Time Travel Tuesday – September 2024, From the Amador Ledger Archives
by Admin | Sep 20, 2024 | Time Travel
| – Time Travel Tuesday – September 2024, From the Amador Ledger Archives Go back in time with us as we dive into the Amador County newspaper archives from the late 1800’s and throughout the 1900’s and see what they were saying about the kaolin clay deposits here in the Ione area, and how they still relate to us and our operations today! |
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 | | Ione Main Street circa 1890. From the Amador County archives. |
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| Amador County is considered the heart of the Motherlode in California because of its ever-so-rich gold mining history where the precious commodity was discovered in abundance back in the gold rush era in the mid 1800’s. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to this area in hopes of striking rich. What also was discovered, were other high-value minerals, especially in the city of Ione. You guessed it, kaolin clay and silica sand were among those. |
| | Purebase thought it would be interesting to tie in our mineral history from hundreds of years ago and show our audience just how long these deposits have been utilized by locals and beyond for hundreds of years. Once a month, we will show you first-hand newspaper excerpts from the Amador Ledger newspaper that has been in existence since 1855 and is still fully functioning today, now called the Ledger Dispatch. |
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| This month’s Time Travel Tuesday excerpt comes from the September 3, 1915 issue of the Amador Ledger. The clipping title mentions there are “Big plans for Ione Development Company”, a property full of kaolin clay and sand in the works of being dried from a pond bed to be used in the “making of fine china” by erecting a pottery. |
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| Their plan was to “install a steam dryer to have day and night service to erect a pottery…thereby using material directly from the banks and saving the shipping to other factories.” Kaolin is highly sought out for pottery due to its plasticity and its fine particle size, making it ideal for shaping and molding ceramics. This is also the reason it is ideal for its use in concrete applications, as its workability is desirable. Other sought out properties of kaolin in concrete include its strength and durability, density, chemical inertness, its bright white color, its affordability, and its highly reactive pozzolanic activity. |
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 | | The front page of the September 3rd, 1915 issue of the Amador Ledger newspaper, where the above excerpt was clipped from. |
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