Up for consideration is a New Idria Quicksilver Mining Company stock certificate from 1915:

#A835

Issued to Charles Pfaff and Fulton Trust for 100 shares on September 21, 1915

Signed by Edmund H. Marion as president and H. P. Baker as assistant treasurer

Incorporated in Wyoming

Capital stock of $500,000

Datelined: Boston

Printer: John A. Lowell Bank Note Company, Boston

Uncancelled

Certificate in good condition

The New Idria Quicksilver Mining Company was formed in 1896 to mine cinnabar at the former mining town of New Idria, in San Benito County, California in the Diablo Mountain Range (in Coastal, Central California). The original mining in the area began in in the early 1850s at the New Idria Mine, and by 1857 the town of New Idria sprang up on the northeastern slope of San Carlos Peak. By the 1860s the New Idria Mining Company had as many as 90 employees, with a school house, post office and many homes and businesses.

In the later part of the 19th century the need for cinnabar (the mineral used to produce quicksilver, or mercury) was required in the gold mining industry of the California Gold Rush to extract the gold from the quartzite host rock. The discovery of rich cinnabar deposits in the southern Diablo Mountains in 1853 lead to the development of the world's fourth largest quicksilver mine at New Idria.

In 1896 the New Idria Quicksilver Mining Company took over operations after purchasing the New Idria Mining Company and continued operations up until 1920 when it filed for bankruptcy. Mining operations resumed in 1923 under the new name of New Idria Quicksilver Mines, Inc. By 1948 Quicksilver Prices had dropped and the mine operations began lay offs, although survived through the next century working skeletal crews as small as 20 men. It was in 1972 that all operations had finally seized never to reopen.