The history of Calaveras County is much like that of other such 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 between these areas 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 to the miners; the bare bones of civilization in the form of government, law, newspapers, and social lodges developed; and violence became commonplace, not only among the newly arrived argonauts, but also with the Indians who had lived in the area so long.
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.
Moraga and Vallejo were soon followed by Jedediah Smith, Joseph Walker, John Frémont, and by the French trappers working for the Hudsons Bay Company and headquartered at French Camp near Stockton. The Bidwell-Bartleson Party, an emigrant group, traveled through the area in 1841, followed by others of their ilk. There is little information about any historic settlements from this early era, however, or remains of any settlements of Sonoran miners. Historic activity began in earnest soon after Marshall’s discovery of gold on the American River in January of 1848; an event that forever changed the face of Calaveras County’s physical and cultural landscape.
The name of the county was derived from the Calaveras River which courses through its northern half, reputedly named Rio de los Calaveras (“River of Skulls”) by members of the 1806 Moraga expedition who claimed to have discovered the skulls of Native Americans along its banks. Although the area was visited by successive waves of trappers and traders over the ensuing years, and pertinent evidence indicated that the area was mined for gold by people of Hispanic origin, it wasn’t until Americans discovered gold on the American River in January of 1848 that the local area was visited by any appreciable numbers of Euro-Americans.
When California was admitted to the Union in 1850, Calaveras, which then included present Amador County and part of Alpine County, was one of its original 27 counties. It has had five county seats, the first named was at Pleasant Valley, about 1.5 miles west of Jenny Lind, in February 1850, but was not established. That honor went to Double Springs, where the first county officers were elected in April of that same year. In 1851, however, both Jackson and Mokelumne Hill petitioned for an election to move the county seat, and after much wrangling, it was established at Jackson. By 1852, with Mokelumne Hill much larger than Jackson, it was again moved. There it remained until, with the decline of gold production in the Mokelumne Hill area in the 1860s, and due to its distance from the southern half of the county, voters selected San Andreas as the new county seat. In 1867, a new courthouse and jail were completed, and with the move, county officers, attorneys, and many professional people relocated to San Andreas, changing the demographics of the county forever.
As the century progressed, some Gold rush settlements became villages and then towns, with others disappeared. Churches and schools were established, and community and fraternal organizations flourished. Neat frame houses and brick and stone commercial buildings replaced the tent cities of the miners. Hotels and inns, general merchandise stores, tine and carpenter shops, boot and shoe shops, liveries, and the ubiquitous saloons lined the main streets.
Close behind the prospectors and miners came the agriculturalists, families from the eastern states and Europe who saw opportunities for stock-raising and truck garden operations on the open grasslands. Following the decline of placer deposits in the Mother Lode after ca. 1860, ranching became more important to the foothill economy. Settlers established farms in the area where they grew hay, alfalfa, and wheat and planted orchards, Most families practiced a mixed agricultural economy, raising cattle, sheep, hogs, and poultry, which supplied them with a steady supply of foodstuffs augmented by vegetable gardens and orchards.
Livestock, however, has always provided the backbone of the agricultural industry, with the practice of transhumance opening up the high country to cow and sheep camps. Upland grazing of cattle, sheep, and goats was an important early historical land use, beginning as early as 1849, with livestock herds annually moved to the mountains during the hot summers, returning to the valleys below before winter. Most of the geographic names in the high country were derived from the summer pasturing of the foothill ranching families, i.e. Tryon Peak, Hiram Meadow, Adams Camp, Wheat’s Meadow, and many others.
Some families established vineyards and produced wines and brandies for personal use and for sale, while others bottled the clear, fresh waters of local springs and sold them commercially. Hops were grown and baked in kilns for breweries that produced local beers and ales. Olive trees were planted and the olives cured or made into oil, in both family and commercial orchards. Commercial winemaking began in 1851, with 1,000 vines set out on the Calaveras River. Mokelumne Hill was another center of wine production, but vineyards were also planted in virtually every community in the early years.
Nineteenth-century impetus for agricultural development came from disenchanted county boosters who blamed mining for Calaveras’ socioeconomic problems and perceived farming as a panacea. A host of problems plagued the county’s agricultural development, not the least of which was the public perception of the foothills as mining territory incapable of fostering anything better than infertile “bedrock ranches.” Local farming never developed beyond a subsistence level and gradually gave way to livestock operations. As the mining economy declined, however, farming gained importance as a family enterprise which helped to establish more permanence and stability in the society.
The historically and architecturally significant buildings in Calaveras are diverse in style, as well as in method and period of construction. They are built of adobe, stone, brick, wood, or concrete and have sidings of brick, wood, stucco, and plaster. The architectural styles represented are Neoclassical, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate, Queen Anne, Eastlake, Mission Revival, False-front commercial, Craftsman, Spanish Eclectic, Tudor Revival, Art Moderne, and various vernacular adaptations of all.
The first dwellings were the brush houses of the Mexicans and canvas tents of the miners, followed by the adobe homes and business establishments of the Sonorans (from the Mexican State of Sonora). Soon, however, more permanent wood structures were built, with the first frame houses constructed in the simple one-story vernacular Greek Revival or National Folk style. Commercial buildings were usually built close together on both sides of the main streets, one or two stories high, with gable roofs, front porches, and French doors. Fires and damage from earthquakes [and floods] destroyed many of the structures and buildings of those early days, and those that were not damaged through such actions were later razed in the name of “progress,” were inundated by reservoirs, abandoned and forgotten, or otherwise decreased in importance as settlements.
After many towns were destroyed by fires, the scourge of the Mother Lode in the early days, more affluent merchants began to rebuild in the more permanent brick or stone. Although many Americans built of stone, it was the Italian and French stonemasons, so experienced with this method of construction in their homelands, who built the majority of the lasting stone structures in the California foothills. They built commercial establishments, residences, basements, storehouses, outbuildings, ovens, walls, corrals, ditches, and numerous other structures with the abundant local schists, slates, marbles, and andesites.
As the camps became communities and women and children moved west to be with their menfolk, the appearance of the towns changed. Back streets were lined with one and two-story frame houses, picket fences delineated planted yards and gardens, and churches, schools, and social halls were constructed, usually in a simple Greek Revival style. Farmhouses dotted the landscape, surrounded by their attendant barns, bunkhouses, blacksmith shops, sheds, corrals, creameries, and springhouses.
During the 1880s and 1890s Second Gold Rush, numerous false-front commercial establishments, as well as Italianate, Eastlake, and Queen Anne residences were constructed. From the 1910s through the 1920s, Craftsman bungalows were built in communities and on ranches alike. During the late 1920s and 1930s, a romantic nostalgia for the Hispanic culture culminated in the Mission Revival and Spanish Eclectic styles, both in commercial and residential architecture. The immense popularity of the style, coupled with a period of economic development in the county, spurred many property owners to cover the facades of their original buildings with stucco in the Spanish Eclectic style.
Most of the residences and commercial establishments in the county were built by local carpenters and builders and in later years from pattern books and style guides, and not as high examples of any particular style. In most instances they were vernacular adaptations that do not conform to pure academic categories, commonly combining elements from several different design types or historical periods. However, no matter how ambiguous these vernacular buildings may appear in terms of style, they are, nonetheless, accurate reflections of the tastes at the time of their construction as well as an important indication of the building techniques and materials of their day, with a compatibility not often found in major cities and commercial centers.
The California Gold Rush is identified as the greatest world-wide migration in peacetime history. Within a few years, hundreds of thousands of hopeful miners and entrepreneurs poured into the Sierra Nevada foothills and then spread out across the landscape. Although most returned to their homelands, many stayed to make new lives in the land of opportunity.
Calaveras, in the Southern Mines, had a more ethnically diverse population, and the county swarmed with representatives from throughout the globe. The first to arrive in 1848 were the Californios and the Mexicans, followed by those from the Pacific Rim as reports of gold spread via sailing ships. Following on their heels were the Forty-Niners from the Eastern States and Europe who had jumped aboard ships and launched overland treks in 1848 bound for California. This initial “rush” lasted for about a decade before the easy gold was exhausted and the dream of instant wealth dissolved. People, however, kept coming, with later migrations from Southern Europe adding more flavor to the Mother Lode stew.
Chileans and Mexicans arrived with considerable mining skills. The Chinese, a legendary group of hard-working miners, railroad builders, cooks, and ditch-diggers, composed 22 percent of the county population in 1860. The Anglo-Americans, the majority of inhabitants, had subgroups of English, Irish, Welsh, and Scots, as well as American Yankees, southerners, and “Pikers” from Missouri. Blacks, both slave and free, came to try their luck. Europeans in the early days included Germans, Jews, Swiss, French, Basque, Italians, and Eastern Europeans, as well as miners from New Zealand and Australia.
In towns and mining camps, these groups tended to gather with fellow nationals. Discrimination drove some apart, while others settled together for the camaraderie of familiar languages and customs. Towns teemed with restaurants, lodging houses, and bars catering to particular nationalities, and a babble of languages filled the streets. Some of these groups left descendents who remain today, and some left names on the landscape such as Chile Camp, Italian Gardens, China Gulch, Negro Hill, and French Camp.
For many years Calaveras slumbered, but beginning in the 1920s and continuing to the present, water storage and hydroelectric generation began to play major roles in the economy. Of prime importance was the establishment of the Calaveras Cement Company plant in San Andreas in 1927, the largest employer in the county for over 40 years. The centennial of the gold discovery, celebrated statewide in 1948, introduced another generation to the legends and lure of the gold country. Histories were written, pageants produced, and ghost towns and ruins were visited. The stories of Mark Twain and Bret Harte were republished, and films and documentaries drew attention to the region.
