AURORA: A County Seat in Two Counties

In 1857, gold was discovered in Dogtown which is about seven miles south of Bridgeport. This led to a mining boom in the area.

Other gold strikes occurred in the Mono region, including Aurora in 1860. Aurora became a booming town, at one point reaching 10,000 in population. Mark Twain spent some time there mining. With a shortage of wood, most of the town was built of brick

 

Aurora Mining Town and County Seat

At one time Mono County was second only to Nevada County in gold production. Mono County was formed in April 1861 and Aurora was named as the county seat. Aurora's mines were so rich that miners came from all over the west. Travel in the spring was much easier than in the winter or colder months. In the Spring of 1863, Aurora had 760 houses, 20 stores, and 22 saloons. Like most mining boom towns, the population had a small number of women and children compared to a large male population.

 

1876 Map of Aurora and Bridgeport. Note that Bodie just west of Aurora barely within the California state line is not listed.

Although California was convinced Aurora was well within the California border, Nevada Territory believed Aurora was within their jurisdiction and they claimed it as the county seat of Esmeralda County. Both California State and Nevada Territory governed the fast-growing gold mining town at the same time while they waited on the results of a U.S. Government survey that had been requested to determine exactly where the California and Nevada boundary fell. Its California assemblyman was the speaker of the house while the Nevada legislative member was elected as president of the Nevada Territorial Legislature. During this time, the records for each county were kept separately.

Esmeralda County Courthouse built in Aurora in 1874

In September 1863, the survey results determined that Aurora was situated approximately three miles within Nevada Territory. The Mono County officials packed up the offices and all the records for their county and moved them to Bodie, a mining town a few miles to the west that was safely within the border for California and Mono County.

 

1895 Map of Mono Co. California and Mineral Co. Nevada. Note that the map shows Bodie, but not Aurora.

After a special election in April 1864, Bridgeport was named as the county seat for Mono County.

In the meantime, Aurora remained the county seat for Esmeralda County until it began to go the way of all cities built upon gold and silver mining. As the town began to fail, the county seat was moved to Goldfield. Aurora soon found it itself in a new county, Mineral, with the county seat in Hawthorne 27 miles to the east. As the town completely failed, it became a ghost town. The brick buildings were dismantled, and many of the used bricks from Aurora ended up in Los Angeles homes.

 

Aurora as a ghost town before most buildings were dismantled

Although my latest book in the Eastern Sierra Brides 1884 series, Haunted by Love, takes place about twenty years after Bridgeport became the county seat for Mono County, it is easy to understand how its early history as the supply hub and agricultural center in a region of boom and bust mining towns led to its stability. My story is set both in Bridgeport at the Leavitt House, a popular hostelry servicing travelers in the Eastern Sierra-Nevada region, and in Robinson Creek area, part of the Big Meadows that supported cattle, sheep and hay-raising, as well as wood from the foothills immediately to the west. With its economic base being established on agriculture and shipping, it remained an established city in the region long after Aurora had begun to fade into a has-been former gold town.

Today I am giving away one copy of Big Meadows Valentine, the first book in the Eastern Sierra Brides 1884, series to one person selected from among those who leave a comment on this blog by midnight, PDT Tuesday, September 20^th.

Zina Abbott is the pen name used by Robyn Echols for her historical novels. The first four novellas in the Eastern Sierra Brides 1884 series, Big Meadows Valentine,  A Resurrected Heart, Her Independent Spirit, and Haunted by Love are now available.  He Is a Good Man was published as part of the Lariats, Letters and Lace anthology.

ZINA HAS A NEW RELEASE! HAUNTED BY LOVE! GET IT HERE!
https://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Love-Eastern-Sierra-Brides-ebook/dp/B01I1Y6DXO/

Legal Issues and Family History Sources

I immersed myself into genealogy and family history before I became a full-time author. One of the exciting aspects of learning about family history is getting a sense of connection with my own ancestors. One of the great negatives about becoming acquainted with societal conditions and the legal records of past generations is becoming aware of the great injustices perpetrated upon women in the name of providing and protecting them.

