Historic Randsburg

Rand Camp began as a tent city raised by miners who rushed into the Mojave Desert after a major gold discovery in April 1895. A year later, the town of 1,500 had been renamed Randsburg, with saloons, a U.S. Post Office, and the community's first newspaper, The Randsburg Miner. By 1900, its 3,500 inhabitants had a 30-stamp ore crusher, a bank, churches, and theaters, and railroad tracks soon linked nearby Johannesburg to Kramer's Junction about 25 miles to the south. At the turn of the century, when gold brought only $12 to $16 an ounce, the Yellow Aster Mine recovered $3 million in gold, and in 1911 the take reached $6 million. Most visible, or free, gold in the Rand Mining District had been found before World War II, when gold mines across the nation were classed as non-essential and closed. Through boom and bust, fires and war, and smallpox and influenza epidemics, Randsburg has tenaciously clung to life and still endures.

Johannesburg, California · United States