Donald Wearn Evans

The first thing that I want to say about my father is that he was more of an observer rather than a participant in life.  My fondest memories of and about him centered on the family stories about his childhood growing up in Nevada City.

We called them the “Cousin Jack” stories.  Cousin Jacks and Jennies were the Welsh and Cornish mining people that came to America and other parts of the world to work the deep shaft mines of the later 19th century.  My father’s family came from other parts of the United Kingdom, as well.

My fathers maternal grandmother, Jane Donald Huddleston Wearn (who you will hear more about) is reputed to have come from the Scottish/English border country of Northumberland in north eastern England

Northumberland is where Great Grandmother Wearn emigrated from.

Donald was her maiden name, so this is likely to be Low Country Scottish.  Keep in mind, too, that the English-Scottish border moved from time to time, so there probably was a mixing of English and Scottish people.

The Cousin Jack stories were an oral history of my father’s childhood growing up in Nevada City.  They ranged from what went on around the house to what went on in the community, and especially how the mines were operated.

The most important theme, however, centered around key family members, especially Grama Wearn, the matriarch of his mother’s side of the family.

Perhaps the best place to start discussing my father is to provide some background about Nevada City, his birthplace and home town.

A Brief History of Nevada City

Nevada City in 1856

Today, Nevada City has a population of just 2,800 but it wasn't always so peaceful. In 1850, there were 10,000 boisterous souls living here, and in the general election of 1856, the 2,082 ballots cast in Nevada City were exceeded in the state only by Sacramento and San Francisco.

"People visiting here for the first time are struck by the old mining town appearance," says Edwin Tyson, curator of the Nevada County Historical Society's Searls Library, located near the County Courthouse.

"Preservation of the town's historic appearance is important to the people of Nevada City," Tyson said. The town's off-the-beaten-path location, on state highways 49 and 20, but away from the busy interstate highway system, has allowed Nevada City to retain its homespun charm.

Realizing the value of preserving city history for future generations, Tyson and other citizens were successful in 1985 in having the entire downtown area registered as a national historic landmark.

The historic district, including 93 buildings, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In addition, eight individual buildings are listed on the register and the town also contains 18 state and local landmarks.

There is even a plaque in the National Hotel parking lot which is dedicated to the ladies of the evening and their unique contributions to the Gold Rush. The plaque was placed by the fun-loving fraternity of E Clampus Vitus.

As the county seat, Nevada City served for many years as the commercial, governmental and professional center of Nevada County. Since the turn of the century, however, it has gradually relinquished its domination of the retail trade to nearby Grass Valley and has in recent decades actively developed its tourism industry.

Nevada City developed along the banks of Deer Creek in 1849. Early reports told of miners who pulled a pound of paydirt a day from gold deposits along the creek. The town was first known as Deer Creek Dry Diggins and later as Caldwell's Upper Store. Several major fires in the 1850s and early 1860s convinced the townspeople to use more brick in rebuilding their structures.

Civic leaders named the town Nevada, Spanish for "snow-covered," in 1850 and the next year the newly-incorporated city became the Nevada County seat. The town's name was later changed to Nevada City after its title was borrowed by the state to the east.

Nevada City has had its share of firsts and famous people. Former U.S. President Herbert Hoover lived and worked here as a gold miner in his younger days. Three former U.S. senators, George Hearst, A. A. Sargent and William Morris Stewart, lived in Nevada City.

The consolidation of water companies that formed the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. occurred here and PG&E's first general office was located in the National Hotel. The area boasts several inventions in the fields of mining, water and electricity.

It was in May, 1853, that Professor Henry Durant, formerly of Yale University, met with a committee in Nevada City to formulate plans for an academy that was incorporated two years later as the College of California. It would later become the University of California, Berkeley.

While many California gold rush towns have disappeared into the pages of history, Nevada City has rebounded time and again to emerge as a unique blend of yesterday and today. Nevada City's current cultural and economic renaissance is again proof of the town's indomitable spirit.

"After more than a century of pioneer heritage," says Edwin Tyson, "Nevada City remains the most complete gold town in California. It is a genuine small town and a living museum."

Story from Nevada City Chamber of Commerce website, May, 2006.

My paternal grandfather was named Jacob Bumgardner.  He, and my paternal grandmother, Flourence,  appear to have come from Ohio.  Mr. Bumgardner died, according to my father, when His maternal grand-mother, Grandma Wearn, as mentioned earlier, was from Northumberland, England.  Her second husband, John Wearn, was, according to my father, from Australia.

It appears that all of these relatives came to Nevada City because of the mining industry.

With this brief background in mind, here are some of the stories that I wish to share with you.

At Home on Long Street

I never saw the Nevada City house that my father was born in.  When he was very small, his family moved into a house on Long Street.

As I remember the house growing up, it was always in a glorious state of disrepair.  The house sat back about fifty feet from the street, and was essentially invisible because of an overgrown hedge that bordered the front of the property.  Situated in the center of this row of brambles was a narrow opening that led to the house.