This developed my interest in including the true legal conditions of past eras in my historical fiction. The legal condition of women in the past can best be summed up by the first sentence in the book description for The Hidden Half of the Family – A Sourcebook for Women’s Genealogy by Christina Kassabian Schaefer:

“By law and by custom, women's individual identities have been subsumed by those of their husbands. For centuries women were not allowed to own real estate in their own name, sign a deed, devise a will, or enter into contracts, and even their citizenship and their position as head of household have been in doubt….”

It goes beyond a desire to be historically accurate. I believe my reading audience which is primarily female needs to understand that the legal rights women have today were gained through a great deal of hardship and hard work. They are not to be taken for granted. And, if we are not diligent, it is possible they could be taken away in future generations either for religious reasons or in the name of men providing for and protecting their families.

I did take one year of law. First year law students are dangerous creatures, especially if they think they have enough knowledge to give legal advice or manage their own legal affairs. As a writer, this education was valuable. It gave me a basic understanding of some of the fundamentals of our legal system. 

In spite of that, I find I gain more practical knowledge about past laws, particularly as they relate to family relations, by studying family history sources. When searching for records about ancestors, some of the best sources are the legal documents still available in many courthouses. To know what the basic laws were in any given era, what documents were generated by marriage, divorce, birth or death, the books I prefer going to are my family history sources.

In my Eastern Sierra Brides 1884 series, one of the elements of each book in the series is the legal conditions of the day, particularly as they apply to my heroines. Featured in the first two books, Beth Jessup Dodd, living and married in Ohio, travels to California in an effort to find the husband who deserted her. 

The prologue in the first book, Big Meadows Valentine, sets the tone with Beth’s father, Elmer Jessup, ill with consumption and a firm believer in women being incapable of running a farm or conducting business, refusing to will his farm to his two daughters. Instead, he sells the farm to Jim Dodd with the understanding, memorialized by written contract, that Jim will marry Beth, a portion of the value of the farm will be considered her dowry, Jm Dodd will provide for both his father-in-law until his death and Beth’s little sister, Zelly, until her marriage. He will work the farm and provide security and family for Beth for the balance of her natural life.

To find out if Elmer Jessup had the legal right to do this, I turned to my family history resources, in this case, The Hidden Half of the Family – A Sourcebook for Women’s Genealogy. The following is a comparison of basic legal considerations between Ohio and California. First, Ohio and California had completely different origins in different time periods:

Those differences affected the laws put in place regarding marriage and divorce:

Even though in 1880 Beth, as long as she was of legal age, could have owned the farm if willed to her, her father chose instead to sell the land. Beth was forced—bullied is perhaps the better word—into obeying her father and marrying a man she had never met and did not voluntarily choose because of two circumstances. First, she felt compelled to provide for her father and little sister who, because of her father’s sale of the farm, could be turned out without any means of support if Beth refused to marry Jim Dodd. Second, Beth, at twenty years of age at the time of her marriage, was still underage. Before the law she was considered an infant, and therefore subject to her father who had complete legal control over her.

In addition to the book mentioned above, another of my favorite books detailing family law and the rights (or profound lack of them) of women and children is Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy by Val D. Greenwood. It was in this book I found my information about the status of children under the age of twenty-one.

Once Beth married, she came under the “protection” and control of her husband. With no separate property of her own upon her marriage, she had nothing to call her own. Since she was not of legal age, even her chickens she purchased with childhood birthday gift money were technically the property of her father while she was single. Although her father assured Beth her husband would not interfere with her chickens, the legal truth of the matter was that they were sold as part of the farm and became Jim Dodd's property once Jim Dodd signed the contract to purchase the farm and marry Beth. When Jim Dodd decided to liquidate the farm and return to his mining activities in California, he sold her chickens along with everything else and pocketed the money. Beth had no legal recourse.

In Big Meadows Valentine, Beth realizes her husband has no intention of coming back to Ohio for her once he is set up in California. Knowing he is legally and contractually obligated to provide for her support, she travels to California in search of him. She soon learns that when it comes to governing property and inheritance, the two states have different laws. Here is a comparison:

 

I have used the comparison charts with the information obtained from The Hidden Half of the Family – A Sourcebook for Women’s Genealogy with the permission of the publisher, Genealogical Publishing Company. For more information on how to order this book, click HERE.

