Black Diamond Mines

Five coal-mining towns stood on this ground from the 1860s, and Sarah Norton was midwife to them. A Canadian immigrant, widowed and then married to Noah Norton — the man Nortonville was named for — she is credited with delivering more than six hundred babies across the district. On 5 October 1879, travelling to attend a sick woman, her horse bolted and threw her from the buggy. She was sixty-eight. Local accounts hold that Norton, not a religious woman, had asked her children not to hold a funeral for her; the town tried anyway, and the service was broken up twice, first by a violent storm and then by a stampede of livestock, until the mourners gave up and buried her. She lies in Rose Hill Cemetery, on the hill above the vanished townsites, and she is the figure people mean by the White Witch — reported among the headstones and across the surrounding hills. The cemetery and the mining towns' remains sit inside Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve, which is open to the public.