Eighty years ago today, the New York Stock Exchange crash plunged the world into financial ruin.

It also revitalized Nevada County.

October 1929 was the same month Grass Valley citizens erected a granite monument at the site where prospectors had discovered quartz-bearing gold 1850. It was a last-ditch effort to revive the region by attracting tourists, even as the brightest young people were leaving and the population was declining.

The monument still stands on Gold Hill, but at the time it emphasized that the region called “the Northern Mines” was living off the fading momentum of Gold Rush glory.

That all began to change with the crash, as investors who survived sought surety by turning to gold.

No one better embodied the glamour of gold than Glendolyn MacBoyle, a plumber's daughter and wife of mining engineer Errol MacBoyle. Glendolyn lived with her husband in a leaky shack on Union Hill and ate food on credit from Chinese grocers as Errol developed the Idaho-Maryland Mine on a shoestring. After the mine struck it rich, she would fly by private plane to San Francisco to attend the opera in shimmering gold gowns.

Glendolyn MacBoyle became the society page's “golden girl.”

Investment in gold accelerated as governments abandoned the gold standard and a world gold market developed. Then, Congressman Harry Englebright of Nevada City personally confronted President Franklin D. Roosevelt, asking him to help the gold miners by allowing them access to new markets.

Plucking an argument from thin air, Roosevelt retorted: California produces more asparagus than gold.

But Englebright wouldn't be bluffed or brushed off.

As a result of the Congressman's goading and the president's own desire to lift commodity prices, the government began a gold-buying spree in autumn 1933 that eventually lifted the domestic price from $20 to $35 per ounce.

Gold mining expands

By that time, investment capital was coursing through the veins of the local economy. Soon, more than 40 mines were operating near Grass Valley and Nevada City, and mining employment increased from about 600 before the crash to more than 2,600 by 1935.

This was during the decade when national unemployment peaked above 25 percent and never fell below 14 percent.

Grass Valley and Nevada City feared being overrun by the unemployed and desperate from other regions. A newspaper editor urged locals to tell their far-away relatives not to come.

But the news of the gold cities' prosperity spread in the pages of Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, through newsreels and by radio.

Before the decade closed, the Nevada County population had doubled, reaching 21,500. The editor wrote the two cities were “as full of people as a sausage skin is full of meat.”

Families flocked to Nevada County from other mining regions and the metropolitan areas to find living wages and sufficient income for a house (with a new federally-backed mortgage), new appliances and even a car.

In those years, the Grass Valley Union newspaper called the trail of new cars that drove to the Saturday night dances at Lake Olympia, a popular recreation spot in Glenbrook Basin, “a prosperity parade.”

Prosperity, federal stimulus funds

The mining jobs begot thousands of other jobs, especially in services and residential and commercial construction. Those who still lacked work could turn to the federal programs that improved roads, replaced water mains and sewers, raised embankments and stone walls, paved sidewalks, built reservoirs and repaired flumes.

New Deal programs created Pioneer Park, helped to build two schools and repair others, and built Nevada City Hall and rebuilt the Nevada County Courthouse on Court Street.

While swanky hotel rooms were vacant across the country, one had to wire ahead to assure a room at Grass Valley's Bret Harte Inn. The hotel lobby, spacious and modern, could hardly accommodate its crowds.

Men came and went attired in everything from khaki shirts with high-laced boots to business suits and dinner jackets, and women wore riding habits, tweeds and evening dress.

The lounge buzzed excitedly: “. . . A new ore body in the Empire?”. . . “New leases in the Golden Center?”. . . “This stuff will run $9 a ton!”

Grass Valley's Main and Mill streets hummed, as active in the 1930s as they are today. With the mines working around the clock, the cafés and saloons were constantly busy feeding men coming off their shifts.

‘Golden years'

It's little wonder that those who lived through the Depression in Nevada County remember it, in the words of The Union columnist Bob Paine, as “the golden years.”

Manuel “Chick” Cicogni of Grass Valley recalled: “The Depression years were super years.”

One mustn't forget the many who suffered on the margins, and the many who suffered before they found their way to the foothills. Still, the old-timers who look back at those years uniformly say: “There was no depression here.”

Author Gage McKinney, 58, lives in Sunnyvale and comes from five generations of Nevada County folk, descended from Cornish miners.

Gold production in Nevada County, 1929-41

Fine oz. Value* % state production

1929 87,000 $1.8M 21.2

1930 106,000 $2.2M 23.2

1931 160,000 $3.3M 30.6

1932 176,000 $3.6M 30.9**

1933 183,000 $4.7M 29.8

1934 204,000 $7.1M 28.3

1935 251,000 $8.8M 28.2

1936 283,000 $9.9M 26.2

1937 309,000 $10.8M 26.3

1938 322,000*** $11.3M 24.5

1939 319,000 $11.2M 22.2

1940 313,000 $11.0M 21.5

1941 282,000 $9.9M 20.0

All figures are rounded.

* Value is in millions of dollars, not adjusted for inflation. From October 1933 to January 1935, the U.S. price of gold rose from $20.67 to $35 per ounce.

** Highest proportion of California total for the period.

*** Highest amount and value in the period.

Source: California Department of Natural Resources