Silverado-Tungstite Mining District: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Mojave National Preserve
Regions 8, 9, 10, and 12 Park Cultural Landscapes Program and Northwind Resource Consulting, LLC. 2023. Silverado-Tungstite Mining District: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Mojave National Preserve. Cultural Landscapes Inventory Report. 976265. National Park Service. NPS Pacific West Office, San Francisco, California / CRIS-CL Database
The Silverado-Tungstite Mine is located north of Cima in San Bernardino County, California. The property is abandoned, although vestiges of roads and pathways, stone buildings, mining structures, rock walls, prospect pits, artifacts, and other cultural materials associated with its more than 60-year history remain. The property encompasses 24 acres and consists of at least 91 historic and modern resources, including historic-age stone buildings, prospect pits, excavated trenches, waste rock piles, and shafts. The features were documented in 2012 as part of a broader effort by the California Abandoned Mines Land Unit (CAMLU) to remediate public safety and environmental hazards at abandoned mines within the Preserve. While all of these features were observed by North Wind, only 36 of these features were recorded during the current project at the request of Preserve Cultural resources staff (Figure 8; Table 1). Documented resources consist of 12 prospect pits (F2, F4, F6-F8, F12-15, F17, F21, and F35), six mining claim monuments (F3, F18, F23, F26, F32, and F33), four rock wall segments (F11, F31, F34, and F36), four remediated mine shafts (F9, F16, F19, and F20), four stone building ruins (F10, F22, F25, and F27), three waste rock piles (F1, F5, F24), two artifact concentrations (F29 and F30), and one privy foundation (F28). Unrecorded resources consist of excavation cuts or bulldozer trenches, and waste rock piles. All of the resources are located on NPS-administered land. The mining property is situated in rugged desert terrain with steep hillside inclines among the ridgetops, and an extensive network of washes. Vegetation includes creosote, Joshua trees, big galleta grass, blackbrush, brittlebush, banana yucca, and buckhorn cholla. Further review of topographical maps and aerial photography confirms that additional dirt roads were developed at the mine property in the period spanning 1955 and 1994, nearly all of which remain today. The current network of graded dirt roads is in varying states of condition due to continued erosion from off-road vehicle use and weather events. This is particularly the case where road segments intersect natural washes. The district is locally significant for its association with the development of the mining industry in the east Mojave Desert, and its contribution to the economic growth of the region between the years 1895-1945.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Regions 8, 9, 10, and 12 Park Cultural Landscapes Program; Northwind Resource Consulting, LLC
- Date of Issue
- 2023-09-29
- Publisher
- National Park Service
- Units
- MOJA , PWR
- Keywords
- abandoned, archeology, artifact, California, economics, equipment, extractive facility, headframe, industry, Ivanpah Mountains, J. Riley Bembry, mine shaft, mining, Mojave, Mojave Tungsten Company, prospect pit, rock wall, ruins, silver, standard mining district, stone building, tungsten, World War I, World War II
- Subjects
- CRIS-CL: 976265: Silverado-Tungstite Mining District
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International