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Atolia,CA - San Bernardino County - c1915-1920 - Atolia, California RPC :

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Western Americana Start Price:100.00 USD Estimated At:200.00 - 400.00 USD
Atolia,CA - San Bernardino County - c1915-1920 - Atolia, California RPC :
The story goes that Charles Taylor and T. McCarthy were the first to discover tungsten deposits in this area about 1903. They actually shipped a carload of the ore to Germany in 1905, which was reported in the Mining and Scientific Press, netting them $8,000. By February of the following year their claims were purchased by E.B. De Golia and a man named Atkins, who built the first tungsten mill and put an end to hand sorting the gold from the equally heavy Scheelite, a problem that had vexed miners for years. A railroad spur was built by 1907 and the place was named Atolia, as a contraction of the names of the new claim owners. Although the mill was burned in 1916, it was quickly rebuilt and Atolia enjoyed its heyday from then until about 1918, when it was producing more tungsten than any other mine in the world. At that time there were restaurants, general stores, a drug store, shoemakers, a hotel, rooming houses, barber shops, pool rooms, picture show, butcher shops a newspaper and a school for 60 children. Small amounts of tungsten continued to be produced until WWII, the Hoefling Brothers of Sacramento formed the Atolia Tung-Sun Placer Mining Company for the extraction of placer scheelite in Baltic Gulch in 1942 [Ref: americanghosttowns.us/Atolia and wikimapia.org].