Old Mint

A refinery worker wrote down the moment they were told to give the building up.

Collection: San Francisco: More Stories · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The Old Mint at Fifth and Mission · Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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How the story begins

More than two hundred million dollars in gold and silver sat inside this building on the morning of the earthquake, in April 1906. The city's water mains were broken. The Mint had a well in its yard, and about fifty employees, and one of them, a refinery worker named Joe Hammill, wrote down what happened in a letter to his brother three weeks later. The superintendent, Frank Leach, a former newspaper publisher, came over from Oakland early and took charge.

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