Northern General Documented placer claims · Mother Lode, California

History · Big Oak Flat district

Gold country.

The claims sit in the historic Big Oak Flat mining district of the California Mother Lode. Everything on this page is citable, and the sources are named at the bottom — the same ones cited in full in every buyer packet.

The district

Big Oak Flat, Garrote, and Deer Flat.

The placer camps at Big Oak Flat, Garrote — today’s Groveland — and Deer Flat produced roughly $25 million in gold at 1850s prices. On the order of a million ounces.

That figure is stated at 1850s prices on purpose. Converting it to modern dollars is a sales trick, and it tells you nothing about any particular piece of ground.

1855–1860

The Golden Rock Ditch

The district’s placers were rich but dry. Gravel without water is just gravel. So in 1855 the miners formed the Golden Rock Water Company and spent over $150,000 — an enormous sum for a mining camp — on forty miles of ditch and timber flumes standing up to 265 feet, to carry one river’s water to the diggings.

The river they tapped was the South Fork Tuolumne. The same river that runs through the Pennyweight claim.

First water reached the towns on March 29, 1860.

A note on accuracy: the ditch’s diversion was on the upper South Fork. The river was tapped by the Golden Rock Ditch — that is the connection, and I am not going to stretch it into a story about the ditch running across this ground.

Historical photograph of the Big Gap Flume: a long timber flume carried across a forested canyon on tall braced trestle towers
The Big Gap Flume, part of the Golden Rock Ditch — eleven timber towers up to 265 feet, built 1859–60 to carry the South Fork Tuolumne’s water to the diggings. Buck Meadows, a few miles from our own ground. Height per the National Register of Historic Places, #75000438. Public-domain historical photograph.

The name

Why “Northern General.”

It is a merchant’s name.

The Gold Rush made a few miners rich and a lot of merchants comfortable. The storekeepers were the ones who outlasted the diggings — Ghirardelli began with a store in Hornitos. Northern General joins that lineage: the steady trade behind the gold fever.

“The money supplies the dream — claims, gold, and knowledge of the ground.” Northern General

Sources

Credited, and cited in full in every buyer packet.

  • California Division of Mines & Geology, Bulletin 193
  • USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS)
  • Groveland Community Services District history

This is the ground that history sits on.

One claim is for sale now, documented end to end.

See the claim for sale