Morrison Family History, Part 3

Continued from last week...

George Morrison’s cabin at the American Exchange Mine in Hog CanyonThat dusty, drafty old cabin at the mine is imbedded fondly in my childhood memories of mountain summers. When Arthur brought my mother and me up from Sierra City for a few days’ stay with his family, we lived as though time had been turned back a century. The cabin had no electricity, only candles and a kerosene lamp; we cooked on the old wood range, the water gurgled continuously out of a pipe in the wall from an icy spring a hundred feet away, flowed through the sink, down a short drain and out again by the back door; the privy was up a trail in a stand of ancient white fir. We picked bounteous bouquets of azaleas and tiger lilies in the meadow near the house where the four-stamp mining mill rotted gracefully away and we fished for our dinner among the willows along Butcher Creek. These days, Arthur’s son Bruce and his nephews keep up their family interest in the mine.

George and Lydia’s second son, Martin Luther, my grandfather, married Clara Dietel, who came to Sierra City from Dresden, Germany when she was ten years old. Clara’s mother was a part of the Fischer family, which still has several branches in the Gold Country. Martin and Clara had five children, but the unchecked childhood diseases of the time took the oldest, Clara, when she was about three, and the youngest, Harold, when he was only an infant. The three children who survived into old age were Leslie, born in 1900; Mabel, born in 1901; and Walter, born in 1904. When Martin and Clara married in 1897 in Sierra City, Martin moved his bride immediately into a small house on Church Street. Built the previous year, the house had only a small bedroom downstairs, a small front parlor reserved for special occasions, like a parson’s visit, and a larger room the width of the house that served as kitchen, main living room, and bathing room. Upstairs were two large bedrooms. The privy was stationed in the back yard. All five of Martin and Clara’s children were born in that house and the surviving three grew up there; they went through high school in Sierra City until graduation, except for my mother, Mabel, who finished at Polytechnic High in San Francisco. Martin, like his Morrison forebears, became a highly skilled carpenter. He served as foreman for the construction of a number of mining stamp mills in the area, including those at the Sacred Mound and Primrose mines. From family accounts, Martin seems to have been strict and gruff, and unlike his garrulous brother George, he was a man of few words. Yet he was a painstaking woodcrafter and a poet.George Morrison

Mountain Springs can be purchased at the Downieville Historical Museum, Sierra Country Store in Sierra City, Bassett’s Station, Graeagle Store, or directly by emailing lcrosen@yahoo.com.