California Gold Country

Angels Camp

The area around Angels Camp, California was rich in placer gold and attracted thousands of prospectors who came to get rich quick. The town of Angels Camp was founded in 1848 by two brothers from Rhode Island, Henry and George Angel, who also came to strike it rich but in a different capacity. They established a trading post and tent store for the gold prospectors flooding into the region. Once the easily accessible surface gold was depleted, the discovery of gold-bearing quartz veins lead to numerous stamp mills being constructed in town to process the ore. While visiting Angels Camp in 1865, Mark Twain (then Samuel Clemens) overheard a story about a jumping frog while he was staying at the Angels Hotel. Twain’s first major literary success was a short story titled “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and this literally put Angels Camp on the map. The story inspired the first Calaveras County Fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee in 1928, an event that is held every May to this day. The world record for frog jumping is 21 feet, 5 ¾ inches, set in 1986 here in Angels Camp by a frog named Rosie the Ribiter, handled by her owner Lee Guidici.

Calaveras Big Trees State Park

In 1852, a hunter by the name of Augustus T. Dowd was in pursuit of a wounded grizzly bear when he was stopped in his tracks upon the discovery of grove of giant sequoias. While initial news of his discovery was met with disbelief, it soon sparked a rush of visitors and the grove became a major tourist attraction. The discovery led to the logging and exploitation of the trees. The Discovery Tree, probably the largest giant sequoia in the grove, was cut down in 1853 and was turned into a bowling alley, bar, and bandstand for the tourists. Another notable tree, the Mother of the Forest, had its bark stripped from its base to a height of 116 feet so that it could be reconstructed as a sideshow attraction. Outraged citizens and conservationists, including John Muir, fought to protect the giant sequoias and led to the establishment of Calaveras Big Trees State Park in 1931.

Giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) can live up to 3,400 years and weigh as much as 2,600 tons or about 18 blue whales. They are the world’s largest trees by volume: their cousins, the coast redwoods grow taller. Once widespread, they now grow naturally only in 75 groves on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Their thick, fibrous bark can be as much as 18 inches thick and is an excellent protection from fire. A giant sequoia has both male and female cones. It takes the small, egg-shaped female cones two years to mature and they can wait on the tree for as long as 20 years before some outside force like wind, snow, or even animals knock them to the ground. Each female cone contains about 200 tiny seeds which are about size of a flake of oatmeal. In the spring, the male cones that remain in the tree release pollen that is blown around the grove. Sequoia seedlings spend the first few years of life establishing a strong root system before focusing on growth. Some of the larger trees in Calaveras Big Trees State Park could be anywhere from 800 to 3,000 years old and you always know the older trees by their rounded crowns and enormous branches which are often bigger than other trees in the forest.

Located just east of Arnold, California on State Route 4, Calaveras Big Trees State Park protects two groves of giant sequoias: the more accessible North Grove and the more secluded South Grove. The North Grove is adjacent to the park’s entrance and visitor center. The relatively flat North Grove Trail is a 1.7-mile loop which has interpretive signs along the path. The majority of human presence occurred in the lower North Grove, where the downed Discovery Tree and destroyed Mother of the Forest are located. By skinning the living tree, senseless human actions left Mother of the Forest vulnerable to fire and it has been a blackened snag for decades. The largest specimen in the North Grove is the Empire Tree which has a base of 30 feet in diameter. The Father of the Forest fell to earth long before the discovery of the grove and the natural tannin in the heartwood of sequoias has slowed the decomposition process. The tree is today hollow and a favorite for photos, but in the early days of tourism it once hosted a brass band and troop of calvary. A common practice in the early days was to name individual “big trees” after prominent people. After his death in 1865, a beautiful specimen of a majestic giant sequoia was named after Abraham Lincoln. The Pioneer Cabin Tree, a famous “tunnel tree,” allowed cars to drive through its trunk for decades until it fell in a heavy storm in 2017.

Located about nine miles from the park’s entrance, the South Grove contains about 1,000 mature giant sequoias, about ten times as many as the North Grove. Because it was never subjected to tourism development like the North Grove, the South Grove has some of the biggest sequoias in the park. From 1945 to 1954, a conservationist movement, which included a $1 million donation from John D, Rockefeller Jr., fought logging attempts in the South Grove which finally resulted in a public purchase of the South Grove in 1954. It is a five-mile round-trip hike from the parking lot to reach the South Grove’s biggest sequoia, the Agassiz Tree. This specimen is named after Louis Agassiz who was a Swiss zoologist who became one of America’s leading naturalists. At 6 feet above the ground, the Agassiz Tree is still 25 feet in diameter and the tree reaches a height of 250 feet. Giant sequoias are generally resistant to fire, but when subjected to multiple fire events they sometimes perish which is evident with the Chimney Tree. During the 1870s, visitors to the South Grove named The Palace Tree after San Francisco’s newly opened, elegant, seven story Palace Hotel. The large opening in the base of the tree reminded people of the central courtyard carriage entrance of the hotel.

