Placerville

Old Dry Diggin’s on Hangtown Creek

In 1939 the Federal Writers’ Project guide counted 2,322 people in Placerville, seat of El Dorado County, and traced its Main Street along the rock-lined banks of Hangtown Creek, where the first comers settled.¹ The state landmark dates the mining camp on those banks to the spring of 1848, the year James Marshall found gold at Coloma, eight miles away.^2,3 In July 1848 Gov. Richard B. Mason reported to Washington that William Daylor and Perry McCoon, ranchers from the Sacramento Valley, and their Indian retainers had taken $17,000 from one small ravine at “Old Dry Diggin’s” in a week.¹ A marker at Gold Bug Park tells it as three men taking $17,000 in one week in the summer of 1848, when gold was valued at $16 to $19 an ounce.⁴ Soon thousands were working the gulches of what became known as the Ravine City, and by 1850 it had grown into a town of 2,000 people.¹ In 1850 Lucy Ann Wakefield, from Connecticut, bought a log building on Main Street and sold mince pies to the miners at $2.00 plain.³

How the Camp Became Hangtown

The Federal Writers’ Project guide tells of three outlaws who held up a Frenchman named Cailloux at knifepoint and stole 50 ounces of gold dust, and who were caught the next morning, tried, and hanged from a great oak at Main and Coloma streets.¹ The street became the alcalde’s courtroom, and the crowd the jury, for such men as “Irish Dick” Crone and Bill Brown, who were summarily hanged, and the camp was known as Hangtown, unofficially, ever after.¹ The Placerville Historical Society’s walking tour dates the name to 1849 and says the three hanged men, originally six, had robbed a stage to finance the confederacy in California.³ A state marker puts the Hangman’s Tree on the old Hay Yard and says its stump lies under the building that carries the plaque.⁵ The name Placerville became official when the post office opened in 1854, and the town incorporated on May 13 of that year.³

The Road to Washoe

Placerville stood from the first on the overland trail and the Coloma Road, and by 1854, the 1939 guide says, it contended with San Francisco and Sacramento in wealth and population.¹ Mark Hopkins set up shop on the muddy main street with a wagonload of groceries from Sacramento, and Philip D. Armour ran a small butcher shop in the center of town.¹ In 1853 blacksmith Hugh L. Hinds hired John M. Studebaker, who made more money building wheelbarrows for miners than digging and went home to South Bend, Indiana, in 1858 with his fortune.³ On April 4, 1860, the first eastbound Pony Express rider, William (Sam) Hamilton, changed horses here, added an express letter to his mochila, and rode off for Sportsman’s Hall.⁶ Placerville was the western terminus of the Pony Express from July 1, 1861, until the line ended on October 26, 1861.⁶ When the rush to the Comstock Lode broke, wagons drawn by six-mule teams poured through the town with merchandise and provisions for the Washoe mines.¹ From 1856 to 1876 John A. ‘Snowshoe’ Thompson carried 60 to 80 pounds of mail on skis from Placerville over the Sierra in winter, to Carson Valley and Genoa, Nevada.^2,3

Fire and Brick on Main Street

Fires swept most of the town three times in 1856 and again in 1864 and 1865, and the walking tour says the town rebuilt in brick.^1,3 The stone Soda Works of 1852, where spring water from the hillside was bottled for miners, came through the 1856 fires and now holds the Fountain & Tallman Museum.³ The Methodist Episcopal Church of 1851, which its state marker calls the oldest church building in El Dorado County, first stood at Cedar Ravine and Main Street and was moved to the grounds of the newer church on Thompson Way.^3,5 A marker placed in 1993 calls Placerville Hardware the oldest continuously operating hardware store west of the Mississippi River.⁷ The county courthouse of 1859 burned in 1910 with many of the county’s early records, and its replacement on the same lot was completed in 1912.³ The Ivy House, a three-story brick hotel built in 1864 and once home to the Placerville Academy, was torn down as unsafe in 1964.^1,3

Hardrock on Poverty Ridge

By 1852, a Gold Bug Park marker says, all but the hardiest miners had gone, along with the easy pickings along the creek.⁴ Hardrock mining began in the hillsides in the late 1800s, peaked during the Depression, and lasted until World War II.⁴ George Cozens built the first stamp mill in the canyon in the 1890s for the Silver Pine Mine, and Horace P. Moulton rebuilt it completely in the mid-1930s.⁸ Running full, its two sets of 4 stamps could be heard in Placerville, a mile away.⁹ The Gold Bug mine nearby, once named “Hattie” for the daughter of an original owner, William Craddock, carried its last name from 1924 until it closed for good in 1942 because of the war.¹⁰ In 1965 the City of Placerville took the ground from the Bureau of Land Management and made it a park.⁴