Calaveras Heritage Council

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.

Legendary bandit Black Bart held up his first stagecoach (1875) and his last stagecoach (1883) at the exact same spot, on Funk Hill near Copperopolis.

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 county seat of San Andreas has no connection with the earthquake-causing San Andreas Fault that lies some 120 miles to the west.

In 1850, at the height of the Gold Rush, there were 62 males for every female in Calaveras County. By 1860, the ratio was just over 6:1.

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.

Sections of Calaveras County, one of California’s original 27 counties founded in 1850, helped form Amador County in 1854 and Alpine County in 1864.

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.

Albert Michelson, who measured the speed of light and became the first American to win the Nobel Prize (1907), attended school in Murphys.

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).