This is the only ingot known from Southern California.
CA – Calico ~ Ghost Town!,San Bernardino County – 1881 – J. R. Lane Calico Silver Ingot
At its height, shortly after it was founded in 1881, Calico had a population of 1,200 people and over 50 silver and gold mines.
Between the years 1881 and 1940, it was estimated that the ground surrendered around $20 million in gold and silver.
Besides the usual assortment of bars, brothels, gambling halls and a few churches, Calico also supported a newspaper, the Calico Print.
“As a mining camp, Calico was better than the average,” longtime resident and miner John Hoban said in Calico Memories of Lucie Bell Lane. “For there were only two killings in town, not counting the robber of the payroll.”
In the mid 1890s the price of silver dropped and Calico’s silver mines were no longer economically viable.
The town got a reprieve when large deposits of borax were discovered in the region, keeping the town alive for another 40 years.
With the end of borax mining in the region in 1907 the town was completely abandoned and many of the buildings were moved to the nearby town of Yermo.
The last original inhabitant of Calico before it was abandoned, Mrs. Lucy Bell Lane, died in the 1960s. Her house remains as the main museum in town.
Lucy Lane was a lifelong resident of Calico, having moved there with her family at the age of 9 in 1884.
Her father George Valentine King had been a miner in Southern California and it was the silver strike at Calico, the largest in the state’s history that inspired him to move his family from Azusa to the then small mining camp in the Mojave Desert.
When she was 15 Lucy met store clerk John Robert Lane, who she promised to marry when she reached the age of 18.
In later years, Lucy and her husband bought the general store where he was once an employee and several of the mines and milling operations in the area, until the mines played out.
In the 1950s, Walter Knott, founder of Knott’s Berry Farm, who spent summers with an uncle who lived in Calico, bought the dilapidated town, relocated building from other deserted mining and western towns and opened up the former boomtown as a tourist and education attraction.
Knott gifted the town to the county and today, has become a regional park in the San Bernardino County Park system.
This is now known as “Knott’s Berry Farm”!
[11/2011] https://www.icollector.com/CA-Calico-Ghost-Town-San-Bernardino-County-1881-J-R-Lane-Calico-Silver-Ingot_i11297592 ($24,675)