The path was marked by a crumbling sidewalk that had suffered too many snowy winters.  It led up to the stairs leading up to a covered front porch that was essentially at the second floor level.  Nobody ever used the front door, so you followed the path that lead to the left side of the house, and then on to the back to a little porch fronting the kitchen door.  This entry was at ground level as the property gently sloped upward as you moved to the back.

Like the sidewalk, the walls of the house had also suffered too many winters.  What was left of the creamy paint on the clapboard exterior walls, formed a scabby texture similar to some old person’s skin of the same vintage.

If you looked carefully, you could see that the house leaned and sagged on its wooden pier and post foundation.  It always gave me a scary feeling that the place was going to keel over and crush me; it could only fall one way, and that was on me regardless as to where I stood.

When you entered through the old fashioned screen door into the kitchen, you were immediately confronted with the moldy smell of something very old.  This permeated throughout the whole house.  It, frankly, was an unpleasant smell that reminded me of something septic, organic, an olfactory layer cake of past meals and people.

The kitchen was populated with a marvelous old wood burning stove with its sheet metal chimney reaching up and piercing the outside wall.  As an acknowledgement of the more recent past, an old gas hot water heater stood in the corner, and an electric stove sat nearby.  The lower portions of the walls were covered by bead board wainscoting and the upper portions by pealing wallpaper.

What I always thought as so interesting was the fact that the sink was located off in a little side room adjoining the kitchen.  It had running City water, but I also had an old hand pump that still provided potable water.

The other interesting plumbing feature was the toilet in the bathroom that adjoined one side of the kitchen.  In my father’s childhood the only indoor plumbing consisted of the hand pump located at the sink.  The other plumbing consisted of a privy or out house located at the back of the property.  No clues remain concerning its location, but it’s likely that the back yard is still rich in nutrients.

The later indoor toilet is what one would have to call an early model.  The water tank is a porcelain cistern hanging over the toilet near the ceiling.  The water comes down a long pipe to the toilet bowl, itself.  The most amusing component is a long chain that hangs down from the tank.  You can sit on the toilet and pull the chain to flush just like you were blasting a steam whistle on a locomotive.  What fun for an anally retentive little boy like me.  Toot toot.

Also adjoining the kitchen in another direction was the dining room.  The central feature was a pedestal based round dining table surrounded by a few high backed wooden chairs.  My father always said that he had been given the table by his mother, but he never seemed anxious to claim it, so there it still sat.

The perimeter of the room was filled with an old broken down couch, a couple of equally dilapidated stuffed chairs and an old china cabinet filled with remnants of various unmatched dish sets, and inexpensive knickknacks.

The remaining feature was an oil burning, free standing stove that spouted a sheet metal chimney that reached up to an outlet in the wall.  Obviously, the stove was not original to the house.  It probably had been bought at Alpha Hardware where my Aunt Grace had worked in the 1930’s and ’40’s.

The room formed a backdrop to all of these pieces.  It was a typical high ceiling Victorian era common room with long high windows and yards of multi-layered, peeling wallpaper.  Everything had the look, feel, and smell of an old attic rather than a living area.

The last room at the front of the house was the parlor.  It always remained dark and unused with its discarded fireplace, more lumpy couches and chairs, and a sense of abandonment.

The other rooms in the house consisted of several bedrooms, at least one of which had been added on as an afterthought to accommodate a growing family.  These rooms always seemed to be to be in a state of confusion.  Beds were never made.  Suitcases and boxes of clothes lay about letting one know that the occupants were only in temporary residence.

As mentioned, earlier, the lot sloped up towards the back.  This created a basement area near the front of the house which was accessed through a shed like door at the side of the house.  When we visited the house, my father and I would invariably go into this storage area to paw through a treasure trove of junk.  Inside there was a small work bench filled with the normal remains of repair projects; old paint cans, rusty tools, and garden equipment.  Most of the area contained heaps of old lawn furniture, broken household furniture, and an ample layer of mold and dust.

What my father was after, however, was his baby picture of himself seated in a porcelain bowl wearing his birthday suit.  After some searching, he would find it and root it out from under a pile of discarded junk.  Here he was looking like an infant simpleton staring back at us.  We always had a hardy laugh over this picture.  It was one way that I learned that my father had a sense of humor.  He could laugh at himself.

My father, Donald Wearn Evans.  This photo resided in the basement of my father’s childhood home for many years.  It was rescued  in the 1950’s. I had it cleaned up and reframed in the 1980’s.

Apparently, roving salesmen would make house calls to get families to purchase pictures of their children.  This picture is a photograph that has been retouched with tints to give the appearance of a color photo.  I’m sure that this was a common practice in the early 1,900’s.

After a number of years, we rescued the picture, and it sat in our basement or garage for many more years.  When I had my own home, I was able to have the picture reframed and cleaned.  It’s currently hung in our guest bedroom.  I hope it will bring cheer to many more of my father’s decedents

Growing up in Auburn, I and my parents usually went up to Nevada City and the house on Long Street on the Fourth of July.  This was the time of year when my father’s sister Grace and her family came up from Stockton to get out of the summer heat.

