View of reduction works at New Almaden Mines where the cinnabar was heated in furnaces to extract the valuable mercury. The fumes created in the process were piped up and released through the smoke stack that appears in the top right. The New Almaden Quicksilver Mine in Santa Clara County, California is the oldest and most productive quicksilver (i.e., mercury) mine in the United States. The site was known to the Ohlone Indians for its cinnabar long before a Mexican settler discovered the ores in 1820. By the time they were identified as mercury, the mine was perfectly timed to supply the California Gold Rush. The mine ran intermittently after 1927 and eventually closed. It was purchased by the county and is now part of Almaden Quicksilver County Park. The town of New Almaden is located south of San Jose, off the Almaden Expressway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Almaden Scanned with Microtek Scanmaker 1000XL Pro; as a 600 dpi TIFF image in 8-bit Grayscale. Auto Level image processing applied and compressed into JPG format using Photoshop CS3.
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