Death Valley Ghost Town: Conservation of the Ryan Mining District
Cindy Olnick 0:00
Today on Save As:
Mary Ringhoff 0:01
It really is a tangible way to connect you with the past, and it’s so rare to have something that’s that hasn’t been messed with.
Cindy Olnick 0:16
Welcome to Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation, an award-winning podcast that glimpses the future of the field with graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Cindy Olnick.
Trudi Sandmeier 0:28
And I’m Trudi Sandmeier.
Cindy Olnick 0:29
So Trudi.
Trudi Sandmeier 0:31
Yes, Cindy.
Cindy Olnick 0:32
You are so Trudi. When I think of you, I just think she is so Trudi. Welcome back.
Trudi Sandmeier 0:38
Thanks. Thanks for having us.
Cindy Olnick 0:40
Yeah, yeah, and thanks to our listeners for coming back. We appreciate it. We’re nothing without you. All right. So in this episode, our fab producer and MHC alumna, Willa Seidenberg, interviews fellow alumna, Mary Ringhoff about her thesis on Death Valley.
Trudi Sandmeier 1:03
Yeah, so Mary had sort of an inside track on her thesis topic. She got hooked up with this ghost town that’s just outside of Death Valley National Park called Ryan. And, it was a former mining town, you know, has abandoned buildings and archeological remains and old mine cars. It’s this crazy place. And I actually went up there with her one weekend and spent a little time there. And it is, it’s just a totally incredible place, right on the edge of Death Valley. And her thesis is that exploration of this place and its history. And it’s really fascinating.
Cindy Olnick 1:51
Cool. What’s amazing about it? One thing.
Trudi Sandmeier 1:56
It is this town that time forgot. It’s this almost perfectly intact moment in time, kind of captured on the edge of a hillside in the desert that feels like people just dropped what they were doing and walked away. And when you’re there, you just, it’s like you have this window into the past that is really unbelievable.
Cindy Olnick 2:25
Well, let’s get to it. Here is Willa’s interview with Mary Ringhoff.
Willa Seidenberg 2:35
Welcome Mary to your second appearance on the Save As podcast. I want to say that Mary is a special person to me for several reasons, one of which is she has a daughter named Willa. So welcome, Mary.
Mary Ringhoff 2:51
Thanks, Willa, thanks for having me. You’re special to me too.
Willa Seidenberg 2:54
Thanks. Well, so Mary appeared on the episode that we did on Save As about the Manzanar Japanese internment camp that operated during World War Two. And Mary was teaching a class called Cultural Resources Management that I took and as a class, we went up one weekend to Manzanar, which is in the Owens Valley, and we did a volunteer work weekend. And I just want to tell you it was such an incredible and special experience, and I really thank you for providing that for all of us.
Mary Ringhoff 3:33
Yeah, I was so happy it worked out. I was really excited we were able to do that.
Willa Seidenberg 3:37
Yes, and I will put a link to that episode in our show notes for this episode. But we’re here today to talk about her thesis that she did as part of the heritage conservation program at USC, and what she’s been doing since she graduated. And when did you graduate?
Mary Ringhoff 3:56
2012.
Willa Seidenberg 3:58
So what led you to the Heritage Conservation Program in the first place?
Mary Ringhoff 4:01
I had a previous life, as you know, as an archeologist. So I got a master’s degree in anthropology with an archeology emphasis at the University of Nevada, Reno, and then I worked in cultural resource management as a consultant in Nevada for about 10 years. And I was just starting to get a little burnt out on that — the field demands are a lot. It’s kind of hard to have a real life. And all of us that get into archeology do it primarily because of the fieldwork and the hands-on aspect of learning about human history. But a lot of people burn out on it. My emphasis was already in historic resources, rather than prehistoric, particularly residential communities that were associated with industrial sites, mostly mining in Nevada. It’s a very, very interesting topic, which I have a connection to because my mother’s family is from southwest Montana, and they were involved in the copper mining industry.
