Tour C - South Bay Extractive Industries - Tour Guide

Alviso

We will begin with a tour of Alviso, now a part of San José, but previously an independent city which was the port for the Santa Clara Valley.  Remnants remain of the days when wheat, mercury from New Almaden and the salt harvested from the Bay were loaded aboard flat bottom scooners to be transported around the Bay and beyond.  We’ll take a look at the ruins of the Thomas Chew's Bayside Canning Co., the largest Chinese owned cannery in the US.

Salt Harvesting and Processing

Then we’ll take a journey to another very old industry, the harvesting of salt on San Francisco Bay.  Depending on your route of flight, you may have seen the multicolored evaporation ponds which cover much of the south part of the Bay. We’ll take a look at these from a vantage point in the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge in Fremont, where we may be able to see the historic (launched in 1936) dredge Mallard II at work building up the levee’s that form the ponds.  We’ll drive by the Cargill (former Leslie) salt processing operation with gleaming white piles of salt awaiting further processing and packaging.  Along the way we'll have a "virtual" process tour developed by Cargill on salt production. Mark Kurlansky's book, Salt, is an excellent discussion of the history of salt production around the world.  Work is underway to return over 16,000 acres, an area larger than Manhatten, of salt evaporation ponds back to a more natural state over a 50 year period.

New Almaden Mercury Mines

The mercury mines of the New Almaden area of San José were in production from the mid 1800's through the 1900's and produced an astounding amount of mercury, much of which was used in gold mining. The tour will include a visit to the New Almaden Quicksilver Mining Museum at Casa Grande, a van tour of the Mine Hill area with County Park Rangers, and a walking tour of the town of New Almaden and its historic buildings.

The mine complex included several smelters over the years. The van tour will stop at the ruins of a Gould rotary smelter. The smokestack from the older smelter is still standing, but was damaged in the 1987 Loma Prieta earthquake, and is off limits to visitors.

Mine Hill was also the home of a CCC Camp which is memorialized with a plaque. We'll stop by the entrances to several of the old mines (now sealed for safety reasons), and other historic industrial and mining sites.

The town of New Almaden along the banks of Los Alamitos Creek housed the leaders of the mining company, including the mine superintendent in the Casa Grande. Most of these are now private homes, but we'll walk around and imagine what this area was like in the mine's heyday.

Here's the NPS summary of the New Almaden. For a fictional account of life in New Almaden and other Western mining towns, the Pulitzer Prize winning, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner is an engrossing read.