Judge Edmonds

Some '49ers were already spiritualists when they arrived.  John A. Collins settled in San Francisco in 1849, one of the city's pioneer merchants.  As a student in the 1830s, Collins had been interested in clairvoyance, mesmerism, and other spiritual phenomena--a spiritualist before the Fox sisters appeared on the scene.  He was an abolitionist, the first to approach Frederick Douglass about speaking on behalf of abolition, as described by Douglass in My Freedom and My Bondage.

James J. Owen arrived in California in 1850, but left within two years after discovering that mining was much too much trouble.  He had attended the first public demonstrations of "the raps" in Rochester, New York. He returned to California in1860, bought the San Jose Mercury, and served one term in the Assembly.  He moved from San Jose to San Francisco in the 1880s, perhaps to escape ridicule for J. J.'s Folly, and published a spiritualist journal there.

Others became spiritualists after arriving in the state. William David Hambly, a pioneer in Plumas County, commenced to reading Judge John W. Edmund's Spiritualism during the cold spring of 1859 and discovered that "the more I read, the more I wanted to know of this mystery."

Still, spiritualists in California were isolated, with no journals or societies to link them together.

That all changed when Emma Hardinge, one of the most popular trance speakers on the East Coast, arrived in 1863.  She spent fifteen months in California, ten months in San Francisco alone, lecturing three times a week, and, not surprisingly, many mediums arose during her stay.  She left spiritualists encouraged and their ranks enlarged. 

J. J. Owen

Emma Hardinge

                 The commencement of the promised new era was to be inaugurated by an extraordinary discovery of material as well as spiritual wealth.  Mines of treasure were to be discovered in the earth, and floods of spiritual light were to descend from the heavens, and both these vast outpourings were, it was predicted, to occur in the year 1848, and to continue until about 1870.

          We call attention to the fact that the discovery of gold in California and the breaking out of Spiritualism through the “Rochester knockings” both occurred in 1847-8.   

Emma Hardinge, referring to a revelation by spirits to the Shakers in 1830, 
Modern American Spiritualism