LOT Holabird-Kagin Americana  /  Mining, Minerals and Mayhem Auction  / 

1197

NV - Gold Hill,Storey County - c 1861-2 - Harris, Harvey, Assayer, Silver & Gold Presentation Assay

Currency:USD Category:Coins & Paper Money / Bullion Start Price:15,000.00 USD Estimated At:30,000.00 - 35,000.00 USD
NV - Gold Hill,Storey County - c 1861-2 - Harris, Harvey, Assayer, Silver & Gold Presentation Assay
Session D is a Mail-Bid Only Auction. Absentee bids will be accepted only. No live bidding will be allowed. All winners will be contacted after the auction. BIDDING ENDS MONDAY JUNE 27 AT 5PM PACIFIC TIME!!!
This is a rougher looking ingot with an unfinished appearance measuring approximately 1 x 1.75 x .5” and weighs 185.8 grams. Obverse is stamped: No. 6226 / HARRIS / ASSAYER [Harris’s assayer’s stamp] /5.95 OZ /FINE [printed vertically along the right edge]; the reverse is blank with a cooling depression that has been smoothed down; the top is stamped: S. / W. /G.; the bottom is stamped: I. Shaw; the left side is stamped: G$ 2.40; the right side is stamped: S$ 7.50. The business of assaying incorporated so much of the mining business, and in the final study, it becomes so much easier to understand the movement of assayers, financiers, and Gold Rush banking systems. This wonderful ingot was one of at least two different ingots presented from Simon W. Glazier, hence the “S.W.G.” on one side. Glazier was a client of Harris’ in Marysville. The second ingot of his was a gold ingot in the Bass Collection. Glazier was a mine financier and manager, and I. Shaw, was a young man probably working in Marysville or thereabouts in the mid 1860s. He was born in 1842, and by 1880 had moved north to Tehama, where he was a farmer. There is also a bullion receipt and related correspondence form Glazier in the Marysville Section of this catalog. This ingot is probably from Harris’s Marysville office c 1861-2. The reasons for this evaluation are that A) Simon Glazier was a known client out of Marysville and B) There is no IRS bullion tax stamp on the ingot, which means it must pre-date June 1863. After Harris moved to Gold Hill he probably punched the town name into the ingot.



The Harris Silver Ingot





This Harris ingot came From the John J. Ford, Jr. Collection. It is the most impressive of any of the Harris silver ingots from the Gold Hill period. It is a Territorial piece, dated August 1864, and carries the city and territorial designation and is one of the few ingots surviving that do so. It was presented to Mrs. Jane Jackson from M. W. Irvin. It does not appear to have an IRS bullion punch, perhaps because it is from the territorial period, and as such, was not subject to the Federal Tax. More research is necessary.

M. W. Irvin was a resident of Gold Hill and participated in the 1862 Territorial Census, when he was 52 years old. He later was listed in the 1862 Territorial Directory as being in the mining business working out of Olney’s mining office (promoters). The identity of Mrs. Jane Jackson will remain unknown for now. The only possibility at the present time is that there was one, and only one, Jane Jackson in Nevada for the 1870 Census. She was an African American housekeeper living in Carson City and born about 1820 in New York, who was not present for the 1862 Territorial census [Ref: After the Territorial Census, Irvin is absent from US Census data. He may have died shortly after].

There are only a handful of legitimate Harris ingots known today. This ingot was struck in an identical manner to the gold Harris Marchand ingots of the 1850s, with the “seeing eye” at the center. As such, it is an excellent partner to any of the Harris Marchand gold ingots. It has the usual assay chips taken from opposing sides, with typical Comstock fineness, .083 gold and .905 fine silver. Fine to Very Fine. From the John J. Ford, Jr. Collection.







A Fabulous Harvey Harris Silver Ingot

By Fred N. Holabird











Introduction





The story of Harvey Harris and Desiree Marchand is one of a good, solid partnership that lasted through the tumultuous Gold Rush years. The partnership was responsible for many of the gold ingots found at the wreck site of the treasure ship S.S. Central America, which sank in 1857, carrying $3 million in gold.



