Calaveras Heritage Council

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.

Cement from the Calaveras Cement Co. helped build the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, McClellan and Travis Air Force bases, San Francisco Airport and several dams throughout region.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Estanislao Cucunuchi, born at San Jose Mission, was 28 when he led fellow Laquisemne Yokuts (from near Ripon) in a revolt in 1828. The horse-raiding rebels were pursued by Mariano Vallejo, but Estanislao turned himself in and was pardoned. His name (with English pronunciation)was bestowed on both a river and county.

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).