Turning An Abandoned Mine Into A Library!!

[Music] hello there my name is brent and right now we are in the abandoned mining town of cerro gordo and i've been making videos up here in this ghost town for the past two years and i've never shown the room that is behind that door that is because this door leads to the dynamite vault here the same room that would have held the dynamite that created 30 miles of mines underneath this town the same dynamite that pulled out 500 million dollars of minerals out of this mountain and in this video we're finally gonna go behind that door the dynamite is long gone but we're gonna turn it into the coolest library so let's get to work [Music] all right so as of today this hole behind me is just that it's basically a hole inside of a mountain with a couple doors in front of it and some pieces of wood on the floor and my hope my dream really is to make this into a beautiful library you know with an amazing floor down maybe some rugs comfortable chairs bookshelves chandelier i don't know how far we'll go but it's just the history in this town is so important to me it's what keeps me here it's what drives me every day to explore the abandoned mines or talk to people that have relatives that once lived here or read a bunch of books and so i think first step is a little tour all right so the first thing to note about this is that there's actually two doors you have to go through to get in there's the steel door and behind it a secondary door that you also have to unlock if you look at this wood and how well preserved it is it makes me think that this environment in here is going to be perfect for preserving these old books for just years to come you look on the wall and there's documents of 1917 1911 you know they brought in 39 boxes of 40 in 1911. it's crazy you know all this is talking about how many boxes they brought in and the percentage like 30 nitroglycerin 40 nitroglycerin and so on and so with that the grand reveal is this right now an open space where there was once a floor they must have taken out but i hope to kind of clear this out put beautiful wood on the bottom i think i'm gonna use these two by twelves that they have already started with and to get them i'm gonna go down into the union mine and scavenging any good wood from there because i think for a floor for a basement it would just be very appropriate if it was you know from the mine itself so i'll try to get some stuff like this we'll get together nice then you put a rug underneath this you can see in the later years probably in the zinc air they did run power into here i don't think that's gonna work for us but i would love to get just a chandelier there you know this old time correct chandelier and then build some bookshelves all around the walls and the bookshelves also to be built from the mine wood from the mine itself i gotta say somebody who loves books and loves libraries i can't think of a cooler library especially for a mining town than an old dynamite vault and so it's going to be a lot of work but i'm very excited about the prospect of it and then you know one day sitting oh right about here reading up on some old history of this mind all right so now for the next step of creating the coolest library ever i am headed into this building behind me in this building is the union mine and the union mine is a vertical mine shaft that goes 900 feet down and inside that vertical mine shaft is some great wood and back in the 1800s this was the largest silver mine in california's history and so the only way to get there these days is a hoist that lowers you down and so getting this water is going to be easy it's going to be a process take you over show you the hole that we're going down in that is where the wood for the library will come all right so the quest for wood begins we're headed down there we got scotty is here haley is here and we're headed to the 700 first and then we're gonna go to the 550 and we're gonna make a library [Music] all right we're down here for uh wood but we're making a quick pit stop trying to get the water going again you know the water is always a situation here and the way that the town gets water is from this pump 700 feet down that goes over there i'm gonna check right now i'm gonna check the oil i'm gonna check to see if it's primed and then we're gonna try to get this pump going again trying to prime it 700 is probably my favorite levels not just because it has the water at it but because also this is the level i spent 24 hours in so i know this level very well on a recent trip to the 700 foot level i noticed a collapse that was very dry and inside that collapse there was just these beautiful 2x12 timbers you know they're sturdy as the day they were cut this collapse got some prime wood there's some 2x12s that we're looking for so we're probably going to want to take some of this stuff out of here when we get out coming soon to a library near you this is a good piece oh yeah that was two i really want see this really long one right here oh yeah we're gonna move these all right watch out how the hell are we gonna get this in the hoist sounds like a 10 minute from now probably things you do for wood [Music] [Music] a little assembly line going getting the wood out of here this is a really big piece regular conveyor belt it looks really heavy you're really happy this is all the wood that we have staged so far and it's a lot i think what we're gonna try to do is put it up there and then tie it around and bundle it above and maybe below so what we probably need to do is let so we got enough wood here we're probably not gonna have to go to the 550 but if we're gonna bundle it on top i need you to drop the cage down about six feet so we can get out at her you know i'll go ahead and drop it down you're gonna have to can you tell us when to stop uh no [Applause] not really i'd say a wrap around the the hoist maybe and if if not i'll get back into the cage and tell you more how about that water check we have some psi going that's a good thing that means that we got water going to town so not only did we get wood we got water wood and water two things that we always