Today, Calaveras County, like the rest of the foothills, has recently experienced a rapid growth in population; the economy presently depends on employment by units of government, service industries, construction, tourism, and agriculture. Golf courses, residential development, and second homes sprout up amidst the wine grapes and olive orchards, cattle and sheep ranches, and pristine open space. Boating, fishing, camping, hiking, and biking, have replaced mining and logging. Yet still today, witnessing growth unprecedented since the days of the Gold Rush, Calaveras County relies on its history as a touchstone of its essentially rural character.
INTRO TO ROADS AND TRAILS
EMIGRANT ROAD/BIG TREE AND CARSON VALLEY TURNPIKE/ALPINE HIGHWAY
The present Highway 4 alignment follows the approximate route of an early emigrant trail over the Sierra Nevada that was improved in 1855-56 and known as the Big Tree Road and in the early 1860s as the Big Tree and Carson Valley Turnpike. Originally a free trail, it became a toll road from 1864 through 1910, and then a free county road in 1911. It was accepted into the state highway system in 1926 and portions were paved in the 1930s. The road was realigned in the mid-1960s when the Bear Valley Ski Resort was opened, making it an all-weather highway. Historic themes within the project area focus on transportation, settlement, and agriculture.
TRANSPORTATION
The Sierra Nevada has been traversed by succeeding waves of humans for more than 12,000 years. Native American trails between watering places and hunting and gathering areas were undoubtedly used by those European and American fur trappers and traders who conducted the first reconnaissances into the Sierran regions. The locations of these earliest routes are almost impossible to find, however, for most of them have been obliterated by historic and recent road construction.
Calaveras and Alpine counties each incorporated some of the higher Sierra Nevada and were explored by scouts looking for a pass into California, or were traversed by some of the early emigrant parties. Jedediah Story Smith appears to have been the first Euro-American to enter the region. From his camp on the lower Stanislaus River, Smith and two companions traveled eastward, upstream, and crossed the Sierra Nevada in eight days during May of 1827. It is thought that the path traveled by Smith and his fellow trappers may have paralleled the present California Highway 4. The Bidwell-Bartleson party, touted as the “First Immigrant Train to California,” although leaving their wagons behind on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, entered California somewhere near present Lake Alpine and traveled down the Stanislaus River drainage in 1841 (Davis-King et al. 1992:4.3)
The Sierra Nevada trails became popular after the discovery of gold at Coloma in 1848, precipitating a worldwide rush of peoples to the Sierra Nevada foothills. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War in 1848, brought the American southwest into the Union at almost the same time that gold was found at Sutter’s Mill on the American River in California. These two events, the annexation of the southwest and the discovery of gold, provided the impetus for numerous forays into, and trips through California, as miners and settlers searched for the quickest routes to the gold fields.
Prospectors and emigrant parties quickly began using the route from Genoa, Nevada, to Murphys and the surrounding gold fields. Although the name of the first traveler over this route is unknown, by 1849 it was in use by several parties, many of whom gave descriptions of the Big Tree Grove in their diaries (Frances Bishop, personal papers).
In 1850, attempting to establish a trans-Sierran route in the central portion of the Sierra Nevada, Major John Ebbetts, the man for whom the Highway 4 pass is named, crossed over Border Ruffian Pass in April with a large group of prospectors. The name was not bestowed upon the pass until after the summer of 1853, however, when Ebbetts, then in the employ of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad Company, surveyed the route for a proposed trans-Sierra railroad. The pass was formally named in 1854 by George H. Goddard, a close friend and member of the 1853 exploration party, after Ebbetts’s death in a steamer explosion near San Francisco (Wood and Bishop 1968:33). It was not until 1893, however, that the U.S. Geological Survey team, in drafting the Markleeville Quadrangle, officially named the location for Ebbetts (Las Calaveras 1988:14).
The general route of present Highway 4 was certainly used by Leonard Withington Noyes, who, prospecting on the way, investigated the Calaveras Big Tree and traveled as far as Bear Valley by 1853. As part of the Murphys Expedition which traveled east over the crest and down into the Carson Valley in 1855-56, Noyes was investigating the route of a future wagon road. The contract for the Big Tree Road was awarded to Noyes and Dr. N. C. Congdon of Murphys in 1856. According to Noyes, who left behind a journal written about the building of the Big Tree Road, work began in July and by September he was escorting emigrants across the trail, which required the construction of eight bridges. Noyes and his party also gave names to the major valleys, lakes, and geographical features along the route (i.e. Silver, Indian, Faith, Hope, and Charity valleys and others).
Noyes described the work:
During the winter of 1855-56 a subscription was raised of $4000 for which I agreed to open a Wageon Road to Carson Valley sufficient for Emigrants to pass over in 60 days, in the spring as soon as fesable I started out with an Ox Team loaded with my Tools, Provisions and some 10 men. there was but little work excepting to turn over a stone and role it down hill out a fallen tree out of the road little or no grading and a fiew log bridges to build, at Bear Valley there being a most beautifull spring of cold water by it, we had considerable work on Carson Cannon where there was already a road. I never spent a pleasenter summer the Montain Air agreeing with me so well we all enjoyed it very much, but we rushed it through so that in 40 days there was an emigrant train passed over the Road….[Noyes n.d.:92].
The whole rout was plotted as if it had been surveyed by myself giving the names of the Valleys, locating grass and water, giving course & Altitudes, as best could be done considering we had no way of masuring distances, and but a very small pocket compass to get the courses from….[Noyes n.d.:90]..
In 1856 this route became known as the Big Tree and Carson Valley Road, a simple clearing and straightening of the 1849 Emigrant Road. Near present Lake Alpine, this route passed by Dennis/Osborn’s Hotel and through the “Picken’s Bill Williamson’s Race Course,” both of which were later inundated by Lake Alpine when the Utica Mining Company constructed the dam in the late 1880s. This original branch of the road went north over Border Ruffian Pass and through Faith, Hope, and Charity valleys towards Carson Pass and ended at Genoa, leaving the main trail in Hermit Valley near the site of Holden’s Station. Much of the emigrant travel to California over the ensuing two years came over this road, but by the late 1850s, it was being used infrequently and became almost impassable (Wood and Bishop 1968:36, 48).
A branch of the road departed the old Big Tree Road at the “Forks of the Road” near Big Meadow and coursed westward to West Point along the ridge between the Middle and North Forks of the Mokelumne River. In 1857 an improved road was laid out along the route of the trail via the McNair Ranch, above Sheep Ranch, running to the Big Trees past San Antonio Falls and Sleeper’s Lumber Mill (Wood and Bishop 1968:36, 42). Also known as the “Big Tree Road,” this route followed approximately the present route of Armstrong Road and Summit Level Road to Manuel Mill and White Pines.
On April 15, 1857, the Calaveras County Board of Supervisors established “a road from Murphys to Big Trees according to maps and survey now in possessior of James Sperry at Murphys” (Roads According to Township Boundaries, 1850-1880:341). Sperry was then owner of both the Murphys Hotel and the Mammoth Tree Hotel at Big Trees.
One of the more interesting chapters in the history of the route involves the exploits of John A. “Snow-Shoe” Thompson, who lived in Diamond Valley (near Woodfords) and delivered mail from 1856 to 1876 along two routes. One of the routes was from Woodfords to Placerville, and a second from Woodfords to Murphys by way of Indian Valley. Johnson was famous for having made skis, like those from his native Norway, which he wore when delivering mail across 90 miles of snow-covered trails and passes.
It was the discovery of silver on Nevada’s Comstock Lode, however, that was to provide the impetus for the construction of a major road over Ebbetts Pass; the first to traverse the steep route into the rough country of the East Fork of the Carson River. Nearer by, rich strikes on Silver Mountain in the early 1860s created a need for a more direct route to supply the burgeoning mining camp with equipment, supplies, and foodstuffs from the Pacific slope.
During the winter of 1861-62, a group of Murphys men organized the Big Tree and Carson Valley Turnpike Company and raised $4,000 to build a road from the Big Tree to the Silver Mountain and Monitor areas. The company incorporated in 1862 for the purpose of constructing a toll road to the silver mines, with an eye to reaping the profits from the teamsters transporting supplies to the booming mining camps. Construction began in June of 1862, between Black Springs and Carson Valley. Oxen were first used, but were soon replaced by horses. Starting in the vicinity of the present Calaveras Big Trees State Park, the road followed the route of the earlier Emigrant Road to Hermit Valley, at which point it veered east to near Highland Lakes, then over the summit to Silver Creek. The route crossed the summit a bit east of the old Ebbetts Pass trail, at a slightly lower elevation. From Silver Mountain City to Markleeville, the road was maintained by the newly formed Alpine County. This route was another improvement on two earlier roads to the Carson Valley and reflected the importance of the silver discoveries in Alpine County and Nevada to trans-Sierra travel.
As a leader of the Whitney Geological Expedition of 1860-64, William H. Brewer visited the Silver Mountain region in July and August of 1863 and described the road thusly:
Recent reputed discoveries of silver ore at Silver Mountain, just east of the crest, on the headwaters of the Carson River, near Ebbetts Pass on your maps, has caused much excitement. An old emigrant road over the mountains, via the Big Trees, runs within ten or twelve miles of it, and now, suddenly, travel is pouring over this route. A stage runs part of the way, until the road becomes very rough; then a “saddle train,’” with a few pack animals, takes the passengers and their luggage to the promised land. So horses in these mountain valleys all at once become important, and at Silver Valley the stages stop and saddle trains start [Farquhar 1930:431].
