The History of Empire Mine Company: George W. Starr
This is the second article in a series on the history of Empire Mine Company. See the first article in this series: The History of Empire Mine Company: The Bourn Family.
During the difficult economic conditions and tough industrial realities of the 1870s, the Empire Mine Company’s mining operations did not go well. In January of 1875, William Bowers Bourn, Jr. left his Nob Hill community in San Francisco and went to England for his education at Cambridge University. In 1878, William’s mother, Sarah, summoned him back to California, before he could complete his education at Cambridge University, and demanded that he take over for his father’s estate and rebuild the Empire Mine Company.
In what turned out to be an amazing stroke of luck and in 1881, William hired his cousin, George W. Starr, as a mucker in the mine. A mucker is a miner who shovels broken rock into mining cars for removal from the mine. Although being initially hired to one of the lowest level positions at the mine, the hiring of Starr was pivotal to the success of William and the Empire Mine Company. Starr was an orphan at the age of eleven after his mother died, and he was abandoned by his father. Despite his humble background, Starr had a knack for mining and was a very talented miner. Starr worked his way from being a mucker to a miner, and then to shift boss. Finally, in 1887, and after six short years, Starr became the superintendent of the Empire Mine Company to whom the younger Bourn, after selling his controlling interest in the mine, left the management of the mine.
Just before Starr was appointed the superintendent of the Empire Mine Company and in 1886, the mine switched over from steam power to the use of the Pelton water wheel which dramatically increased the available power for the mining operations. In 1880, Lester A. Pelton invented and patented the Pelton water wheel which was significantly more efficient than traditional water wheels at the time. Pelton’s design is a type of impulse turbine and is one of the oldest ways to generate power from streams and rivers. The Pelton wheel is different from older, traditional water wheels in that, on a Pelton wheel, buckets attached to the ends of the wheel which create greater efficiency in transferring the linear momentum of the water into angular momentum which powers electrical generators and, in the case of the Empire Mine, also the stamp mills. Empire Mine Company had no problem obtaining Pelton wheels from Mr. Pelton, as he invented the wheels in Camptonville which is only a few miles from Grass Valley. In addition, the giant metal wheels used by Pelton in his design were constructed at the Miners’ Foundry in Nevada City which is also only a few miles away from the Empire Mine. With this increase in available power, the Empire Mine expanded from the fifteen-year-old, 20-stamp mill to a new water-powered, 40-stamp mill in 1886.
In addition to the labor issues with which the elder Bourn was forced to address immediately after taking control of the Empire Mine in 1869, William and Starr had to deal with their share of labor issues after the expansion. In 1888, two men were killed in a large surface explosion. The explosion was so large that it destroyed two entire buildings, the blacksmithing works, and carpentry area. In addition to surface building destruction, the hoist to the main shaft was badly damaged and all of the windows in the mill were blown out. As a direct result of the demonstrated safety concerns of the miners, labor relations between ownership and the miners were tense. This tension resulted in the first unionization of miners in Grass Valley.
Despite another rough beginning for management of the Empire Mine Company, Starr had a knack for mining and was a very talented miner and manager. Starr embodied the notion that if you are not moving forward, you are moving backward. He constantly strove to improve the operations of the Empire Mine. As such, in 1890, Starr introduced drills powered by compressed air which increased the productivity of the miner as well as the depth to which the miners could dig. Later in 1891, Starr launched electric lighting to illuminate the mine without smoke or fumes. At the Empire Mine, Starr built a formidable reputation as a miner in California and worldwide as an authority on hard rock gold mining.
In 1893, Starr was lured to South Africa by John H. Hammond and left Grass Valley for the gold mines continents away. Prior to Starr’s departure, the Empire Mine Company began to take a slight downturn which subsequently became a large downturn. In fact, and in 1893 and again in 1894, the Empire Mine Company failed to pay expenses. Despite these financial difficulties, from 1854 through 1895, the Empire Mine had a total product of over five million dollars. Considering the economic losses between 1893 and 1894, the value of the Empire Mine Company dropped. With the diminution of the mine’s value, Starr’s cousin, William, bought low and regained his controlling interest in the Empire Mine Company in 1896. During the period from 1893 to 1898, the mine continued to operate at a loss.
Shortly thereafter, and while Starr was visiting San Francisco from South Africa, William convinced his cousin, Starr, to rejoin him at the Empire Mine Company. William offered his cousin the position of Managing Director with the understanding that Starr would bring the mine back to its former greatness. Prior to accepting the position, Starr examined the operations of the mine and demanded $200,000 from the board of directors and investors in order to modernize and repair the above-ground facilities which were a mess. While the board of directors was at first quite hesitant, William pressured the board to accept Starr’s terms, and Starr was rehired.
Starr, with a newly freed hand, went about turning the mine around. Under Starr’s management in 1898 and armed with the experience of hard rock gold mining in South Africa, Starr reinvigorated the Empire Mine Company and guided it to become an extremely profitable venture. During the early 1900s and under Starr’s management, the Empire Mine Company became a standard in gold mining. Starr made huge capital improvements to the mine when he got rid of the old Cornish pumps and replaced them with new hydraulic pumps as well as completely renovating the above-ground facilities (rock crushers, boilers, compressors, and offices). In addition, and in 1910, the Empire Mine completed construction of a cyanide plant below the stamp mill with a 150-ton capacity.
