The Hogarth Family
The Hogarth Family has had a long involvement with the mining industry in Angels Camp. Patriarch Henry ("Harry") Hogarth, Sr. was born in Scotland in 1831. He immigrated to the United States at an early age and soon settled on a career as a miner, moving to Yuba County, California, where he was naturalized in 1867. In 1865 Harry and his wife Rose had a son, named Henry (Harry) Hogarth, Jr. For the next few years Harry used his mining skills as the operating head of a number of various gravel mines. Sometime before 1888, the Hogarth family moved to the Angels Camp area. He then spent most of his life working in the mining industry. In 1895 he and two other miners (James H. Candy and Naylor Williams) established their own claim in the Angels Camp region, hoping to capitalize on the 1890's hard rock mining boom.
Little is known of the early years of the mine, but Harry would eventually gain control of the entire claim and in April 1904 deeded it, "for love and affection," to his son Harry, Jr., along with all his property in Calaveras County. By that time young Harry, Jr., was an experienced miner, having taken his first job running an ore car, working a ten-hour-a-day shift seven days a week at a wage of $2.00 per day. Harry, Jr. originally worked the mine by hand, bringing ore home and crushing it in a simple bowl mortar with a pestle. He eventually purchased a small stamp mill to crush his ore.
The claim continued to be worked through the years. Harry, Jr. died in 1952, and while his son Harry Lewis Hogarth continued working on the mine, by the late 1950s the mine and mill had been abandoned and left to deteriorate.
Marker can be reached from South Main Street/Golden Chain Highway (State Highway 49), on the right when traveling north.
Courtesy hmdb.org