Short on funds with which to complete the road, the Big Tree and Carson Valley Turnpike Company in 1864 entered into an agreement with early settlers Harvey S. Blood and Jonathan Curtis of Bear Valley to pay back taxes and complete unfinished portions. Blood and Curtis were to pay taxes due and repay the turnpike company with interest on the amount already expended on the road. The road was to be kept in repair and tolls collected at Bear Valley for five years. Soon thereafter, Blood and Curtis began completion of the road and began construction of a residence and barn at the toll gate in Bear Valley (Las Calaveras 1988:17). A map of the Silver Mountain Mining District, completed in 1864, depicted the Big Tree Road as continuing through Silver Mountain City to Markleeville, so they must have completed the road in record time (Reed 1864).
Unfortunately, the anticipated profits never materialized; bogged down in debts, the company was deeded to Blood and Curtis in 1868. Their first construction project was to complete the new road between Bear Valley and Silver Valley. In 1861 T. J. Matteson of Murphys began the first mail delivery between Murphys and Genoa in the Carson Valley. The contract was for twice-weekly delivery, via the Big Trees Road (Las Calaveras 1988:15-16). The road proved immensely popular and by 1869 stages were departing Murphys daily on Matteson and Garland’s stage line for Big Trees, Bear Valley, Hermit Valley, and Silver Mountain, with a return trip daily (Maule 1938:42).
Blood’s toll station in Grizzly Bear Valley included a station house, barns, corrals, and a tollgate. Tollgates were also established at Cottage Springs, Hermit Valley, the Summit of Ebbetts Pass, and at Silver Mountain City (Wood and Bishop 1968:45). In April of 1887 the Calaveras County Board of Supervisors granted Blood a franchise to collect tolls on the road through Calaveras County for the next ten years. Over the ensuing two decades, however, Blood had to fight several legal contests over his right to collect tolls, resulting in his right to operate the road until 1910 (Board of Supervisors Minute Book H:113, 140, 153, 251; Wood and Bishop 1968:44, 56-58).
In May of 1891, when Blood’s petition to operate the toll road for one year was granted, the tolls were set as follows:
Horse and vehicle 40 cents
Two horses and vehicle 50 cents
Each additional animal 25 cents
Loose horses and cattle 08 cents
Goats, sheep, and swing 01 cents
Horsemen 25 cents
Pack animals 25 cents
In response to the petition of George A. Wood, George Avery, and others, provision was made for those traveling 10 miles or less on the road at a considerably reduced rate (Board of Supervisors Minute Book H:251).
In 1911, the year after the death of Harvey Blood, the road was accepted into the State Highway system and called the “Alpine Highway.” The state took over the road only as far as the Big Trees, however, with Calaveras County maintaining the remainder of the route. In 1919 the Board of Supervisors applied to the federal government for funds to grade the road from Murphys to the Big Trees. In June of 1923 Calaveras County entered into an agreement with the Secretary of Agriculture to construct the road, at a total cost of $212,000. Grading was completed in 1926, with all work done by mules and scrapers.
In December of 1926 the Big Tree(s) Road became a part of the state system. It was surfaced to the Big Trees in the early 1930s, with the road over the summit oiled gradually over a period of several years. The development of the Bear Valley Ski Area provided the impetus for the realignment and regrading of the road in the 1960s. Realignments were constructed between Camp Connell and Bear Valley, and segments of the old route abandoned. Maintenance stations were built at Camp Connell and Cabbage Patch, Highway 4 was brought up to the required standards for winter maintenance, and snow removal equipment was made available; all at a total cost of about ten million dollars. The ski resort opened in the fall of 1967, with the new Highway 4 route completed that year (Wood and Bishop 1968:60-62).
Three historical road segments are located within the project area: a segment of the Big Tree Road, the junction with the West Point Road, and the 1891 junction between the Big Tree Road and the Big Tree and Carson Valley Turnpike. The 1856-1863 Big Tree Road coursed northeasterly from the present Highway 4 at Black Springs (NE ¼ of Section 15, T6N, R16E), passed through the Guishetti Dairy Ranch (NW ¼ of Section 32, T6N. R16E, near Cabbage Patch), and rejoined the Big Tree and Carson Valley Turnpike southwest of Blood’s Meadow (SW ¼ of Section 13, T7N, R17E) (Ryan n.d.).
The West Point Road branched northwesterly from the old Big Tree Road (SW ¼ of Section 36, T7N, R16E) in the 1850s. When the new Big Tree and Carson Valley Turnpike was constructed in the early 1860s, a connecting link was made to that route (NW ¼ of Section 11, T6N, R16E) (Ryan n.d.; Wheeler 1877).
In 1891 two connecting roads were made from the old Big Tree Road and West Point roads to the Big Tree and Carson Valley Turnpike, both located northwest of Big Meadow (Section 32, T6N, R16E), from the Guishetti Ranch to Cabbage Patch (Ryan n.d., USGS 1901). As the Big Tree and Carson Valley Turnpike was a private road, the only public records involve Harvey Blood’s petitions to the Calaveras County Board of Supervisors to collect tolls and to establish toll rates. In 1891 he was granted a franchise to collect tolls for another year, so evidently felt that construction to improve the connecting links between the two roads was warranted.
SETTLEMENT AND AGRICULTURE
Although mining provided the impetus for settlement on both sides of the Ebbetts Pass route, no major mining regions were located within the project area. With gold mining in Calaveras County and silver mining in Alpine County and the Nevada Comstock booming in the 1850s and 1860s, however, small agricultural settlements were established along the route of the Big Tree(s) Road. Second to mining in importance in the gold country, agriculture was always critical as a supporting service. With animals providing much of the labor, massive production of hay and grasses was necessary to feed the cattle, oxen, and horses for mining, agriculture, and transportation. Additionally, fruits and vegetables produced in the foothills were transported across the pass to the mines on the eastern slope.
As there was no method for obtaining legal title to agricultural or residential parcels in the earliest years of the Gold Rush, many settlers simply filed claims under the mining claim laws, stating that they were using their lands for agricultural purposes. When a local government was established, however, claimants were able to obtain title to their land under the Public Land Act of April 24, 1820, and most did so. The Homestead Act of 1862 also allowed settlers title to their lands, although both laws required specific periods of residence and the making of improvements of a specified value prior to the issuance of a patent.
Upland grazing of cattle, sheep, and goats was an important historic land use in the Sierra Nevada. As early as 1850 there were accounts of stock grazing in the high country. A newspaper account in September of that year mentioned that a man (unnamed) was herding cattle in the Silver Lake Valley area (present Lake Alpine) (San Andreas Independent, September 17, 1850). William Dennis, owner of the Willow Creek Sawmill near San Andreas and a ranch near Jenny Lind, was the first to claim land I the Silver Lake Valley area. According to the San Andreas Independent (July 2, 1859), Dennis claimed the valley and commenced fencing in the summer of 1859 on 160 acres of land in Silver Valley, “near the Union Water Co.’s Reservoir.” Dennis brought 300 head of half-breed and American cattle to his range that summer. By 1860 he had also obtained title to a ranch in Grizzly Bear Valley (present Bear Valley), selling to Harvey Blood in the spring of 1864 and moving to the booming mining community of Silver City where he erected a steam sawmill (Stockton Independent, March 29, 1864).
When the Murphys Exploring Party of 1855 visited Big Meadows they stopped at what was probably the oldest cabin built along the route between Dorrington and Bloods. There they found “the meadow taken up and claimed by Smith and four others, who are cutting grass and hauling hay to the sawmill (Union Water Company’s steam sawmill on Mill Creek, two miles above present Dorrington) and the Big Tree, hunting, etc.” They also found a good wagon road up to this point. Known as Big Meadows Ranch in the 1870s, the site became a dairy ranch and known as Guishetti’s in the 1890s and early 1900s (Wood and Bishop 1968:42).
By the mid-1860s, virtually every lake, meadow, and open area had been appropriated by stockmen. Pasturing stock on their foothill ranches during the winter and spring months, they made the annual trek to the high country every June or July so that the animals could partake of the verdant mountain pastures. This cycle was extremely important since the green grass of the lower elevations would have been eaten and the stock ponds would be dry by mid-summer. Worry about water and food for the animals was not a concern in the high country. This pattern of high country stock grazing has continued to the present, although the Stanislaus National Forest now issues only six leases in the Calaveras District, compared to more than 600 issued in the early 1900s when the Forest Preserve was established and stockmen were first obliged to obtain leases.
Virtually all of the original stopping places along the Big Tree(s) route were established as ranching and grazing operations and provided sustenance to travelers and stockmen during the summer months. These included: Stickles Half-Way House/Avery, Flanders, Morans, Fourteen Mile House, Cold Spring Ranch/Gardner’s Station/Dorrington, Hinkleman Meadow, Mill Creek Station, Cottage Springs, Mud Springs, Black Springs, Big Springs, Ganns, Cabbage Patch, Big Meadows/Register Flat, Onion Valley/ Tamarack, Grizzly Bear Valley/Blood’s Station, Stanislaus Meadow, Pacific Valley, Holden’s Station/Hermit Valley, and undoubtedly others lost to history (Bishop Notes, n.d., various). These were rude establishments at best; travelers were often forced to bed down on dirt or wood floors or on rough cots, usually sharing a room with a dozen or more folk. The names of these stopping places, however, have remained on the land as geographical locations on historic and current maps.
The exception to this settlement pattern was at the Big Tree Grove/Calaveras Big Trees, ostensibly discovered by Augustus T. Dowd, an employee of the Union Water Company of Murphys, who came upon the grove while on a hunting expedition in 1852. Other Americans who had claimed discovery earlier included John T. Bidwell, who asserted that he traveled through the grove in 1841 on his way over the Sierra Nevada. Several emigrants, including the William B. Prince party, the Flanders party, and a Missouri doctor, recorded their impressions of the North Grove as they traveled westward in 1849 (Bishop, personal papers, no date).
