If one had to guess at how Stonewall Mine got its name, the imposing granite peak of the same name towering in the distance would seem an important clue.
Less likely: that it was inspired by a Confederate war hero.
But the San Diego backcountry landmark and others nearby are indeed vestiges of the Civil War — despite no battles ever having been fought here — and lasting reminders of the region’s Southern-sympathizer history.
Monuments and markers that memorialize the Confederacy are under renewed scrutiny as the nation is challenged to reconcile its racist past and present following the in-custody death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
While much of the debate has been focused on statues in public plazas, school names and flag displays, the memory of the Confederacy — and its fight to retain states’ rights to hold onto the institution of slavery — also lives on in natural landmarks and obscure outposts.
Stonewall Mine, now part of Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, is one of them, along with nearby Stonewall Peak, Stonewall Little Peak, Stonewall Peak Trail, Little Stonewall Creek and Stonewall Creek Fire Road.
But it all started with the mine, discovered in 1870 — five years after the end of the Civil War and seven years after the death of Confederate commander Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
‘An open powder keg’
While California ended up ing the Union in the Civil War, the state’s views on slavery were more complicated.
A decade earlier, California had been permitted to enter the nation as a free state, potentially upending the balance of pro- and anti-slavery states in 1850. But it had to agree to a law that would force non-slavery states to assist in returning runaway slaves to owners elsewhere.
Southern-born pro-slavery lawmakers in the Democratic Party in California ed the concept and pushed for a state version of the law. After battling with an abolitionist faction in the party, the state ended up ing its own version of the fugitive slave law in 1852.
By the start of the Civil War, San Diego was still a rough frontier town that in many ways related more to the Southern cause.
Confederate sympathizers in Southern California talked of secession. Some later sneaked off to the South as the battle lines crept west.
“Southern California was an open powder keg,” retired Army Col. George Rulen wrote in The Journal of San Diego History. “All that was needed was an able leader to ignite the fuse which would rend the state asunder and bring the Civil War to the Pacific coast.”
The biggest Civil War action that San Diego saw came in late 1861. Two advance scouts, running ahead of a group of 20 well-armed men led by a state assemblyman, were caught near Lake Henshaw carrying letters to secessionists in Los Angeles.
When the group was eventually stopped at a ranch, they told Union troops that they were headed to Mexico to look for gold, despite their lack of prospecting supplies.
They were imprisoned at Fort Yuma for a while, and the assemblyman eventually made it to Texas and ed the Confederate Army.
A few years later, it was the promise of gold that brought many ex-Confederates and their sympathizers to California.
A former Black slave from Kentucky touched off San Diego’s own gold rush.
Frederick Coleman had been living with his Native American wife and their children north of the Cuyamaca Mountains after having tried his hand at gold in Northern California.
In the winter of 1869, Coleman had stopped to let his horse drink from a creek and saw the unmistakable flecks of gold in the water, according to local lore, documented in the seven-volume series “The History of San Diego,” written by Richard F. Pourade.
That find and larger ones that followed sparked a prospecting frenzy in the isolated mountains.
“A stampede immediately ensued and the road has now for several days been lined with teams of every description and men mounted and on foot enroute to the mines,” The San Diego Union reported in March 1870. “From persons who returned yesterday we learned that there are now on the ground not less than 600 persons and the number is daily increasing.”
Many Southerners had ed in the hunt.
Among them were the Bailey and Julian brothers, cousins from Georgia who had served in the Confederate Army.
Drury Bailey owned much of the land that the prospectors were squatting on and developed the camp into Julian City, named after his cousin Mike Julian, according to Pourade.
“For some reason, the number of Southerners in early Julian was quite high. I have a strong feeling it was just by word of mouth, that Julian had Southerners,” historian Leland Fetzer, who chronicles the time in “A Good Camp: Gold Mines of Julian and the Cuyamacas,” surmised in an interview last week. “It attracted other Southerners, I suppose.”
After the war, Confederate soldiers returned home to poverty and devastation. The West beckoned those looking for a new start.
But while some 2,000 Civil War veterans were documented as relocating to the San Diego area, only about 1 percent were identified as ex-Confederates, according to Barbara Palmer’s book “The Civil War Veterans of San Diego, CA.”
“They wanted anonymity to some degree,” said historian Frank Lorey III, author of “A Guide to the Gold Rush Country of California.” “A lot didn’t settle in the big cities. They went to backcountry areas. They tried to keep to themselves, keep to the people they knew.”
A few made lasting marks on the California map.
For instance, four massive trees in some of California’s most famous national parks are named after Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
On the other side of the Sierras, a group of Southern sympathizers who’d found gold near Lone Pine named their claim, within a massive boulder field, the Alabama Hills, a nod to the Confederate warship CSS Alabama that was destroyed in a battle off in 1864.
In retaliation, Union sympathizers in nearby Independence named their claims — and a mountain and a — after the USS Kearsarge, which had sunk the Alabama.
San Diego’s richest mine
The discovery of the Stonewall Mine is most often credited to William Skidmore, a Tennessee Confederate sympathizer who brought his family by mule train from Texas to the San Diego mountains. (His daughter would later marry Mike Julian.)
As the story goes, on March 22, 1870, Skidmore was looking for a lost mule when he found a thick vein on the southern shores of Lake Cuyamaca, seven miles south of Julian.
