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In 1861, Noah Norton located the Black Diamond Vein of coal in the eastern foothills of Mt. Diablo and with several others, opened the Cumberland Mine. Soon he founded the town of Nortonville.

When the mine first started the coal was carried by wagon from the mine to Pittsburg, where it was put on a boat for San Francisco, Stockton or Sacramento. By 1865, so much coal was being taken out that a railroad was built to carry it to the river.

Because the mines were high, the loaded cars were given a push and coasted down the hill. A steam engine pulled the empty cars back up to the mine.

The Nortonville mines were closed permanently in 1885. The miners and their families left to find work in other areas and Nortonville became a ghost town.

The Miner

Many of the miners who lived in Nortonville were Welsh - that is, they came from Wales a country near England which also had lots of coal mines. The miners worked very hard, digging coal for 10 hours a day. Because the tunnels were so small, the miners had to crawl into them and dig lying on their stomachs with only oil lamps for light. Then they had to push the coal back out of the narrow shafts where it could be loaded onto mule carts and carried to the surface. If the tunnels became too small for men to work, young boys were employed to dig out the coal. They worked as hard as the men.

The Welsh miners were also superstitious. One time, two miners ran out of the mine yelling. "There's a ghost down there." One of them had seen two bloodshot eyes and heard whining noises. Everyone was afraid to go into the shaft where the "ghost" had been seen. Finally several men decided to investigate. They went in and captured the "ghost." When it was brought out into the light, it turned out to be a beautiful gray fox. Still, the miners continued to believe in ghosts.

The Miners Wife

Life in the mining towns between 1865 and 1879 was very difficult. Women worked has hard as the menfolk. Just to do the laundry, clothes were carried to a nearby creek and tied to a rock so the water could pound against them. Buckets of water were carried from the well and poured into washtubs and set to boil over fires. The clothes were gathered from the creek and scrubbed with harsh soap on a washboard then put into the boiling water. Next they were rinsed and hung to dry. A women tried to have this done by 10:00 in the morning.

The rest of the day was taken up by chores such as milking the cow, churning butter, making cheese, making pork sausage and bacon, pickling, salting and drying meat and cooking meals for the family. Clothes also had to be made by hand and mended.

Large families with five or more children were common. During the diphtheria epidemic of 1878, some families lost all of their children. One or two children survived in the lucky families. It was not unusual for women to have a second family with five more children. There was only one doctor for all the mining towns so when people became sick they often had to be cared for by the families.