Fiddletown Finds a Cure for Its Crumbling Old Herb Shop
For 136 years, the people of Fiddletown have stood watch over the old Chew Kee Herb Shop, a sort of time capsule representing life in a Gold Rush-era Chinese community of California.
You Fong (Jimmy) Chow was the caretaker and protector of the rammed-earth adobe shop and its dust-covered contents for 61 of those years, fulfilling a promise he made to his friend Fung Jong Yee on Yee’s deathbed in 1904. Yee erected the shop in this Mother Lode hamlet in 1851 and operated it for 53 years.
Before the old herb doctor died, Chow promised him that he would guard the shop the rest of his life, keep it intact, never disturb or sell anything in the store.
When Chow died in 1965 at the age of 80, the responsibility passed to the people of Fiddletown, population 112, and to Amador County, which assumed ownership of the shop.
But rain, snow, wind, frost and decay steadily weakened the structure. Its two-foot-thick walls crumbled and cracked and gradually opened like a flower in bloom, leaning outward more and more. Mice and rats nibbled away at the herbs in the 135-year-old storage drawers and munched on the dust-covered 19th-Century newspapers, magazines, ledgers, records and artifacts in the shop. The roof leaked. Wallpaper made of 1880s and 1890s newspapers peeled off in places.
But now, through the efforts of the Fiddletown Preservation Society led by its president, Marie Scofield, 50, and Sacramento dentist Dr. Herbert Yee, 62, $100,000 is being spent to shore up, restore and save the Chew Kee Herb Shop.
Scofield and Dr. Yee obtained an $88,000 grant from the state Parks and Recreation Department’s Office of Historic Preservation. Dr. Yee, great-grandson of the shop’s founder, contributed another $10,000 and the people of Fiddletown gave $2,500 to the restoration project.
Busy at work putting on a steep-gabled pine shingle roof identical to the original and placing concrete collars around the foundation to ensure long life is builder Davis Easton, 38, who specializes in constructing contemporary rammed-earth adobe buildings.
The thick walls have been strengthened and reinforced. Working with Easton are archeologists Julia Costello and Jane Armstrong.
Fiddletown was first settled by gold seekers from Missouri in 1849. They called the gold camp Fiddletown because the miners were “always fiddling around.”
Chow was born in a house next to the herb shop. When Yee died, Chow moved into a tiny, one-room shack behind the store, where he remained throughout his vigil. He was a jack-of-all-trades in Fiddletown.
At the time of the Gold Rush in the 1850s, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Chinese miners lived in Fiddletown, the second-largest Chinese settlement in America. Only San Francisco had more Chinese.
By the turn of the century, however, only a handful of Chinese were left in Fiddletown. Soon they, too, were gone--all except Jimmy Chow. He told everybody that he could never leave. He had to guard the herb shop.
The herb shop’s shelves are filled with bottles used by Fung Jong Yee. Clay cremation burial pots line the floor. A 150-year-old, 11-bar abacus sits on a dusty counter. Record books filled with vital statistics about early day Chinese miners line the cupboards. Fung Jong Yee’s bedroom is the way it was the day he died in 1904, his clothing still tacked to the wall.
‘Nothing Like This Anywhere’
“There’s nothing like this anywhere in America,” Dr. Yee said. “Everything was left intact in the shop all these years since my great-grandfather died. This has so much meaning for Chinese people. It is a visible reminder of their heritage. It really does turn back the clock.”
From time to time, groups of Chinese from Los Angeles and San Francisco charter buses to Fiddletown just to see the old shop.
When the restoration project is finished, the Fiddletown Preservation Society plans to open the Chew Kee shop to the public.
“The town is absolutely ecstatic that this remarkable treasure has been saved,” said Isa Lawless, 85, longtime resident and former owner of Fiddletown’s 1852 general store, who added:
“Jimmy Chow would really be pleased. So would Fung Jong Yee.”
