21350 Almaden Road, San Jose 95120
New Almaden holds the story of a gold-rush era that goes beyond the well-told narrative of grizzled forty-niners panning for gold.
Santa Clara did not have the gold deposits of the interior, nor did it experience the economic boom of San Francisco. But just south of the city, significant deposits of mercury (also known as quicksilver) provided the foundation for mines that became globally significant. The first and largest mine was named New Almaden by its British- Mexican developers as a nod and challenge to the famous Almaden Mine in Spain (Almaden comes from the Arabic word for “metal”). Once developed, New Almaden’s became some of the most profitable mines of the nineteenth century, producing fortunes that rivaled those from the deep gold and silver reserves of the Sierra Nevada. The mercury extracted from New Almaden would also become a major source of pollution; it still lingers in the bay’s marine ecosystems.
Ohlone peoples had long known the hills that became New Almaden for its abundance of cinnabar, a red mineral used as a decorative pigment. Europeans preferred to vaporize the mineral to capture its mercury for use in amalgamating gold. Cinnabar mining was known to be dangerous, and the decorative red powder it produced was certainly toxic. But the personal and environmental toll of its creative uses pales in comparison to the impacts of the mass mining and production of mercury brought by the European and Anglo business interests at places like New Almaden.
In 1846 the British merchant house of Barron, Forbes and Company caught wind of the mining potential here. A full two years before the gold rush, they leased the mine from the Mexican government, which controlled the territory at that time. They planned to sell the valuable mercury to Spanish American precious metal miners along the Pacific Coast (who at the time were still reliant on expensive mercury shipped around the world from European mines). With access to investment capital, Barron, Forbes and Company quickly built an industrial-scale facility that by 1851 was producing nearly 50 percent of the world’s mercury. In the chaos of the US seizure of California, Barron and Forbes lost control of the mine to East Coast investors at the Quicksilver Mine Company—though the wily financiers maintained controlled access to the valuable mercury markets.
Industrial-scale nineteenth-century mining required human labor—lots of it. The new US mine owners initially tapped networks of Mexican and Chilean miners who had years of experience blasting and digging for metals across the Spanish-speaking Americas. They also hired Mexican Californians, many of whom were losing their land and livelihoods as North Americans seized territory. Conditions in the mines were brutal, and in the above-ground processing facilities, workers faced hot, toxic work. When conditions worsened under the new US owners, Mexican workers unleashed a series of five strikes in 1864 and 1865. The company responded with the classic strategy of reinforcing an already racially stratified labor environment: They hired Cornish miners (skilled miners from the traditional tin mining area of England) and Swedes for the higher-wage and often safer jobs of the mining and processing operation. Meanwhile, workers of Mexican heritage were given the more dangerous and lowest-paid work. In nearby mines, Chinese workers, who had been excluded from gold mining but were trained in similar labor from building the transcontinental railroads, were handed the lowest and frequently most-lethal jobs. As contemporary scholars of quicksilver mining have shown, this rigidly enforced racial hierarchy of labor strained worker solidarity across racial lines. This, paired with a system of subcontracting employment strategies, kept workers in mercury mines from effectively advocating for improved conditions, whether through strikes or other means.
The raw product from New Almaden sold for extraordinary profits to gold and silver mining operations in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where hydraulic mining had become the method of choice for ripping precious metals from the mountains. High-pressure water dislodged rocks, and the resulting slurry was mixed with mercury, creating a gold-mercury amalgam that could later be heated to release the gold and form bullion. The mass profits of New Almaden and nearby mines ground to a halt by the end of the nineteenth century due to a combination of financial crises, changes in production, and the replacement of mercury with synthesized cyanide. Many of the mines operated at a smaller scale for another fifty years or so, as mercury remained useful in thermometers, electronic switches, and industrial uses. The surviving labor force was absorbed into the agro-industrial and urbanizing workforce of the region. In 1976 Santa Clara County took over the mine sites and incorporated them to the Almaden Quicksilver County Park by the end of 1978.
Another legacy remains: The tons of mine tailings, leaching mercury, and other toxins that streamed into the waterways feeding the San Francisco Bay are still found today in the guts of fish and other aquatic organisms. The park now has the peculiar attribute of being both on the National Historic Registry and on the list of federal superfund sites. Its toxic legacy is hard to visualize from the graceful rolling hills sliding out of San Jose’s suburban sprawl.
You can enter the park from the parking lot at the south end of Almaden Road. The Almaden Quicksilver Mining Museum is just to the south of the parking lot. The park offers excellent hiking, but very little of the former mines is visible. If you take the English Camp trail, it will lead you to a few ramshackle structures left over from the white mining town at New Almaden.