Nevada City

Canvas Houses on Deer Creek

Nevada City stands on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains, midway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.³ A marker put up by the Native Sons of the Golden West says the camp became a town of 16,000 in the early 1850s, after gold was found on Deer Creek in 1849.¹ One early settler moved from Deer Creek to the present site and put up a crude cabin on Nevada Street, a place later known as Caldwell’s Upper Store.⁴ John Steele passed through on September 23, 1850, and found little more than a row of canvas-covered houses on either side of the Emigrant Road in the valley of Deer Creek; every nation, island and tribe, he wrote, seemed to have its emigrant representative.⁵ Nevada City has been the seat of Nevada County since 1851, and the Pioneer Cemetery was laid out that same year on a knoll behind the First Methodist Church.^1,6

Ditches, Nozzles, and the Pelton Wheel

The state landmark plaque calls the South Yuba Canal Water Company the first incorporated to supply water for hydraulic mining, and says its original ditch was in use in May 1850.⁷ The company used its office at 134 Main Street from 1857 to 1880, and the plaque calls it the headquarters of the largest network of water flumes and ditches in the state.⁷ The county’s landmarks list credits Edward E. Matteson with the first hydraulic mining in 1853; he had already used water at his Buckeye Hill claim in 1852, and in 1853 he employed a nozzle.⁴ A 1965 Native Sons marker places that first hydraulic mining on American Hill near Nevada City in 1853 and names the miners’ giant nozzle The Monitor, which washed hillsides away to uncover gold-bearing gravel.² The method flourished profitably until 1884, when the Sawyer decision closed hydraulic mining; the same marker notes that rivers were being filled with mud debris, causing flooding of the farmlands below.² The Pelton Water Wheel was first manufactured commercially in 1879 at George Allan’s Foundry and Machine Works, and its paired buckets were shaped like the bowls of spoons.⁸ Lester Pelton moved his business to San Francisco in 1888, but Allan’s Foundry kept the right to make the wheels and built them into the early 1900s, when most local mines shifted to electric power.⁸

Brick After the Fire of July 1856

A great fire struck the town in July 1856.⁴ The National Hotel was built in 1856 as three brick buildings known as the Bicknell Block, escaped damage in the fire, and opened as the National Exchange Hotel on August 20, 1856.^4,7 The state plaque says the hotel’s exterior is virtually unchanged since then and calls it one of the oldest continuously operating hotels west of the Rockies.⁷ The Durbrow Building went up late in 1856 to replace two buildings lost in the fire, and the brick Flagg Building rose the same year on the site of the U.S. Hotel.^4,9 The Flagg has served as the Council Chamber and as Schreiber’s, where a music box called Felix thundered Strauss waltzes and ‘Carmen’, and since 1957 as Eddie Furano’s Bank Club.⁹ Firehouse No. 2 had its cornerstone laid in October 1860; it was the first permanent firehouse in Nevada City, paid for by public subscription.⁴ Firehouse No. 1 was completed in 1861 and later housed the Nevada County Historical Museum.⁴ James J. Ott assayed the first ore of the Comstock Lode in 1859 in his original office, and when that frame building burned in 1863 he moved to a building put up in 1855.⁴ His son Emil Ott ran the assay office until his own death in 1956.⁴

The Nevada Theatre, the Streetcars, and Broad Street

The Nevada Theatre opened on September 9, 1865, as the town’s seventh and last theater; the state plaque calls it California’s oldest existing structure erected as a theater.^4,7 Edwin Booth had performed at an earlier theater owned by Hamlet Davis, and Mark Twain, Jack London, and Emma Nevada later appeared on the Nevada’s stage.^4,7 The theater got a movie marquee in a 1947 remodeling and closed in 1957; it was then bought with public donations and reopened on May 17, 1968.^4,7 From 1901 to 1924 the Nevada County Traction Co. ran four 28-ton streetcars five miles from Grass Valley to Pine and Broad Streets, until a winter storm in January 1924 shut the line down for good.¹⁰ The Nevada City Downtown Historic District was entered in the National Register of Historic Places on September 23, 1985.^1,11 In 2009 a congressman put the town’s population at 3,001.³ At North Pine and Commercial, Elks Lodge No. 518 dedicated its first lodge on June 14, 1913, and the hall served until a fire broke out on the morning of March 20, 2002.¹² The building on the corner now is a reconstruction that follows the architecture and style of the one it replaced.¹²