design Department for parks all around the district. He worked on all parts of the infrastructure, such as hiking trails, parking lots, water systems, and all the other things that go into making up a park.

Two different kinds of mines were co-located on what is now the park property. An early series of coal mines were worked from the 1850s until the turn of the century, ultimately drilling and digging for hundreds of miles back into the huge Mount Diablo Coal Field.

During those five decades 4,000,000 tons of coal were removed by up to 900 workers in a dozen mines. Four million tons seems like a lot of coal, and it is when dug by hand. However, John says that in some modern underground coal mines, modern machines will produce more coal than that in a single year with just a few technicians sitting in front of operating panels controlling the equipment remotely.

Mining was resumed in the area beginning in the 1920s and proceeded until 1950, but during this period the miners were hauling out sand rather than coal. The sand was used in manufacturing processes, especially for creating glass jars.

Closing Down Before Opening Up
John said that the idea of opening the mines for visitors was discussed for several years before the first shovel full of dirt was moved. Even when they began working, John said that for several years their efforts were confined to conducting surface reclamation work.

Over the years, John and his team sealed about 200 openings to the surface to prevent people from going into the mines. A raw mine is a fascinating but dangerous place for untrained people to go wandering around in. For example, four young men died in 1981 in a tunnel belonging to a mine that is now part of the preserve. They walked into a cloud of carbon dioxide gas. The gas is odorless and colorless, so the men never suspected anything was wrong, but in 10 seconds they were down on the floor, and a few minutes later they were dead.

John is currently opening up another mine tunnel in which over three decades ago a man fell to his death after walking off a machinery drift into a retreat mined area. John said that, left to themselves, people are easily injured and killed in these restricted areas.

John described the never-ending task of surface reclamation in an unstable area like Black Diamond Mines. The mines include more than several hundred miles of tunnels and shafts. The huge scale of the excavated areas means that processes of erosion continually change the surface of the land and opening up accesses to excavated areas that might have been sealed a hundred years before.

Subsidence is also a big problem, as roofs of the mines collapse and the material settles into the old shafts and tunnels. Sometimes the subsidence extends all the way to the surface.

This year John and his crew will spend about $365,000 in simply insuring that the surface of the land remains safe. This amount is typical of the annual costs for this required maintenance. The mine shafts and tunnels were drilled through very fragile rock and, in many cases, were close to the surface, resulting in an ongoing series of problems.

In one instance, about three years ago, John said they discovered that a tunnel had only about two feet of rock between the roof of the mine and the surface. In cases like this they have to take steps to prevent collapse. In this particular case, they created bulkheads sealing off the more stable areas and filling the most dangerous parts with polyurethane fill and sealing the whole thing with concrete.

In one job they backfilled a stope (a mined out void) with over 4,000 cubic yards of compacted material extending down more than 150 feet vertically. It was an immense, yawning dangerous chasm before they filled it.

John believes that a number of people are alive today because of his ongoing efforts to keep this area safe. He said that no one has been killed or injured in a mine on any property under their jurisdiction.

Opening the Underground to Visitors
Once the decision was made to open the mines to visitors, John Waters was naturally tapped to head up the project, since he was the only one in the Parks Department with a background in geology.

Mine hazards take precedence over all the other work John and his staff does. However, a lot of the other stuff they’re doing is more interesting to people, and, he says, is frankly a lot more fun to work on themselves. The most interesting project right now is the museum that they’re in the process of developing right in one of the mines.

The current plans are the results of years of research and debate. There was initially a lot of discussion on how to interpret mines so that people could learn and understand. For a while they considered creating a mining village. Finally, one of the planners had the idea of actually taking people into the mines. John headed the team that conducted the feasibility study.

Executing the Plan
The Hazel Atlas Portal was the first place where visitors were provided with underground walking tours. The portal first opened to visitors in 1980. Flashlights were passed out and tours were guided 800 feet into the mine.

The tour remained open from about 1985 through 1990. During this time about 8,000 visitors per year passed through the portal to the underground mine. The exhibit closed in 1990. In 1995 the decision was made to resume work on the mine, reopen it to the public, and continue to develop the museum and other facilities according to the original plans.

