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By about 1910 the "fruit bubble" of the North Fork was close to bursting. The ultimate collapse of the fruit industry may be attributed to several factors, but the killing blow was simply overproduction as part of the "band wagon" aspect of the boom. Additionally, the advent of the Pacific Northwest fruit industry resulted in national surpluses, and far more fruit was produced locally than could be handled by the railroad without damage to the product. Pests increasingly became a problem, and the "big freeze" of 1912 destroyed most of the peach orchards. This was the first serious freeze to affect the industry since it started, and it virtually devastated the valley. Many people lost all their property as a result of the collapse of the fruit market. Orchards were plowed up and the land put into general farming ground. By 1913 the North Fork Valley was gripped in bitter depression. Although the fruit industry eventually managed to recover, the production of recent decades has only been one-third to one-quarter of what it was in the boom period from about 1906 to 1910 (Rockwell 1975:120 and 1938). Local informants today stress that overproduction was responsible for killing the fruit industry. The physical evidence for intensive development of the fruit industry includes the .breakup of the larger land holdings in the North Fork Valley, increased population, and development of numerous small orchards and family farmsteads throughout the Valley. The urbanization and increased population density which seems to have characterized the fruit boom was augmented by the arrival of unemployed miners who came in from the mining regions • in the 1890's. Coal Mining: Other than fruit and stock ranching, the only signi- ficant means.of intensively exploiting the North Fork region has been through the mining of coal. Coal mining is an intensive form of economic activity which has had, and still is having, significant impact on the North Fork Area. According to one local historian, the first settlers in the region were unaware of the vast coal deposits in the Valley and used overgrown willows to make charcoal for their forges (Rockwell 1975:161). The regionally-prominent Somerset and Bowie mines were not discovered until the fall of 1883. Ranchers filed on the coal claims of the area but abandoned them, and it was not until much later that indications for appreciable concern for coal are noticed in the local history. The arrivai of the railroad in Somerset in 1902 (Beebe 1962:374) made commercial mining on a large scale feasible,by opening up distant markets. Rockwell does note some active speculation in advance of the railroad regarding the Somerset mine properties. The Crystal River Railroad had intended to run a spur into Lhe North Fork from the Crystal River in order to tap the vast potential in coal there. Major coal production seems, however, to have started with the Utah Fuel Company which acquired the Somerset property in 1901. Utah Fuel built a company town at the mine in 1903, and the mine operated continuously for the next twenty years and is said to have produced nearly 1,000 tons of coal per day (Rockwell 1975:161-163). 12