Avawatz Salt and Gypsum Company records, 1889-1991, bulk bulk 1908-1922
Collection context
Summary
- Title:
- Avawatz Salt and Gypsum Company records
- Dates:
- 1889-1991, bulk bulk 1908-1922
- Creators:
- Wilderness Land Trust
- Abstract:
- The Avawatz Salt and Gypsum Company was formed by Herman Henry Kerckhoff in Los Angeles in 1912. The company owned 2,450-acres of mining property in the Avawatz Mountains, located in the Mojave Desert of San Bernardino County. In 2011 the Wilderness Land Trust, a Colorado non-profit corporation, purchased the Avawatz Salt and Gypsum Company and donated the land to the United States Bureau of Land Management for preservation. The collection contains a rich assortment of corporate document books, ledgers, and stock books; geologic and economic reports; mining-related government publications and newspaper articles; and geologic, structural, property, and railroad maps, tracing the history of this early southern California mining enterprise. Materials date from 1889 to 1991, with the bulk of the collection dating from 1908 to 1922.
- Extent:
- 23.4 Linear Feet (4 doc boxes, 2 half doc boxes, 1 flat box, 3 oversize flat boxes, 9 oversize map boxes)
- Language:
- Materials are in English.
- Preferred citation:
-
[Identification of item], Avawatz Salt and Gypsum Company records (Collection 1993). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Background
- Scope and content:
-
This collection contains an assortment of corporate document books, ledgers, stock books, legal documents, and occasional correspondence from the Avawatz Salt and Gypsum Company and its separate but related corporations - the Death Valley Chemical Company, Avawatz Salt Company, Avawatz Gypsum Company, Avawatz Sales Company, and the Amargosa Valley Railroad Company. Also included are mining-related government publications and newspaper articles; and a wealth of large geologic, structural, property, and railroad maps illustrating Avawatz land and the proposed Amargosa Valley Railroad. Particularly notable are several Avawatz commissioned economic and geologic reports featuring financial projections, photographs of the land, and detailed maps. Materials date from 1889 to 1991, with the bulk of the collection dating from ca. 1908 to 1922.
- Biographical / historical:
-
The Avawatz Salt and Gypsum Company was formed in June of 1912 by Herman Henry Kerckhoff, a member of the prominent Los Angeles Kerckhoff family. Avawatz Salt and Gypsum was the final amalgamation of several earlier companies including the Death Valley Chemical Company (1908-1911), Avawatz Salt Company (1911-1912), and Avawatz Gypsum Company (1910-1912). The company owned 2,450 acres of land on the northeast edge of the Avawatz Mountains, at the southern end of Death Valley. This included, as of 1917, 50 mining claims and mineral deposits of gypsum, rock salt, and celestite. Kerckhoff intended to transport gypsum, the main ingredient in cement and wall plaster, from the Avawatz mines to nearby Los Angeles where it could be utilized in the ongoing building boom. To this end, the Amargosa Valley Railroad Company was formed in 1917 to construct a sixteen mile line connecting the Avawatz mines to the main railway leading to Los Angeles. Despite the Avawatz Company's large investment in engineering reports and land surveys, the outbreak of World War I made securing financing for the railroad difficult and it was never completed. Without the railroad connecting the remote mines to Los Angeles, Avawatz Company activity was for the most part halted. In 2011 the Wildness Land Trust, a Colorado nonprofit which buys and protects wilderness land, purchased the Avawatz Salt and Gypsum Company from the Kerckhoff family and subsequently donated the land to the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management. The land is now part of the Death Valley Wilderness Study Area and falls within the boundaries of land which will be permanently preserved by Senator Diane Feinstein's pending California Desert Protection Act.
- Acquisition information:
- This collection was donated by the Wilderness Land Trust in 2012.
- Processing information:
-
Collections are processed to a variety of levels depending on the work necessary to make them usable, their perceived user interest and research value, availability of staff and resources, and competing priorities. Library Special Collections provides a standard level of preservation and access for all collections and, when time and resources permit, conducts more intensive processing. These materials have been arranged and described according to national and local standards and best practices. Processed by Courtney Dean in 2012 in the Center for Primary Research and Training (CFPRT), with assistance from Jillian Cuellar.The processing of this collection was generously supported by Arcadiafunds.
We are committed to providing ethical, inclusive, and anti-racist description of the materials we steward, and to remediating existing description of our materials that contains language that may be offensive or cause harm. We invite you to submit feedback about how our collections are described, and how they could be described more accurately, by filling out the form located on our website: Report Potentially Offensive Description in Library Special Collections.
- Arrangement:
-
The collection has been arranged in the following series:
- Series 1: Business records, 1889-1991
- Series 2: Reports and resource materials, 1908-1989
- Series 3: Maps, 1911-1989
Series 1 is arranged chronologically by creating agency. Series 2 and 3 are arranged alphabetically.
- Physical location:
- Stored off-site. All requests to access special collections material must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
- Rules or conventions:
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Indexed terms
- Names:
- Wilderness Land Trust
About this collection guide
- Sponsor:
- The processing of this collection was generously supported by Arcadia funds.
- Date Encoded:
- This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2022-10-06 15:36:25 -0700 .
Access and use
- Restrictions:
-
Open for research. All requests to access special collections materials must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
- Terms of access:
-
Property rights to the objects belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. All other rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.
- Preferred citation:
-
[Identification of item], Avawatz Salt and Gypsum Company records (Collection 1993). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
- Location of this collection:
-
A1713 Charles E. Young Research LibraryBox 951575Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575, US
- Contact:
- (310) 825-4988