Art and history
Mosaic mural under way in Mokelumne Hill pays tribute to town’s 19th century Chinese community
Anne Cook, a 65-year-old artist in Mokelumne Hill, is working on what will be a multi-panel mosaic mural in Shutter Tree Park depicting some of the Gold Rush town’s history.
Elements of one panel of the mural will include pieces of Chinese porcelain excavated in Mokelumne Hill and elsewhere in California. The artifacts include shards and broken bits of porcelain bowls, made and signed by Chinese artisans in China before their owners brought them to the Golden State.
The story behind the mural goes back to the town of Mokelumne Hill’s roots in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Cook said the area was one of the richest gold strikes in the Mother Lode region. Some historians say miners from Oregon in 1848 founded a mining camp there known as Big Bar.
Mokelumne Hill was one of the largest towns around by 1850, with as many as 15,000 American, French, German, Spanish, Chilean, Mexican and Chinese gold seekers.
Shutter Tree Park is named for an old iron shutter dating to about 1850 when most of the town of Mokelumne Hill was built. Fires in town were frequent then,
and iron shutters were used on many homes and buildings to keep flames out. Iron shutters were used on buildings along East Center Street, close to the 1851 Hotel Léger, at the heart of downtown Mokelumne Hill.
About 20 years later, a Chinese merchant named Chung Kee came to California from coastal Guangdong Province on the South China Sea. Records show Kee had a store in San Andreas in 1868, and his wife and 10-year-old son joined him in 1870. They moved to Mokelumne Hill’s Chinatown in 1872, where Kee opened his store on East Center, and his wife bore him two more children in Mokelumne Hill.
Archaeologist Julia Costello, 74, of Mokelumne Hill, has referenced census records that show close to 100 Chinese people in Mokelumne Hill in 1880. Kee was prosperous and purchased a lot of storefront property on East Center, including a lumber yard, a stable, a warehouse, a Taoist temple, and numerous wooden dwellings.
Today, there are signs identifying the neighborhood as China Gulch. In 1887, Kee came to own the lucrative What Cheer Mine in Chilean Gulch.
An 1895 Sanborn Fire Insurance map shows Kee’s store on the south side of East Center, and his lumber yard on the north side of East Center. Kee and his family apparently returned to China in the mid-1890s.
The Chinatown neighborhood was nearly wiped out by fire in 1898. A census two years later showed only 14 Chinese people remained living in Mokelumne Hill at the time.
Kee’s store with its iron shutters had survived the fire, but it and the remaining structures in Chinatown fell into decay and ruin by 1910. Eventually one of the shutters became encased in ailanthus trees that grew from seeds brought to Mokelumne Hill from China. The Chinese call ailanthus Trees of Heaven. The old shutter from Kee’s store remained encased in the growing Trees of Heaven, which grew together and reached a height approaching 50 feet by 1970.
The so-called Shutter Tree was a landmark dominating an open space that became known as Shutter Tree Park, dedicated in May 1977. The Shutter Tree was old with rotting roots and dying by then. In 1995, the dead tree caught fire and much of it burned. A year later, the tree was considered a hazard and workers cut it down to a seven-foot stump, with Kee’s old iron shutter still embedded and halfburied at ground level.
Costello and other archaeologists excavated the historic iron shutter in 1998. The shutter was placed on the porch of the Mokelumne Hill Library, which stands next to Shutter Tree Park.
Now, Cook has made Kee’s shutter a central element of her artwork, which she calls the Shutter Tree Wall Project.
She’s been working on the project since 2015. She credits artist Scott Greer with conceiving the idea of a stucco tree with the Kee’s shutter attached. Greer and fellow stucco artists Chad Gunn and Clayton Majors recently completed their artwork on the exterior of the Mokelumne Hill Library building, a wall that faces Shutter Tree Park.
Cook said she has also been helped by artists Ric Elhard and Rose Herrera, who have helped with painting, and artist Anne Dasch, who has helped with mosaic elements of the mural.
The Chinatown portion of the Shutter Tree Wall Project will likely be completed and put in place on the exterior wall of the library by the end of 2021. Cook said she is considering as many as seven or more panels for the finished project. Other panels will include more of Mokelumne Hill’s history.
“We will have more people as the project goes on,” Cook said Friday. “There’s no timeline for the rest of the mural. It will happen as I have time to work on it.”
For more information call Cook at (209) 286-8040 or Mokelumne Friends of the Library at (209)
286-0507.