In the late 19th century, economic development of the Mother Lode
depended on it being linked via railway to the commercial
networks of the western United States. Calaveras was served by
three railroads: the Stockton and Copperopolis, the San Joaquin
and Sierra Nevada, and the Sierra Railway.
During the Gold Rush, the area in today’s West Calaveras south of
the Mokelumne River claimed towns called Poverty Bar, Clay’s Bar,
Winters Bar and Limerick, the latter after the many Irish
immigrants who settled there. In the mid-1860s, as camps and
settlements dwindled, pioneers who hailed from Iowa named their
most significant town Camanche, after the Iowa town of the same
name–and misspelled the name of the Native American tribe
(Comanche) in the same way.
The community of Campo Seco (Spanish for dry field or camp) was
an early placer mining camp that also provided services to the
bars along the Mokelumne River (recorded as State Historic
Landmark No. 257). The camp was located on Oregon Gulch, which
enters into the Mokelumne River at Oregon Bar, and served many of
the miners who mined along the numerous bars of the Mokelumne
River.
When gold was discovered in California in 1848 it was an undeveloped region without the infrastructure to feed, clothe, supply or house the thousands of people who were arriving daily. Many of the gold seekers and most of the supplies came through the new city of San Francisco, which at that time was a city of tents. Entrepreneurs saw that the need for housing could be met with prefabricated houses from China. During the first few years of the gold rush between 75 and 100 of these Chinese houses were brought to California.
The history of Calaveras County is much like that of other counties in the California Mother Lode. Hoards of miners came; water systems were developed; settlements grew up around the more successful and environmentally rich mining areas; transportation networks developed, first as trails and then as wagon roads; farms, orchards, and truck gardens sprang up; saloons and fandango halls, along with boarding houses provided entertainment, bed, bath, and sustenance; and the bare bones of civilization in the form of government, newspapers, and social lodges developed.
The first recorded visit by a European to the area now known as Calaveras County was made in October 1806, when Gabriel Moraga, with his diarist and chaplain, Padre Pedro Muñoz, visited the Stanislaus River area on their search for potential inland mission sites. During a subsequent visit in 1808, the Moraga expedition named the major rivers in the region, calling the Stanislaus “Rio de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe.”
General Mariano Vallejo was in the area in 1829 with a party in search of the escaped mission Indian, Chief Estanislao, for whom the Stanislaus River may have been named. It is believed that Estanislao received his Christian name when baptized, in honor of one of the Polish saints names “Stanislas.” The river became known as Rio Estanislao, and was anglicized by John C. Frémont in 1844. On the opposite side of the county, the Mokelumne River was given the name of the Indian group who resided there.
CalaverasHistory.org has been compiled and continues to be augmented by historians, archeologists, researchers and writers. This site offers the most authoritative and comprehensive gold mine of historical information for historians, genealogists, residents and anyone with an interest in Calaveras County.
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Cement from the Calaveras Cement Co. helped build the San
Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, McClellan and Travis Air Force
bases, San Francisco Airport and several dams throughout the
region.
The first native Californian promoted to admiral in the U.S. Navy
hailed from landlocked Calaveras County. Theodore Vogelgesang,
born at Petersburg in 1869, was appointed rear admiral in 1922.
Mokelumne Hill photographer Edith Irvine arrived in San Francisco
the morning of the 1906 earthquake. Prints from her glass-plate
negatives premiered in 2006 and are seen today at the Mokelumne
Hill Library.
The California red-legged frog, made famous in Mark Twain’s 1865
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County” but feared
absent from the county by 1969, was rediscovered in 2003.
The first set of U.S. Senators from California (1850) were
abolitionist John Fremont and Southern sympathizer William Gwin.
The latter later owned the Gwin Mine near what today is
Paloma.
Contrary to popular belief, the first three-story structure in
the California interior was not the Mokelumne Hill IOOF Hall (the
third story was added in 1861) but the Union House (1854) across
the street (destroyed in the 1865 fire).
Estanislao Cucunuchi, born at San Jose Mission, was 28 when he
led fellow Laquisemne Yokuts (from near Ripon) in a revolt in
1828. The horse-raiding rebels were pursued by Mariano Vallejo,
but Estanislao turned himself in and was pardoned. His name (with
English pronunciation) was bestowed on both a river and county.
At the November 2, 1930 dedication of the original Hogan Dam, a
bronze plaque was affixed onto the dam using cement and sand
gathered from all corners of the state and water taken from the
wells of several historic Spanish missions.
