Limekiln: Chinese Labor and the Ruins Nobody Interrogates

The four stone towers ahead of you are among the most photographed ruins in Big Sur. They are genuinely beautiful, covered in fern and moss, set against a redwood canyon that seems designed by someone who understood the word picturesque. Almost no one who photographs them asks who built them.

The Rockland Lime and Lumber Company extracted limestone from the Santa Lucia mountains in the late eighteen eighties, burned it in these kilns, and shipped quicklime by coastal schooner from a small wharf below. The operation ran for about three years, from around eighteen eighty-seven to eighteen ninety, then closed when competing lime sources undercut its prices.

The workforce was primarily Chinese laborers. The Chinese Exclusion Act had been signed into law in eighteen eighty-two, five years before these kilns began operating, barring Chinese workers from American citizenship and making their legal position in the country increasingly precarious. They were the same workforce that had built the transcontinental railroad, that was laying track across California, that was working the farms and canneries and kilns wherever difficult labor was wanted and legal protection was not offered. At Limekiln, they lived in a camp at the site and worked the most dangerous positions, feeding the burning kilns. They left almost no written record.

The ruins are the record they left. The state park interprets them as industrial heritage. The men who made them are not named anywhere on the site.