needed saragordo now it's just getting all this wood back up top all right so this is our wood situation as you can see we got it all strapped on the top of the hoist i mean in these days and age that's probably worth more than any of the silver we could have pulled out so that is a future library right there to ever sell one goodbye 700 level thank you for your wood and water and water all right so this is the first haul down from the 700 foot level if you look at it it's all that rough cut super thick not ever going anywhere flooring that one's super tall except for the math that's about 108 square feet of wood so i don't think that's going to quite cut it so we are going to have to go down and get some more wood but i think this is enough to at least start with but we have to go down anyways because i want to build everything in there out of it the shelves everything out of wood from the union mine i think that's just a very cool tie-in to a dynamite vault library but for now we've got 108 square feet which is at least enough to start with and so with that we gotta go figure out the joists and uh flatten out a little bit more and then start putting on the floor [Music] you know there's this book called silver seekers by remy nadeau and it's actually his great great grandson i think and in that book they talk about the cerro gordo social union and this was a collection of people that in 1871 these guys decided hey these miners need to stop spending so much time in the brothel so much time in the saloon we need to have some culture up here so he set up this debate and literary club that met and apparently things went well you know time week over week it was growing it was growing one day there was this political argument that burst out and in the silence in between the argument the violence and the harps of lola's palace came trickling down the mountain and into there and slowly one by one the miners left this literary union and then went back to the brothels and that was pretty much the end of that civic union that they had created here at cerro bordeaux and so they tried you know the miners tried i imagine a lot of the miners continued reading you know in their own right but cerro gordon is a library and a library is exactly what cerro gordo got now that i got the wood out of the mine it's time to start cleaning up this place so i'm gonna get in here start leveling it out you know raking this floor even so that way we have a relatively straight floor for now i'm gonna get some of this loose rock out of here all right get a little bit smooth as you can see cleaning out a little bit and all of this stuff's actually nailed together so i might just work off of the wood that's already in here because if you look look at that dead level so since these are already in here and level i think we're gonna work off of those stuff we can clean out a little bit more back there but you can kind of see it come together now and i think this could be a really special space so i want to bring in some experts so we got a guy all the way from the uk you know a watcher of this channel that's on his way up that's going to help build this thing which i'm pretty excited about [Music] all right so the first step in all this is going to be taking these and just kind of rough laying them out almost like a jigsaw puzzle you know all right so this is all the wood that i got from that first trip laid out so obviously this is not enough wood to do all the way to the end that i wanted so that's gonna mean another trip down into the union mine but even just jigsawing laying it out like this is exciting you know to see a floor in here almost brings it to life i want to keep the original character of this you know i try to think about a few things you know one where was the tree this came from it was probably across owens valley you know by horseshoe meadows or something and then the guy who cut it the miner who put it down as a you know support for the mine shaft at the 700 level did he ever think that 150 years later you know somebody would be taking it back up to make a library you know memorializing some of the historic feat that he was part of here at cerro gordo you know he was part of history and i can't imagine that that circle of life happened but i just love reusing wood and i love looking at the character of it all this wood has been touched by history you know in a way it's been touched by the miners here at cerro gordo and so just get somewhere some of this fur so it's not scratching everybody up and then seal it when all said and done this is going to be a library to remember and so thank you to the miners that brought this wood down there and thank you to anybody that comes to this library in the future you know i hope it stays back here for a long time and a lot of people get to learn about all the cool things that happen here [Music] all right set me down so i'm gonna head down to the 86 hopefully get enough to finish off that floor so that way tomorrow we don't got to worry about going down to the mine so i'm taking a little solo trip late night mine always something the race is on i need to get some wood gotta get this and hopefully i can find some decent wood in a decent amount of time you know i'm looking for that same rough milled kind of look this isn't it unfortunately that would've been too easy that's not going to do it let's look right this way first collapses are usually good places to start i think there's a collapse over here if i remember correctly that piece up there might work got boulders on it though this level might have been scavenged pretty good because of its proximity to everything and just like that we should have enough wood to finish off the library that's crazy late late night mining for wood we're a timber mine now not a silver mine this library adventure is just getting more and more we now have wood from a couple different levels of the union mine it's crazy imagine the work that guys went through to put the wood down there and how to bring the wood back up but i think this is a more sustainable way you know lots of people get to go in this library very few people get to go to