Talk:John Muir National Historic Site

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You know the irony of this location? There are several oil refineries along the coast of Contra Costa County, including one just off California State Route 4 a few miles down in Franklin Canyon outside Hercules and Rodeo. Now isn't that a contrast?--Geopgeop 09:41, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Even without an itinerant naturalist, there is an obvious contrast between any residential home nestled in a fruit orchard, and an oil refinery (but it isn't irony). I have some comments further below about the seemingly dichotomous juxtaposition (the odd couple neighbours) of the naturalist and the oil industry. Not all [about John Muir] is as it seems!

The Conoco Phillips oil refinery in Rodeo (confusingly called the San Francisco Oil Refinery) is just over ten miles from Muir's house. It is on San Pablo Avenue, well past the western end of Highway 4. The same company owns an industrial facility that is in Franklin Canyon, close to Highway 4, but the Contra Costa Carbon Plant takes solid petcoke (a coal-like by-product of an oil refinery) and heats it in kilns to get rid of volatile constituents by decomposition, conveniently generating electricity in the process. Both facilities opened in 1896, half-way through John Muir's ten-year tenure (sic) managing his father-in-law's fruit orchard business.

I agree that northern and western Contra Costa County is oil-refinery country. Much nearer to the Muir house, Martinez has two oil refineries today (Shell and Tesoro). John Muir saw the construction of the Shell refinery in the two years before his death and he lived for a decade with a previous oil refinery for a neighbour (built by Bull's Head Oil Company in 1904). Associated Oil (Avon) opened their facilities (not a refinery) in 1913, just as the California Gasoline Company started building a major shipping terminal in town. Since 1905, Mountain Copper company had operated a giant smelter that ran all day every day, and employed 400 people. In summary, Martinez was not a quaint little rural village in the last decade of John Muir's life.

I recited that litany, because Muir was not against this emergence of an industrial side to his home town (the industry was needed, and it wasn't being built in Yosemite). It spurred major growth in the local economy, and a succession of building booms was underway; the population almost doubled in the first decade of the 20th century. That approval wasn't just by tacit silence. Just a short walk up the hill to the east of his house alongside the Santa Fe trestle and railway tracks is the site of a former railway station, with its attendant noise, steam, and coal associated with the Industrial Age. That station was commissioned at the suggestion of John Muir, who funded it, and donated the land for the station as well as a branch spur into the Strentzel-Muir orchards to facilitate loading the fruit for shipment. The road is now called Muir Station Road.

John Muir had always had this "irony" (actually dichotomy) entirely within himself. He was generally in favour of Industry and Commerce in their proper place (which was Martinez, apparently). He had always displayed a strong technical and scientific inclination, submitting several inventions to competition, and being noted for his ability to make a multitude of industrial machinery more effective or efficient. It is this picture of John Muir, inventor, accomplished scientific and progressive modern man of the time, who initially supported, and always recognized the need for industrial growth, it is the man, living in the most modern house in Martinez (running hot water in every room, etc.) that seemed so strangely incompatible with my original perception of John Muir the naturalist.

From the preface of Son of the Wilderness:

In addition, John Muir was a writer, a lecturer, a geologist, a botanist, a glacier expert, an explorer, a school teacher, a Sunday School teacher, an efficiency expert, and inventor. He was a complicated, multi-talented man. Wanda Muir Hanna, elder daughter of John Muir, explained her father to one of his biographers (Linnie March Wolfe), "If you had known him, you would have seen only one side of him, and he had many sides. No two people -- even his closest friends ever had quite the same idea of him."

With thanks from ChrisJBenson (talk) 04:46, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

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