The discovery was located within a mining district set up by Englishman Charles Hensley, and the Union credited Hensley with the find in an article that ran a week later.
Nonetheless, together the men, along with other partners, staked their claim, calling it the Stonewall Jackson Mine.
Unlike the previous gold finds that used only placer mining — separating it from sand or gravel — the Stonewall was a lode mine requiring deep digging to separate the mineral from solid rock.
The mine quickly changed hands, and the claimants narrowed to two men, Almon Frary Sr., from Illinois, and Joseph Farley, from Ohio, who began serious production with stamp mills that would crush the rock to extract and process the gold.
According to park historians, voter records and other sources suggest that both men were pro-Union Republican party , along with other investors, offering a likely reason for the “Jackson” being dropped from the mine’s name. The singular Stonewall name later spread to natural features nearby.
“The Stonewall is beyond question one of the most valuable mines in California,” the Union exclaimed in October 1872.
The Weekly World, another San Diego daily, called the 10-stamp mill running at the mine “one of the most perfect things of the kind imaginable.”
But it was an expensive operation, and the mine shuttered after a few years with the owners believing it had been fairly tapped out and lacking the finances to keep pushing it. In 1886, it was bought by Robert Waterman, a San Bernardino mine owner and operator who went on to become California governor.
Overseen by his son, the mine grew with additional stamping mills, a railroad, a lumberyard and a sawmill. The deepest shaft reached 630 feet, with over a half-mile of tunnels branching off that, according to Lorey.
The Stonewall was far from tapped out.
“During most of his ownership, it was very profitable,” Lorey said. “But he overdid it. It never really had enough ore to have the stamp mill fully operating the way he’d hoped.”
The family sold the mine around 1892 after Waterman’s death. Subsequent owners were unable to extract much gold out of the tailing piles left behind, according to a state parks history of the mine.
Still, it was the richest gold mine in today’s San Diego County, producing anywhere from $1 million to $3.5 million in gold — the rough equivalent of $25 million to $85 million today.
By the 1930s, the long-abandoned mine and Cuyamaca City that had grown up around it had been dismantled by a wrecking company to make way for a development project that never materialized.
The land is now part of Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.
History revisited
Little remains of the mine today, but it is still a popular destination with hikers. A small green cabin maintained by the parks department displays photos and historical information.
The mine’s actual footprint is fenced off to visitors for safety reasons, as is hulking antique mining equipment left behind.
Nearby Stonewall Peak is also a well-known day hike, with handrails at the uppermost reaches to get climbers to the summit.
The landmarks have largely escaped local discussion over the years about whether to do anything about the name — perhaps due to the decision of the mine’s owners long ago to drop the “Jackson.”
Attention has instead been focused on more public traces of the Confederacy in San Diego. In 2016, Robert E. Lee Elementary School in Paradise Hills was renamed Pacific View Leadership Elementary School.
The move was spearheaded by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, who had co-authored legislation that would have required similar name changes throughout the state. Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the bill, saying the issue should be decided at the local level.
The following year, Mayor Kevin Faulconer ordered the removal of a plaque from Horton Plaza downtown that recognized the so-called Jefferson Davis Highway, a planned east-west route that never came to fruition as a continuous transcontinental highway.
The plaque had been donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, whose San Diego chapter, founded in 1901, is named after Stonewall Jackson.
While Jackson never set foot in California, his grown daughter and her husband lived in San Diego for a short time.
With help from Jackson’s widow, in 1888 the couple bought a home on 13th Street between A and B streets downtown, according to a 1968 article in The Journal of San Diego History. The home, known thereafter as the “Stonewall Jackson House,” was demolished around 1970 to make room for the expanding San Diego City College campus.
In Mount Hope Cemetery, a monument still stands honoring the Confederate veterans and their wives buried there. It was also a gift of the United Daughters.
A monument to fallen Union soldiers stands nearby.
Gonzalez’s office said last week that there is no plan to bring repeat legislation on name changes this year. She is hopeful that “public entities, including school districts, cities and counties, do an inventory of their legacy names and self-correct.”
State parks officials said there are no immediate plans to change the place names associated with Stonewall, but that a project is under way to update information s at the mine site that “will include a more expanded historical context based on more recent scholarship and public engagement.”
The agency is also open to continuing the conversation to “with scholars, visitors, activists and families to understand perspectives and gain a wider understanding of the name’s usage and how it may impact the visitor experience and those who come in with the name,” officials said in a statement Friday.
The debate over name changes and monument removals poses thorny questions for historians: How do we without glorifying? Viewing such history with context is key, historians say. Although that may be easier to do with a statue — which could be moved into a museum, presuming one agreed to take it — than with a mountain in the great outdoors.
For many, of course, the only context that’s needed is to remove Confederate recognition, period.
Tackling all U.S. geographic names would be a monumental undertaking, said Fetzer.
Still, the renaming movement has spread to some natural landmarks.
On the California-Nevada border, local officials are in the process of changing the name of Jeff Davis Peak, called so by Southerners who lived in nearby Summit City in honor of the Confederacy’s onetime president Jefferson Davis.
Last year, the name of another Jeff Davis Peak, in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park, was restored to its Native American name, Doso Doyabi.
