49er Farm Trail

The 49er Farm Trail Map is a printed guide to where food is grown and sold in Nevada County, California. It lists farmers markets, you-pick farms, vineyards and wineries, and tree farms that sell cut-your-own and live container Christmas trees in season. It also marks places to stop and eat outdoors. The map is free. Copies are kept at the district office, 113 Presley Way in Grass Valley, and at the Chamber of Commerce offices in Nevada City and Grass Valley, and the map can be downloaded from the district’s website. Its compiler, the Nevada County Resource Conservation District, says it hands out more than 5,000 copies to locals and tourists. Each farm’s entry follows that farm stand’s own website or the text it sends in, and may be shortened for space. The maps come in editions. In August 2024 the 2023 map was still on the counter at Presley Way, along with a preview of the 2024 map due that fall. For farms the map leaves out, the district refers visitors to Sierra Harvest’s Nevada County Food & Farm Directory.

The district’s notices follow the growing season. In 2026 it announced U-Pick Tuesdays at Food Love Farm, 16200 Lake Vera Purdon Road, held from 4:30 to 6:30 in the evening on Tuesdays from August 11 through September 29. The farm asked a voluntary $5 a basket toward seeds and labor and accepted cash, card, check and EBT: “No one will be turned away due to a lack of funds.”

The district was founded on January 4, 1944. It is a state-mandated special district, neither a regulator nor a city or county agency. Its board is appointed by the Nevada County Board of Supervisors and drawn from local landowners. With the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service it advises landowners on erosion, ponds, weeds, pasture, rangeland, and orchard and vineyard management.

Miners’ money and a nursery on Nevada Street

The trail takes its name from the Gold Rush, which is also where foothill farming began. The Nevada Irrigation District’s history states that the influx of miners created a need for food, and that miners paid premium prices for it. Farmers raised fruit, vegetables and wine grapes, and ranchers ran sheep and cattle. The organic farmer Amigo Cantisano described the pattern in 2013: “Every mining community around here had to feed themselves … They definitely grew a lot more than they could eat. This is true everywhere you go. Where you find mining camps there’s remnants of agriculture.”

The district history calls Felix Gillet the most important horticulturist in the county. He was born in France and settled in Nevada City in 1859. By 1866, by that account, he had established the Barren Hill Nursery, one of the first fruit and nut nurseries on the West Coast. Laura Brown, writing in The Union in 2013, gives 1871 as the year the “testy little Frenchman” opened the nursery to the public, on 16 acres of logged ground at the top of Nevada Street. The two accounts also differ on his sources: the district history says plants from more than 30 nations, and The Union says as many as 40 countries. His introductions included almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, prunes, cherries, pears, apricots, wine and table grapes, figs and strawberries. An 1884 photograph shows one of his chestnut trees at Barren Hill in full bearing. He helped found the state Board of Horticulture, and at least one walnut variety was named for him. Gillet died in 1908 at 72. Charles E. Parsons bought the nursery in 1913, renamed it the Felix Gillet Nursery, and ran it into the 1960s. On January 27, 2008, Nevada City proclaimed Felix Gillet Day.

Cantisano farms Heaven and Earth Farm on the San Juan Ridge. In the 1970s he came on Buck’s Ranch, an abandoned homestead eight miles down a dirt road at 4,000 feet, loaded with fruit and nut trees. The Buck brothers had owned it in the 1870s, a stone’s throw from a mining camp. He first heard Gillet’s name from a customer at Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, the business he had founded. Later the owners of Gillet’s old Nevada City house showed him a box that had belonged to Parsons, full of catalogues, records and correspondence. “There’s thousands of pages,” he said. Through the Felix Gillet Institute he gleaned and mapped old trees in six gold country counties. The institute’s 2013 catalogue offered the Swaar apple, which Gillet brought to California in 1884, and a Reinette Pippin grafted from a 110-year-old tree at the Camptonville home of Lester Pelton. In season the fruit went to local farmers markets. “It’s a taste of the past,” Cantisano said. “It’s a direct link to Gillet and early miners.”

Bartlett pears and the price of water

Hydraulic mining reduced the miners from several thousand to a few hundred, and many of the farms that had fed them were abandoned. Fruit brought the farms back. “Truly speaking, they are ‘fruithills,’” Lardner wrote in his 1924 county history. In 1888 the Nevada County Land and Improvement Association distributed a 96-page booklet titled “The Famous Bartlett Pear Belt of California.” At the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, Nevada County won the Grand Prize for Bartlett pears.

Water remained the limit. In May 1912 farmers protested after the Excelsior Water and Power Company raised its rate from $5 to $7.50 an acre once the year’s planting was done. The Nevada County Water Consumers’ Association, formed in 1913, wrote: “Fruit growing in Nevada County has proved successful in the past few years, and with irrigation will be one of the greatest resources of our county.” In 1914 Christian Bierwagen invited his neighbors in Chicago Park, nine miles southeast of Grass Valley, to a picnic. The guests formed a farm club, and its chief concern was the old ditches falling into disrepair. By 1917 thirteen farm centers had organized, among them Peardale, Rough and Ready, Gold Flat and North San Juan. Irrigation advocates were among the founders of the Nevada County Farm Bureau.

The fruit trail as it ran in 2003

The 49er Fruit Trail was established in 1964. In March 2003 The Union described it as a network of about 30 farms reaching from Roseville to North San Juan and from Forest Hill to Lincoln, most of them along Highways 80 and 49, across Placer and Nevada counties. The farms sold vegetables, nuts, wine, and livestock from lambs to llamas, as well as fruit. The map carried a harvest calendar: kiwis in April; eggs, melons, plums and rhubarb in June; apples, mandarins, pears and persimmons in November; Christmas trees in December.

The farms the article visited lay around Auburn, in Placer County. Machado Orchards, number 56 on the map, stood on Bowman Road alongside Interstate 80. A windmill marked the entrance, where Rudy, the farm’s boxer, often kept watch. Inside the store were peach, berry and apple pies, the apple pie heaped high with Empire apples, along with caramel apples and juice pressed on the premises. The family had farmed the land since 1926, and the son, Gary, managed it. Bobbi “Mom” Machado, 73 and a little over five feet tall, said she had wanted to be a farmer “ever since I was a little girl.” On school tours, children watched a 70-year-old apple peeler that could do 88 apples in a minute.

At Amber Oaks Berry Farm, number 51, Tim Boughton had set out his first berry plants at age 8. He picked kiwis only when their sugar reached 9 to 12 percent. “Store kiwis are 7 percent,” he said. In October he took schoolchildren to taste tomatoes off the vine with a leaf of basil, roasted chestnuts with them, and sent them off on hayrides. At Country Ranch, Sheri Minkner showed visitors her catfish pond, crested ducks, Sebastopol geese, two llamas and her turkeys. About a dozen egrets roosted there each night and left the fish alone. “They know,” she said, “that this is a bed, not a breakfast, place.”