Chapter 2 –
The Development of Ryan as a Mining Town

Establishment and Early Growth: 1914-1919

The mining camp of Ryan, California was established in 1914 as an autonomous company town supporting mining activity in six underground mines along the eastern hillsides of Death Valley. The mines delivered borate ore to Ryan via a series of tramways and a narrow 24-inch-gauge railroad, called the Baby Gauge. The Baby Gauge employed several battery-powered and gas locomotives to haul long cars of borax ore to be dumped into massive wooden ore bins. Then, the ore was transferred into rail cars and shipped to the processing center at Death Valley Junction by a 20-mile long, 36-inch-gauge railroad, the Death Valley Railroad (DVRR), specifically designed and constructed for this purpose.

The store at the Lila C Mine (“old Ryan”) was moved to Ryan to serve the same purpose, ca. 1915.

(Pacific Coast Borax Company 23a, DEVA Archives)

The rugged desert setting dictated the organization of the early Ryan settlement, as its steep, rocky slopes precluded free placement of buildings. Structures, including tents, had to be placed wherever a flat spot could be found or, more commonly, erected atop a small dry-laid rock and earth platform. Enclosed by the Death Valley Railroad wye, the earliest configuration of Ryan contained the boarding house, store/post office (moved from the Lila C mining camp), a concrete cellar, a coal shed, and a cabin.¹ A blacksmith shop and second smaller shop sat near the south edge of town, next to an entrance to the Upper Biddy mine. At the northwest edge of town, on a flatter slope, sat a corral with an attached shed and stable. This would have housed the camp’s mules, used for getting around as well as hauling ore out of the underground mines.

An early image of the northern buildings of camp, ca. 1915, view north. The superintendent’s house (which later became the hospital) is right of the DVRR tracks. At the time, electricity was generated from a “Light Plant.”

(DV-RYA-01A, DEVA Archives)

A view of Ryan from the Upper Biddy McCarthy mine looking down the earliest iteration of the skip track, view west, ca. 1917. The Store and the dining room/boarding house (at left middle) are not yet connected and early cabins and tents are visible middle right.

(DV-RYA 07, DEVA Archives)

Even at an early date, Ryan had distinctive residential areas; at the north end of town were two frame dwellings which housed the mine superintendent and possibly the assistant superintendent. The larger superintendent’s dwelling later served as the camp hospital.² Most of the residences were at the south end of town, with twenty-two small cabins stepping precariously up the slope above the Upper Biddy ore bins and the DVRR line. At least ten of these cabins were moved from the Lila C mining camp, and were placed in a cluster of tidy rows as well as could be expected on the steep mountainside.³ Newly constructed buildings included the boarding house, ore bins, at least two cottages, an office, and one cabin serving as the cook’s residence.⁴

Ryan had core infrastructure resources from its earliest days, as illustrated by the presence of an electric light plant, a pump house connected to two uphill water tanks via a two-inch pipe, and two additional iron water tanks. Most likely, the light plant powered some large-scale lights in the area of the ore bins, boarding house and store, but the miners’ cabins are unlikely to have had electrical power this early. Over the next few years the number of outbuildings slowly grew with the addition of an oil house, coal storage house, warehouse, and machine shops; these would have served to support both the district’s mining activities and day-to-day life in Ryan.

Ryan did not have a water source of its own, so water for domestic and industrial activities was brought in on DVRR tank cars every day from Death Valley Junction. The management of the water supply was a major shaping element in the town and continues to be so today.

The full extent of Ryan’s early residential water system and sewage system is not currently known. Although privies were likely used during the early years, some historic records indicate that privies were plumbed for toilets given Ryan’s “splendid drainage.”⁵ The network of ceramic sewer pipe originating from the buildings in Ryan suggests sewage and wastewater drained down the slope and into cesspits even early on.

Trash disposal posed another ongoing infrastructure challenge. Early Ryan residents probably discarded household trash in close proximity to their homes instead of in designated dumping areas; however, as the camp grew, trash disposal became more organized as reflected by a network of roads and dumps on the western slopes below the camp. In addition, a narrow trackway originating from the kitchen area permitted flammable trash to be hauled by ore car to two incinerators on the western edge of town for immediate removal.

