Sutter Creek took possession of the Knight Foundry June 30. Photo by: File photo

The place that made the Gold Rush go round now belongs to the city of Sutter Creek.

The Knight Foundry, now city property, was powered by the Knight Wheel, engineer Samuel Knight's innovative water turbine. It sped up "hard-rock" gold extraction in the Sierra Nevada by forging, out of iron, a myriad of gears, pulleys, hoists, ore-cart wheels and other mining necessities - at a point crucially near to the mine sites themselves. Some 1.7 acres at the foundry will be the site of a significant cleanup of lead and other heavy metals and a restoration of the historic factory.

"The foundry plays a unique, significant part in the city's history," said Sean Rabe, assistant city manager. "The city has been working to acquire the property for several years in order to preserve it and to make it an educational working museum showcasing the history of the Gold Country."

Sutter Creek took possession June 30 and will use some $600,000 in federal grant money to remove hazardous lead from the site. The price to buy the foundry facility from the Samuel Knight Co. was $851,087.

"The grant can't be used for the purchase price, but it can be used as matching funds for the California Cultural Historic Endowment grant that we have received for the purchase," Rabe said.

Officials from the nonprofit Knight Foundry Corp. for years have pushed a cleanup-restoration project such as is now scheduled, Rabe said.

"The Knight Foundry Historic Water-Powered Iron Works is without parallel in California - an almost perfectly preserved late-19th and early-20th century industrial complex," agency officials wrote in 2004 in a grant application. "This unique historic site is the only surviving water-powered foundry and machine shop in the United States, but is currently a threatened historic resource. In uninterrupted operation until it last poured iron in 1996, it is the last American workplace where traditional cast iron foundry production processes and skills have been handed down almost unchanged."

The grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency treats the foundry site as a "brownfield," a site in need of cleanup for public-health purposes. Rabe said no health effects have been reported to date.

"The city has been working very closely with the California Department of Toxic Substances Control and with the US EPA," he said. "Neither agency has put an enforcement action on the site. In order to preserve the foundry the cleanup must be done concurrently. Private property owners are usually not able to receive state or federal funding for these types of projects. The previous owner did not qualify for funding."

Samuel Knight Co. officials could not be reached for comment by press time.

The company wants Sutter Creek to indemnify it against haz-mat liability.

"The property owner is concerned about potential litigation," Rabe said. "There is still some discussion about whether or not the City will or can indemnify the previous owner."

According to the Knight Foundry Corp., when the foundry ceased production in 1996, it was designated one of "America's Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places" by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and became an official project of the joint National Trust/White House "Save America's Treasures" program.