SF History Night: The Legendary Comstock Lode | Pacific Heights
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Congregation Sherith Israel Newman Hall | 2266 California St, San Francisco, CA 94115
Event Details
Submitted by the Event Organizer
SF History Night | Pacific Heights
The San Francisco History Association hosts monthly talks which explore our city’s enchanting history in depth.
Each month, a local history expert hosts a themed talk usually accompanied by a slide show with light refreshments.
Gregory Crouch will discuss the legendary Comstock Lode and mining magnate John Mackay, rags-to-riches hero and one of the most celebrated men in 19th-century San Francisco. A destitute Irish immigrant, Mackay rose to the full power of his manhood in the deep, rich, and outrageously dangerous mines of the Comstock Lode beneath Virginia City, Nevada, the ultimate Old West boomtown.
On the Comstock, Mackay worked his way up from nothing, battling the pernicious “Bank Ring” of San Francisco capitalists who’d monopolized the lode, and struck the Big Bonanza, a stupendously valuable body of gold and silver ore buried 1,500 feet below the center of town. The Comstock Lode’s extraordinary wealth exercised a power over San Francisco similar to the modern tech industry, transforming, the city into the innovative financial powerhouse it still is today, driving wild stock market frenzies up and down Montgomery Street, and launching Mackay’s wife, whose beginnings were every bit as humble as his own, on a meteoric social career among the finest European aristocrats. When John Mackay died in 1902—with a personal fortune equivalent to about $50 billion in modern dollars—front page obituaries all over Europe and the United States hailed him as one of the most admired Americans of the age.
Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.
Cost: $10*