The first thing John and his crew did for the reopening, at the request of the Naturalists, was to open the Visitors Center, which is the present Greathouse. This is a big tunnel but is a small center, with a capacity of about 100 people. John then turned his attention to the replica mine, and opened that to visitors a few months later.

The underground mine exhibit is the former site of a real mine containing replicas that reproduce the original conditions as closely as possible. Now about 25,000 people annually take the underground tour.

Building Learning into the Exhibit
John is planning to provide a far richer experience for mine visitors than a mere walk down a dark hole. He intends for people to learn information about mining and, especially, to learn what the experience of being a miner was like.

Two facilities are currently under development. One of these is an improved Visitors Center and the other is a giant immersion exhibit showing the conditions of an actual working mine.

An immersion exhibit is an educational depiction in which the visitor is inside the exhibit with no reference to the modern life. Visitors to Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts, for example, can discern no reference to the modern world. This is in contrast to Colombia Village, in the Gold Country, where automobiles drive past tourists eating ice cream cones.

The first step in the process of development was to open a section of the 20th Century Sand Mine, which involved returning a section of the mine to the condition it would have been in at the end of its operations, in 1945. A neighboring section was set aside that will eventually depict a tunnel, or gangway, from a coal mine as it would have appeared in 1865.

A period early in the coal-mining era was chosen and another late in the sand-mining era as a technique for illustrating the greatest contrast in the levels of technology and the working conditions between the two eras. The two parts are being recreated to the greatest possible levels of authenticity, using a hundred clues in order to reproduce the original lighting system, the compressed air systems, etc.

John is willing to go to amazing lengths in the mine exhibit in the name of authenticity. His goal is eventually to provide an underground experience that is indistinguishable from that of being in a mine in 1945.

Venues for Teaching
and Training
John manages a “special use program,” that continued even during those years when the mine was closed to the general public. Scientists and students regularly carry out learning and research projects in engineering and geology. They examine topics covering everything from plate tectonics to mine engineering.

For example, John regularly leads field trips for Civil Engineering undergraduate students who are enrolled in a course in engineering geology. The course provides a hands-on experience, which includes going underground at the Black Diamond facility and studying the engineering techniques used to develop the mine.

The last phase of development for the underground museum will be the recreation of an 1870s coal mine. This will actually be undertaken in a sand mine tunnel, since making an actual coal mine safe for visitors would be very expensive to develop and to maintain.

Two problems with using an actual coal mine is that the rock formations are much less stable and there is an ongoing problem with asphyxiate gasses. Also, the ceilings in all the coal mine passages are close to the floor, even in the main access tunnels.

Even though the exhibit will be in an old sand mine tunnel, the immersion experience will be indistinguishable from the real thing. The height of the tunnel itself will be an authentic five feet high. Visitors unable or unwilling to stoop down will be given the option of bypassing this section through a parallel tunnel with the full seven feet clearance.

Right now finishing touches are being made to a new electrical system for the museum. Wiring was hidden from the public, since the original mines, of course, had no such modern convenience.

The underground walking tour is currently expanding and improving. The length will be increased from 400 to 1,600 feet, and will cover every phase of the underground mining process. The entrance tunnel into the Greathouse Visitor Center will also be rebuilt as part of the program of expanding its capacity from 100 to 400 people.

Resources for Carrying out the Plan
Over $1,000,000 in available development funds should keep John and his crew busy for the next few years. The money will be used to double the number of visitors from 25,000 to about 50,000 per year. If the public likes what it sees and the number of visitors continues to increase, then expansion will continue into the future.

Right now John says he is finishing the paperwork for next year’s reclamation project. One of his complaints is that sitting at a desk is not very exciting. He wants to be down on his knees at the bottom of some shaft, figuring out the best way to keep the roof from falling in. He said he regrets not getting to do the fun work very much any more, but he still enjoys seeing the results of his efforts as projects continue to get completed. °