It’s a scavenger hunt to find the Olema lime kilns, relics of a little-known past. Recognized as a historic landmark and maintained by the park service, the centuries-old kilns located just west of Highway 1 between Olema and Bolinas are not marked by a bronze plaque or a formal trail. Yet with some light bushwacking, the three kilns, crumbling and overgrown, can still be found near a large deposit of limestone on the east bank of Olema Creek.
Historians have long debated their origin. Were they the work of Russians at Fort Ross or the Spanish padres who erected the Mission of San Rafael? Neither, it turns out. Richard Nielsen, who grew up at the Marconi wireless station in Bolinas and has written multiple histories of the area, is a leading expert on the subject.
In an article published last November in the Anne T. Kent California Room archive newsletter, Mr. Nielsen, who now lives in North Carolina, describes how two gold-seekers from Maryland—physician James Shorb and farmer William Mercier—negotiated a 10-year lease with Olema landowner Rafael Garcia to exploit the limestone around 1850. The Calera limestone itself was likely connected to a much larger deposit in the Santa Cruz area but broke off as the Point Reyes Peninsula was pushed north along the San Andreas fault.
The men used the kilns to burn the stone down to lime, a hot commodity in San Francisco, where brick buildings built after fires required lime mortar. Yet it has long been thought that the kilns were barely used after they were built.
The 1951 “Geologic Guidebook of San Francisco Bay Counties” says that the kilns were probably only fired up a dozen times. “That lime from the kilns ever reached San Francisco or any other destination is, however, unlikely, for only a brief period of operation is indicated, which probably resulted in considerable financial loss to the original builders and operators,” it states.
Yet Mr. Nielsen believes the men had more success. After reading archives of the Maryville Daily Herald, he determined that around 500 pounds of lime— “a not insignificant amount,” he said— were sent by boat from Bolinas to San Francisco between August and November of 1853.
So what stopped the deliveries?
Mr. Nielsen said two factors likely spelled the demise of the Olema kilns. First, increasingly larger quantities of lime were reaching San Francisco from Santa Cruz, which had an abundance. The second reason was tragic.
An article in the Oct. 15, 1853 issue of the Sacramento Daily Union that Mr. Nielsen happened upon stated: “Day before yesterday a small boat containing five men, in crossing the bar at Bolinas Bay, was capsized and five of the number drowned.” All of them had been working at a kilns, and the loss of skilled labor undoubtedly rang the death knell for the operation, Mr. Nielsen said.
Defeated, Mr. Shorb—who had become Marin’s first county judge—and Mr. Mercier—who served as the court clerk—returned to their families in Maryland by 1855.