the union mine howdy in the end it took me about i think six trips down in the union mine to get all the wood we needed i was really spoiled by that first trick to the 700 foot level each trip down after that i got less and less wood from each level i remember just being pretty hard work you know i imagine the miners obviously had much harder time putting up all this wood to begin with but taking it down wasn't easy either you know i was down there with like kind of a crowbar in the dark just sweating profusely getting all this wood up and so i was really fortunate over these past few weeks that there's a lot of volunteers here there's a lot of very skilled volunteers you know so shout out lawrence first and foremost from the uk he came over for a week to help and he just so happened to be kind of a master craftsman all right so you have the big idea what do you think about the project i think it's good i think it's i think it's pretty straightforward yeah so yeah i'm laurence i'm from the uk um i've been watching the ghost town now since march 2020. i'm just excited to come out and give a hand yeah with this new floor um i run a little furniture company with my brother and cousin um started out during lockdown and it's just taken off so so that was a bit crazy yeah first day i turned up i was uh quickly whisked up there in the back of a four by four and i'm showing this really little overgrown tucked away magazine where they used to store the dynamite and brent told me his vision that he wanted to be sitting in there surrounded by books that have been donated by everyone this is right our longest best one we've gone through all the wood it's been collected mines graded it we've got a nice interesting piece up against the wall we've got our short pieces down here on the floor we've got a longer pieces here we're going to use for the shelves next step is to clean them all back sound them getting looking nice and assembling them [Music] all right so we're centering them down making it look pretty next up after that we got some uh varnish over here we're gonna take this in here seal it so that way the boards look real good this is that wood from the mine already looking so beautiful and so with a little bit of this on top we'll be looking good so that's the next move these will become our shelves for the the old library it's exciting you know a lot of steps but it's gonna be sweet when it's done [Music] as i'm putting on this varnish look how cool this is like this it's kind of so much more red than this piece so you can tell they're using different species and even the cut lines see the cut lines that are circular and over here they're straight it's so rewarding just to put that stuff on and see this stuff come to life it's beautiful look at all these different colors there's like the lighter one darker a little darker and this one with the kind of black almost in it then almost that it's beautiful and they're all unique [Music] so close all down now and um we'll fix them secure so we're gonna get going with the lacquer give it a nice satin gloss finish uh give it a nice deep color and get it ready for the library hell yeah [Music] after the floor is down the next episode shelves you know what is a library without bookshelves and so when we were thinking through the bookshelves phil dillon and lawrence took this hike and they just went above the hoist house a little bit and found these beautiful pipes you know that must have been who knows from a hundred years ago but they were just these thick sturdy pipes that they decided were gonna be perfect for kind of the uprights for the shelves and i have to get full credit where credit is due i was not that creative i was thinking maybe we'd find some old wood uh but we ended up doing is just drilling these circular holes in the middle of these two by twelves and then using these old bolts that we found on the property as a support and these shelves went up and i was blown away [Music] a few days ago this was just an empty yeah room of nothing and now it's a library library i don't think this is library i don't think this is going anywhere for a very very long time [Music] yeah so um we've got the two shells in place they're not fixed now so what we want to do is we want to run some braces in between these horizontal shelves to break the shelves up so we've got some old iron flat bar as well from them from the mines which we're going to use we're going to cut it up and we're going to run these braces in between these three sets of horizontals so this all becomes one nice unit nice and solid [Music] it's crazy this thing a week ago two weeks ago looked nothing like this everybody's been chipping in it's kind of in this collaborative process that uh get my socks then i'll walk on this floor so cool it's so cool to see a project that's coming together and so once we had the shelves up obviously no library would be complete without books and so in a previous video i put out a call for anybody that had any books they might want to donate to sarah gordo to send them our way and i got to say you guys delivered i think in the first week i got something like 70 books at this point it's definitely over 100 of just the coolest books in the world [Music] a lot of books this is exciting this is i think not even a week into saying that we're gonna start the library there's at least 50 books here so we're gonna go back up the hill unpack them all and see what cool gems we have so thank you everybody [Music] so when it came time to stock this library with books the viewers on this channel just crushed it you know you guys came through in such a huge way i briefly mentioned at the end of a video that this library might exist and almost immediately the book started showing up and probably the coolest thing for me was that they weren't just books random books these were all just hits they were all perfect for the library you know there was so much thought and care put into each one that just blew me away it just reminded me how many people care about this town and just warned my heart you know there was these modern books on mining technology there was history books there's