My school doesn’t do any field trips, so we do them as a family on the weekends.

On one of our historical family day trips, we drove to Empire Mine. Empire Mine was one of the richest hard-rock mines in California, making 5.8 million ounces of gold from 1850-1956! People estimate that this is only 20% of the gold in the park and that 80% of the gold still remains in mountains, old mines, and under the park!

George Roberts was the original owner and discoverer of the mine, but he sold his mine to William Bourn Sr. in 1869. The Bourn family had control of the mine until they sold it to Newmont Mining in 1956. The Bourn cottage grounds include extensive lawns with fountains, a reflection pool, and gardens with a greenhouse! The Bourn gardens have about 13 acres and the roses have been restored with more than 950 bushes of 56 types. We even got to meet one of the living descendents of William Bourn! The park includes tours of the Bourn Cottage, the mineyard and living history events.

We got to see all of the different tools used for mining gold! The park has different mining tools and machines that we got to see when the mine was in action. We also got to check out the old mine shafts and mine carts. Mules sometimes pulled the mine carts full of gold back up and through the mines.

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My family and I love to go on family adventures and lately we’ve been doing a lot of history related trips because that’s what I’m learning about in school. One of my favorite historical adventures was at the Coloma Living History Day at the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park.

On January 24 1848 James W. Marshall was building a sawmill for Captain John Sutter. Marshall used water from the South Fork of the American River. He noticed little flakes of shine in the water and knew it was gold! Marshall tried to keep his gold discovery a secret, but the word of gold spread fast and started the California Gold Rush of 1849! After all the gold was gone, most tired miners headed home, but some took another look at California and liked what they saw! These pioneers came to see that the land produced many resources and California’s great wealth came from the farm land, not the mines!

To see what it was like during the gold rush, we went to one of the Living History Days in Coloma!

First, we explored different jobs. We learned how people cooked, hunted, traded, and made rope. We even got to make our own rope! Making rope is a lot of work. After you wind the rope, you have to take it to the blacksmith’s shop where he burns of all the fuzz off so the rope is usable smooth and usable!

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