
tL's phOTOGRAPH_oF_tHE_dAY #1497 - The Eagle Mountain Mine produced gold between 1881 and 1900. Mr. L.S. Barnes originally secured claims to the area and sold the mines to the Pacific Railroad in 1909.
Kaiser Steel bought the whole lot in 1944, and four years later built a feeder railroad out of these mountains. Eagle Mountain iron ore was railroaded 112 miles west to its Fontana California plant which began producing steel plate for the Pacific Coast shipbuilding industry.
The ore in the distance contained as much as 54% iron & yielded a respectable 23% lead, 6% copper, 16 ounces of silver and 15 ounces of gold per ton. Leftover rock fragments were used for ballast in Liberty Ships.
Eagle Mountain experienced a resurgence when Los Angeles proposed turning the gigantic 1.5 mile wide by a half a mile deep pit into the world’s largest sanitary land fill and would ship garbage east from L.A. via the Eagle Mountain Railway.