Tidbits of this legal information will be part of all five of the novellas in the Eastern Sierra Brides 1884 series. Published by Prairie Rose Publications, Big Meadows Valentine and A Resurrected Heart are available now. The third book in the series, Her Independent Spirit, will be published in the first half of 2016.

Zina Abbott is the pen name used by Robyn Echols for her historical novels. Please visit and follow the Zina Abbott’s Amazon Author Page by clicking HERE.

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The Tibbits House in Columbia

Outside of Tibbits House corner of Main Street & Fulton Street, Columbia, CA

I have been to Columbia State Park in California many times in the past decades, but the first time I recall the Tibbet’s House being open to the public was during my trip last month. This house on the corner of Main Street and Fulton Street in Columbia is a neat, one story frame structure with an interesting history that reflects the growth of this gold rush city.

Mrs. Tibbits formal parlor so she could entertain her friends

 This house was named after the Lyman C. Tibbet (aka Tibbitt) family who lived in Columbia, California from 1887 to 1932. 

The back portion was formed from a cabin originally built in the 1850s on land north of Columbia in Gold Springs. It was originally owned by Lyman’s father, John P. Tibbets who died in 1866. In 1887 Lyman had the cabin moved to a vacant lot in Columbia.  Previously, the lot had been used for a general merchandise store, a meat market and possibly a saloon.

Mrs. Tibbet was dissatisfied living in the cabin because she did not have a formal parlor in which to entertain her friends. Her husband remedied that by buying a portion of another building in town and attaching it to the front of the original cabin.

That parlor is now restored to the 1870s era. Much of the decor is original and the rest is authentic to the time period.

Docent by door leading to modernized back cabin

The back part, which is the original cabin, has been modernized and is currently being lived in by a park employee.

From 1880 to 1911, Dr. Tibbetts ran a pharmacy across the street from the home in the current bank building. He later ran the pharmacy out of the parlor in his home. He also served as the town’s postmaster for several years.

Map of Columbia with arrow pointing to location of Tibbits House

Although Columbia was on the other side of the Sierria Nevada Mountains by way of the Sonora Pass from Lundy in Mono County, the time period in which the Eastern Sierra Brides 1884 series takes place is about the same time that "Doc" Tibbits worked as a pharmacist in Columbia.

Now Available

There is a reference in both of my novellas, Big Meadows Valentine and A Resurrected Heart (scheduled for release in April), of Doctor Guirado who also worked as a physician and ran a pharmacy in the gold mining town of Lundy, California. Big Meadows Valentine starts in the first week of January, 1884 and concludes on Valentine's Day.

Although no known photos exist of Dr. Guirado's home or business, we do know that his pharmacy was located on Main Street between First Street and Second Street, across the street and a half block down from the Arcade Saloon in which my character Beth Dodd works as a cook for the chop shop (steak house) in the back.

Scheduled for release April, 2015

I know of no known record that tells us what Dr. Guirado was doing on April 5th, 1884, a day in Lundy dubbed by the locals as "Resurrection Day." A Resurrected Heart is about the weekend surrounding this event. However, I'm sure with all the celebrating that took place in addition to the usual illnesses, in real life the good doctor was kept busy.

On Friday in A Resurrected Heart, Dr. Guirado is called on to patch up a miner injured in a confrontation. On Saturday, Beth is called on to assist with a birth because Dr. Guirado is busy escorting two very ill Lundyites to the county hospital in Bridgeport. It was an action-packed weekend for all filled by "A march, a birth, a burial -- and a resurrection of her heart."

     Zina Abbott is the pen name used by Robyn Echols for her historical novels. Her novel, Family Secrets, was published by Fire Star Press in October 2014 and her novelette, AChristmas Promise, was published by Prairie Rose Publications in November 2014. Big Meadows Valentine, the first novella in the Eastern Sierra Brides 1884 series, is now available for Kindle HERE and for B&N Nook HERE and A Resurrected Heart is scheduled for release in April 2015.

Please visit the Zina Abbott’s Amazon Author Page by clicking HERE.