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In the spring of 1851, three prospectors ran across a rich deposit of gravel in the hills about ten miles northeast of Nevada City and others arrived when one of them was followed back from a supply trip. The followers were elated at finding the rich new diggings and quickly began working along the creek, with high hopes of striking it rich. But try as they might, pan after pan yielded nothing but dirt. The trip was declared a “Humbug,” and so they named the creek.

Two years later, with the advent of hydraulic mining in the region, a town sprang up near the creek, a town called Humbug which grew and was soon an important mining center for the region. When the post office was established in 1857, the Humbugians felt their town needed a more melodious name, and Bloomfield was the people’s choice, to which the post office added “North” to distinguish it from Bloomfield in Sonoma County. North Bloomfield prospered greatly, due mainly to the highly productive Malakoff Mine, and claimed some seventeen hundred residents, which included a large settlement of Chinese immigrants.

It was here at the Malakoff Mine that hydraulic mining, described as “a devilishly successful method of blasting gold from the ground,” realized its full potential. The gold the miners were after here along the San Juan Ridge was located in “deep gravels,” ancient riverbeds which had dried up some fifty million years ago. Since that time, the powerful geologic forces that created the Sierra Nevada have twisted, moved, broken, and buried those ancient river channels and their gold deposits, often times under several hundred feet of low grade or worthless dirt. And the most efficient and economical way to move that dirt and get the gold was hydraulic mining.

This method of mining consists of simply blasting a hillside with tremendous, high-pressure streams of water shot from a giant nozzle known as a “monitor.” These jets of water were so powerful that a strong man could not strike a crowbar through a six-inch stream. A fifty-pound boulder placed on the spray would be hurled fantastic distances, and records show that men and animals were killed by the force of the water alone at distances of more than two hundred feet from the nozzle.

The mountains which faced the onslaught of these terrible forces of water simply disintegrated, bringing down tons of rock, gravel, pay dirt, small animals, and vegetation. The gold-bearing sludge then traveled through a deep cut or tunnel which was lined with a series of sluices to catch the gold, the remaining muddy water being discharged into any nearby canyon or river.

The North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company operated the Malakoff Mine, the world’s largest hydraulic operation. In an effort to provide better drainage needed to reach the richest deposits, the company embarked on one of the greatest mining engineering feats of all time, carving an eight thousand foot long drainage tunnel through solid bedrock. Hamilton Smith was the engineer in charge of digging the tunnel, and after thirty months of intense activity he saw his tunnel completed on November 15 of 1874, which allowed the company to mine the deep gravels and dump the tailings directly into the South Yuba River. The company reached its peak after completing the tunnel, operating seven giant monitors twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and processing fifty thousand tons of gravel per day. In this manner, more than forty-one million yards of earth were mined, which resulted in creating the Malakoff mine pit, a spectacular canyon some seven thousand feet long and three thousand feet wide, which reached a depth of nearly six hundred feet at the peak of mining operations.

Although hydraulic mining proved to be extremely profitable, it also proved to be disastrous to the environment. The waste gravel, mud, and water from the mining operations were initially dumped into Humbug Creek and later into the Yuba River. These tailings polluted the streams, killed the fish, and rendered the Sacramento and Yuba rivers un-navigable for ocean going vessels for more than one hundred years. The silt from hydraulic mining reached as far as San Francisco Bay and on through the Golden Gate. At Marysville, debris from the Malakoff mine choked the Yuba until the river bottom was higher than the adjacent town, causing severe flooding and damage. And as the bed of the Sacramento River rose, floods struck the rich agricultural areas in California’s great Central Valley, resulting in millions of dollars in damages for local farmers.

The farmers, who were not about to let hydraulic mining destroy their land, fought back and by in 1883, in a landmark case, a suit was brought against the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company to stop them from dumping tailings into the Yuba River. A January 1884 ruling was in favor of the farmers and the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company from dumping tailings into the Yuba River. This was the famous Sawyer Decision, the firs

The Jersey City Main Post Office (Zip Code 07302), located at 69 Montgomery Street, was built in 1911 and dedicated on November 7, 1913. It was rededicated for former US Representative Frank J. Guarini on June 16, 2008. Guarini, a native of Jersey City, fought in World War II as a Navy Reserve lieutenant aboard the USS Mount McKinley, and served in the New Jersey Senate from 1965 to 1972 and in Congress from 1979 to 1983.

The two-story Neo-Classical Italian Renaissance structure was built by the Hedden Construction Company. The exterior walls are made of Mt. Waldo granite. The Washington Street facade has fluted Corinthian columns and carved capitals flanked by piers with Corinthian style pilasters. The roof is made of copper and the exterior window and door frames are of cast bronze and bronze-covered wood, iron, and steel. The public lobbies are decorated in Kingwood sandstone and Botticine marble, and the ceiling of the main corridor on the first floor is decorated in solid gold leaf.

New Jersey State Register (1986)
Paulus Hook Historic District New Jersey State Register (1981)
Paulus Hook Historic District National Register #82003276 (1982)