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 may have been the Union House (1854) across the street (destroyed in the 1865 fire).  It is very difficult to prove a "first" of anything in booming Gold Rush California, but the Union House was certainly "one of the first."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The first 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.

At the November 2, 1930 dedication of the original Hogan Dam, a bronze plaque was affixed onto the dam using cement and sand gathered from all corners of the state and water taken from the wells of several historic Spanish missions.

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.

Charles Earl Boles, alias Black Bart, was an American Old West outlaw noted for his poetic messages left after only two of his robberies (the fourth and fifth). He was also known as Charles E. Boles, C.E. Bolton, Charles E. Bowles, and “Black Bart the Po8.” A gentleman bandit, Black Bart was one of the most notorious stagecoach robbers to operate in and around Northern California and southern…