Piety Hill Traditional Cache
Nomex: No response from owner. If you wish to repair/replace the cache sometime in the future, just contact us (by email), and assuming it meets the current guidelines, we'll be happy to unarchive it.
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Difficulty:
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Size: 
(small)
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History Happened Here: "Piety Hill." Another cache celebrating locations of historical significance in Shasta County's past.
Grabbing the cache is the geocaching/log book fun part of this game. Understanding the history of the real Piety Hill is the second part of the geo-fun. The cache, a 3 inch Nalgene container is at the above posted coordinates. To log this find, this is the only place you "must" visit.
If you like learning about the history of the area, visit the actual site where Piety Hill stood between 1850 and 1866 at N40 30.261 and W122 31.989. The cache container was not placed here because of a lack of good parking on this narrow road. Read below for a bit of history and view it as you pass on your way back to Redding. The fenced property is private.
Piety Hill was established in 1849 in the Gold Rush before Shasta County was created. It once claimed 1500 residents, 600 of whom were Chinese.
No one knows the exact reason of how or why Piety Hill acquired it's name. One claims the town was named for the regular religions and political (mostly religious) discussions held there by some of its pious residents. The other version claims the town was named in honor of resident Grandma McKinney's former home in Piety Hill, Michigan.
In 1866, all the white residents moved across Conger Gulch to the newly laid out town of Igo, and all the Chinese stayed. The move was made because an ancient river channel was discovered beneath the town and Hardscrabble Mine, a local hydraulic mining company, was making plans to mine the townsite for the gold they believed that lay beneath it.
The Chinese's foresight to stay on at a Piety Hill proved accurate because the mining that was washing away the hillside to the east stopped. Courts had stepped in and made it illegal to conduct this type of mining in California. Mining had come to within a stone's throw of the settlement. The white residents never returned - they stayed at Igo, and Piety Hill became exclusively a Chinese town.
All that remains of Piety Hill today is an empty reservoir, ditches, faint structure traces, depressions in the ground that were once cellars, and the still very visible scars caused by the hydraulic mining on the bluff at the very eastern edge of where the town once stood.
Thank you Dottie Smith for your historical research.
There is NO NEED too walk into the mining ditch, beyond and below the cache site.
The new container: (muggled twice!)
FTF-III bandana and small trade items.
Carpe Diem, Carpe Geocachiem . . . MtnMike
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Gur nag svyyrq xabg ubyr vf fgnevat ng gur pnpur. Ebpxf+ Fgvpxf + Ohfu = OVATB! Lbh jvyy unir vg.
Treasures
You'll collect a digital Treasure from one of these collections when you find and log this geocache:
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