In order to separate the gold flecks (atoms, in essence) of refractory gold from the ore, a chemical process must occur. In connection with free mill gold ore, nature’s chemical process had already accomplished this separation, but with refractory gold deposits, man had to invent an artificial chemical process and discovered that potassium cyanide leaching can remove the gold atoms from the quartz. Such cyanide leaching was necessary in order to extract the gold from the deep ore which the Cornish miners were bringing to the surface.
By the early years of the twentieth century, cyanide had transformed the gold-mining industry across the world, and California was no exception. By breaking open the geochemical lock that had limited gold mining to the surface of the earth, cyanide leaching redefined what gold ore was and recast the geography of gold mining, opening vast new sources of ore for exploitation. See Lortie’s A History of the Empire Mine, p. 13, and available at Searls Historical Library.
As with most chemical reactions including cyanide, it is very dangerous for workers to be near, and the environment is at risk from accidental spills which can cause serious damage to wildlife, humans, and groundwater. Although, if safely used, cyanide leaching is very effective in separating refractory gold from crushed ore.
From 1854 to 1915 and even while making large capital improvements, the Empire Mine had a total production of $18 million. Starr explained, “What appears as an extravagance is a remunerative improvement.” During Starr’s tenure, the mining operations never shut down and he never requested additional funds aside from the initial $200,000. All improvements in addition to the initial $200,000 was paid for out of earnings and the company still issued dividends. In short, George W. Starr was a driving managing force behind the success of the Empire Mine Company.
According to the Empire Mine Company financial statements for 1928, the peak mining revenue of the Empire Mine Company was in 1916 and amounted to a little less than $1,200,000. By 1928, the year before William sold the mine to Newmont Mining, the company’s mining revenue was only $121,023 for that year. On average, the Empire Mine Company from 1900 to 1928 had a net annual revenue of about one million dollars. All the while, William paid the miners three dollars a day for a 10-hour workday. In 1907, the miners went on strike arguing for an 8-hour workday. In 1919, the miners again went on strike for a one dollar a day pay increase and a ten percent annual bonus. Notwithstanding these occasional labor issues, by 1923, the Empire Mine Company employed 400 miners.
During his lifetime, the wealthy William found plenty of real estate to purchase and improve. In 1895, Bourn commissioned a “wall mural and stained-glass windows for a new home” located at 1220 Webster Street in San Francisco. In 1915, Bourn set out to build his estate on the peninsula south of San Francisco, and his Filoli estate “is considered one of the finest remaining country estates of the 20th century, featuring a 54,000 plus square-foot Georgian revival-style mansion, 16 acres of exquisite English Renaissance gardens, a 6.8-acre Gentleman’s Orchard, and hundreds of acres of Natural Lands with five distinct ecosystems and a one-mile Estate Trail.” Bourn even purchased an estate in County Kerry, Ireland, for his daughter and her new husband which was built in the 1840s and “consisted of 11,000 acres and a 100-room Elizabethan mansion.” That said, and aside from the 4,600 square foot Bourn cottage, built in 1896, at the Empire Mine State Park which William used when he or his family visited from their home in San Francisco over 100 miles away, there is no indication locally that Bourn was a fixture in Grass Valley. Even lucky George McKnight, who tripped over the quartz outcropping in 1850, has a street named after him. Possibly, the miners had a good point in 1869 when Bourn took over the mine and when the miners felt that he cared about neither the miners nor the local community. Aside from displays of Bourn’s wealth at the mine, there is really nothing of consequence in Grass Valley named after Bourn or William.
By 1929, William was confined to a wheelchair after suffering from a stroke, his wife got sick, and his daughter died. William decided to sell the company to Newmont Mining which shutdown the mine in 1957. In the mid-1970’s, the surface of the Empire Mine was sold to the State of California which turned the surface land into a state park in Grass Valley, California. That said, Newmont Mining still owns the mining rights to the Empire Mine, as well as to the North Star Mine a few miles away, and has been, over the past decade, attempting to work with the state and local officials in re-opening the mines.
The Bourn family capitalized on the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada through good management, keeping labor costs low, and innovation. William kept his cousin, Starr, who had become a world-renowned miner in his own right, active in the Empire Mine Company. Despite labor disputes here and there, William and Starr kept cheap immigrant labor from the Cornish region in England, as well as many Asians, employed at the mine. These Cornish miners in particular brought thousands of years worth of experience in hardrock mining for tin. This knowledge lent itself well to the physical characteristics of the Sierra Nevada gold deposits and the expansive network of plummeting shafts that are the Empire Mine complex. In addition, William and Starr made a habit of moving the business forward through capital improvements, such as the use of the Pelton wheel, and innovations in the extraction process through dynamite and cyanide leaching in order to efficiently separate the refractory deposits from the quartz. In all, it is clear that Starr was a driving force in establishing the success of the Empire Mine Company.
