Swansea

Article and photography by Natasha Petrosova 

Swansea in Califonia was once a booming "silver town" located on an eastern shore of Ownes lake  . Swansea owns its success to a nearby silver mining  operations of Cerro Gordo mines in the late 1860s.   Swansea stands about 10 miles south of Lone Pine along Highway 136.  Swansea in California is named after many experienced Welsh miners who traveled across the Atlantic from Swansea to find their fortune in Death Valley, became a hub for smelting the ore and transporting the resulting ingots to Los Angeles more than 200 miles away.   

In 1872 the disastrous Lone Pine earthquake damaged the smelters and uplifted the shoreline and rendered the Swansea pier inaccessible by Owens Lake steamships.  As a result , most of the smelting and transportation business moved to a nearby town called Keeler, leaving Swansea virtually a ghost town.  To make matters worse, in the summer of1874 , a thunderstorm- induced debris flow inundated Swansea under several feet of water , rock, and sand .  However by this time the town was almost deserted.  The Owns Lake Silver-Lead company was also involved in expensive litigation with another company at the same time and they could never afford to rebuild.  

As 2007 there is only one structure is left in Swansea.  

 the only structure left in Swansea