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photos by Bob Pennell Caroline Sittler, left, of Kearny, Ariz., and Inez Castor of Crescent City, Calif., sift soil through a screen looking for artifacts at the site of the mining town of Altaville. Digging history One family has personal stake in uncovering Altaville By DANI DODGE ALTAVILLE, CALIF . -- Lisa Jeffs of Central Point dug into the deep red soil just west of Gasquet Mountain this week to unearth her history. The 39-year-old found it in rusty square-headed nails, shards of amber ale bottles and thick pieces of chipped porcelain. The artifacts were relics of a hotel her great-great-great-grandfather built on the site in the 1860s. "He could have drank from this glass," Jeffs said holding up a quarter-sized fragment of white glass in her soil-stained fingers. Her four children, aged 8 to 15, gazed at the glass with wide eyes. Jeffs was one of about 150 people who have been excavating the lost town of Altaville, about eight miles up a dirt road off Highway 199 outside of Gasquet in Northern California. They are history buffs and archeological enthusiasts who have traveled from as far away as Massachusetts in search of the town lost 100 years ago. The Jeffs family has a special relationship to the place: Their relative -- Nicholas Tack Sr. -- built one of the two hotels in the town that bustled from the 1862 through the early 1870s. The Jeffs family of Central Point, from left, Cathern, 12, Diana, 10, Bryan, 15, Andrea, 8, and Lisa work on their plot. They're related to one of the men who built a hotel in Altaville. The project, located in Six Rivers National Forest and on land owned by the mining company Cal-Nickel, is part of the Forest Service's Passport in Time program, which sponsors digs across the country. The goal of the excavation is to sift through enough history to earn Altaville a place on the National Register of Historic Places. Historians also want to learn about the town's past, particularly in the face of illegal relic collecting that has occurred over the years. Sitting on the pine-needle mat of a forest floor, Jeffs scraped a 3-by-3-foot square of red dirt marked off by fluorescent orange string. Her children crowded in with each find, their heads nearly meeting at the center of the square. But they continued to work. One used a whisk broom to sweep the red dirt into a dustpan, and dumped that into a stainless steel bucket. The older brother and sister dumped the bucket's contents onto a screen that they shook until the loose dirt fell through, while the treasures -- like nails that were used to hold their great-great-great-great grandfather's hotel together -- stayed behind on the metal mesh. "What a great thing to be connected to our family from 130 years ago," Jeffs exclaimed. Except for a foundation here and a square-headed nail there, though, few above-ground traces of Altaville still exist. It's a peaceful forest where the wild azaleas still are in bloom. The only disturbance is the archeologists and all their red squares dug below the forest floor that give the place the feel of a drunken chess board. Yet, once the town housed 1,000 people. In 1863 town geologist William H. Brewer described Altaville in his journal: "A filthier, dirtier, nastier, noisier place I have not struck in the state." Prospectors discovered the rich copper deposits of Altaville in 1853, but the remoteness and the cost of mining, transporting and smelting the ore outstripped the market value. Then the Civil War erupted. It cut off traditional sources of copper while at the same time increased the need for the metal to make shell casings. In 1862, the area was named Altaville for its proximity to the Alta California Mine. Town lots sold briskly as more mines were dug and transportation improved between the Southern Oregon gold mining community and Crescent City. But with the end of the war, the population dwindled. In 1881, a Crescent City man described Altaville as a ghost town. "When copper and chrome was first discovered at Altaville and the mine worked, the little town was full of life and activity," A.J. Blewsoe wrote. "Now it is deserted, and but few of the buildings remain. Black mouths of tunnels appear in the hillsides and heaps of blueish (sic) colored rock show the locality of the mines; shafts and mounds of dirt indicate the place where the prospector expended his time and muscle, and the numerous ravines and hillsides bear witness to the fact that prospecting was once extensively carried on here." Several times over the years since, people have gone to Altaville in search of minerals, but the town never revived. Eventually, the buildings scavengers hadn't carried away decayed in the coastal mountain mist. The remains were buried under the copper-rich soil. "It was built on a main road," said Pam Conners, the historian for the Six Rivers National Forest. "As the road was regraded, more dirt was pushed over it. There was also dirt from layer after layer of mining." So now, the lovers of history dig. `We found some old glass," said Caroline Sittler, 58, of Kearney, Ariz. "It's from a champagne bottle." The retired nurse and her husband Don now take their motorhome from dig to dig around the country. "It keeps us from fighting," she joked. The Jeffs family found even more than the relics of their ancestor's hotel: They discovered a living relative too. Kim Hernandez, a distant cousin from Lodi, Calif., and also related to Nicholas Tack Sr., was at at the dig. Both had read about the digs in newspapers. As others continued their excavations, Jeffs pulled out the family tree she had plotted working on the Internet. She quickly found Hernandez' spot on a branch. The blank spot now had names like leaves on a tree. "You come expecting to be connected with history but you get the bonus of finding a cousin too," Hernandez said shaking her head. Jeffs' youngest child, 8-year-old Andrea, was still hoping for more. "Maybe we can find a treasure chest," she said eagerly scraping away at the dirt and cutting plant roots with a hedge trimmer. ``Maybe it will have gold and stuff." But then she shivers: "Maybe we will find a dead body." Diana, 10, admonished her younger sister for her imagination: "Will you stop thinking like that? It will freak you." Then they all got back to the job at hand: bringing their great-great-great-great-grandfather back to life in the best way they could -- by digging deeper into the crimson soil. 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