Willa Seidenberg 4:59
Oh, wow.
Mary Ringhoff 5:00
This is how I got interested in that. And I was also taking on most of the architectural history documentation for my company. But the Nevada SHPO wanted me to have a degree in order to be able to be, you know, a qualified professional to be doing that kind of work. So I thought this was a good opportunity to go back to school.
Willa Seidenberg 5:21
And just to clarify, the SHPO is the State Historic Preservation Office.
Mary Ringhoff 5:27
Yeah, the state entity that oversees historic preservation management. So when I talked to Ken Breisch, who was the head of the USC Heritage Conservation Program at the time, he told me about Survey LA, which was the Los Angeles citywide historic resources survey, which sounded really fantastic. I was very interested in it, and so that’s essentially why I chose that program, was because it sounded like pretty much anyone who had an interest in preservation and had the training, or was undergoing the training, was able to get involved in that project in one way or another. So I just thought that was a really great opportunity that I wanted to be part of.
Willa Seidenberg 6:11
So your family history in mining sort of makes sense given what your thesis was, right, which is about the Ryan District in Death Valley. It’s basically a historic context statement, and it’s incredibly detailed and thorough. And I was particularly interested because I do love Death Valley. I love desert areas, and so this was a fascinating read. So I now understand why you chose this subject, but how did you know about it?
Mary Ringhoff 6:43
Having been through the thesis process once before, I didn’t want to get bogged down with doing my dream topic, as is common. You know, we’re all passionate about something, and we all want to find the perfect topic for a thesis, but really, it’s just an opportunity to work your research muscles and your analysis muscles and learn how to do it correctly. So having gone through the process once, I was pretty practical. A good friend of mine was the park archeologist at the time, so I went to visit her and see if there were any projects that I could do that would help Death Valley National Park, because that was the other piece of this. I wanted to have just a practical, doable topic, and I also wanted it to be of some benefit. So my friend at the park, she had a couple of possible topics that I was interested in and thinking about. And I came back to L.A. and I came to class on Monday, and Ken Breisch said, Oh, I just talked to this guy who’s trying to preserve a mining town just outside of Death Valley National Park. It sounds really interesting. And I was like, Cool. So he had talked to someone who was with the Death Valley Conservancy, which is a preservation conservancy group, a nonprofit, and they had access to this completely intact, you know, I don’t want to say pristine, because that’s never really true, but a really amazingly preserved borax mining town, which was actually outside of the boundaries of Death Valley National Park. So it was not managed by the Park Service, but it had been owned by a mining company continuously for decades, and was fenced off and not accessible to the public. So its archeological resources were still intact. It had a bunch of buildings that were still intact. And I said, I think what would help you is just a comprehensive historic context statement for this town of Ryan. And so that’s what I did.
Willa Seidenberg 8:36
Who were the original inhabitants of that area?
Mary Ringhoff 8:40
Well, originally, it was the Timbisha Shoshone who still maintain, you know, this is part of their traditional homeland, and they still maintain residence within the National Park. And they had, you know, obviously, because Death Valley is a really challenging environment, they would have a seasonal pattern where they would be higher up in elevation during the heat of the summer, and then they would come down to the valley floor during the winter.
Willa Seidenberg 9:05
Okay, so when was borax first discovered in that area?