The discovery created tremendous excitement throughout California and many rushed to the area to view the mighty giants for themselves. A rough log cabin was built in the grove in 1852, followed by the Mammoth Tree Hotel in 1853, and the Mammoth Grove Hotel in 1861. That hotel, which could accommodate 60 lodgers, burned to the ground in 1943. The Big Tree Grove is now a unit of the California Department of Parks and Recreation (Costello et al. 1988:7-14),
Public lands that were not immediately suitable for agriculture and had no obvious mineral reserves were ignored for the first three decades after the gold discovery. On June 3, 1878, however, Congress passed the Timber and Stone Act. This law allowed the individual acquisition of 160-acre parcels of timbered land for $2.50 per acre. Individuals with an eye to the future began to file claims to timber land. The procedure was easy and many patents were issued without the claimant ever setting foot upon the parcel involved. Frequently, claims were transferred to other people as soon as the filing was recorded, or upon issuance of the patent. Speculators regularly made agreements with potential patentees and, under such arrangements, substantial adjacent blocks of prime, virgin groves of timber could be assembled and made available to sawmill interests.
In the higher elevations, vast tracts of land were acquired in this way, allowing the growth of a new industry in a region once dependent upon mining. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing through the 1940s, logging became a significant local industry with sawmills in many mid-elevation areas. Company towns such as Wilseyville and White Pines were established, while West Point, Railroad Flat, and Avery expanded with the increased population and prosperity. Logging continues in the forests today, but as no sawmills remain in Calaveras County, the timber is trucked to Tuolumne County or more distant locations for milling.
PROJECT AREA, DORRINGTON TO GANNS MEADOW
The small community of Dorrington is located about two miles southwest of the project area, but will be included herein as it is the nearest settlement to the western end of the project, whose eastern terminous is at Ganns. Although Gardner’s and Black Springs were the only locations deemed important enough to be depicted on a mid-1870s map of the project area (Wheeler 1877), and only Sewell’s house and an “old log cabin” were depicted on another of the same period (General Land Office 1876), several other ranches and stopping places had been taken up on the route by the early 1860s. Of those noted below, only Gardner’s, Hinkleman’s, Wood’s, and two other sites were occupied by structures in 1890-91, although Cottage Springs and Black Springs were still depicted as geographic locations (USGS 1901). The histories of the following locations are described from west to east, along present Highway 4.
Dorrington, a historic stopping place on the Big Tree-Carson Valley Road, was originally known as Cold Spring Ranch (NW ¼ of Section 12, T5N, R15E). The first recorded mention of the ranch was in November of 1853, when Clark and Benjamin Stockwell sold 160 acres to G. H. Woodruff. The property then passed through several hands until sold to John Gardner and William A. Gibson in January 1868. Gardner built a hotel, across the highway from the present hotel, and when it was destroyed by a fire, built the present hotel in the early 1880s. Stock corrals were erected, a general store opened, a school built, and the stopping place became a toll station on the Big Trees-Carson Valley Turnpike from the 1890s until 1910. Known as Gardner’s Station when a post office was established in 1902, the Post Office Department objected to the name because there were so many others of the same, so the maiden name of John Gardner’s widow, Rebekah Dorrington Gardner, was chosen instead (Wood and Bishop 1968:40-41).
Camp Connell was established in 1928 by Jack and Noreen Connell (SW ¼ of Section 1, T6N, R15E), who had purchased the Dorrington Hotel property in the mid-1920s. With auto traffic increasing and the old hotel in need of repair, the couple decided to build the Camp Connell Store, complete with gasoline station, general merchandise store, and a campground. Camp Connell quickly became a stopping place for travelers along the Ebbetts Pass Highway, as well as a gathering place for local residents and cattlemen. The post office was moved there from Dorrington in 1934 and remained until 1978, when it was returned to Dorrington. The stopping place was sold to the Anderson family in 1947, who subdivided lots in Dorrington and built the A-frame units across Highway 4 from the old hotel (Las Calaveras 1996:35-37).
Hinkleman Meadow, located east of Dorrington and west of the project area (NW 1.4 of Section 6, T5N. R16E), was once the site of a small store, hotel, and stock corrals. The upland cattle ranch was occupied by Bill Hinkleman from the turn of the century until shortly after World War I. It is now the location of the Dorrington Forest Service Station (Johnson 1999:13, Las Calaveras 1988:21-22). The meadow was encircled by another road in the 1870s, identified as an “old road,” which coursed northeasterly from Gardner’s (southeast of the present road) and connected with the Big Tree and Carson Valley Turnpike just east of Hinkleman’s (Wheeler 1877).
The Mohawk Sawmill of the Union Water Company was located on Mill Creek, where it crossed the Big Tree Road (SW ¼ of Section 32, T6N, R16E). Constructed in 1855, the steam sawmill provided lumber for the flumes of the company which brought water for mining purposes to Murphys and Angels Camp. The mill was noted as “a fine one, capable of producing 1000 feet of lumber per hour” (State Surveyor General Annual Report, 1855).
Mill Creek Station, a 320-acre ranch, was located on Mill Creek near the former Mohawk Sawmill. During the 1860s it was owned by A. J. Pool and W. W. England. One-quarter of a mile above A. J. Pool & Co.’s ranch, Theodore Trimmer operated a 160-acre ranch (Calaveras County Assessment Rolls, 1861-1867).
The Pool and England ranch was apparently later sold to A. J. Sewell, who in 1873 was assessed for a 160-acre ranch on both sides of the Big Tree and Carson Valley Road (SW ¼ of Section 32, T6N, R16E), with a house located west of Mill Creek (Calaveras County Assessment Rolls 1873, General Land Office 1876). East of Sewell’s ranch was the ranch of George A. Wood, patented in 1892, and located on the north side of the road (Calaveras County Patent Maps, USGS 1901).
Cottage Springs (NE ¼ of Section 28, T6N, R16E, and southwest of the present community of Cottage Springs) was owned by A. Henry Stevens/Stephens as early as 1865 (Calaveras County Assessment Rolls 1865). The ranch was conveyed by Sheriff Ben Thorn to John Gardner in 1870 when Stevens failed to pay back taxes (Calaveras County Deed Book S:224). It was patented by his wife Rebekah Gardner in 1888 (Calaveras County Patent Book V:445).
Black Springs (NW ¼ of Section 15, T6N, R16E) was noted in Taylor’s Guide Hotel Directory in 1857 as being located nine miles from the Big Tree Grove and 90 miles from Stockton (San Andreas Independent, October 1857). The ranch was patented in 1862 by William Carmichael and Jacob Pettit, and encompassed 160 acres on the “Big Tree Road leading to Carson Valley” (Calaveras County Land Claim Book C:590). In 1865 J. H. Lowman was assessed for the ranch, the record noting that he had “household furniture, one wagon, one American cow, one Spanish horse, and two mules” on the property (Calaveras County Assessment Rolls 1865).
An “old log house” was depicted on an early map of the area (SW ¼ of SW ¼ of Section 11, T6N, R16E) located about one-quarter mile east of Black Springs (General Land Office 1876). The land was not patented until 1907, so the builder of the log home is unknown.
At Mud Springs (NW ¼ of Section 14, T6N. R16E) was the ranch of Josiah McClelland, located “on both sides of the road leading from Murphys to Carson Valley in the Utah Territory known as the Big Tree Road” (Calaveras County Land Claim Book C:306). Interestingly, McClelland and his partner Stevens noted the travel on the road from the 15th of August to the 16th of September in 1862: 134 horse teams, 70 ox teams, and 650 pack animals (Stockton Independent, September 24, 1862).
Big Springs, located at the junction of the Mokelumne Hill and Big Tree Road, was also an early stopping place on the Big Tree Road (NW ¼ of Section 11, T6N, R16E). It was noted as being on the Big Tree Road, three miles from Black Springs and 93 miles from Stockton (San Andreas Independent, October 1857).
Poison Springs (NW ¼ of NW ¼ of Section 11, T6N, R16E), and also known as Williams’ Springs for the road house operated by a man named Williams, served the freight traffic and stages traveling to and from Silver Mountain City (Las Calaveras 1988:20).
Gann’s (S ½ of NE ¼ and N ½ of SE ¼ of Section 1, T6N, R16E) was established in the 1870s by George, Jackson, and William Gann, who arrived in California from Missouri in 1853. First engaged in the cattle business in San Joaquin County, they eventually acquired a ranch in Calaveras County north of Salt Spring Valley on the old road to Spring Valley (near present Valley Springs). Their summer cow camp was located on the Big Tree and Carson Valley Road, which soon became known as Gann’s Station. The 160 acre ranch was homestead by Charles A. Gann in 1902 and patented in 1910 (Calaveras County Patent Maps; Las Calaveras 1988:13). A modern residence and restaurant was built there in the late 1960s to cater to travelers to the Bear Valley Ski Area.
REFERENCES CITED OR CONSULTED
Alpine County
1921 Official Map of Alpine County
Anonymous
n.d. Map of Area from Board’s Crossing to Lake Alpine. Manuscript Map. On file, Foothill Resources, Ltd., Murphys.
Bishop, Frances
n.d. Frances Bishop notes. On file, Calaveras County Archives, San Andreas, and Foothill Resources, Ltd., Murphys. .
Calaveras, County of
var. Assessment Rolls
var. Deed Books
var. Land Claim Books
var. Patent Books
var. Board of Supervisors Minute Books
1850-1886 Roads According to Township Boundaries Book
var. Land Patent Maps. On file, Calaveras County Surveyor, San Andreas.
Centennial Book Committee
1964 Alpine Heritage; One Hundred Years of History * Recreation * Lore in Alpine County, California. Centennial Book Committee, Markleeville.
