Gelatin silver photographs. Images approx. 19.5x25 cm (7¾x9¾"), in original studio mats with photographer's imprint in lower margin.
Photographs of the golden hills of Contra Costa County, across the bay from San Francisco, one showing some fencing and a steep hill cleaved by an arroyo, the other the ranch house, barn and outlying buildings. Each has on the back of the mat the pencil caption "Old Laugher Ranch Somerville about 1933 (Geo. Laugher had this picture taken)".
Somersville is an unincorporated ghost town in eastern Contra Costa Co,, CA located 6 miles of Mount Diablo. By 1860, there were six miles of mines stretching between the towns of Somersville and Nortonville, and Judsonville and Stewartville.
Four million tons of coal were extracted during the brief history of coal mining in the Mt. Diablo Coalfield. The soft bituminous coal was of low quality. By 1902, the mining costs, competition from high quality Washington coal, the advent of oil as an industrial power source and affordable available transportation drove most of the mines out of business.
Nortonville and Somersville became “ghost towns” overnight. Many of the people who had come seeking wealth in the coal fields stayed and became farmers, ranchers and merchants. In 1922, silica sand mining began in Nortonville and at the site of the old Pittsburg Mine in Somersville. The sand was used in the making of glass at the Hazel-Atlas Glass Company in Oakland and by the Columbia Steel Company in Pittsburg for steel production. Mining operations in what had been the biggest coal mining operation in California closed down for good in 1949.