To attest to Ryan’s rapid growth, by 1917, Ryan had 54 total buildings including 31 residences and the same communal buildings and outbuildings noted above.⁶ The residences were mostly cabins and tent-structures located along each side of the north/south rail line. Improvements included additions to the superintendent’s house and the main warehouse, alteration of an older building into an office, and the replacement of some tents with cabins.⁷ Ryan’s infrastructure improvements also continued, notably with the construction of a new power plant in 1918. This supplied the town with a more reliable source of electricity, produced by a Fairbanks Morse engine driving a Westinghouse generator, but necessitated the rearrangement of the existing electrical system for the new high-tension current.⁸ Pacific Coast Borax (PCB) also built a compressor plant that year, enabling the eventual use of compressed air drills at all of the Ryan mines.

For the remainder of the decade, Ryan continued to grow with the construction of new buildings and structures, additions to existing buildings and the relocation of existing resources (such as the original corral and stable complex) to accommodate the building activity.⁹ The most notable building added during these years was the Recreation (Rec) Hall. The Rec Hall, called a club house on the older maps, was not a newly constructed building, but St. Mary’s Catholic church that PCB moved to Ryan from the Nevada ghost town of Rhyolite in 1919. The church was originally built in 1906 and transporting it from Rhyolite to Ryan must have been an extreme undertaking.¹⁰ While no documentation of the move has been located, building observations suggest that the 28 by 45 ft building was disassembled into sections, loaded onto flat railcars, transported roughly 50 miles to Death Valley Junction via the T&T Railroad, and then freighted to Ryan via the 20-mile run of the DVRR. Once at Ryan, it was reconstructed 25-feet above the railroad grade on the hillside on the northern edge of the camp. Once in place, additions included a roofed porch on the west façade, a stage and dressing rooms on the northern façade, and a bathroom on the south side of the building, adjacent to the vestibule. While it was originally a church, the building served as a recreational center for Ryan, hosting dances, musical and dramatic performances, movies, and even a satellite branch of the Inyo County Library much enjoyed by residents.

Ryan had informal footpaths and trails crisscrossing the town, established through frequent use and following contours of the steep slopes. Some of them were evidently shored up and improved over time, as shown today by small rock retaining walls and footbridges over gullies. The camp’s roads were likewise informal until the early 1920s, traversed mainly by trucks and wagons hauling trash, maintaining infrastructure, or doing assessment work around Ryan and beyond. It was technically possible to reach Death Valley Junction via road, but it was a roundabout route on an unimproved, sandy wagon road via Greenwater Canyon and the Lila C.¹¹ The road between Ryan and Greenland Ranch, traversed on a regular basis by workers bringing beef and other supplies to the boarding house and store, was only slightly better. Most of Ryan’s freight and passenger traffic came and left by railroad, so it was not until PCB began its significant modifications to the local topography around 1921 that major roads started to be improved and maintained.

Early on, Ryan developed residential areas and private dwellings scattered away from its central core. Starting in 1918, maps show a few habitations on the slopes to the west and northwest of town, and a group of ten neatly-aligned houses moved from Goldfield, Nevada in an area that came to be called “Little Goldfield” by residents.¹² Residential areas of Ryan likely extended far beyond the boundaries of Ryan’s official maps and the descriptions of company holdings.

Harry Gower recalled, “Living and working conditions at Ryan up to 1922, when we began to get some new bunkhouses and staff residences, were pretty rough by today’s standards though probably no worse than most other mining camps. Some of the men wouldn’t even live in the ramshackle old cabins provided, but built for themselves rock huts or lean-tos on the hillside above or in the gulch below town. A stranger would have been amused to see the heads pop up all over the place like prairie dogs when the warning whistle blew before breakfast.”

