There is little documentary information about land occupation and ownership in the Flowers Ranch area prior to the issuance of land patents and the late 1850s assessments, but the first Euro-American occupants were undoubtedly miners working the creeks and drainages for placer gold. The presence of stone bread baking ovens attests to the use of the land by Mexican or Mediterranean peoples prior to the dates of the agricultural land uses. Built of stone and firebrick, bricks identified at the Flowers Ranch were manufactured by Joseph Cowen & Co., Blaydon-on-Tyne, England, and date from between 1823 and 1904 1(pg. 71). They were brought to California as ballast on ships and apparently made their way from San Francisco to the gold miners’ camp on Littlejohns Creek sometime before the land was taken up by farmers.
The placering piles along the streams and drainages, the ubiquitous prospect holes and pits, and the tent platforms and rock alignments are also remnants of those early mining years. The names of numerous miners, including Chinese, were listed in the general area by the census enumerator in 1860, but the exact locations of the miners are unknown, and they undoubtedly moved around. By 1870, almost everyone residing in and near the Flowers Ranch area was listed as a farmer, suggesting that the placers had played out and were being mined only sporadically, if at all.
Interestingly, although the Flowers Ranch lands were situated between the two large copper mining areas of Copperopolis and Quail Hill, no copper veins were located on the Flowers Ranch lands, and all the mining activity was related to placer gold 2(pgs.131–133) (Handy & Wallace 1864). None of the placer diggings, however, were ever important enough to have been patented 3.
- Bricks and Brickmaking, a Hanbook for Historical Archaeology,
Gurcke, Karl
, Moscow, ID, (1987) - Mine and Mineral Resources of Calaveras County, California,
Clark, William B.; Philip A. Lydon
, (1962) - Mine and Mineral Resources of Calaveras County, California,
Clark, William B.; Philip A. Lydon
, (1962)
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