The supply chain, as a concept, can be hard to follow, involving ports, international shipping and mysterious absences of toilet paper. That’s less true in the Inland Empire, where boxy, blank-looking distribution centers and freeways full of semi-trucks make our role clear. But elements of the supply chain have been around for more than a century, long before the pandemic made the term a household word. Starting in the 19th century, trains shipped oranges and grapes from the IE to the rest of the nation. For most of the 20th, amid bucolic farmland, a cement plant in Colton pulverized rock and sent dust flying. That cement was used to build freeways, some of which cleaved San Bernardino, Pomona and Riverside in half as they allowed the quicker transport of goods. “The slow violence of the supply chain,” said Cathy Gudis, a public historian at UC Riverside. An initiative titled “Live From the Frontline,” described as “a public art and memory project,” explores these linkages, connecting past and present. Gudis leads a team that put together a website, livefromthefrontline.org, delving into eight sites in the industrial heart of the IE — in Mira Loma, San Bernardino, Bloomington, Colton, Fontana and Riverside — as well as assembling a Riverside museum exhibition. With logistics a hot topic of debate around the IE, the idea, according to Gudis, is “to find these roots and put these pieces together.” I met with Gudis and artist Tamara Cedré last month at the California Museum of Photography, part of the UCR Arts complex (3824 Main St.) in downtown Riverside. The museum show is focused on Fontana and Colton and ends Oct. 27. A reception on Sunday (Oct. 13) from 3 to 5 p.m. includes an artist talk by Cedré. This paperweight commemorates the first pig iron produced at Fontana’s Kaiser Steel mill in 1943. It’s on display as part of “Live From the Frontline,” an exhibit at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside. (Photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG) As she told me via email: “I delve into the industrial histories of Colton and Fontana as a means to contextualize the current warehouse boom as it has affected frontline communities.” Visitors enter past a 1954 aerial photo of Slover Mountain, blown up to fill an entire wall. The Cahuilla called it the Hill of the Ravens. Even by 1954, as the photo makes clear, the hill was surrounded by farms. But Portland Cement Co. was already a half-century into grinding it down to create the basic material for freeways, viaducts and dams. As my colleague Joe Blackstock wrote in 2001: “The limestone from Slover Mountain is a key ingredient of the cement used to build many of the West’s major construction projects in the 20th century, from Hoover Dam to Los Angeles City Hall.” The hill was once 500 feet high, nearly as tall as Riverside’s Mount Rubidoux. Slover Mountain’s peak had an enormous American flag that was visible from the 10 Freeway, even as the “mountain” slowly became a molehill due to mining. The exhibit says Portland Cement shut down in 2009. Nearly a century of work at the plant created jobs, but there were protests by farmers and others whose daily lives were disrupted, much as warehouses today are fought by neighbors. “Older folks have vivid memories of it: the siren blast, then an explosion. Dust and then silt would drift down,” Gudis said. Half the exhibit is about the operation’s effect on Colton, as told through newspaper clippings, archival photos, postcards and an audio collage of community voices. Also, through fresh photos by Cedré and drone footage by Adrian Metoyer. One drone video pans over the railroad tracks and past Agua Mansa Cemetery, one of the oldest burial grounds in San Bernardino County, before reaching — immediately, incongruously and inevitably — warehouses. Tamara Cedré gazes at a 2024 photo she took of the former Slover Mountain site, which has been leveled and now contains a manmade mountain of shipping containers. (Photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG) Earlier this year, Cedré, who is a visiting professor of photography at Pitzer College and a lecturer at Cal State San Bernardino, went looking for Slover Mountain and couldn’t find it. She had to check the geographic coordinates to get there. The mountain no longer exists. The site is now at ground level. And it’s filled with shipping containers, stacked high, a sort of manmade replacement for Slover Mountain. Imagine if they’d done that to Mount Rubidoux. No one was around when Cedré visited last spring. “Eerie,” Cedré said of her visit. “Coyotes to the right and left of us. It’s like a Roswell experience.” She considered climbing the containers and planting an American flag, a la Slover Mountain, but thought better of it. She returned with still and video images that documented the scene. Good thing, because weeks later, such action was impossible. “After we shot, they walled everything off so you can’t get to it,” Cedré said. The other half of the show is about Kaiser Steel, a mill that employed thousands in Fontana from the 1940s to the 1980s. Archival and fresh photos make up that portion too. Vintage copies of the Kaiser Steel in-house newsletter, The Snorter, are on display as part of “Live From the Frontline,” an exhibit at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside. (Photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG) So does a pig-shaped paperweight, a reference to pig iron, and copies of the mill’s in-house newsletter, humorously named The Snorter. (The Snorter could have been popular with Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine the telephone operator.) A collage of boosterish Kaiser videos from the World War II era play. Related Articles Local News | TV crime drama has ‘High Potential’ for insulting Fontana Local News | Could Dodgers’ postseason secret weapon be this Cardinals fan? Local News | Kris Kristofferson had varied interests as Pomona College student too Local News | Stories of Riverside’s Fairmount Park a focus of Local History Book Fair Local News | Stuffed lions and donkeys, favorite sports and last coffees, oh my! “The largest steel mill west of the Mississippi!” says the original narrator with “March of Time”-style flamboyance. Kaiser is, the male voice proclaims later, “now furnishing steel for the sinews of war.” By the 1980s, Kaiser was dealing with pollution complaints. A slick advertisement asserts defensively: “A strike closed our mill for weeks. But the smog was as bad as ever.” As a historian, Gudis confided, “a joy of it for me was finding the crazy footage and crazy advertising images.” But the show has a serious message. As you shouldn’t be surprised to learn, the effects of industry have historically been felt the most in poorer, ethnic neighborhoods. They’re not blasting mountains into dust in the nice parts of town. David Allen writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, blast it. Email [email protected], phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on X.