Lee was almost 102 when she passed away this past May.
I first met Eleanor “Lee” Swent as part of my very first interview as the newly minted historian of science, technology, and medicine at what was then still known as the Regional Oral History Office in the Bancroft Library (now, of course, the Oral History Center). Lee was the project lead and interviewer for ROHO’s Western Mining in the Twentieth Century Oral History Project from the 1980s until the 2000s. Over several decades, she had crisscrossed the globe, attending mining conferences and visiting old colleagues and friends with her husband, Langan Swent, who was also interviewed as part of the collection.
In her oral history interview Eleanor reflected on the origins of the series, the importance of preserving mining history, and her life in various mining communities in Mexico, South Dakota, and California. This interview was conducted in 2013 in order to provide a coda to all of the previous work on the Western Mining in the Twentieth Century project, and to orient new research and interviews in a new project that I was starting, called Global Mining and Materials Science. Lee organized the series together with Willa Baum, Lang Swent, Douglas Fuerstenau and many others in the mid-1980s. By 2013, over 106 interviews had been recorded and made available to the public through this project.
When I interviewed Lee in 2013, I was under the impression that I was interviewing someone who was retired. And indeed she had retired from the Regional Oral History Office some time before. It would be more accurate to say Lee was retired, but active. As with many of the extraordinary but supposedly superannuated I have met since starting at Berkeley, Lee was always pushing forward, sometimes pushing all the way into my office with continued advocacy for ideas new and old about the history of natural resource extraction and processing, and most importantly the communities that sustain them. Lee was interested in the salt of the earth, literally and figuratively, emphasizing the importance of salt mining to California and world history. Then I began to get calls from Lee about a book project, sharing ideas and progress updates. There can be prejudice when people talk about book projects. Many, many people have book projects; a smaller number publish books. I discovered that Lee was in the latter category, publishing One Shot for Gold, which is a history of the Knoxville Mining District, the largest gold mine in twentieth-century California. It was based in part on her eight-volume oral history project with ROHO about the district, chronicling the economic, political, legal, environmental, and community aspects of the history of mining in that area.
But Lee wasn’t done.
Then I started to get calls from her about an autobiographical project. Three years later, in 2024, she published Landing Uphill: Seven Years at San Luis, a memoir of her time at a mining community in the mountains of Mexico. I often marvel at the productivity of friends who are in their 80s. Then I think about Lee publishing two books in her late 90s. Then I’m reminded that of the many reasons people might live to be 101, having a strong sense of purpose has to be near the top of the list.
Lee made an outsized contribution to the history of mining worldwide, and to the local history of ROHO in the Bancroft Library.
Rest in peace, Lee.
My heart breaks a little when I think about how many people we’ve lost in the orbit of the ROHO/ the Oral History Center. More communications from the OHC are to follow to remember the stories and the people that surround this work.