Improvements and Consolidation: 1920-1927

After World War I, Ryan’s workforce was at a low point but PCB clearly anticipated a big postwar revival of business, as the company pushed to modernize and enlarge its principal operations in the Ryan district. In late 1919, the company constructed three new buildings that were significantly different from those that had been constructed previously: they were a staff house (no longer surviving) and two large, two-story bunkhouses containing 44 rooms each. The bunkhouses, together able to house 176 men, provided a centralized, company-controlled residential area for the camp’s single male workers. By sometime in 1920, the new buildings had steam heat generated by an oil-powered steam-fired boiler just downslope; the steam plant also heated a shower house constructed between the two bunkhouses.¹³

The beginnings of PCB’s improvements and consolidation phase of construction in the Ryan Historic District, early 1920s, looking north. Note that the former superintendent’s house is now the Hospital, but not fully renovated. The two bunkhouses (to the left of the DVRR tracks) and the Rec Hall (behind the hospital) are present. The DVRR switch with track to the left allowed a tanker car to dump water in the Lower Reservoir (not pictured).

(DV-RYA-05A, DEVA Archives)

Once the superintendent’s residence, another of Ryan’s large buildings, the hospital was renovated and expanded as early as 1920. According to Superintendent Julian Boyd’s recollections, the Hospital was wrecked in 1921, the “year of the big wind.”¹⁴ The old hospital was repaired at that time.¹⁵ In 1924, the hospital underwent a major renovation. The new building had basically the same footprint as far as size and orientation, but its first story was modified, and the original roof and “mezzanine” were removed and replaced with a full second story. The building’s foundation was shored up with a new rock wall and a porch was constructed all the way around it. The final version of the hospital had two stories and contained housing for the hospital staff and patients, as well as Ryan employees and guests.¹⁶

The hospital before its major renovation, 1922.

(DV-RYA 05B, DEVA Archives)

The most significant changes to Ryan’s layout in its history occurred between 1921 and 1925. The first modification tackled the town’s challenging topography. Having run out of flat spots and room for small platforms, PCB took the direct approach by cutting several large, stepped terraces into the hillside for erection of its new buildings. The new features were reinforced by masonry walls of faced native cobbles, built by at least three stone masons: Dobie Gunnarson, Jourgensen (first name unknown), and Serafin Esteves.¹⁷ Esteves was a Ryan miner of Basque extraction who later did rockwork at the Furnace Creek Inn and at Zabriskie Point.

The bunkhouses sat on the lowest terrace; the next terrace contained the DVRR grade and some outbuildings; the third supported the new hospital; and the fourth terrace underlay the new houses for supervisory staff (referred to today as Houses 1-3). The feel and character of the town would have changed considerably with the addition of the terraces, connected to each other with stairways and landings that would have aided, though not eliminated, the constant up-and-down travel demanded by Ryan’s hillside location.

In 1921, PCB built six new houses for lower-level, but still fairly high-ranking, employees in two different areas, neither of which was in the main terraced area of the camp. Three of the houses were constructed on a finger ridge known as “Little Mesa”. They were nearly identical in layout and style, although there appear to have been small variations in size. Around the same time, PCB constructed three other new houses at the north end of the camp, just west of the DVRR. Their rock platforms stepped west down the slope in a tidy row, aligned with two older houses that had been there since 1918. According to a 1947 map, this group of five houses was known then as “Copenhagen Row,” but it is unknown whether that name was used as early as the 1920s or was an informal later assignation by caretakers or visitors.¹⁸ All eight houses seem to have largely been occupied by families, or at least married couples, whom the company would have seen as a stabilizing influence. The addition of these new, company-built residences came at the same time as the removal of most of Ryan’s older cabins; by 1922, most of the old cabins from Goldfield and the Lila C that once comprised the bulk of company-provided worker housing had either been demolished or moved. The old staff quarters next to Bunkhouse 1 was also removed at some point after 1922.

Sometime between 1920 and 1922, Ryan received an important new building: a one-room schoolhouse for its children in the southwestern part of the camp. It is not clear whether the school was newly constructed or moved from elsewhere; Bill Smitheram, grandson of William Smitheram, believed it was (like the Rec Hall) moved from Rhyolite.¹⁹ Children were being taught for years before the official schoolhouse arrived, reportedly in one of the management houses, but the schoolhouse represented the final step in making the company town family-friendly and feasible for year-round occupation by school-aged children. The school had a privy behind it to the north, fully plumbed and possibly even steam heated.

