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Everything in Placer County history leads to gold, from its name--the Spanish term for gold-bearing gravel--to the mining camps that sprouted overnight in its rugged river canyons. Ecstatic cries of "Gold on the American River!" in 1848 launched the largest voluntary migration in the history of the world. As claims "panned out," thousands of miners swarmed like locusts between the rough-and-tumble mining camps, from the crest of the Sierra Nevada to the Sacramento Valley. Some camps disappeared along with the easy placer gold; others found new methods to extract gold deposited deep in quartz veins or underground and developed into stable towns that still stand. Sometimes washing whole hillsides into rivers, hydraulic mining was outlawed in the 1880s, but the colorful characters and tall tales of the Gold Rush live on.
Rocklin is a town built on and named for granite rock. Forty-niners headed for Placer County gold fields noticed gleaming boulders scattered among the oak and pine, but a decade passed before the first Rocklin quarry supplied granite blocks to build the state capitol in Sacramento. By 1910 there were 22 quarries chiseling stone to build, among many, the United States Mint and city hall in San Francisco, Oakland's civic auditorium, the San Joaquin, Solano, and Placer County courthouses, and Rocklin's own city hall after it incorporated in 1893. The quarries and the Central Pacific Railroad, which built a roundhouse in Rocklin in 1866, attracted a large number of Finns, who at one time made up a majority of Rocklin residents. But no matter what their point of origin, Rockliners loved sports, forming baseball teams and frequenting a racetrack where quarry owners ran horses with names like Golden State, Moko Boy, and Shamrock.
Though small in geographic size, Placer County is large in its rich history of railroading in California. This book covers 14 different railroads that did or still do exist in some association with Placer County. There were narrow-gauge and standard-gauge, long transcontinental, and short point-to-point railroads. Some railroads were fully contained within the county, and others just touched the county. Some railroads were short-lived operations, while others operated for decades. One railroad still functions today, undiminished after 150 years in service. This book is more than just a collection of photographs of locomotives; it provides the reader with a visual history of various aspects of the many railroads operating in Placer County over the years.
Auburn, the county seat of Placer County, was founded during the Gold Rush in 1848. Unlike many such towns in the Mother Lode, Auburn has remained a vibrant and growing town ever since. This citys relevance since the initial influx of gold seekers is due in part to its location at a nexus of transportation routes, both old and new. Halfway between San Francisco and Reno and at an elevation of just over 1,000 feetabove the fog and below the snowAuburn is a very attractive place to live. Furthermore, it is a place with sincere respect for its roots, as evidenced by its restored old town, preserved courthouse building, and other historic structures throughout town.
Guangdong -- Gold Mountain -- Central Pacific -- Foothills -- The High Sierra -- The Summit -- The Strike -- Truckee -- The Golden Spike -- Beyond Promontory.
Located at the junction of gold-rich ravines, Auburn was the site of the first gold discovery in Placer County. Though the superficial gold was quickly panned out, by 1850, the town had become an important trading center. Auburn became a center for goods, services, entertainment, and a place for miners to "winter-over." More importantly, it became a transportation hub. As the county seat, Auburn's hotels, saloons, and merchants experienced a steady stream of customers as county residents came to town to deal with legal matters. Though plagued by numerous destructive fires, the citizens of Auburn rebuilt, and the town continued to thrive. This book will introduce the reader to some of the individuals who were instrumental in shaping Auburn as it grew into the town it is today.
The matriarch of a remarkable African American family, Sally Thomas went from being a slave on a tobacco plantation to a "virtually free" slave who ran her own business and purchased one of her sons out of bondage. In Search of the Promised Land offers a vivid portrait of the extended Thomas-Rapier family and of slave life before the Civil War. Based on personal letters and an autobiography by one of Thomas' sons, this remarkable piece of detective work follows the family as they walk the boundary between slave and free, traveling across the country in search of a "promised land" where African Americans would be treated with respect. Their record of these journeys provides a vibrant picture ...
This book is the answer to the perennial question, "What's out there in the world of genealogy?" What organizations, institutions, special resources, and websites can help me? Where do I write or phone or send e-mail? Once again, Elizabeth Bentley's Address Book answers these questions and more. Now in its 6th edition, The Genealogist's Address Book gives you access to all the key sources of genealogical information, providing names, addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, e-mail addresses, websites, names of contact persons, and other pertinent information for more than 27,000 organizations, including libraries, archives, societies, government agencies, vital records offices, professional bodies, publications, research centers, and special interest groups.
Placer County runs between the Sacramento Valley and the Sierra Nevada mountains, against Sacramento County in the west and 100 miles east to Lake Tahoe. Along the present-day southern border, gold was discovered in 1848 by James Marshall at John Sutter's lumber mill, leading to the California Gold Rush. This relatively narrow county (only 10 to 15 miles across in some spots) has early immigrant trails, wagon roads, railways, and highways all passing through as they head across Donner Summit and across the Sierra Nevadas. Mining, agriculture, transportation, logging, and recreation made Placer County important in the past, and they keep it a thriving place to live now in the 21st century.
Water supply is an extremely contentious resource issue in California and the West. The framework currently used to resolve these issues, however, is based on the legal system that arose in response to the 1849 Gold Rush, and on which California and other Western states modeled their laws. In "Golden Rules: The Origins of California Water Law in the Gold Rush," Mark Kanazawa mines a vast cache of previously untapped historical sources both to tell the story of California s water laws and to shed light on how institutions and economies develop in relation to each other. The Gold Rush was a massive shock to the California economy and provides a unique opportunity in which to observe largely un...