Mary Ringhoff 9:09
Borax is one of those less charismatic minerals. I guess it’s, it’s very useful in industry. You know, everyone knows now it as a washing aid, I guess it’s for whitening clothes and things like that, but it’s used a lot in manufacturing and other industry. So it was in the 1870s when people began exploring surface deposits of Borax. So a lot of times you’d have them in those ancient lake beds, and the borax would kind of precipitate out to the surface. So early borax mining was really just people scraping borax off the surface. They would scrape it up into piles, and then they would process it in these big tanks. So the Pacific Coast Borax Company, the early version of it in Death Valley, it was at Harmony, what’s now called Harmony Borax Works, which the park has a nice little interpretive trail and stuff there. And it was mostly Chinese American employees of the borax company who were doing the labor. And so they would scrape up all the borax and precipitate it out in these tanks, process it, and then it would get hauled out. And this is where you get the sort of iconic image of the 20-mule team borax wagons, where you’d have these giant teams of mules with actually a couple of horses in there too, pulling these enormous wagons. In those days, you know, they would haul it all the way to the, I think the nearest railroad stop was in Mojave which is quite some distance. So they did that for a little while, but then eventually the borax company built closer railroad connections. So by the time they discovered the underground borax deposits at what is now Ryan, the borax company built the Death Valley Railroad, which came in from the Death Valley Junction. So they actually set up their milling operation at Death Valley Junction. And all this was happening starting in 1914 typical underground mining. And then the ore would go out on the Death Valley Railroad to Death Valley Junction, and that’s where they would process it and get it on the mainline railroad to send it out.
Willa Seidenberg 11:23
Ryan’s lifespan as a mining town was pretty short-lived, just mostly during the 20s, right?
Mary Ringhoff 11:30
So Ryan, when it was at its height, it had multiple buildings. In 1920 the borax company did a big modernization, like originally, they had brought in a bunch of old cabins from another location where they’d been mining, and they just dragged them in on the railroad. And then after that, they did a big modernization in 1920 where they built two big bunkhouses for workers. But there were still plenty of people living on their own across the landscape. They had sort of a little, an area they called Little Goldfield that was mostly families. So they there were, you know, sort of a group of families that were living in their own houses, and then they had other people who just, whether because there wasn’t space or they didn’t want to be under company control, kind of just living on their own in little dugouts and shacks. So that’s an important thing to note about Ryan, is it was very much a company town with all of the control that that entails.
Willa Seidenberg 11:30
Death Valley is such a punishing environment. Who was signing up to work under those conditions?
Mary Ringhoff 12:15
Yeah. I mean, I think they definitely slowed down during the summer. One piece of this that I keep thinking I would love to go back and research, just because, for one thing, so many more newspapers and sources are available online now than they were 12 years ago when I was doing this thesis. But I did find one reference to there being sort of like a shadow workforce in the summer, and they referred to Kanaka people, which are Hawaiians, Native Hawaiians.
Willa Seidenberg 13:01
Wow.
Mary Ringhoff 13:01
So I am really curious to find out if they were sort of importing another workforce that I presume was paid less, but I think they might have had them in there to keep things going during the summer, and then they had the regular workforce come in. This is speculation based on one article at this point, but it’s a very, it’s a very interesting piece.
Willa Seidenberg 13:24
Yeah, and so a lot of the people, as you say in your thesis, who were there were single men, but there were some families, as you mentioned. Do you know much about who actually was there during the winter months when the mining was in full swing?
Mary Ringhoff 13:42
Yeah, it was definitely a mix. And when I say a mix, I mean mostly European immigrants as well as native-born. I think there were some Timbisha Shoshone that were working there. We know that it was Mexican and Mexican American railroad workers who built the Death Valley Railroad going in there. But hard rock mining populations tended to be recent immigrants. They went where the work was, and if the work was in Death Valley, you know, that’s where they went. I don’t know how many people were there long-term, aside from the management class it does appear that the families were mostly managers. You know, the company probably thought if they have their families with them, they’re more likely to stay with the company, we’ll give them some accommodations. So they actually moved some of them into new, when they built new cabins, they would move some of those families into the cabins because those were the managers and the engineers that they wanted to keep around.
Willa Seidenberg 14:35
And one thing I thought was so interesting is that they would not allow many single women to come into the camp because they wanted to avoid prostitution.
Mary Ringhoff 14:47
Usually there weren’t a lot of single women, but there was usually a school teacher who was a single woman, and sometimes the nurse that would come into town to help people out would be single, or at least was there without her husband.