Aunt Grace presided over a cornacopia of food laid out on the dining room table.  People started coming in early in the morning and paraded through for most of the day.  Some were old Nevada City friends of my Aunt’s family.  Others were friends of my cousins Donaldine and Jackie, who went to school in Nevada City.  Sometimes my Uncle Jack, Emma and my cousin Nancy would be there, too.

Midday was the time for the annual Fourth of July parade which alternated between Nevada City and Grass Valley.  In many ways, this was the highlight of the year because the parade brought out not only locals, but also out of town folks like ourselves to swell the population if only for a day or two.

It might be useful to note that during the 1920’s through the 1950’s, Grass Valley and Nevada City were almost economically like Appalachian mining towns.  With the decline of the mining industry, there was little activity with the exception of a small, dwindling timber industry.  I always felt depressed going up there where there was a drabness in the air.  The Fourth of July celebration could momentarily distract everyone from this reality.

I guess that all parades have their own character, but this parade had its own particularities.  In addition to the high school marching band, the open cars featuring local “dignitaries,” and a few scraggly floats, there fleets of fire engines, not only from the Grass Valley and Nevada City local volunteer departments, but also from little mountain fire districts scattered about.  Additionally, there seemed to be an unending supply of logging trucks, with air horns blasting.

The mandatory “clown” event was always provided by the E Clampus Vitus lodge, the Clampers, who rode an old fire truck that shrieked its siren and hosed down the crowds with its fire hose to the delight of children of all ages.

The last several parades that I and my family attended had “Bud Man,” a Budwiser beer character as the grand marshal.  How fitting for Nevada City, a little town with 2,600 people and 27 saloons.

These last Fourth of July visits to Nevada City occurred between my mother’s death in 1981 and my father’s in 1986.  These were opportunities for my father to visit his favorite sister, Grace.  He always said that he loved Grace because she would eat his potatoes at dinnertime that he didn’t like to finish.  My Aunt Grace had lost her husband, Albert by this time, so it was important that they had each other.

The Cousin Jack Stories

I’ve made several earlier references to the Cousin Jacks and Jennys.

A little more needs to be said in explanation.  When the California Gold and Nevada Silver Rushes began, mining primarily consisted of harvesting the metals from rivers and streams through panning.

When the “low fruit” was no longer available, miners organized into larger groups and companies to engage in placer mining where water was concentrated through huge water cannons called monitors to wash down hillsides into sluce boxes where the heavier metal could be separated from the rest of the runoff.

This approach was short lived because the silt from placer mining clogged the rivers flowing through the Sacramento Valley, thus creating major problems for the agricultural interests.  The farm lobby was successful in getting the California Legislature to put an end to placer mining.

It was about to end anyway because the easy ore had been recovered.  By the 1880’s it was time to resort to the technology of hard rock, deep shaft mining, both in the Sierra and in Nevada around Virginia and Silver Cities.

You might say that this was an earlier version of the Silicon Valley boom of one hundred years later.  Large amounts and capital and skilled workers were needed to dig the deep shaft mines, extract the ore, and to extract the gold and silver from the ore.

For the most part, the gold rush 49’ers weren’t skilled enough for what was required.  Mine owners had to look elsewhere for experienced miners, and they found them in the tin and coal mines of Cornwall, Wales, and England.

The saying goes that a mine owner asked one of his miners if there were more relatives in the old country who could come to work in his mine.  The miner answered, “Yes, I have a cousin Jack.”  So, the name stuck.

I suppose that some geological work was required to decide where to sink main shafts and where to branch off looking for seams of gold or silver sandwiched between formations of very hard quartz and granite.

These tunnels required a great deal of engineering provided by mining engineers frm places like the Colorado School of Mines.  Not only did the tunnels have to be blasted out of hard rock and the rubble hauled out, major timber systems had to be installed to brace the walls and roofs of the tunnels to minimize cave-in’s.

Timber had to be cut and hauled in to the mine sites, usually by narrow gage railroad systems.  As an aside, I’ve seen old photos of the Lake Tahoe Basin where all of the original growth timber has been removed for mine timbers in the Virginia City area.

Most of mine work was backbreaking manual labor.  For example, to advance a shaft, a miner would hold a large steel drill against the rock face, and two additional miners would alternately hit the end of the drill with heavy sledge hammers while the drill holder would rotate the drill slightly between each blow.  Through this means, a pattern of deep holes would be drilled into the rock to receive black power charges.

This was a time before dynamite, a more powerful and stable form of explosive was available.  “Powder monkeys,” who apprenticed their trade through trial and error and luck, packed the drill holes with black powder, inserted blasting caps and fuses  cut to predetermined lengths to create the desired blasting pattern.

If everything went well, the tunnel was advanced, and the ore and waste rock was reduced to rubble small enough to be loaded into ore cars and taken to vertical lifts to be removed and processed.