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New book provides glimpse of Bodie’s history |
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Thursday, 18 June 2009 |
Photo-essay collection includes previously
unreleased Photo-essay collection includes
previously unreleased private photos photos
By Catherine Billey
Mammoth Times Staff Writer
 Submitted Photos. Bodie: 1859-1962 is available at the Booky Joint, online bookstores, or through Arcadia Publishing at www.arcadiapublishing.com.
Bodie: 1859-1962, by Terri Lynn Geissinger, is the most recent title set in Mono County in the Images of America series, a photo-essay collection published by Arcadia that promotes local history through beautifully duplicated vintage photographs evoking American towns and regions in bygone days.
“This is more of a personal glimpse into Bodie’s past,” Geissinger said in a recent phone interview. “People get into the Big Bad Man from Bodie and the prostitutes, but this is more of a softer side – the women, the children, the immigrants.”
Geissinger is a local historian, tour guide and interpreter at Bodie State Historic Park.
“This is a small glimpse of a phenomenal history. There are alot of great books on Bodie out there. This will hopefully stand right alongside them,” she said.
While some of the vintage images are from the Mono County Museum, the author scanned more than 700 images from personal collections of families with generational roots in Bodie and made a selection of about 185 from there.
“Most of the images have never been seen before. They were in albums of private Bodie families. I was blessed because these people I’d come to know were very generous in allowing me to scan their personal collections,” she said. “What made choosing so difficult is so many of these beautiful, touching snippets of history, I couldn’t get in the book.”
Situated north of Mammoth among windswept hills and for decades a popular visit on the tourist route, Bodie is the Eastern Sierra’s most notorious mining town and the largest unrestored ghost town of the Old West. It sprouted up seemingly overnight when gold and silver were discovered northeast of Mono Lake in 1859. Twenty years later, it was, by the standards of the day, a metropolis with 10,000 people and the third largest city in California.
That didn’t last long. Mines reached peak production four years later and the exodus began by the winter of 1882. Some stayed on, however, and continued living among the town’s sage-covered hills throughout the 1950s. Bodie was purchased by the California State Park system in 1962.
Bodie was never entirely abandoned, despite a New York Times article dating to 1912 that described it as a ghost town.
“A very common theme in the oral histories is this: Children remember sitting at the dinner table and strangers walking in apologizing, thinking that the town was abandoned,” Geissinger said. She spoke with a number of those children, who today average about 85 years of age.
Bodie is today managed in a state of “arrested decay” – a special philosophy written especially for Bodie. That means that what existed in 1962 at the time of the purchase must remain in that condition. But special crews keep the historic buildings standing by stabilizing old rock foundations and repairing leaky roofs to prevent further decay.
The name “Bodie” is derived from W. S. Bodey, who arrived in the area in 1859 to pan the creeks in a camp above Monoville at about 8,300 feet in elevation. What he and his partner, E.S. “Black” Taylor, eventually discovered became the largest gold and silver deposits in California – though neither man ever knew that. Sadly, Bodey perished during a blizzard later that year, and Taylor was killed by Native Americans near Benton.
Bodie explores the early days of the rip-roaring camp that followed their discovery through its evolution into a more respectable place, attracting such California luminaries as Leland Stanford, F.K. Bechtel, Thomas Legget and Theodore Hoover.
Bodie joins another recent regional release, Mono Lake Basin by Don Banta and David Carle, which came out in late 2008. That book reflects the knowledge of two locals with more than a century of experience between them.
Bodie: 1859-1962, $21.99, Arcadia Publishing. Available at local retailers, online bookstores, or through Arcadia Publishing at www.arcadiapublishing.com or (888) 313-2665. Geissenger will be at the Lee Vining Community Center for a book signing on July 13.
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