Willa Seidenberg 15:31
And then tourism started developing alongside the mining,
Mary Ringhoff 15:36
That’s right, and actually the borax companies, so first Pacific Coast Borax, which then became U.S. Borax was really instrumental when it came to the formation and the sort of the promotion of Death Valley National Park after World War I. You know, there were no more material restrictions or anything like that. People had a little more money. More and more people had cars. And this is when auto tourism really became a big thing in the U.S. So the borax company and the National Park Service were really promoting Death Valley as a place that people could come. And a lot of it is people from Southern California, people from Los Angeles, who could go out there for a weekend trip, drive out there and see all the geological wonders and everything else. Tourism was becoming a bigger deal in Death Valley in the 20s, in the late 20s, and that’s also when the borax company discovered a much bigger and easier to access borax deposit at what is now Boron, California, which is still a big open pit borax mine. So they were kind of shifting operations over there. So they actually converted Ryan into a hotel. So it became the Death Valley View Hotel. You know, they kind of fixed up the cabins and everything else, and they made the mess hall nice, made a little hotel lobby. The Death Valley Railroad came in from Death Valley Junction and ended at Ryan. But then there was a smaller gauge railroad they called the Baby Gauge that would go out to the other more far-flung mines. It was almost like a little mini-locomotive with little open seating in the back. And people would ride on the Baby Gauge and see everything and stay at the hotel. And it sounds like it was a really nice little setup. But that didn’t last too long either, once they finished the fancy hotel.
Willa Seidenberg 17:26
And now that hotel is called the Oasis at Death Valley.
Mary Ringhoff 17:31
Yeah, the Death Valley View hotel that was Ryan became a little bit more of an overflow housing when there were big events, although it did see continuous occupation most of the time, but it didn’t last too long as a hotel, and eventually it just got kind of mothballed, and the mining company just closed it up, fenced what they could fence, basically put a gate at the entrance road and kept it private. And they just held onto it In case they ever needed to come back and mine those borax deposits again.
Willa Seidenberg 18:05
When was Death Valley designated as a national landmark?
Mary Ringhoff 18:10
It was in 1933 it became a national monument, and it had that status for actually, for a long time, it didn’t become a national park until the 1990s.
Mary Ringhoff 18:16
So Ryan is just outside of the park boundary then?
Mary Ringhoff 18:26
That’s correct. So it was managed by, you know, the private mining companies for a long time, but they turned the property over to the Death Valley Conservancy, that nonprofit group that I did my thesis for.
Willa Seidenberg 18:39
I noticed that the Conservancy is now doing tours of Ryan.
Mary Ringhoff 18:42
They do do occasional tours. They want to be really cautious about letting too many people up there at once, because the, you know, the buildings are stabilized, but they are, you know, they’re old, and there’s a lot of very heavy wind up there and things that tend to take roofs off of structures and stuff and things are a little rickety, so they’re very careful about not having too much wear and tear on the buildings. But I do highly recommend the tours if you can get on them. And the Conservancy does you know, even though their their primary goal is the preservation of Ryan, they do provide funding for other projects, both in and inside and outside of Death Valley National Park. So they’re pretty strong partners with the park, even though Ryan isn’t actually part of the park.
Willa Seidenberg 19:31
We’ll put a link to the Conservancy and its tours. You can sign up to get emails when they’re offering tours.
Mary Ringhoff 19:39
Yep.
Willa Seidenberg 19:40
Was there anything in your research that was a real surprise to you or that you found particularly interesting?