Harvey Harris was born in Denmark in 1814. In the late 1840s, he was working for the U.S. Branch Mint in New Orleans. It is difficult to ascertain how long he worked there, or in what capacity, since no records of employees from that period have yet been located. Harvey married his wife Augusta about 1848, and they conceived and had their first two children in New Orleans. Both had the same “disease” as their father. Edward, born 1849, and Ernest, born 1850, followed in their father’s footsteps and became assayers. The couple had three more children, one of whom was born on the trip to California in 1852 somewhere off the coast of South America, or while in port in Valparaiso.



Harris may have been one of the many U.S. Mint employees highly recruited by the private assaying firms near the onset of the Gold Rush when coinage was so badly needed in California. With numerous private coiners producing millions of dollars in gold coinage in the absence of a U.S. Branch Mint in the West, Harris’ skills as a melter and refiner were in great demand.







Harris in California





Kellogg & Humbert (Company) were probably his first employers in California. They were one of the two largest assay firms in California and needed highly skilled personnel. This is the company Harris cited later in advertisements as among his experience. He probably went to work for the U.S. Branch Mint in San Francisco when it opened in 1854, but only stayed briefly, no more than a year.



In 1855, he opened his own assay firm in Sacramento with Desiree Marchand from Paris. How the two met is a story yet to be told, but the partnership was solid. They had a third partner, C. L. Farrington, a Wells Fargo employee. The Sacramento location was pivotal to the business, because it was centrally located in the foothill gold belt region, and was an obvious stopping point between San Francisco and the mines. It allowed the miners, merchants and bankers a closer place to process their bullion, and Harris & Marchand scored well as a result. Within a year, using the same business model, the pair opened another assay office in Marysville, calling it the “Pioneer Assay Office.” At Marysville, Harris was perfectly located to receive the greater portion of gold coming directly out of the rich Sierra and Butte County mines, which included such places as Rattlesnake Bar, later named Laporte, where the Blue Lead, a tertiary (fossil) gravel channel produced tens of millions of dollars in gold.







Harris Investigates Nevada





The two businesses were so successful that the pair opened an office in San Francisco in 1859. Late that year, the firm may have received bullion for assay that was completely different, silver-gold bullion from the Comstock. As the next year or two worn on, discoveries were made at Aurora and later Unionville, deep in the Nevada interior. By mid 1861 the firm must have received many bullion bars for assay, and Harris, sensing another mining rush, was off to investigate. By this time he had moved his home to Marysville. Using the same business model that had worked so well for the pair, he set up the first assay office in Carson City, the third of his “Pioneer Assay Offices”[Ref: Carson City Silver Age, 10/20/1861]. It was the geographic focal point for the entire Nevada silver rush. Aurora was south, less than 100 miles. The Comstock was north about twelve miles, and the Humboldt region (Unionville) was farther north more than 100 miles. Each of these were served by Langley’s Express. Second on his list was Aurora (1861), and an office in Unionville was short lived because it was simply too remote and did not have enough bullion production to warrant a permanent office.



In a recent discovery, one of Harris’s original bullion assay receipts from Aurora shows that Harris hired an assayer to run and manage that office in 1861, which confirms that he never lived there. Harris was becoming fixated on the Comstock, so he sold his interest in the California operations to his partner Marchand, which helped finance the Nevada operations, and which later became known as “Harris & Co.” The Carson City office might have been the geographic center of the Nevada mining community, but it was not the economic center. The real business, Harris learned, was to be in the middle of the action on the Comstock. In 1862, he rented out part of his Carson City Assay Office, at one time offering the upstairs floor to Orion Clemens, Sam Clemens’ brother and future Secretary of Nevada Territory [Ref: Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 1, 1853-1866, p208-9, 212].







