Sumpter, Oregon the old Gold
Town
June 17, 2007.
We are staying at Mountain View Travel Park in Baker
City, Oregon. $24.79 FHU, shade and a nice enough RV-Park.
It must be a former KOA (Keep On Adding) since they charge extra for
everything, $2 extra for wifi, $2 extra for larger sites, you get
the picture Keep On Adding.
Site of the Bank of Sumpter, Oregon
Bank of Sumpter, Oregon
There it is folks --- what is left of the Sumpter Bank.
The mining camp of Sumpter,
Oregon was named for Fort Sumter, South Carolina, by five
ex-Confederate soldiers who discovered gold near the town in 1862.
The Sumpter Valley Railroad reached Sumpter in 1896 and the town began
to boom. At one time it was home to 3,500 people. On August 13, 1917
the dreaded fate of may mining towns occurred, fire raged through
the town and destroyed eleven city blocks including nine brick buildings.
The fire and dwindling returns from gold mining ended the boom. Today
Sumpter is not much more than a ghost town.
Actually, there is more to the story of naming Sumpter. It was the
United States Post Office that had a hand in it finally being named
Sumpter.
It seems that the ex-Confederate soldiers wanted to name it Fort Sumter.
The Post Office would not accept a name with Fort in it if it wasn't
really a fort. Then the soldiers submitted Sumter but again the Post
Office would not accept it (I can't recall what the reason was). Finally
the old Confederate soldiers submitted Sumpter
(with a P this time) and the post office accepted Sumpter. Now you
know the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say.
Sumpter
Valley Steam train tracks & Station
These are tracks for the Sumpter
Valley Steam train that operates on weekends and holidays
during the summer. We did not take the train ride but did see it chugging
through the valley with a load of tourist.
Beautiful pastures are dotted throughout Sumpter
Valley.
When
we located the old gold dredge we also found the Sumpter Valley Railroad
station.
Next to each other is this monstrous dredge sitting idle and the
Station for the Sumpter Valley Railroad.
For about 100 years, the glint of gold drew many thousands of people
to this valley. Sumpter became a boom town almost overnight. There
were more than 90 businesses -newspapers, stagecoach lines, blacksmiths
hotels, brothels, saw mills, churches, assayers, banks, schools and
more including parades on the Fourth of July.
At times streets were hot and dusty. Sometimes they were chest-deep
in snow. But the bustling economy seemed to produce most of what the
4,000 residents wanted. At least it did until the town burned down
and it got too expensive to mine for what gold remained.
This gold dredge dug
up thousands of acres of Sumpter
Valley during the 19-years it operated here. It extracted
about 9-tons of gold (about one cubic yard). At current gold prices
of say $350 an ounce that would be 9-tons of gold worth, by my calculations,
$100,800,000.
A gold dredge is basically
a giant shovel mounted on the deck of a boat. Instead of one bucket,
this dredge had 72, each weighing a ton (as much as my Saturn automobile).
The assembly of buckets was called the digging ladder.
This dredge was built on dry land (for about $300,000) and launched
like a boat into a hand-dug pit filled with water. The digging ladder
could scoop out 25 buckets per-minute of earth, rock and minerals
as the dredge chewed its way forward, floating on the pond it created.
The excavated material was transported up the ladder and dumped into
a series of screens inside the dredge.
Massive amounts of electricity were needed to operate a dredge. Long
before any of the surrounding farms got electricity, a 12 mile, 23,000
volt line was strung to the dredge overland from a hydroelectric power
plant.
Very few people had access to the gold, at least officially. Though
there are tales of embezzlement, the security of the gold became tighter
as the years went by. After separating the gold from the mercury,
it was poured into bricks for shipment to the US Treasury.
Mike & Joyce Hendrix
Mike
& Joyce Hendrix who we are
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