Thomas Vingoe Trevorrow
1898 to 1969aged 71
Hard-rock miner, Empire Mine, Grass Valley; timbering foreman from 1938
- Born
- 22 July 1898, St Just in Penwith
- Died
- 6 April 1969, Grass Valley, California
He sailed in April 1921, at twenty two, for Grass Valley, California, because a man from Pendeen wrote and said come. He arrived in a town where two thirds of the population had Cornish ancestry and he was underground at the Empire Mine within a fortnight. He worked it for thirty five years until it closed in 1956 and he never went underground anywhere else. He wrote to St Just every Christmas for forty eight years. Everyone in the principal branch of this family comes from the decision he made in a kitchen on Cape Cornwall Street in the spring of 1921.
Accomplishments
- Thirty five years at the Empire Mine, Grass Valley1921
From 1921 until it closed in 1956, the last eighteen as timbering foreman. The Empire produced 5.8 million ounces of gold out of 367 miles of underground passages between 1850 and 1956, and Cornishmen provided the bulk of its labour force from the late 1870s to the day it shut.
- Sang bass in the Grass Valley Cornish Carol Choir for forty Decembersabout 1925
The choir was organised in 1876 by John Farrell, a Grass Valley miner, merchant and lay preacher, and it was still singing in its 150th season in 2025. The carols were composed by Cornish miners who had learned their music in Methodist chapels at home.
- Brought three families out of West Penwith to California1949
Two Pendeen families in the 1920s, and in 1949 his own nephew Samuel Nicholas, who had just come out of the Duke of Cornwall Light Infantry. He put every one of the men to work.
