History

Gold mining in southern California goes way back – the first placer discoveries in California, before the better-known Gold Rush up north, were in the Santa Clarita area not far south of the Frazier/Lockwood region. In the later 1800s there were placer workings and a few small hard rock mines around Frazier Mountain and Mt. Pinos, and an antimony mine on Antimony Peak with a cable tram carrying ore to a mill the base of the mountain.

From the California State archives. This is identified as part of the Russell holdings.

In the late 1890s, a prospector named McLaren, poking around on the south side of Mt. Pinos, spotted a white crystalline material that looked similar to something he had seen at a mining exhibition in Los Angeles not long before. It proved to be Colemanite, a borax ore. He and his partner staked out a claim in 1898 in the hills on the north side of Lockwood Valley. The mining operation was soon sold to larger operators and three mines eventually were built along the ridge – The Frazier Borax Mine, the Russell Mine and the Columbus Mine. For a few years, this is said to have been the largest borax mining operation in the United States. Teams of eight to fourteen mules, and later a steam tractor, hauled the Colemanite to the railroads in Bakersfield or Mojave, from where it was shipped to processing plants in San Francisco.

The little town that grew near the mines was named Stauffer for one of the owners of the mine. The photo below shows what was left in the 1930s. The building at the center of the picture below was the post office and store. The Frazier mine itself is at the upper left. In its heyday, the town also included houses and bunkhouses for the mine workers; stables, stores, and other businesses. About all that's left of the original mine today are the tailings piles. More modern houses are scattered over the area where the town once stood.

The mines where only active for about ten years. Production began in 1899 or 1900, depending on what source you look at, and continued until about 1912. By then, larger and more easily accessible deposits of borax were found in Death Valley and the Calico Mountains. There’s nothing left but piles of tailings today, though a friend who grew up in the area can remember when some of the buildings still stood and there were pieces of old mining equipment to be found.

When the borax boom was at its peak, in 1903, a company was formed down in Fillmore, which proposed to build a railroad north through the mountains from Fillmore to Maricopa, on the Sunset Railway in the San Joaquin Valley. The Bakersfield & Ventura would have passed just three or four miles west of Stauffer. I have another blog devoted to the B&V here. I assume that if the railroad had been built, borax would have become an important source of traffic; and with improved transportation, the mines would have stayed profitable and in operation longer. In my HO scale track plans, there’s a standard gauge branch from Lockwood on the B&V, to the mines. You can read more about my concept for a B&V model railroad layout here.

In a different alternate universe, the Stauffer branch becomes a narrow-gauge line that interchanges with the B&V at Lockwood and continues beyond Stauffer to serve other customers – The Lockwood & San Emigdio.

There is other potential traffic for the railroad. A few miles east of Stauffer there is a quarrying operation, run by a company called Armalite but known to old-timers as Ridgelite. Among other products, it produces “rotary mud” used in the oil fields. Production reportedly began in the late 1930s, so it’s entirely logical that if the L&SE was still in operation by the ‘30s, this would have been a major source of revenue, hauling drilling mud to the oil fields in Ventura County and the south end of the Central Valley. Maybe enough so that the line would have been standard gauged to avoid transhipping the product at Lockwood. That’s more or less the situation in the HO standard gauge track plans for the Bakersfield & Ventura.

I imagine the narrow gauge L&SE following more or less along Lockwood Valley Road past the mines at Stauffer and the Ridgelite plant, through Cuddy Valley, where an early family of settlers still raises cattle, past the current community of Lake of the Woods, then north through Pinon Pines and Pine Mountain Club, ending at Mil Potreo. There were some small gold mines in this area that might have warranted a spur and an ore loading bin; and of course there was the antimony mill near Pine Mountain Club. Mil Potrero at the end of the line was the site of a lumber mill.