Costello, Julia G., Editor, Frances Bishop and Judith Cunningham (Marvin), Betty Jean Ciccio, Star Hempstead, and Wayne Harrison.
1988 Historical and Archaeological Research at the Calaveras Big Tree Cottage Area. Foothill Resources, Ltd., for the Calaveras Big Trees Association and the California Department of Parks and Recreation, Sacramento.
Davis-King, Shelly, and Judith Marvin, Dorothea J. Theodoratus, Terry L. Brejla, and Duncan E. Hay.
1990 Waterscapes in the Sierra: Cultural Resources Investigations for the Angels (FERC 2699) Project, Volume I, Calaveras County, California. Infotec Research, Inc., Sonora, for submittal to Pacific Gas & Electric Company, San Francisco.
Farquhar, Francis P., Editor
1930 Up and Down California in 1860-1864. The Journal of William H. Brewer. Yale University Press, New Haven.
General Land Office
1871 Township 5 North, Range 15 East, MDBM, Plat Map.
1876 Township 5 North, Range 16 East, MDBM, Plat Map.
1876 Township 6 North, Range 16 East, MDBM, Plat Map.
Howard, Thomas Frederick
1998 Sierra Crossing, First Roads to California. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Jackson, W. Turrentine
1964 Report on the History of the Grover Hot Springs State Park Area and Surrounding Regions of Alpine County. Division of Beaches and Parks, Department of Parks and Recreation, State of California. Reprinted by the Alpine County Museum, Markleeville.
Johnson, Lynn
1999 An Archaeological Survey Report for Proposed AC Overlay and Shoulder Backing of State Route 4, Calaveras County, California. 10-CAL-4 (KP 79.8/93.3 [PM 49.6/58.01]). EA 10-1A5000, Contract No. 06A0182, Task Order No. 5. Archaeological Research Center, Institute of Archaeology and Cultural Studies, Department of Anthropology, California State University, Sacramento. Prepared for Dale Jones, Central Sierra Chief, Environmental Management, California Department of Transportation, District 10, Stockton, California.
Las Calaveras
1988 People and Places in the High Country. Las Calaveras, Volume XXXVI, Number 2. Calaveras County Historical Society, San Andreas.
1996 Camp Connell, Gateway to Ebbetts Pass. Las Calaveras, Volume XLIV, Number 3. Calaveras County Historical Society, San Andreas.
Marvin, Judith, and John Holson
1993 Recordation and Eligibility Assessment of the Meiss Meadow Historic Cabin and Barn Complex. BioSystems Analysis, Inc., Tiburon, California. Prepared for Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, Eldorado National Forest, South Lake Tahoe, California.
Maule, William M.
1938 A Contribution to the Geographic and Economic History of the Carson, Walker, and Mono Basins in California and Nevada . California Region, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, San Francisco, California.
Metzger
1939 Map of Alpine County.
Noyes, Leonard Withington
n.d. Journal and Letters, 1850-1858. Unpublished manuscript, on file Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts. Typewritten copy, on file Foothill Resources, Ltd., Murphys.
Owens, Kenneth N.
1992 Historical Trails and Roads in California, A Cultural Resources Planning Study. Prepared for the California Department of Transportation, Sacramento.
Reed, Theron
1864 A Map of the Silver Mountain Mining Districts. H.H. Bancroft & Co., San Francisco.
Ryan, John P.
n.d. Map of the Big Meadows Area Showing Locations of the Old Big Trees Road, the New Big Trees Road, and their Relation to the Road Leading from West Point. On file, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, and Foothill Resources, Ltd., Murphys.
San Andreas Independent
Various Issues. On file, Calaveras County Archives, San Andreas.
State Surveyor General
1855 Annual Report, 1855. Report of O.B. Powers, November 25, 1855.
Stockton Independent
Various Issues. On file, Cesar Chavez Library, Stockton.
United States Department of Agriculture
1946 Stanislaus National Forest, California. Mount Diablo Meridian. Surveyed 1939. USDA, Forest Service, Washington, D.C.
United States Geological Survey
1901 Big Trees Quadrangle. Surveyed 1890-91.
1956 Big Meadows Quadrangle. 15 minute series.
1979 Boards Crossing Quadrangle. 7.5 minute series.
1979 Calaveras Dome Quadrangle. 7.5 minute series.
1979 Dorrington Quadrangle. 7.5 minute series.
1979 Tamarack Quadrangle. 7.5 minute series.
Wheeler, Lt. George M.
1877 Map of the Expeditions of 1876 & 1877 Under the Command of 1st. Lieut. George M. Wheeler. Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army, Washington. Scale, 1 inch to 4 miles, or 1:253,440.
Wood, R. Coke, with Frances E. Bishop
1968 Big Tree-Carson Valley Turnpike, Ebbetts Pass and Highway Four. Old timers Museum, Murphys, California.
Close behind the prospectors and miners came the agriculturalists, families from the eastern states and Europe who saw opportunities for stock-raising and truck garden operations on the open grasslands. Following the decline of placer deposits in the Mother Lode after ca. 1860, farming gained importance as a family enterprise, which helped to establish more permanence and stability in the society. Settlers established farms growing hay, alfalfa, and wheat, and planted orchards and truck gardens. Most families practiced a mixed agricultural economy, raising cattle, sheep, hogs, and poultry, which supplied them with a steady supply of foodstuffs augmented by vegetable gardens and orchards. Livestock, however, has always been the backbone of the agricultural industry, with the practice of transhumance (taking livestock to the high country to pasture during the summer and returning in the fall to their foothill ranches) opening up the high country to cow and sheep camps.
Commercial winemaking began in the county in 1851, with 1,000 vines set out on the Calaveras River. Mokelumne Hill was another center of wine production, but vineyards were also planted in virtually every community in the early years. Hops were grown and baked in kilns for breweries that produced local beers and ales. Olive trees were planted and the olives cured or made into oil in both family and commercial orchards. Local farming, however, never developed beyond a subsistence level and gradually gave way to livestock operations.
In late 1889, Chickamauga Post 149 of the Grand Army of the Republic, the national organization for Union Civil War veterans, was chartered in Burson, Calaveras County, California. As the first G.A.R. post in the county, in 1890 it sponsored the area’s first Memorial Day observance. The post also quickly built a meeting hall on Burson Road and became the center for other veterans’ activities in the county, including paying for the burial of indigent soldiers and holding graveside ceremonies not only for Union Civil War veterans but for soldiers and sailors who served during other periods. After selling its hall, the post moved to Valley Springs and then back to Burson before finally settling in San Andreas in 1897.
On June 15, 1912, the Calaveras Prospect reported that Congressman John Raker had introduced a bill in the Sixty-Second Congress that the Secretary of War “deliver to the City of San Andreas, California, two condemned bronze cannon, mounted on carriages for use at Chickamauga Post 115 [the post number was in error and should have been listed as 149], G.A.R. the same to be subject at all times to the order of the Secretary of War.”
The bill passed and the Prospect announced on January 11, 1913 that condemned brass and bronze cannon would be distributed from the Benicia arsenal to various Northern California G.A.R. posts--San Andreas, Placerville, Auburn, Nevada City, Downieville, Newcastle, Redding, Columbia, Anderson, Corning, Suisun and Martinez. No carriages would accompany the cannon but the War Department would provide a blueprint illustrating how to mount the cannon on masonry foundations.
The cannon designated for the San Andreas post were mountain howitzers designed to propel a 12-pound shot. Both were 1841 models cast by the Ames Manufacturing Co. of Chicopee (Springfield), Massachusetts, founded by Nathan Peabody Ames, which made cannon beginning in 1836. They were two of 237 cannon made by Ames. The cannon with government registration #24 was cast in 1844 and weighed 777 pounds. The cannon with registration #78 was cast in 1847 and weighed 790 pounds. James Wolfe Ripley was the initialed inspector (JWR) on each cannon. The cannon were on the East Coast during their early years and probably saw service during the Civil War.
Congressman Raker took up the matter of transporting the cannon from Benicia to their final locations with the Southern Pacific Railroad. While the result of that negotiation is unknown, what is certain is that the cannon arrived in Valley Springs via the Southern Pacific in late December 1913 or early 1914. They were then retrieved from the depot and trucked to San Andreas by Fred Winkler, among whose duties was the maintenance of the Peoples Cemetery. It is thus likely that the cannon were intended from the beginning to be displayed at the cemetery, where a Soldiers or G.A.R. Plot had already been established.
The cannon were temporarily deposited, however, in the rear of the Masonic Hall (also called Fraternal Hall). One probable reason is that just before the cannon arrived, the post’s charter was withdrawn by the G.A.R.’s Department of California and Nevada. The membership had dwindled as the old soldiers died or moved away, often to veterans’ homes elsewhere--a situation that was true across the country. More damaging though was the fact that those at the helm of Post 149 were judged incapable of continuing to run the organization. In June 1913, G.A.R. authorities recalled the post’s charter. So the cannons languished.
Still active and well run, however, was the Chickamauga Relief Corps, the post’s ladies auxiliary. This local branch of the Womans Relief Corps (initially identified as #65 but later as #106) was formed immediately after the veterans post. “The San Andreas Womans Relief Corp,” wrote the Prospect on April 4, 1914, “have resolved to raise and contribute a fund sufficient to erect a permanent monument to the memory of our soldiers by mou(n)ting in the soldiers plot in the cemetery, by the plan proposed by Judge Reed and under his superintendency, the two large brass (sic) cannon which for the past three months have been lying in the rear of Fraternal hall.”
The women succeeded and on December 25, 1915, the Prospect proclaimed that “the cannon donated to the local G.A.R. Post some years ago have at last found a fitting home…the Woman’s Relief Corps took up the matter, and have at last secured their placement in the G.A.R. Plot at the People’s Cemetery. The guns are finely mounted on a cement base, the work of N.J. Cavagnaro…The cement work by Mr. Cavagnaro is well done, and elicits praise from all who have seen it.”
