Columbia State Historic Park

The stagecoach comes down Main Street in Columbia, season and weather permitting, past storekeepers and clerks dressed in the clothes of the 1850s. The town stands at 2,100 feet in the oak woodlands of the Sierra Nevada foothills, three miles north of Sonora off Highway 49. California State Parks manages 273 acres of it, and admission and parking are free. The park’s brochure calls it a living gold rush town with the largest collection of gold-rush-era brick buildings in California. About 2,000 people still lived in Columbia in 2019, and the park lies within the town’s working boundaries.

Main Street, boardwalk by boardwalk

The shops sit on raised boardwalks. The Columbia Candy Kitchen sells hand-dipped chocolates. Candles are dipped in a garden courtyard, and Seven Sisters makes soap and candles in what was Konrad’s Garage. There is Ebler’s leather and saddle emporium, a bookseller and stationer in the old Franklin-Wolfe Variety Store, a photographic studio in a former barber shop, and the Columbia Mercantile for groceries. Music comes out of the saloons. In 2019 a street musician called “Tater” played music reflecting California’s Mexican heritage. That year 15-year-old Jack Douglass worked the antique piano in the Jack Douglass Saloon. He was no relation to the saloon’s namesake. “I actually learned the songs from YouTube,” he said.

At Parrott’s Blacksmith Shop the forge is worked. “What we mostly do is make unique gift items for the people who come and visit Columbia,” blacksmith Erik Waight said in 2019. Down at Matelot Gulch, visitors pan for gold. After two hours of it, 10-year-old Julliette Carol of Oakland gave her finding: “It’s sorta hard to find actual gold.”

Exhibits fill a dozen buildings: the Wells Fargo office, the assay office, a drug store, a bowling saloon, a Chinese store, a justice court, the jail. The Dentist’s Office opened in July 1978 with the instruments of Dr. Paul F. Sikora, given by his son, a Columbia dentist. The display holds an 1850s case of ivory-handled instruments and tooth keys dating to the Revolutionary War period. Visitors crowd its viewing window to hear a recorded exchange between a gold miner and a dentist. One honorary curator, Dr. Matthew Cummings, once played Dr. Malcolm McCleod Moore, Columbia’s first tooth extractor, in top hat and watch chain, with a jar of teeth. “Pulling teeth was about all dentists did in the 1850s,” he told visitors.

Free town tours, about an hour long, start in front of the museum in the old Knapp Store. In front of the firehouse on State Street is the square lid of a cistern dug beneath the streets after the fire of 1854. Below the main parking lot stand bare limestone formations, washed clean by miners who took the dirt down to bedrock. A walk leads out of town to the two-story brick schoolhouse, built in 1860 and used until 1937, with displays on both floors. The cemetery beside it holds Masonic, Odd Fellows, veterans’, and public grounds. On a hill at the south end of town, facing the schoolhouse, is St. Anne’s Catholic Church, built in 1856. It still belongs to the church and holds services on special occasions. A one-mile nature trail runs through the park.

The 2015 brochure lists Gold Rush Days on the second Saturday of each month, from 1 to 4 p.m., with docents in period dress. It also lists Columbia Diggins, a replica of the 1852 tent town, held the weekend after Memorial Day.

The Fallon House and its boarders

The Fallon Hotel on Washington Street holds the theatre and an ice cream parlor. Owen Fallon, an Ireland-born New Yorker, bought the west lot of the Maine House in 1857. The building had served as a courthouse and boarding house. After fires and rebuilding it became a boarding house named the Fallon House in 1863. That year Fallon bought the east lot and tore down the dividing wall. In 1864 he added ground on the west side for a garden and stables. The ice cream parlor occupies space that once held a gazette and a bakery. The theatre’s box office was once a saloon. The theatre itself was added in 1885.

Dr. Robert Burns, president of the University of the Pacific, bought the hotel in 1944 and sold it to the state in 1947 for $1. From 1949 to 1989 Pacific’s drama students spent their summers in Columbia, living in the Fallon and later in Eagle Cottage, and played repertory in the Fallon House Theatre.

The hotel has its stories, as Our California magazine tells them. A boy is said to have fallen from the window of room six and died. Since then, the account goes, he has been heard running by the door, seen peeking around corners, and has played with toys left in the parlor.

Hildreth’s Diggings

The Central Sierra Miwok lived in the Columbia area for thousands of years. They built multi-family villages near oak groves and water, and lived largely on acorns. Their grinding rocks can still be seen in or near the oak groves. A malaria epidemic struck in 1833, and the gold rush brought further abuses and deaths. The descendants of Miwok and Yokuts people survive today.

The state’s account of the strike is precise. On March 27, 1850, Dr. Thaddeus Hildreth, his brother George, John Walker, and others were caught in a rainstorm. While their gear dried, Walker tried his luck in a nearby gulch. The Tuolumne County Historical Society says the party had come from New England by way of Pine Log camp in the Stanislaus canyon, and that Walker found the gold while they were camped overnight along a seasonal creek. In a 2019 television feature, park interpreter Kelly Leage dated the first arrivals to 1848, after Walker dipped his pan into a creek.

