Pine Flat and Preston: Quicksilver Mines & Utopian Visions

Speakers: Susan Sheehy and Holly Hoods

This is the story of two very different towns that thrived briefly near Healdsburg. Pine Flat, a quicksilver (mercury) mining boom town in the rugged Mayacamas Mountains, had between 1,000 and 4,000 residents in the early 1870s and was completely gone just a few years later when the price of mercury collapsed. And Preston, a utopian community led by a charismatic healer and businesswoman, flourished from 1885 until about 1910 after the death of its founder Emily Preston.