gold rush books there's even this one called just reference library and it showed everything about mining you know how to assay how to sink a shaft how to timber a drift and i must have flipped through that thing for hours and it just made all the adventures i've had in the mine so far have that much more context you know i also thought it was amazing how many copies of ghost towns of the west showed up you know it seemed like there was at least ten but each one was slightly different you know each one was unique and the blurb about cerro gordo changed just so slightly in each one of them which was super fun to see so i just have to say thank you all so so much you know thank you to everybody that sent in the books it's overwhelming really you know it's a bit intimidating as all these are books that i want to read and i feel like it's just going to take me years to get through all of them but there's definitely worse problems to have and so hopefully this continues to grow and a lot of you guys can benefit from all the knowledge here so just thank you so much all these books are staying here at cerro gordo for as long as at least i'm here and then some you know none of these books are ever leaving and i think my job here at cerro gordo as custodian you know i hate the term owner but as a custodian of this town is just to try to understand and broadcast and bring the history here to life a little bit it's the idea that so many of you contributed books that help fill out that history and that so many of you are going to be able to come sit in the old vault and read these books it is super exciting to me you know it gets me stoked on just the next 10 20 50 years to come these books will still be here at that point who knows how big the library will be maybe we'll have to build more shelves we'll definitely have to do that i think we will have to you know expand the dynamite vault out that is something that i don't know how to do [Music] it just feels fitting to me to be storing all this knowledge inside the old vault you know dynamite was what made these mines it's what made the land here famous and so it's this really nice circle of life knowing that the room that once protected that powder is now protecting the history books for the future you know it's still just wild to me when i try to think about all the dynamite that was needed to make the minds here at this point i've explored miles of mines around the property and they were all made using explosives you know dynamite is what made a mine of this scale possible you know when alfred nobel patented dynamite in 1867 he changed the mining world forever you know before they were going to have to use gun powder and now you can use this substance that makes the whole process that much easier and that much more profitable but the problem is nitroglycerin can be very unstable and so they had to store it in a really secure location so that's why when you see this vault you'll see there's actually two doors and both of the doors have those types of locks that you can't even shoot off and so the dynamite stored in this vault would have been used in the union mine but each level of the mine would have had its own dynamite room as well you know in other explorations i've brought back doors from the 700 level the zero level and different places and all the miners would take it really seriously you know they knew that you know dynamite was nothing to play with and so when i'm down there in the mines these days and i find the old dynamite i try to give it a lot of space over time the nitroglycerin inside can leach out and create these crystals that make it really unstable and so my only experience detonating dynamite came with our old caretaker robert you know robert was a minor he had a blasting license and i was lucky enough over the last two years for him to take me on some blasts you know some areas that he thought there might still be a pretty good board deposit on and so we've tried to open up portals we've uh blown up some slag and it's crazy to me seeing it in real life and trying to imagine that same explosion happening around the clock you know 24 7. you know i wonder what the miners that once stored the dynamite here would think if we're using it as a library and i think about that in cerro gordo in general you know these days it's this great place to have peace and quiet but 150 years ago is anything but you know the mine was running 24 hours a day these blasts were going 24 hours a day there was brothels there were saloons that were just open all hours all right the final real thing that i get for this library is a really cool chandelier and i have one at cerro gordo but today i'm headed to bishop because i hopefully am getting the permit uh to continue on the american hotel which is very exciting and i know that they have an antique shop there so i'm hoping i can stop in and maybe they have a cooler chandelier so we can wrap up this library in total before i dive straight back into the hotel project you know hoping for some cool chairs too i think some type of like high back chairs maybe an old rug that would really just kind of tie the whole library together and you guys have been so cool about sending so many books um so yeah today i hope to at least find some chairs maybe a chandelier maybe a rug get a permit and all that will happen in bishop uh that's a plan anyways we'll see how it goes but exciting you know the excitement of having the library done and then being able to immediately transition into the hotel is just amazing so let's keep our fingers crossed hope for the best and see what happens today [Music] all right pulling back into the city the planning office i got my three sets of final plans structural calcs everything like that and fingers crosses is what they're looking for and we can get going on the hotel again that's pretty exciting to me at least all right papers dropped off and now we are going to hit the antique store hopefully uh we got something to work out [Music] i think one of these trunks in the middle is kind of like a place to put down a book almost like a coffee table might look really cool in there but i