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CCHE project:
Bodie State Historic Park
Bodie State Historic Park, California’s
official Gold Rush ghost town, sits on a high Mono
County plain at the Nevada border. Some 250,000
visitors a year trek to the Bodie site to taste
life as it might have been 150 years ago.
According to state park officials, people from all
over the world become addicted to Bodie’s barren
“wild west” mystique and come back to Bodie again
and again.
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Wheaton
Hollis building in Bodie.
[Photo courtesy Terri Gessinger] |
Bodie’s desolate environment has weakened Bodie’s
few standing buildings. For over a century they have
endured not only the coldest winters in California
but also frequent earthquakes from nearby Mammoth
Mountain volcano. Though legislation requires
Bodie’s buildings remain in “arrested decay” (the
condition in which the
Department of Parks and Recreation received the
site in 1962), the buildings still need to be
stabilized - their roofs repaired, their floors and
foundations shored.
Thanks in part to a $275,000 grant from the
California Cultural and Historical Endowment (CCHE),
the buildings of this wilderness settlement will
survive. The
Sierra State Parks Foundation (SSPF), the
organization that provides operational funds to
maintain Sierra Districts State Parks including
Bodie, applied for, and won, the state grant that is
still being finalized. Since Bodie is both a
California historic landmark, and a National
historic site, the SSPF also received $275,000 in
matching funds through “Save America’s Treasures,” a
federal grant through the National Park Service.
Tom Miller Stable in Bodie.
[Photo courtesy Terri Gessinger]
Susan Fitzgerald Reichert, SSPF Executive Director,
explains that eight of Bodie’s buildings, a mule
barn, the Wheaton and Hollis Hotel, Standard Mine
Assay Office, Sam Leon Barber Shop, Bell Assay
Office, Tom Miller Stable and Ice House, Boone Store
and the Reddy Residence, will receive crucial
repairs with the grant funds. Because the
Federal Department of Interior requires that
preservation teams use traditional materials on
historic structures whenever possible, the Bodie
group, including an archeologist, will try to use
construction materials (such as mortar from Bodie)
that 19th century builders used.
Bodie’s history preserved
Author of
Bodie’s Gold
and SSPF Vice President, Marguerite
Sprague says although miners found small amounts
of gold on the mesa in 1859, Bodie didn’t boom to
life until 1878 when a collapsed 120-foot mine
shaft unearthed a dazzling gold vein to miners.
Bodie’s population of mostly men (only 10% were
women) shot to more than 8,000 including 300
Chinese residents. Soon 450 businesses, from
millinery shops to slaughterhouses to saloons,
were thriving in the barren landscape.
Bodie’s water level – only 250 feet below the
earth - ended Bodie’s boom. Miners went broke
paying to pump water out of the gold mines and
left, quickly.
Bell Assay office in Bodie.
[Photo courtesy Terri Gessinger]
There is still gold in Bodie, and probably lots of
it, but Bodie’s value is even greater
than its ore. Thanks to the
California Desert Protection Act of 1994 (which
includes the Bodie Protection Act) no entity can
mine this precious land that is home to California
history. Now with help from CCHE funding, the buildings
standing there will illustrate that history for many
years to come.
For more information about the
California Cultural and Historic Endowment,
please contact Executive Officer Diane Matsuda at
(916) 651-8768 or email at
dmatsuda@library.ca.gov.
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