Rock Of Ages, Cleft For Me…

That white-bearded patriarch standing inside the fissure of the split granite boulder is Isaac Minor, a tough old gent who was accustomed to moving mountains. He’d arrived on the northern coast of California as a prospector in 1853—penniless but, at the age of twenty-three, full of ambition. Over the ensuing years he ran a supply store, fought Indians, built lumber mills, owned extensive chunks of Humboldt County, and started quarrying gray granite near Arcata; because he hadn’t yet completed a railroad spur to move the stone to the main line, he used it to build a number of local edifices. When he was well into his eighties, he chose the huge boulder above to hew himself a final resting place, at a cost of over $38,000. We learn all this from Peter E. Palmquist’s Fine California Views: the photographs of A. W. Ericson , published recently by the Interface California Corporation. Sad to say, although Mr. Minor completed his mausoleum (left), he apparently never got to sleep eternity away in it. He died while on a business trip outside the area and is believed to be the only member of his family who is not buried within its cool confining walls.