Other than an attempt at theft in the ‘60s, which prompted the cannon to be buried in concrete up to their trunnions, their position was undisturbed until the late 1990s. In 1997, they were moved approximately 15 yards to a more prominent position overlooking the Soldiers Plot. The Calaveras County Historical Society also refurbished and remounted the cannon, placing the 1844 cannon to the south and the 1847 cannon to the north. On July 24, 1997, the cannon were fired for perhaps the first time in the 20th century.
Later that year a plaque was placed at the cannon, incorrectly stating that they were “displayed in Burson by the Grand Army of the Republic, until moved to San Andreas in the early 1920’s.” More accurately, however, the plaque also noted that the cannon monument was “dedicated to the veterans of Calaveras County.”
In September 1998, the 1847 cannon was stolen from the Peoples Cemetery. The Calaveras County Sheriff’s Department retrieved that cannon from a pond in Mountain Ranch in July 2005. In October 2005, the County removed the 1841 cannon from the cemetery with the objective of relocating both cannon. Two years later, the cannon were incorporated into a new veterans' memorial in the plaza of the Government Center in San Andreas. Unfortunately, and ironically, while acknowledging by name the Calaveras County citizens who had perished in wars beginning with World War I, no Civil War soldier was similarly honored. The history of the cannon presented at the memorial was also incorrect. Nor has there been any recognition (as of this date, December 2007) at the People's Cemetery, overlooking the Soldiers Plot, of the original location of the cannon or veterans' memorial. A better conceived memorial, more prominently displaying the Cannon of San Andreas, with an accurate history presented to the public, and a memorial at the Soldiers Plot, may someday truly honor the veterans of Calaveras County.
As of the last known inventory (2002), the Cannon of San Andreas are:
…Two of only 99 Civil War era cannon publicly available for viewing in California.
…Two of only 86 Ames cannon in existence anywhere in the country; more than half of the originals having been used for scrap metal during World War I and II.
…Two of only eight Ames cannon available for public viewing in California (others are at Fort Scott and Fort Point National Historic Site (San Francisco), the California Military Museum (Sacramento), Irvine Park (Orange County) and Downieville).
…Two of only nine cannon sent to G.A.R. posts in 1913 that are still in the same town as originally granted (the others being Auburn, Columbia, Downieville and Placerville).
Sources: Calaveras Prospect (1890-1915); “Known Surviving Civil War Cannon” (Wayne E. Stark, 2002); “The Cannons of Calaveras County” (Essays by Carl Anderson, 1992, 1993); Stockton Record (1998); “Proceedings, G.A.R. Department of California and Nevada” (June 1913); “Las Calaveras” (Calaveras County Historical Society, 1997, 2005); CivilWarArtillery.com (Jack Melton, Jr.); Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (Kirby Morgan, Harry Harland)
The earliest routes into the gold regions followed long-established Indian trails. As Native American trails were superseded by stage and wagon routes, roads became increasingly important after the advent of the automobile and eventually became State Routes, 49, 12, 26, and 4. Railroads, completed to the lower elevations of the county in the 1870s and 1880s, provided the impetus for the development of the lands in the western part of the county.
The first route into Murphys and the Stanislaus Diggings followed the Antelope Trail, also known as the “Old Stockton Trail,” and “Marshall’s Trail.” The most direct route from Stockton to the Calaveras mining camps, it followed a route which led easterly from the Plains over the Antelope Trail through Salt Spring Valley and over Bear Trap Gap to Nassau Valley, Alabama House, Kentucky House, and on to San Andreas, as well as to Angels Camp, Murphys, and the Stanislaus River ferries. From San Andreas to Angels Camp, it reversed the route, following the route from Kentucky House to Alabama House, over the hill to Fourth Crossing, then to Fifth Crossing (Hawkeye), and on to Angels. By 1854 it had been improved to handle wagon traffic, but by 1859 it was known as the “old road,” having been superseded by the route of present State Route 49 to Angels Camp down Scott’s Grade to Calaveritas Creek, constructed in 1854-55.
The wagon roads from the Southern Mines’ principal source of supply at Stockton were at first few and difficult. The earliest and most traveled road to the northern portion of the county was the Stockton to Mokelumne Hill Road along the Calaveras River (followed closely by present State Route 26). It served camps along the way, camps on the Mokelumne River to the north, and Angels and Murphys camps through a branch stretching south from San Andreas. Another branch of the road passed through Jenny Lind to Salt Spring Valley, where it connected with the Stanislaus ferry roads.
In the San Andreas area, the “Old Stockton Road,” established in the earliest years of the Gold Rush, was superseded by the New Stockton Road” in 1856. It coursed northeasterly from Stockton to North America House and on to San Andreas, approximately along the route of present State Route 12.
The Mokelumne Hill-San Andreas Road was another early road, connecting “The Hill” with San Andreas, Angels Camp, and the mining camps in Tuolumne County. Known at various times for its most important destinations, in 1859 as the Mokelumne Hill to Murphys Road, and in 1869 the segment southerly from San Andreas was known as the San Andreas to Columbia Road. This route follows the approximate route of today’s State Route 49.
The present Highway 4 alignment follows the approximate route of an early emigrant trail over the Sierra Nevada that was improved in 1855-56 and known as the Big Tree Road and in the early 1860s as the Big Tree and Carson Valley Turnpike. Originally a free trail, it became a toll road from 1864 through 1910, and then a free county road in 1911. It was accepted into the state highway system in 1926 and portions were paved in the 1930s. The road was realigned in the mid-1960s when the Bear Valley Ski Resort was opened, making it an all-weather highway.
Calaveras was served by three railroads: the Stockton and Copperopolis Railroad, the Sierra and San Joaquin, and the Sierra Railway.
The Stockton and Copperopolis Railroad, originally planned to access the copper mines in Copperopolis, was completed to Milton in July of 1871. The copper boom, which ended in 1867 with the cessation of hostilities after the Civil War, coupled with the expiration of federal funding allocated to encourage the building of railroads during the 1860s, sounded the death knell for completion of the line. From Milton, however, stage lines were quickly established with Copperopolis, Tuttletown, Sonora, Angels Camp, Murphys, and other points east.
Impetus for the construction of the San Joaquin and Sierra Nevada Railroad (later the Southern Pacific), was the growth of the timber industry in the higher elevations. Planned in 1880 to reach Calaveras Big Trees, financial difficulties set the new terminus at Valley Springs in 1885, turning the community into a supply and railroad town. As a land-grant railroad, the company was given alternate sections of land for ten miles on each side of the rail line and in lieu lands at even greater distances from the tracks. As a result, lands near the rail line were developed by farmers as part of a small land boom, and the towns of Burson, Wallace, and Valley Springs were created along its route.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the railroads played an important role in maintaining the economic stability of the region. A steady flow of stage lines, ore shipments (gold and copper), and freight haulers kept the branches busy, if not profitable. In 1902, the Sierra Railway constructed a branch line from Jamestown, hoping to access the timber stands in the Big Trees, but the line stopped short in Angels Camp. The advent of the automobile in the 1920s soon brought about the demise of railroading in the county, except for the branch line to the Calaveras Cement Plant in San Andreas.
Water has always been and continues to be of major importance in the development of Calaveras County. Water was essential to the recovery of gold, and since foothill rivers are seasonal and unpredictable, it wasn’t long before entrepreneurs constructed dams to store water, and ditches and flumes to transport it between drainages. Often transitory in nature, many of these ditch systems were abandoned as the placers played out, while others were improved end extended for hydraulic and hard rock mining.
The largest and most important systems, however, continue to be used to the present day. After the demise of mining, the ditches were converted to agricultural and domestic use, and later to the production of hydroelectric power. The two largest in the county, the Union Water Company, now the Angels-Utica system, and the Mokelumne Hill Canal and Mining Company, now operated by Calaveras County Water District, continue to serve communities on either side of the county.
Beginning in the late 1890s, entrepreneurs began developing hydroelectric projects on the county’s rivers. Included among these were the Electra Powerhouse on the Mokelumne River, the Murphys and Angels powerhouses on Angels Creek, and Camp Nine on the Stanislaus River.
In the 1920s, the East Bay Municipal Utility District began a long-term process of damming the Mokelumne River to provide fresh water for its users. Pardee Dam was completed in 1929, and Camanche Reservoir filled in 1962. The Hogan Dam and Reservoir was dedicated in 1931; the New Hogan Dam dedicated in 1964. On the south side of the county, in the 1890s, the Utica Mining Company enlarged the Union Reservoir, and constructed the Utica Reservoir, as well as reservoirs at Spicer Meadow, Alpine Lake, and others all the way to Angels Camp. The first Melones Reservoir was constructed in 1926, and a new dam completed in 1979, impounding the waters of the Stanislaus River in the New Melones Reservoir. Tulloch Reservoir, completed in 1957, provides water and power to Oakdale and Knights Ferry. Considered “liquid gold,” modern reservoirs bank this wealth not only for Calaveras citizens, but also for populations farther west.
Wine making in Calaveras County began in the early years of the Gold Rush, with the first 1,000 vines set out on the lower Calaveras River in 1851 (Sacramento Transcript, March 14, 1851). Those early day grape growers had reportedly been impressed by the healthy thickets of the native grape, Vitus californica, which grew along the banks of the rivers and streams in the county. Although the varietal was not noted, the vines planted must have been of the Mission grape, whose origins have been traced back to the Old World over 500 years ago.