Mary Ringhoff 19:50
One of the things I’ve always been very interested in is company towns and how people work with and around the restrictions of company towns. So for me, seeing all these little dugouts and stuff, and there are historic photos of these guys just standing up at the doorway of their little dugout where they were living, just because, you know, they, I suspect some of them just didn’t want to be under as much control. You know, company towns didn’t allow drinking. Ryan was so isolated, it was really hard to get any place else. Like once you were there, you were kind of there. There were multiple mines in the Ryan District. So there were a couple that were right there in the town of Ryan, but then there were others that were a few miles down the railroad. So some of those people would basically be living out there by their workplace, and then they would just come into town every once in a while for stuff that they needed. So for me, that’s something that’s really interesting is how people adapt in that way. And then I’m always interested in women and kids living in these kinds of industrial environments. You know, you see these pictures of these little kids, and Ryan is very steep and very treacherous. There’s a lot of cliffs that you can fall off and things. In fact, there was a, you know, there’s a story about a little girl who tumbled down the hill and broke her arm, and they had to take her on the railroad to get her arm set. And, you know, the caretakers who live there now are raising their three kids at Ryan. So their youngest has never lived anyplace else, and he’s alive. You know, he survived it.
Willa Seidenberg 21:32
It is an incredible environment, and it is amazing that a lot of those buildings have survived a hundred years, given how harsh that environment is.
Mary Ringhoff 21:43
Yeah, it’s really incredible. These, they’re these really nice, just vernacular, a very unified company style, with these with corrugated metal sheathing. And they had it painted in white and Ryan green, they called it. There’s a little tiny schoolhouse. There’s a hospital building. They didn’t have a doctor there full time, but it does have what we assume was the operating room with big, big windows that would get natural light. There’s just all kinds of interesting little details in their buildings there. They have a they have, like, a cold storage room that’s basically just heavily insulated, thick wood has this really thick door that you open up and you go in there and it still smells like bacon.
Willa Seidenberg 22:25
Wow.
Mary Ringhoff 22:26
This is where people were storing their smoked meats and cured meats and stuff. It’s just all kinds of really cool things like that. And it really is a tangible way to connect you with the past. Yeah, and it’s so rare to have something that’s that hasn’t been messed with.
Willa Seidenberg 22:57
You graduated in 2012 and what did you do after you graduated?
Mary Ringhoff 23:02
I actually kind of hung out my own shingle for a little bit while I was figuring out what I was going to do. So I did a few projects on my own, but I also started an internship with Architectural Resources Group, where I still work. So I did a Survey LA internship. So just as I had hoped when I came to L.A., I got involved with Survey LA. And so that internship with ARG, I just learned so much about, obviously, about doing survey, but architectural documentation, and it was the most amazing way to get acquainted with Los Angeles, even having, you know, having lived there during the couple of years that I was in school, I sort of knew my neighborhood. I lived in Silver Lake at the time. It wasn’t until I started doing Survey LA that I got to, like, drive every street in Lincoln Heights. And now I know and love Lincoln Heights, and there’s you learn so much. So it was really a fantastic experience.
Willa Seidenberg 24:01
And you have taught several classes over the years at USC, including the one I took.
Mary Ringhoff 24:07
It was kind of unexpected, because teaching was not ever on my bucket list, and this was another thing that just kind of fell in my lap. And it’s because when I was in the program, taking classes and everything with Trudi Sandmeier, I was always the one yapping about archeology and bringing up National Register Criterion D, which is the one that’s supposed to be for archeology, which normally doesn’t get talked about. And yeah, I guess I did that enough that when Trudi became the director of the program, then she asked me if I could teach a class that was basically archeology for architectural historians and planners. So it was sort of a cultural resource management light class, and it’s really just to help raise awareness about the less visible cultural resources.
Willa Seidenberg 24:55
And it did that. It was really such a good combination with all of the other heritage conservation classes, and it did give me a huge awareness of archeology. And, in fact, when I went to Europe last year, I was in Sardinia and Sicily and Malta, and a lot of what we did was visit archeological sites. So I credit you with really giving me that interest in archeology.
Mary Ringhoff 25:21
Thank you. That’s nice. Yeah, and I mean, probably, I think part of why you like the class is I did a lot of field trips. Because so much of you know, like, I keep talking about the hands-on aspect of history and heritage that archeology brings. And so for that reason, in my classes, I always had guest speakers who could address, you know, topics that I didn’t know as much about. And I always tried to do as many field trips as possible. So I took some classes to Ryan so they can see the, just the surface artifact scatters at Ryan are just incredible. And it’s nothing like charismatic, you know, but it’s like the can scatter. Like, I’m not going to go off about can scatters, but they have these can scatters, and these, you know, bottle glass fragments and just all intact, which is just so rare, and it’s very cool.