Gold Hill. The Final Stop





By 1862 Harris opened two more assay offices, one at Silver City and another at Gold Hill. He used the same favored name he used in Marysville, “Pioneer Assay Office,” for each of the lower Comstock assay offices [Ref: Carson City Silver Age, October 2, 1862]. He and his family moved to Gold Hill that year. The Gold Hill business was a success from the start, but sensing a need to focus, Harris eventually sold off or closed the Silver City Assay Office [Ref: The Silver City Assay Office is not listed in the 1863 Nevada Territorial Directory].



Harris was an astute and excellent businessman. He had the ability to see the big picture – to understand business cycles, demand, and from this knowledge spot holes that could be filled. Gold Hill was just such a hole in the assay business. Silver production on the Comstock the first two years was a relative unknown except to those who were there. Some high grade was sent to San Francisco in canvas bags on the backs of burros, mules and horses for processing. Some was sent overseas to Wales. Other ores were processed at one of more than one hundred small mills that were known as “custom mills” because they would process anyone’s ore for a fee, and were not built for a specific mine. The game was for a mill to get a contract for a good producing mine. The other game was to get it right, and extract the gold and silver economically and properly, not an easy task. At least one mill got caught skimming gold. Most of the bullion was coming from Virginia City mines, which were considered the “gut of the Comstock.” But the Comstock Ledge, as it was called, was in reality a wide, long ore zone that stretched from just north of Virginia City south to Silver City, a distance of more than five miles. It bifurcated (“horse-tailed,” in old timers terms) around Gold Hill, splitting into several parts. The big action in Virginia City attracted the first of the assayers. That left a big opening in Gold Hill, and Harris was the man to fill it.

While a manuscript archive of Harris’ business does not exist, it is an easy guess how he got started there, based on his business history. Harris would have gone after the bullion assay contracts for the largest producing mines. This would have included the Crown Point, discovered by George Hearst and the source of his second fortune, the Central, the Plato and Eclipse, etc., all of whom were among the early producers in 1862. Then something special happened. In 1863 the Gould & Curry bonanza was discovered in Virginia City, causing an explosion in mining and exploration. From it came the mighty Yellow Jacket at the north end of Gold Hill, which made a fortune for the Bank of California and William Sharon. Business was so good for Harris that he pulled in his horns elsewhere and concentrated on the Gold Hill office. Business was booming and there was no need to split his efforts.

About this time, Harris must have made friends and favor of William Sharon, the Bank of California’s representative on the Comstock. This man wielded tremendous power in the business world of the Comstock, as the Bank of California ventured into new areas of bank finance by lending money to mines and any business aspect of mining. Failure to pay resulted in complete forfeiture, and the Bank took over or closed many mines and related businesses, including Harris competitor and Gold Hill assayer Conrad Wiegand.



Harris and his family loved Gold Hill and remained there. Harris was very popular with locals, and was known as a punster by Gold Hill News Editor Alf Doten, whose Journals cited one instance: “A pun riddled comment on the appointment of Old Man Harris, rheumatic Gold Hill punster, as vice-council to Denmark – ‘the worst that can be said of Harris is that he has harassed his friends – if he were dying in a garret, his last rheumatic remark would be: This is a room-attic arrangement” [Ref: Doten Journals, p 1453]. The Harris and Doten families were close, often visiting. Doten always referred to Harris as “old man Harris.” There are numerous entries in the Doten Journals of these visits [Ref: Clark, editor; The Journals of Alfred Doten [Doten Journals.jpg">, 1849-1903; 1973. Pp 1241, 1368, 1382, 1391, 1453, 1860].



Harris’ two sons also became assayers. They worked for their father, and Edward was the chief assistant. Ernest worked in Dayton for a while in the early 1870s with his own assay business, and the two eventually ran an assay office together in Carson City about 1879 or 1880.



Harvey Harris died in February 1894. The times were different then, with the western mining camps and society in general in a serious recession. Newspapers suffered from a lack of advertising, and no detailed biography was ever published on Harris after his death. He was buried in Carson City. After their father’s death, Edward went to work as a miner near Reno about 1900. His brother and mother may not have survived.
Sign In to Bookmark Lot