(by Judith Marvin, Foothill Resources, Ltd., Murphys, CA, 2006)
The Mission grape, so named because it was first propagated in California by the mission padres for sacramental and medicinal purposes, is definitely of vinifera (wine bearing) origin. Although no perfect match has been found in the Old World, it is clearly related to the Pais in Chile, the Grande Criollo in Argentina, and the Criollo in Mexico, while some believe it to be a close relative of the Monica grape of Sardinia. Because it was a part of the New World culture for over 250 years before it was carried to the missions in Alta California in the 1770s, it may be a result of one or more crosses or chance hybridization.
Although the grape was planted at many of the missions in Alta California, most of the cuttings used to propagate vineyards in Southern California in the late 1700s were taken from the vina madre, the mother vine, at Mission San Gabriel Arcangel. By the 1820s the mission had the largest vineyard in Alta California and the padres were producing about 500 barrels of wine and 200 of brandy annually. The origins of the huge vineyards planted in the Los Angeles area from the 1790s through the 1850s were from this vine 1:(217-218).
The Mission grapes planted in Calaveras County may have come from several sources: Mission San Jose and its surrounding ranches, Charles Weber’s Campo de los Franceses in Stockton, Sutter’s Hock Farm, or Steven Burge’s ranch in Placer County, who all planted Mission grapes prior to 1852.
(by Judith Marvin, Foothill Resources, Ltd., Murphys, CA, 2006)
Zinfandel. The other early varietal to be planted in Calaveras County, Zinfandel, was imported to Long Island by George Gibbs, probably in 1829 from the Imperial Nursery in Vienna, Austria. The first account of the name, however, did not occur until 1831, when Bostonian Samuel Perkins began selling it as Zenfendel. By 1833 several growers in Boston had the vine, now called Zinfandal by its leading nurseryman Charles M. Hovey (perhaps a relative of our own Chuck Hovey?).
By the late 1830s Zinfandel had become a popular table grape in New England, and was later discovered in California to be identical to the New England Black St. Peter’s grape. When gold was discovered on the American River in January of 1848, hordes of argonauts from every country on the globe poured into California in what has been called the greatest mass migration in human history. The first to arrive in California, the 48ers, were miners from Mexico, Chile, and other countries south of the border, and it appears likely that the grapes they brought with them were the Mission variety. By 1849, however, many New Englanders had arrived in California. With a passion for horticulture, they evidently brought the Zinfandel grape to California.
During the 1850s several vineyardists in San Jose, Stockton, and Sacramento were importing Zinfandel in shipments of vines from New England. By the late 1860s Zinfandel was being grown all over northern California. In the great wine boom of the 1880s, it was the most widely planted vine, but by the turn of the nineteenth century was no longer the most popular but still one of the most common wine grapes in the state. Mostly, however, it was blended with Petite Sirah and Carignanc to produce ordinary Clarets and burgundies. During Prohibition home winemaking and wines for sacramental use were legal and it was one of the favorites shipped east. After repeal, Zinfandel continued to be used primarily as a blending wine, until the 1960s when the revolution in American wine consumption occurred. At this time, its potential as a fine table wine was being discovered from the California foothills, primarily in Amador County.
As for the varietal, no vine of the Zinfandel name ever existed in the Old World. Recent DNA studies, however, have determined that the Primitivo, common in Southern Italy, and the Zinfandel were identical. Others believe that the vine known as Plavac Mali, a dark grape grown in Croatia on the Adriatic is the same, but the DNA examinations have left some doubt. The vines are, however, probably closely related. As much of northern Italy and all of Croatia were part of the Austrian Empire, from whose capital, Vienna, George Gibbs imported his dark grape to Long Island in 1829, Zinfandel can do doubt trace its origins to that region 1(407-411).
By the late 1850s, an amazing variety of grapes were being grown in Calaveras County. In 1857, the Beatty Ranch on Calaveritas Creek was growing several varieties characteristic of the Eastern United States. Among these were the common Eastern (Vitus labrusca), Isabella, Clinton, Catawba, and the unusual Scuppernog, a Muscadine. Louis Prevost, with a nursery in San Jose, began advertising in the San Andreas newspapers that year. The previous year Joseph Kerns had opened his Murray Creek Nursery near San Andreas, with planting stock brought in from nurseries in the Santa Clara Valley.
Soon, however, varieties imported from Europe began to take precedence over the California and Eastern United States vines. In 1859 Francis Medina. of the Bay State Ranch on the Calaveras River near San Andreas, exhibited the first Calaveras grapes at the State Fair. He displayed several varieties of European grapes, including those of the Black Hamburg and Royal Muscadine varieties. At about the same time, Mr. Dearborne from Sandy Gulch displayed the Black and White Hamburg and the Muscat of Alexandria varieties at the Union House in Mokelumne Hill.
At that same location, S.W. Brockway was growing the Los Angeles or Mission variety from cuttings planted in 1857. Others growing grapes on “the Hill” were judge Thompson, Dr. Holbrook, and attorneys William Higby and A.P. Dudley. Lewis Schraack, from Pennsylvania, planted Mission and Isabella vines on his Golden Gate Ranch in 1856 and by 1860 had planted 5,000 vines.
Certainly the premier wine growing area in Calaveras County in the early years was Mokelumne Hill, undoubtedly as it was the County Seat and had the most diverse population in the county. Settlers from Chile, Mexico, France, Germany, England, and the Eastern United States, who had long-established tastes for wine, and were familiar with the cultivation of grapes, quickly developed vineyards in the surrounding area.
First among these vineyards was that of Madame Catia at Chili Gulch, where 7,000 pounds of grapes were raised by November of 1858, most of which were to be pressed into wine. The following year, Francis Mercier’s “French Garden” Ranch in Chili Gulch planted 6,000 vines and 1,800 fruit trees, and had 15 gallons of wine in stock for his hotel. This was the earliest known large commercial wine making operation in Calaveras. When Rose De Loach Au Lion purchased the ranch from Mercier in 1864, the sale included 1,500 gallons of California wine. To the south of Mercier’s property was the vineyard of Charles Garland, a native of Maine, who had 40 gallons of wine on hand in 1860. Winemaking in Chili Gulch continued until recent years, on the McSorley Ranch, where the Garamendi family made Zinfandel wine in their cellar carved from the rhyolite hillside behind their house.
Also in Mokelumne Hill in 1860, Henry Druerson and Lemuel Root were assessed for 150 gallons and 30 gallons of wine respectively, while Adele Rogers of San Andreas was taxed for 40 gallons 1. By 1861 Root’s hillside vineyard had 10,000 vines planted, with 1,000 bearing 2.
Several vineyards were located to the west, at Salt Spring Valley, where in 1863, J.W. Woods had 1,000 vines planted. His neighbor W.D. Allen had 500 acres in orchard and vineyard, the largest in the area, with 3,000 vines; all California grapes, presumably Mission, and planted six and eight years before. Nearby, at the Madame Felix Ranch, then operated by her husband Alban Hettick, the garden boasted three or four acres of vines, planted in 1856, with an arbor of “Los Angeles” (Mission) grapes, as well as “standard grapes of foreign kinds” which produced 250 gallons of wine in 1862 3.
One of the most interesting French settlements was located on the Upper Calaveras River where the Frenchmen Eutrop Hermand, Augustine Vian, Victor Portran, and Company, planted 8,000 vines at their Esperanza Ranch. By 1870, Victor Portron was annually manufacturing 2,000 gallons of wine. Although the date of their first plantings is unknown, the company was located on the property as early as 1854 and was operating a stone store and ranch by the mid-1850s 4, 5.
By 1852, closer to Murphys, David Fausett and James B. Inks had established a vineyard on their San Domingo Ranch (now Stevenot), and Joseph Dowler had planted grapes on what became the Hahn Ranch, now known as the Vogliotti Ranch. Nearby, Manuel Silva planted grapes in 1872 on the present Styskel property, while in 1883 Lorenzo Gardella purchased the ranch that later became known as Macaroni Flat. Gardella grew grapes, made wine, and held grand balls where macaroni dinners were served in a hall on his ranch. This winemaking tradition was carried on by the Dragone family, who sold their product to many local folk during Prohibition. Even Ethel Adams, a staunch Bostonian, grew wine grapes at her Table Mountain Ranch on Pennsylvania Gulch in the early 1900s.
In 1866 the Calaveras Chronicle noted that in each of the three previous seasons the quantity of wine produced in the county had doubled and there was widespread commercial viticulture and winemaking in Calaveras County. The Red Mountain Vineyard, planted in 1863 by Abraham Schell on the Rancho del Rio Estanislao, produced wines until the early 1920s. Judge J.W. Griswold of Salt Spring Valley was producing Mission grape wine at his Reservoir Vineyard, and Joseph Major of Vallecito was building a wine cellar (later the Sciaccaluga and Fuzere wineries). Three years later John Heinsdorff of Murphys was awarded the First Award at the 1869 California State Fair for the best red wine, one year old, and a special notice for his five-year old white wine 1.
It was at about this time also that the Italian population became an important element in the county’s wine production. The Cuneo brothers at San Antonio Camp and their eventual relatives, the Costa family of Calaveritas, were some of the earliest Italian vintners. The Cavagnero family of Camanche had also planted extensive vineyards. By 1870 Louis Costa was assessed for 4,000 gallons of wine, Ratto and Company for 2,500 gallons, and Louis Bordeaux for 3,000 gallons 2. By that year Calaveras had become the fourth largest wine producing county in the state, with 116 winemakers. In ten years the county’s wine production had grown from 277 gallons in 1860 to a reported 100,500 gallons. Only three other counties were producing more wine: Los Angeles, 531,710 gallons; Sonoma, 308,496 gallons; and El Dorado, 118, 831 gallons 3, Heintz 1-5).