Columbia State Historic Park

Columbia is the best-preserved mining town in the Mother Lode, with the most historic buildings (more than 30) in the state of California. On March 27, 1850, a group of prospectors discovered gold here. Passing through the area, Dr. Thaddeus Heldreth, his brother George, John Walker, and others were caught in a rain storm. While spending time here to dry out their gear, Walker decided to try his luck in the nearby gulch where be found gold. Within six weeks, thousands of miners had flooded the area crowding into tent camps they called “Heldreth’s Diggings”. The camp was renamed Columbia on April 29, 1850 officially establishing the town. By 1852, there were more than 150 stores, shops, saloons and other businesses in Columbia. The town also had three churches, a meeting hall, a Masonic Lodge and a branch of the Sons of Temperance. Columbia was known as the “Gem of the Southern Mines” and by 1853 it was one of the largest cities in California with an estimated population of 25,000 to 30,000 people.

The California Gold Rush drew prospectors to Columbia from around the world. Two-thirds of the early miners in Columbia were Mexican. Like many mining towns, by 1852 Columbia had a sizeable population of Chinese, French, Irish, Italian, German and Jewish miners and merchants who contributed to the growing cultural and ethnic diversity of Columbia. Many of these men didn’t stay long for they were harshly discriminated against. Not only were they often forced to live outside the town, but they were also subjected to the Foreign Miner’s Tax which required foreign-born miners to pay the state $20 a month for the privilege of mining.

Between 1850 and the early 1900s, as much as $150 million in gold was mined in Columbia. This gold helped to finance the United States government and the Union Army during the Civil War. As mining dwindled in the late 1860s, Columbia began to decline. Miners tore down the vacated buildings and mined vacant lots in search of gold in the crevices of the limestone bedrock on which the town was built. Unlike many other Gold Rush settlements that disappeared due to fire, vandalism, and time, Columbia survived and never was a ghost town. Though the population dipped after the easy gold was panned out, it was never deserted. Talk about preserving the buildings of old Columbia started in the 1920s when the Columbia Progressive Club was formed. In 1928, the state park commission hired Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. to survey lands for the California park system. Olmsted Jr. recommended Columbia as one of the best preserved gold mining towns in the state. On July 15, 1945, Governor Earl Warren moved his office to Columbia for one day and signed legislation creating the Columbia State Historic Park.

Following the creation of the state park, restoration efforts began on the 150-year-old structures to capture and preserve their historic value. Some of the buildings and exhibits, like the Masonic Hall, have been painstakingly restored by California chapters of their organizations. Many of the historic buildings still house merchants doing business in town. Walking through town, you will find coffee shops, restaurants, book stores, gift shops, and candy stores. The City Hotel on Main Street still offers fine dining and lodging along with drinks and music in the saloon. The Fallon House Theater on Washington street still hosts performances of the Sierra Repertory Theatre on its historic stage. Guests can catch a stagecoach ride at the Wells Fargo Company building or pan for gold at the Matelot Gulch Mining Company. Columbia State Historic Park is still a bustling town with numerous events throughout the year and is a popular tourist and school fieldtrip destination.

Railtown 1897 State Historic Park

Located within the heart of California’s Gold Country in the town of Jamestown, the Railtown 1897 State Historic Park protects and celebrates one of the few remaining railroad roundhouses in America. The roundhouse is an intact and still-functioning steam locomotive repair and maintenance facility, portions of which date back to 1897. In addition to the roundhouse, the complex features an operating turntable, functioning blacksmithing area, and pre-electric, belt-driven machine shop which were all used to maintain the equipment of the Sierra Railway. The state historic park offers daily guided tours of the roundhouse where guests can see where locomotives and rail cars were inspected, repaired, and rebuilt – a function the facility still practices today.

Railtown’s close proximity to Hollywood and the diverse landscape of the Sierra Railway has made it a popular filming location with the motion picture industry. Known as “The Movie Railroad,” Railtown 1897 and its historic locomotives and rail cars have appeared in more than 200 films, television productions, and commercials. The first film appearance was in a 1919 silent serial called “The Red Glove”. Sierra No. 3 is perhaps the most widely seen locomotive in the world appearing in such films as the western classics of High Noon and Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider and Unforgiven. If you watch the 1992 Unforgiven which won best-picture, the gunfighter English Bob arrives in town riding aboard Sierra Coach No. 6 pulled by locomotive No. 3 which are both housed in the roundhouse. Movie crews also produced the railroad sequences in Back to the Future: Part III at Railtown 1897 and several props from the film are in the movie exhibit of the park.