Around Boron

By Barbara J. Pratt and Twenty Mule Team Museum

In the late 1920s, this high desert area with little water and unproductive soil held no attraction for most people, but the small community of Amargo provided a grocery store, gas station, and of course a saloon for the convenience of tenacious gold and borax prospectors. In 1938, after the large deposit of borax was discovered and mining had begun, a town hall meeting was called and Le Roy Osborne, supervisor of Pacific Coast Borax Company, suggested changing the name from Amargo to Boron. Boron is the fifth element on the periodic table and combines with other nonmetallic minerals to form a family of related minerals called borates; after this was explained to those gathered at the town hall meeting, Boron was unanimously chosen as its new name and the community was forever linked to the borax mining industry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781439623084

Barbara J. Pratt

Author Barbara J. Pratt has lived in this community since 1932. She has written articles and columns in local newspapers and has been continuously active in numerous community organizations. Barbara has served as director of the Twenty Mule Team Museum for over 10 years. Photographs in this book have been borrowed from the museum archives and from Boron citizens who have been generous in sharing images and memories of the old days. As always, the Borax Company, now known as Rio Tinto Minerals, has been helpful beyond measure.

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INTRODUCTION

This narrow corridor, around Boron, is about 10 to 15 miles wide, bisected from east to west by the Santa Fe Railroad and by Highway 58. It is a forbidding area, not conducive to agriculture or luxurious living. It is bordered on the east by the intersection of Highways 395 and 58 and dwindles off to the west into a land of arid nothingness before it becomes active again near the community of North Edwards. The San Gabriel Mountains to the south and the Sierra Nevada to the north and west create a changing atmosphere of color and shape because of the effect of desert light and mirages.

This area began as a sparse community for prospectors of gold, silver, borates, and other minerals. During the early 20th century, the discovery of the largest, richest borax mine in the world spurred a sudden growth that emerged in the early 1930s just as the economy of most of the United States was in a deep Depression. As desolate as the area appears to be, it has a quiet charm that bewitches some people to spend a lifetime here. The only native trees are the spindly Joshua trees, some with grotesque shapes. Other vegetation includes mesquite and sagebrush. In the spring, the abundant array of wildflowers is breathtaking.

In December 1931, George Beecher, his wife, Lil, and their small daughter, Georgia Lou, from Pueblo, Colorado, bought 120 acres of desert land at the intersection of Highway 395 and the highway designated at that time as Route 466. A small café was on the southeast corner of the two highways. They had never been in the restaurant business, but the building was there and a café seemed to be a logical enterprise for the location. On the northeast corner, Beecher built a service station equipped with two hand pumps. He added an attractive five-room house where they lived for 17 years. This developing intersection was known as Beecher’s Corners. As the overall economy improved, the Beechers sold two corners of their property to Mr. and Mrs. Angus Green but continued to operate the service station. Eventually the Greens sold their property to Howard Julien. Meanwhile, George Beecher built another service station and leased it to James Darr and Robert Caillier in 1951. In 1953, Beecher built another café and leased it to Roy MacLaughlin.

Three miles west of Beecher’s Corners was the unincorporated town of Kramer, which had existed since 1882 as a station on the new railroad line from Mojave to Needles, California. Kramer was never very large but provided transportation, postal service, and a small store for the homesteaders, prospectors, and miners in the surrounding territory.

As prospectors’ activities for borates increased, another small community was established about 7 miles west of Kramer. Originally called Amargo, meaning bitter water, the name was changed to Boron after the borax mine came into production.

In the early 1930s, dry farmers around Muroc left their farms and moved to Boron to work in the mine. When the school district was formed to combine all of the schools, it was named the Muroc Unified School District. When the hospital district was established in Boron, it was named the Muroc Hospital District. The name of Muroc was chosen for the site that later became Edwards Air Force Base because when the Corum brothers asked to name their post office, Corum was rejected by the Post Office Department because it was similar to another California post office; so they reapplied, requesting Muroc, which was their name spelled backward.

The exploratory search for borates in the entire high desert, from Death Valley to Borate near Calico and Barstow and west to Kramer, became more intense around 1913. The story is that John Suckow, a medical doctor in Los Angeles, planned to build a tuberculosis sanitarium on land he owned in the high desert. He hired Les Griffin and William E. Hoover to drill a water well. The men did not find any water but, at a depth of about 300 feet, found some white ore that Dr. Suckow thought might be gypsum. He displayed samples in his medical office, and a patient, Lew Rasor, whose brother Clarence Rasor worked for Pacific Coast Borax Company, recognized these rocks as borates. The details are vague, but the fact is a claim was filed in 1913 by John Ryan, an associate of Clarence Rasor, on land near Dr. Suckow’s claim. Soon Pacific Coast Borax Company, the Suckow Chemical Company, and another group headed by Henry Blumenburg, called the Western Borax Company, were all busily sinking shafts in search of this white gold.

Because of the competitiveness and the desire to be the first to reach the ore body, measures were taken to keep their endeavors secret. Pacific Coast Borax Company hired a crew of Italian miners to sink the discovery shaft at the Baker mine because they could not speak English and therefore could not divulge any secrets.

One result of all this secrecy was that when the mines were ready for operations, the little town of Amargo was not ready to accommodate the influx of workers. The official start of production at Pacific Coast Borax was in 1927, and the company followed the same pattern they had in Death Valley with all of the employees living at the mine in tents, small cabins, and a few larger houses. Meals were provided, family style, at the cookhouse. Most of the employees were single men. The families of the few married men lived in nearby cities such as San Bernardino or Barstow.

By 1932, there was only one building on the main street of Amargo. There was no electricity, gas, or water system because there had not been any need for them. Electrical and gas lines were soon installed and water wells were drilled, but it was a few years before a water district was established. The few children in the community attended school in Kramer at first, but in 1929, an elementary school was established in a tent. The next year, the first school building was completed. Families built homes for themselves. Some were conventional, and others were quite innovative.

Highway 466, a branch of the legendary Route 66 that began in Chicago, Illinois,