Kevin Knauss: Health, History, Travel, Insurance
Posts I have written about local and regional history, people, places, documents, maps, Sacramento, Placer, and California.
Virtually all visible signs of two dams on the Feather River along with thousands of feet of wooden flume and rock wall canal built in the 1890’s are hidden under the waters of the succeeding water project of Thermalito Lake in Oroville. Nonetheless, I was still drawn, like any amateur historian; to retrace the route […]
So much good history is underwater. Our 20th century dam building covered in water many interesting historic artifacts such as the remnants of a 19th century dam and diversion canal on the Feather River. A small paperback titled “Lost Beneath The Feather River” and a brief story published in Harper’s Weekly clued me into this […]
Most postcards, even from the 19th century, feature a historic building or natural wonder such as Half Dome in Yosemite. I came across a postcard from the early 20th century featuring the environmental destruction of hydraulic mining in Weaverville, California. The title of the image on the small postcard is “#21 Hydrulicing At La Grange Mines […]
The North Fork of The Middle Fork trail is a short little hike right off Mosquito Ridge Road. It is so named because it parallels the North Fork of the Middle Fork of the American River. Because the Placer County Water Agency maintains a dam up-stream this part of the river should have flowing water virtually […]
For people interested in the history or collecting mechanical clocks and watches, there is no better source of information than printed books on the subject. Just as mechanical clocks have become a relic of the past, so have the many books written as historical reference guides also diminished in availability. Over the years I’ve collected […]
Sometimes the craziest ideas actually become reality. In 1870 one man proposed tunneling underneath the Sierra Nevada mountain range to ship Tahoe lake water to San Francisco. While that may seem like an audacious scheme today, similar projects were already underway in the 19th century and parts of the tunnel project under the Sierras have […]
Tunnel Engineering – A Museum Treatment by Robert M. Vogel is a brief history of engineered transportation tunnels published in 1964. The booklet was part of series that accompanied scaled model displays illustrating the advances in tunneling primarily in the 19th century. The short thirty-six page bulletin focuses on how modern engineering design evolved as […]
Even before Folsom Lake Dam was built and the reservoir filled, the north fork of the American River was supplying water to communities, farms and ranches in south Placer and northeast Sacramento counties. I recently found aerial photography from 1952 showing a free flowing north and south fork of the American River. Finally, I can […]
Even in the midst of losing my water, grabbing onto poison oak bushes to maintain my balance, and enduring intermittent leg cramps, stumbling down to see the foundation of the historic Birdsall dam and Knickerbocker waterfalls still wasn’t the worst hike I’d taken. My mistake was thinking that I was smarter and stronger than the […]
I found the century old book West Winds at Mockingbird Used Books in Sebastopol, Ca. In addition to being printed in 1914, I was drawn to this book of California short stories because the illustrations were actually glued on to their respective pages and several of the authors signed their title page in the book. […]
