– Time Travel Tuesday –
October 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!
– The back story –
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 was one of those.
The October Time Travel Tuesday excerpt comes from a more recent edition of the Amador Ledger Dispatch, just 18 years ago in the October 4, 2006 issue. Instead of an article, this time, we found an advertisement of land for sale in the Ione area that mentions a “130 year old vested silica sand & Kaolin Clay mine located in Northern Ca near Gold Country.”
The advertisement mentions a cave on the property, which is actually a method of clay mining that was used called the “room and pillar method”. With this method, a tunnel entry is created into the hillside and the clay is mined by deepening and expanding the tunnel into areas that form “rooms.” Between the “rooms” pillars of the clay are left intact to support the roof of the mine. With this method, there is a limited need for timber support as found other types of underground mining operations.
You can see in the images below a historical photo found in the Amador Archives of local miners in Ione using this room and pillard method. The photo below is the same property of what the tunnels look like today!
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