Randsburg

Written by George Gilbert Lynch

Historic Randsburg is known as the last living ghost town in southern California. This quiet, old, eastern Kern mining town still has many weathered, original buildings and houses scattered along its quarter-mile-long main street. In the last few years, this once prosperous mining town has become a popular spot for “weekend gold hunters” and tourists who want to visit a real gold mining boom town of the 1890s. A town with a story that seems to come right out of an old west novel.

It was the year 1891 and John Singleton, an expert carpenter and millwright, had just finished building a beautiful Victorian-style house at 17th and H streets in downtown Bakersfield. It was the home of the William A. Howell family and is now located in Pioneer Village at the Kern County Museum. Upon completing this construction job, Singleton’s latent gold fever began to resurface.

Bankers, merchants, farmers, sheriffs, and even preachers were subject to being affected by the gold bug, so one could hardly blame Singleton.

The “vacations” they planned spur-of-the-moment were triggered by hearing of a good “find” in some far-away desert canyon by a friend of a friend and it was expedient to file as many claims near the bonanza as possible to share in the golden wealth. Mantels and window sills of most homes were decorated with rows of quartz gold ore that were collected on excursions in the quest of the elusive metal.

A friend of John Singleton, Fred M. Mooers, a previous columnist for a Brooklyn, New York newspaper, caught gold fever and headed to California. Mooers had found a small amount of gold dust at the base of a high desert mountain in 1893 while traveling west. It was now 1895 and Mooers and Singleton had teamed up in their search for gold, dry-washing the sands of eastern Kern County’s Goller Gulch area, which was about 15 miles north of the mountain at which Mooers had previously found “color.”

The pair wasn’t finding enough gold in the dry sands of Goller Gulch to even buy their food and it appeared they might have to abandon their vacation and return to civilization in order to replenish the “grubstake.”

As luck would have it, they were befriended by Charles Burcham, who owned a team and wagon with which he was supplying water and merchandise to the miners in that secluded area. Burcham also had gold fever, had sold his cattle ranch in San Bernardino, and left his mercantile store in his wife’s care while he pursued the elusive desert gold. Singleton and Mooers had a new partner with a wagon and enough provisions to extend their search for a while. One night, as they sat around the campfire, Mooers mentioned his finding “color” two years earlier at that certain mountain 15 miles to the south, and the three agreed to prospect that mountain the next morning because Goller Gulch was slim pickin’s.

The next morning, they loaded all their gear into the wagon and informed the nearby miners they were fed up and going back to town, hoping none would follow them to the mountain to the south.

Upon arriving at the base of the mountain, Mooers stayed near the wagon, prospecting the sands of a gully, while Singleton and Burcham prospected the mountainside. About halfway up the mountain, Singleton inspected a large out-cropping of ore and exclaimed to Burcham, “This quartz is loaded with gold, partner. We are rich.” The famous Yellow Aster Mine had been discovered.

At that time, they didn’t realize how rich they were. They had found a whole mountain range of rich gold ore. The last big gold rush in Kern County had begun. In a short while, hundreds of claims had been staked out in a 50-square-mile area by an army of fortune seekers. The area was named Rand Mining District after the rich gold fields of the Rand Mountains of South Africa, and the settlement was named Randsburg. Hundreds of tents, caves, and shacks dotted the red-hued landscape as the thousands dug into the mountains following the gold ledges.

By 1897, so much gold ore began coming from the three partner’s Yellow Aster Mine, a railroad was built from Kramer (a station on the Santa Fe Railroad’s main line 28 miles to the south), to Johannesburg, the railroad’s terminal one mile east of Randsburg. This railroad hauled the gold ore from all the area mines to a mill in Barstow, where it was processed. No sooner had the railroad been established than the Yellow Aster Mine built a 130-stamp mill to process their own ore, which saved the shipping and milling fees. The smaller mines in the area supported the railroad until 1933, when the Great Depression and reduced mining activity doomed the railroad, and it was abandoned in 1934.

The amazing Rand Mountains never seemed to stop producing wealth of one kind or another. When gold production was dwindling in 1917, World War I sparked a great demand for tungsten, a metal used in hardening steel. England and Germany began importing thousands of tons of the ore from the Atolia area of the Rand Mountains. Many new mines were discovered and a “tungsten rush” took place for a few years. Another tungsten boom also occurred when World War II began in Europe in the 1930s.

In 1919, a big silver rush began when Kern County sheriff John Kelly developed the Kelly Mine near Randsburg. This silver mine produced millions of dollars until 1928, after which the price paid for silver became too low to continue operation.

A few mines continued to produce a small amount of gold until the United States entered World War II and a wartime law halted all gold mining. A few tungsten mines continued production for the war effort but with war’s end, old Randsburg became a living ghost town.

With a population of only a few dozen inhabitants through the 1950s to the mid-’80s, the quiet little community was all but forgotten—a couple of businesses and a great little museum being the only attractions of the isolated town. Then, in 1986, a large-scale gold mining project began at Randsburg’s Yellow Aster Mine by the Glamis Gold Company. The escalating price of gold had spurred another gold boom on the old Rand Mountains.

The heap leach method of mining gold was utilized over a period of 17 years and extracted hundreds of millions in gold from the “mountain of gold.” The operation was concluded in 2003, not due to lack of recoverable gold, but because mining regulations became so stringent, it was unprofitable to continue. Local residents of Randsburg claim the Rand Mountains still hold more gold than has been taken out. With gold prices currently at $1,200 an ounce, another mining boom is sure to take place in Randsburg in the future.

Today’s Randsburg has three or four hundred residents and the main street businesses are a beehive of activity, especially on weekends, when scores of tourists visit the many antique and second-hand stores and everyone visits the interesting Randsburg Museum where hundreds of artifacts, photographs, and ancient mining machines are on display inside the building and scattered around the outdoor display area.

Every September, the little community unites to put on a bang-up, one day, old west jamboree where the main street is filled with vendors of all types and the boomtown days live again with the street gun duals and old mining town atmosphere.

Article appeared in our 27-2 Issue - June 2010