don't want to dominate the space how much is that 92 bucks how much is this one 20 bucks that's more what i'm talking about that's cool some color too all right no chandelier but i did get a trunk and a chair so this chair will be really comfy to sit in so this trunk back there still on the lookout for the chandelier i might just end up using the one that we have up there for now but with that i'll head back to sara gordon ah chandeliers this one's kind of perfect we had this the whole time that's what we need sorted all right now we are safely back at saramorda with the chair the trunk and what will be the chandelier i got some bulbs that we're gonna work for it but that's gonna go in there should be just the right size along with our books so let's get this thing rocking and rolling i don't think it ever really will wrap up i think as you sit in there and more artifacts are found and stuff you know it's going to be constantly added to over time so it's an ongoing project i think we're going to get it there in the next couple of weeks but it's going to be a story it continues for a long long time you know i was talking to lawrence i remember he made this passive remark that you know it'd be cool one day to bring his daughter back here and be able to show her what he had contributed to you know what he helped bring to life and that's what i love about this town right now there's this energy to it there's this collaborative nature and so many people are getting to put their own thumbprint on the town you know big or small and those thumbprints don't just have a relevance in this lifetime you know there again though lawrence will tell his daughter who might tell her daughter that you know their granddad one back in the day helped build this library that stands for hundreds of years it gets me really excited you know it gets me a little bit emotional too that this town has become such a part of so many people's lives you know even if it's just watching on the camera you know or pounding nails or building a library you know it all comes together and it's just this beautiful environment i think in this time where people kind of try to be divisive for all these different reasons that we can all kind of you know come together around history and then it's this binding chord look at this so often run down puts more books in there but this is looking like a library back in an old powder magazine that is freaking awesome all right says aaron aaron is the one that created the sign for the library and for down below the story of the library sign is last time when i was up and we put the sign at the bottom of the hill brent was planning this library out and he asked me hey what do you think about creating a victorian era library sign i said sure and so i crafted this out and got a nice coat of lacquer on here so it should last a year no that'll last longer than that and in order to make it a little bit more authentic i uh outsourced this cool wrought iron holder here and this was shipped from a blacksmith in england dang in order to make sure we kept it you know as period correct as possible so cool so this will hang here at the official cerro gordo library yes and it's here for everyone to enjoy well thank you that's amazing [Music] the official hanging of the library [Music] all right and with the door shut this is it this is the library so you come back here get your nice reading chair all this wood is from the 700 for the level of the mine or different levels of the mine you have these shelves you got your book just kick back right here inside an old dynamite vault you got the lights up there look how cool these shelves came out back in here it's so peaceful in here it's hard to describe how quiet it is in here so if you want to read [Music] there's nothing you stopping you from reading back in here this is so freaking cool [Music] yes i gotta say i absolutely love this space it may be my favorite place at cerro gordo now you know i've been sitting back here just in a perfect peace and quiet it's like the best things of exploring a mine where you have that solitude and that quiet and your phone doesn't work but you feel a little bit productive in here you know because you can read a book or do something else and i just love the fact that cerebral at this point is so much more than just a collection of abandoned buildings you know it's truly a community and a community needs a library and so to see this come together has been amazingly special for me you know it took a long time but i think all good things take time but i think that the biggest thing that the space reminds me of and probably my favorite thing about this whole adventure was just the collaborative nature of it you know as you guys saw it took just literally dozens of people to bring this thing to life you know and along the way each of those people left their thumbprint on this space and one way or the other and i'm excited for a lot of you guys to be able to come up here you know enjoy the space see it i just want to say thank you guys so so much everybody that watches this channel is part of the community you know and i hope many of you guys get to come up here over the coming years or decades or however long this is here uh if you want to send more books we'll take them i'm a little bit behind of sending people back things when i send them in i will get there but it will definitely take me more time now i think i'm just going to sit back here read a book enjoy the space hope you all have an amazing week maybe check out some cool library by you see you guys next time hope you have an amazing week

Channel: Ghost Town Living

Views: 523,154

Keywords: abandoned town, brent underwood, cerro gordo, cerro gordo ghost town, ghost, ghost town, ghost town living, ghost video, living in a ghost town, Library Project, Abandoned Vault, Historic Preservation, Community Project, Collaboration, Renovation, Mining Town, Unique Library, Ghost Town Restoration, Historical Site, Creative Project, Transforming Spaces, Abandoned Places, Exploring History, Cerro Gordo Adventures

Id: yRkUPVAkd14

Length: 36min 24sec (2184 seconds)

Published: Sat May 21 2022