Very few vineyards were planted in the county in the late 1870s and early 1880s, but a substantial 49,210 gallons of wine were produced by 64 winemakers and 112 growers on 312 acres in 1880 (State Board of Viticultural Commissioners 1880). The Italian winemakers, however, continued to prosper. Angelo Sciaccaluga (Pyshon) was first taxed for wine that year, on his one-quarter acre Vallecito vineyard with 150 gallons of wine; by 1889 he had added a distillery to his operation. In later years the winery was described by his daughter Lottie Pyshon Stephens:
My father had two cellars, one where he crushed his grapes and one where he stored his wine. One was called the distillery, and the other the wine cellar. My father made table and sweet wine. He had a well that ran water on both sides of the cellar, kept the sand wet all the time and the cellar cool. The distillery was torn down after the place was sold but the wine cellar still stands today [on the north side of Highway 4] 1:3).
At this point it should be noted that not all winemaking in Calaveras County was for commercial purposes. Winemaking had a long history in the Old World, particularly in France and Italy from where many of the early settlers of the county had immigrated. Farmers from the Eastern United States also hailed from areas where wine was produced, and almost every farmer in the latter half of the nineteenth century planted a few vines, both for table and wine grapes, as well as orchards of fruit, nut, and olive trees, berries, and vegetables for family use. They also raised livestock: cattle, dairy cows, sheep, hogs, goats, and chickens. When the growing season was over, they turned to mining the rivers, creeks, drainages, and veins on their ranches, with water from ditches used both for mining and agricultural purposes. The tradition of home winemaking continues to this day, with many families and friends producing wine for their own consumption.
An account written in 1885 noted that the season of 1885-1886 would probably show a much greater acreage planted in vines and fruit trees than any other season in the history of the state 1:(52). One of the largest late 19th Century vineyards and wineries in Calaveras County was that of German immigrant Frederick Mayer, who established a restaurant at Mokelumne Hill in the early 1850s. In 1860 he purchased a nearby ranch and by 1871 his wine cellar contained 10,000 gallons of wine, produced from his 20-acre vineyard of Mission, Muscat, Zinfandel, and Riesling grapes 2. In 1885 the vineyard was described as having about 17,000 vines, consisting of Mission, Shassle, Muscat, Zinfandel, Riesling and other varieties. Mayer made his grapes into white wine, claret, angelica, and brandy, all noted as of “excellent quality” 3(15, 64-65).
By 1890, Calveras County had dropped from fourth to seventeenth place in the state’s wine production, but it was noted that two wineries were operating at Mokelumne Hill, turning out about 17,000 gallons annually 4(2), 5(152). One of these was undoubtedly that of Frederick Mayer, and the other must have been that of Charles Gardella, who operated the largest commercial vineyard and winery up to that time 6. Other successful wineries were located at Poverty Bar, where a distillery was attached; at San Antonio Ridge, where John Oeters had a good-sized vineyard and winery; and at the Batten Ranch in Vallecito 7(152); 8). By 1900, 26,680 gallons of wine were being produced on 100 acres, far down from the 450 acres in 1889. The heyday was over.
The institution of the Volstead Act in 1919 produced yet another boom in the Calaveras wine industry, as wines for sacramental use and home wine making were the only alcoholic beverages allowed under Prohibition. Almost everyone in Calaveras who had a vineyard became a home winemaker or produced sacramental wine, and numerous vineyards were established or replanted, reaching 445 acres by 1924.
After the Repeal, when alcohol of all varieties again became legal, wine production in Calaveras lagged, undoubtedly also due to the oversupply of acreages planted to grapes in the Prohibition years. In 1930, only 324 acres were planted to grapes, and by 1937 there was only one bonded winery in the county, that of J.P. Fuzere, at the old Sciaccaluga Winery in Vallecito. That same year Fuzure was charged for selling wine to an Indian minor, and Sheriff Zwinge testified that there were several reports of such sales to Indians (Calaveras Prospect, February 6, 1937), suggesting that the wine business was not very successful.
In 1976, Bob Bliss, with partner Jim Riggs, bonded the first new winery in Calaveras County in 40 years; Chispa Cellars. The true beginning of modern winemaking in Calaveras County, however, must be laid at the feet of Barden Stevenot, a fifth-generation resident of Calaveras. Barden purchased the Shaw Ranch on San Domingo Creek in the late 1960s, without a plan, because he was in love with the valley and the land. The 1970s were the beginning of the expansion of the California wine industry, an industry that until that time had remained in the hands of a few old families or conglomerates in the Napa, Sonoma, San Joaquin, and Cucamonga valleys. Noting that the San Domingo Ranch had the same topography and climate as the wineries in Northern California, and that the San Domingo Valley had been a major grape producer from the 1850s until the vines were removed, Barden saw an opportunity to re-establish a vineyard on this ranch.
Taking crash courses at U.C. Davis and exhaustively interviewing anyone who knew anything about wine, Barden set about developing the ranch into a vineyard. In the face of numerous obstacles, his tenacity and enthusiasm paid off. Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Zinfandel were planted in the early 1970s. A winery was established in the old Shaw hay barn in 1977, with the first tasting room located in the cellar beneath the ranch house. As profits and production grew, more buildings were added, including a modern winery, storage buildings, offices, and a shop. The tasting room was moved to the Alaska House, then to the main ranch house. The recent purchase of the adjacent Gardella/Dragone Ranch at Macaroni Flat and the planting of another 72 acres of grapes attests to Barden’s belief in the future of winemaking in Calaveras County.
Barden encouraged others to purchase land and plant vines in Calaveras County, and was, almost singlehandedly, responsible for the rebirth of the wine industry in the county. The major agricultural industry in the county today, many new wineries have been established, and are being planted as we imbibe. Among these are: Milliare Winery, opened in 1983, Black Sheep and Indian Rock in 1986, Kautz Ironstone in 1989, Chatom in 1991, Malvadino in 1996, and more recently, Zucca Mountain, Laraine Wine/Gerber Vineyards, Domaine Becquet, French Hill, Broll Mountain, Irish, Hatcher, Boitano Family, Brice Station, Newsome-Harlow, and Twisted Oak. By 1997 there were approximately 260 bearing acres in the county, today there are over 1,000, a testament to the foresight of the writer who, in 1892, noted:
If, as some predict, the culture of the vine is to ultimately become the principal industry of the foothill counties of California, then certainly Calaveras will aspire to the leadership, as the conditions here existing are altogether favorable 1(152).
Gold was first found in Calaveras County along the banks of the Mokelumne, Calaveras, and Stanislaus rivers, as well as in virtually every stream drainage. Towns, such as Murphys, Angels Camp, and Mokelumne Hill quickly sprang up around the major strikes. Extensive placer mining was carried out during the early years of the Gold Rush in nearly all the ravines and gulches in the area and the results of this work may still be seen in the drainages throughout the county.
It was not until the mid-1850s that gold was discovered in the quartz veins in the county, providing the impetus for another boomlet in the area. There was intermittent activity through the 1860s, and another small boom in the 1870s, but little sustained mining industry until the late 1880s consolidations of the mines, facilitated by advances in mining and milling technologies and the availability of eastern U.S. and foreign capital which combined to warrant large-scale underground mining. Although not a consistent employer, the industry experienced several significant revivals, particularly in the late 19th century and again in the early 20th century.
Mining accounted for the location and names of most of the towns and communities within the area. The larger towns were located where major strikes occurred, or where supply camps sprang up to provide necessities for the surrounding encampments. Along the Mother Lode, Angels Camp was named for Henry P. Angel, who operated the first trading post there in 1848, while Carson Hill was named for James Carson, an early miner in the area. Mokelumne (on the Hill) was named for the Native American tribe who resided along the river, and San Andreas for the Hispanic church established there. Other communities took their names from events, locations, or geographical features.
Many gold camps in Calaveras were abandoned after the first rush (Chile Camp, Esperanza, Pleasant Springs, Esmeralda, Mosquito Gulch), and others inundated later by reservoirs (Camanche, Robinson’s Ferry, Lancha Plana, Petersburg, Melones, Six Mile Bar). The towns which remained were either located in important mineral producing areas or served as supply centers for the surrounding mining camps (Angels Camp, West Point, San Andreas, Mokelumne Hill, Copperopolis). Murphys, which started as a mining camp, lasted due to its proximity to the nearby natural wonders: the Big Trees, San Antonio Falls, Natural Bridges, and caverns. Copper was discovered near Copperopolis in 1860, and near Campo Seco in 1862, and both communities flourished during the Civil War, producing copper for shell casings for the Northern cause.
Until recent times, socioeconomic development in the area has occurred primarily within the context of the mining industry. Not only did the industry lead to the formation of Calaveras County in 1850, it was the main pillar of the local economy for nearly 75 years thereafter. Almost all other businesses operated within the shadow of mining and were directly or indirectly affected by it. Mining changed over the years, from early placer mining, to later hydraulic and hard-rock (or quartz) mining. Although consolidation of the larger mines took place during the 1880s and 1890s, numerous small operations were also producing, as were the prospects of individual miners. Many of the mines closed during World War I, had a small boomlet in the 1930’s Great Depression, but were shut down in 1942 with the executive order that closed all non-war related industries, and have seen only sporadic activity since.
The preeminence of mining, however, ensured that all other local industries would be its auxiliaries. Transportation, lumbering, water, power generation, and ranching have all been directed and influenced by the mining industry.
Within a few scant years after the discovery of gold, sawmills were established, initially to provide lumber and timbers for the flumes, shafts, adits, headframes, and mills of the mining industry. Soon thereafter, however, they were expanded to provide materials for residential and commercial construction as well, continuing sporadically until the mid-20th century. During World War II, when lumber was identified as a critical resource, large new lumber mills and company towns were established in the upper regions of the county, and logging trucks penetrated the high country. Flush times continued through the 1960s when most of the mills closed.