Downtown Kennett, California. Notice the “Meat Market” sign in the center building. photo courtesy of the Bureau of Reclamation.

In 1944, the Bureau of Reclamation closed the gates at Shasta Dam and began inundating the vast network of valleys in the Shasta National Forest. In the valleys resided three unique cities, a fish hatchery, and thousands of residents.

It may not compare to the estimated 1.9 million people displaced by China’s Three Gorges Dam project — a project that is five times as large as the Hoover Dam. However, it was an important location in the West’s history. Some of the largest copper mines resided in the mountains around Shasta. The largest of which was not consumed by the waters of Shasta Lake: The Iron Mountain mine, between Shasta and Whiskeytown. Effluence coming from Iron Mountain has been professed to have a negative pH (the only known natural negative pH). It is more acidic than battery acid.

Not only was there sulfuric acid, there were also smelters, used in the copper refining process. The process of refining copper released toxic smoke into the air. The hills were denuded within a 15-mile radius. The mountains looked like vast victims of a nuclear blast (but that’s a whole other story).

The point of this post was to talk about these inundated towns of Shasta (Baird, Copper City, Elmore, Etter, Morley, Pitt, Winthrop and the largest: Kennett). Kennett boasted a population of 10,000 — it had an opera house, trade stores, hospital, school, as many as 40 saloons, and more.

Kennett was a copper city that boomed in the early 1900s, especially during WWI. Slim Warren’s “Diamond Saloon” was known all across the state as an ornate and dazzling place to imbibe in alcoholic beverages. photo courtesy Shasta Lake Heritage & HIstorical Society.

Before the town was flooded, one of the workers on the dam, Archie Lefler, was interviewed by the Shasta Lake Heritage & Historical Society, saying:

“After our shifts were over, I used to go up to Kennett with a friend and roam around the deserted town. We were just looking around in the deserted, old buildings and saloons, when we found gold coins — some fallen through floors, some hidden in fireplaces and behind walls. We found enough coins during those days that I bought my first two lots in Anderson with the money.”

What does the story of Kennett tell us about Geography? I’ll let you decide for yourself. But one thing I find is that inundated towns tell something about the very real influence we as human beings have on the landscape. However much we may downplay our effects — positing that we are mere ants in the universe — we still have the ability to turn mountains into islands; cities into reefs. And as easily as we can submerge townsites, we can submerge history, never to look back. In the case of Kennett, we buried a place that became barren due to five copper smelters around the town — perhaps because we, as human beings, like to hide our ugly past.

The SS Red Oak Victory via the sky, thanks to MSN’s Virtual Earth

Today, I visited the SS Red Oak Victory. Dad was visiting from Oregon, and I knew he would be interested, because my grandfather served on a similar ship (not a Victory ship, but a Liberty ship). The only difference between the two is the fact that the Victory is a newer design that could travel 1.5 times as fast (17 knots compared to 11 knots). The ‘upgrade’ was inspired partly by the speed of German U-Boats. The Victories could out-run a U-Boat; however, the Liberties could not.

These were cargo ships, about 455 feet long (with 3-5 cargo holds). As a point of comparison, the Statue of Liberty is 305 feet tall (including its 154-foot base). The shaft for the propeller was enormous. And it was simply amazing the techniques they used to keep this ship running.

My father was a machinist, so he enjoyed the machine shop. Overall, it was an incredible day trip. For five dollars, we got a one-hour tour of the ship, complete with original artifacts found in the ship after it was hauled away from the mothball fleet at Suisun Bay.

As a Geographer/History Buff, I would give a pound of my flesh to explore the entire mothball fleet. In all, there are 274 vessels in the National Defense Reserve Fleet (NDRF). Many get turned into reef sites and are intentionally sunk by British, American, and French Navy in their training exercises. Some are sold to local museums (such is the case with the USS Red Oak Victory to the Richmond Museum); and others are sold to companies or foreign governments.

You wouldn’t believe the map rooms in these places… enough to make even the most blas? and disenchanted geographer salivate. We were shown one in particular that showed anchor locations in a small atoll, where the whole fleet would hang out to support operations Japan during WWII.

In the coming weeks, I’ll bring you photos of the dry docks at Berth 1 in Richmond (the Kaiser Ship Yards), I’ll cover the effects of the end of war-time ship production, and bring you pictures from the Kaiser site itself.

Pabco Roofing Manufacturing Company’s railroad-facing facade has glass bricks. It looks like original construction, which means these glass blocks pre-dated Art Deco and Art Moderne, an indication that their first use was in industrial architecture.

Glass blocks (also known as glass bricks) can be found in almost every city that existed in the 1930s to the present day. These bricks began as a purely functional, industrial application in factories and warehouses, but grew in popularity in commercial and residential strucutres with the rise of art deco and art moderne.

Perhaps the earliest use of these bricks was instituted by the American Luxfer Prism company, around 1897, of which Frank Lloyd Wright played an integral role in the design of some of their bricks. Wright designed the company’s headquarters by proposing a street-level facade made entirely of glass brick, around its whole perimeter!