Willa Seidenberg 26:14
Have there been any projects that you’ve done at ARG that were particularly memorable?
Mary Ringhoff 26:20
Oh, man, I’ve worked on a lot, I mean, really Survey LA was kind of my life for the first few years. So having been involved with that and just getting to document so many different kinds of resources and so many different neighborhoods, that will probably always be the topper for me. But since then, we’ve done a lot of really interesting work. I’ve done a couple of local landmark nominations that I’ve been really fond of. There’s actually, there’s a veterinarian’s office on Slauson that I did the Historic-Cultural Monument application for, that it was designated. It’s this amazing art deco veterinary hospital. And I keep telling, maybe I’ll put this message out on Save As, I always tell incoming students who are looking for a thesis topic, I want someone to do a thesis on the typology of the veterinarian’s office and the pet hospital in Los Angeles.
Willa Seidenberg 27:20
Oh my gosh, that would be so interesting.
Mary Ringhoff 27:23
Yeah, because I think some of them are, like, unnecessarily architecturally distinctive. They really are, and part of it is because they really seem to have taken off in the 30s, the 20s and 30s, which is also when you know, Los Angeles was still, despite the Depression, L.A. was really still booming in terms of construction, and the population was still growing. The Great Migration was happening, you know, that would blow up more, you know, during the war, but there were a lot of people coming in. And I don’t know exactly the connection, but there are a lot of pet hospitals being built, and some of them are really great. The zoning is interesting because they’re often in industrial areas, so you’ll just be driving down a street full of nondescript warehouses, and then suddenly, here’s this art deco tower where you take your dog when it you know, needs its shots.
Willa Seidenberg 28:14
I didn’t know the American obsession with pets went back that far.
Mary Ringhoff 28:18
Yeah, yeah. I was, I was kind of shocked, but at least in L.A.
Willa Seidenberg 28:24
Yeah, interesting. Okay, so all you potential students, yeah, some good thesis topics here,
Mary Ringhoff 28:31
Yeah, little, little weird buildings like that. And then I have managed to keep doing more of my Nevada vernacular and archeological work. We’ve done a couple of projects out in eastern Nevada where we work with some tech sub-consultants who do laser scanning. So we’re doing a lot of 3d documentation of rock art sites and historic mining sites, in the interest of interpretation for the Bureau of Land Management out there. So I’m always into that stuff still.
Willa Seidenberg 29:02
Well, thank you so much for this interesting dive into a place that I love, Death Valley, and for being such a great alum and for all the interesting information you gave us today. Thanks.
Mary Ringhoff 29:15
Thanks for having me Willa. It’s great to see you.
Cindy Olnick 29:21
So that was cool. That’s like, I didn’t know any of that before. So it’s, you know, it’s always a journey and a pleasure listening to our own episodes here on Save As. Can scatters, by the way, so they’re just piles of cans? Is that what we’re talking about?
Trudi Sandmeier 29:37
Yeah. So this is a site where the archeological remains of the community are literally laying on the ground that you can walk around and see it. And it’s, it’s like a midden pile, you know, a pile of historic trash. But it’s fascinating. It’s bottles and cans and combs. And toys, and it’s just all kinds of cool stuff, just really laying there for you to see and observe and understand.
Cindy Olnick 30:09
Little bit of archeological lingo. Learn something new every day.
Cindy Olnick 30:22
Thanks so much for joining us for this episode of Save As. For photos and show notes, visit our website at saveas.place. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, review and tell a friend.
Trudi Sandmeier 30:36
This episode was produced by Willa Seidenberg. Our original theme music is by Stephen Conley. The song They Call It Death Valley is by Robert Arthur. Save As is a production of the Heritage conservation program in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