Sometime between 1921 and 1924, Ryan’s store/post office and boarding house went through major changes. The original store and post office building, set above the ground on wooden posts, had been hauled in from the Lila C where it was constructed before 1910.²⁰ Photographs after 1920 show a much-modified building; it was lowered, angled differently, and longer than the original. Architectural evidence, particularly the presence of two different kinds of roof trusses, indicates that an addition was placed on the northern (front) part of the building. The boarding house received a large gabled addition to its west side, containing a modern kitchen and storage areas, as well as a concrete addition to its north side which only remained for a few years. A two-story warehouse building was built just north of the boarding house and across the DVRR wye in 1924, containing storage space on the first floor and living space for kitchen staff on the second floor. If any of the kitchen staff had once occupied the old staff house, they would have moved to this new building.²¹

The store/post office and dining room, looking south, ca. 1925. The massive ore bins at left were removed in 1927 during the hotel conversion. A storage adit, which housed the modified 1912 Cadillac, is left of the Store and one of Ryan’s two fuel pumps is left of the DVRR tracks.

(DV-RYA-08, Frashers Fotos, DEVA Archives)

Ryan in 1925 when it was nearing the end of the improvements and consolidation phase (and after PCB finished construction of all district buildings), view north. The backs of the store/post office, dining room/boarding house, and kitchen buildings (from right to left) after they were joined are center.

(LS_4391, James R. Parks Library and Archives)

In 1924, a fire consumed the houses in which superintendent Boyd and assistant superintendent Gower lived.²² These houses were directly south of House 3 (constructed in early 1924) and with their removal, space was cleared for new upper management dwellings. Thus, in the latter half of 1924, four new supervisory staff houses were constructed, two to replace the burnt buildings and the other two on smaller terraces on the hillside above them.²³ The two houses on a common terrace (referred to today as House 1 and House 2) housed the superintendent and assistant superintendent. The other two buildings (House 4 and House 5) housed the storekeeper (who would have also been the postmaster) and the surveyor, respectively.

Improvements to Ryan’s infrastructure corresponded with the increased building activity of the early 1920s. By the middle of the decade, most of the communal company buildings had indoor plumbing, including bathrooms, and the supervisory staff housing and at least some of the cabins for upper-level employees had running water, electricity, and indoor bathrooms as well.²⁴ The hospital, bunkhouses, and shower house all had steam heat generated by an oil-fueled boiler. Outdoor privies were still very common, and cesspits to contain waste runoff dotted the landscape. In 1924, Ryan received a new electric power plant, switchboard, transformers, several power lines, and other infrastructure additions that improved the supply of electricity to the camp.²⁵ The new powerhouse replaced the 1918 one at almost the exact same location.

The dining room, kitchen, and store are presumed to have had refrigeration added by this point, although onetime Ryan resident Bill Smitheram remembers the building using an old cooling method as late as 1926-1928.²⁶ It had a “cool room” with one end open to the air, covered by sewn-together burlap sacks. A pipe was run from the reservoir to allow water to drip down the sacks, and a big fan blew the wet air in to cool the food stored there. This cool room, which was later demolished, was replaced by a wood-lined refrigerated room, ammonia ice plant, and California cooler installed adjacent to the kitchen.

PCB established a telephone line from Ryan to Greenland Ranch in late 1923 or early 1924, after Julian Boyd requested one to help organize assessment trips and to save automobile trips by arranging ahead of time for pickups of meat, eggs, and vegetables.²⁷ While footpaths remained in heavy use, local roads were graded and widened to allow easier vehicle access around the camp. PCB did most of the road maintenance around Death Valley until it became a national monument in 1933, with the goal of improving access to its tourist facilities as well as its mining properties.

Continue to Chapter 3 — >
Architecture of Ryan

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References