Within six weeks thousands of miners had come. Their camp of log cabins and canvas tents, Hildreth’s Diggings, was formally renamed Columbia on April 29, 1850. Two-thirds of the first miners were Mexican. By the summer of 1850 many had left because of the Foreign Miner’s Tax, which charged foreign-born miners $20 a month. By 1852 the town had more than 150 businesses, three churches, a Masonic Lodge, and a branch of the Sons of Temperance. It also had Chinese, French, Irish, Italian, German, and Jewish miners and merchants. The historical society adds that there were so many French residents that for a short time there was a consulate.

Water governed everything. When the seasonal creek dried in the summer of 1850, most miners left, and the dry spring and summer of 1851 emptied the diggings again. The Tuolumne County Water Company formed in June 1851. The brochure says it brought Stanislaus River water about 20 miles by flume, pipe, and ditch. The historical society says its water came from Five Mile Creek. The miners came back. Its rates were high, and in 1854 a company of miners began a 60-mile aqueduct, the Miner’s Ditch, to undersell it. Facing bankruptcy, they sold out to the older company before finishing.

Fire came the same year. In 1854 a blaze destroyed six blocks. Only the brick Donnell and Parsons store at Main and Washington was left standing. The town rebuilt in local red brick. The 1857 fire left only the thick-walled brick buildings with iron shutters. Two volunteer fire companies formed, and their rivalry lasted into the 20th century.

Estimates of the town’s size at its peak run widely. The state puts it at 25,000 to 30,000 by 1853, among the largest cities in California. The Office of Historic Preservation puts it at 4,000 to 5,000 in the 1850s. The historical society gives 6,000 to 8,000. Estimates of the gold differ too. The state says as much as $150 million was mined between 1850 and the early 1900s. The landmark record estimates gold shipments at $87,000,000.

The town’s own historians lay claim to one celebration. In 1862, according to organizer Barbara Balen, Mexican and Latino miners in Columbia heard of the victory over French forces at Puebla and “celebrated here with songs, food and drink, and speeches.” She called it “the first documented place of spontaneous celebrations of Cinco de Mayo.” At the 2022 commemoration she announced that Columbia and Puebla had become sister cities.

Olmsted, the League, and a dinner with the governor

Mining dwindled in the late 1860s. Miners pulled down empty buildings and dug the vacant lots for gold caught in the crevices of the limestone bedrock. The town’s valuation fell from near $1 million in the late 1850s to $150,000 in 1868. The University of the Pacific’s account counts 500 residents remaining. The historical society counts about 1,000 by 1870. Those who stayed worked the marble quarries, the water company, farms and ranches, and the stores that supplied other camps. The brick buildings were never abandoned. In the early 1890s a recession brought more miners, and logging and tourism helped the town get by.

Talk of preservation began in the 1920s with the Columbia Progressive Club. In 1928 the state park commission hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to survey lands for a park system. He recommended Columbia as one of the best-preserved gold mining towns in the state. The historical society explains why so much had survived. The town lay “just far enough off the major road never to be modernized and just close enough never to be abandoned.” Columbia became California State Landmark 123 on July 6, 1933. In 1934 the local artist Otheto Weston and Rita Zimmerman, a Bay Area preservationist, formed the Historic Mining Town Preservation League. The Depression kept them from raising the matching money.

Dr. James McConnell, a dentist, and his wife Geraldine moved onto Main Street around 1940. Many businesses were shuttered. A rumor that the rundown City Hotel would reopen as a house of ill repute moved Geraldine McConnell to act. Governor Earl Warren was a family friend. Over dinner, she remembered, he said: “I’ll get a bill introduced to make Columbia a state park. All you have to do is raise $50,000.” The McConnells helped raise it. On July 15, 1945, Warren moved his office to Columbia for one day and signed SB 1256. He imagined Columbia becoming “the Williamsburg of the West.” Surviving buildings were restored, and replicas were built from old plans and photographs. The Columbia Historic District entered the National Register on October 15, 1966.

The City Hotel, twice

The City Hotel stands on Main Street. Its saloon is still the What Cheer, after the old What Cheer House. Our California dates its start to 1854, when George Morgan bought the north lot. The Union Democrat says Morgan built the brick hotel in 1856. It burned twice and was rebuilt. By 1874 it was the Morgan City Hotel, holding at various times an auction hall, theater, music hall, restaurant, saloon, and the Morgans’ own rooms. By 1890 it had 20 rooms upstairs. Our California says Morgan hanged himself at about that time. The last innkeepers, Mary and Angelo Nadotti, closed it in 1942.

The state bought the hotel in 1947 and used it for storage for years. Its cherrywood bar had been shipped around the Horn for Morgan in 1856. It lay upside down on the dirt floor of a shed nearby. In 1971 State Parks chief William Penn Mott met Robert Deal, a dean at Columbia College. “If you run it, I will rebuild the old City Hotel,” Mott said. The restoration cost the state about $531,000. In the mid-1970s Mel Wallace and Pat Karnos, who held the park’s carpenter concession, copied the broken pieces of the back bar and saved it. The hotel reopened on October 1, 1975, with nine rooms, antique furnishings, and student trainees.

The first chef, Barry Marcillac, came from Ernie’s in San Francisco. His first menu offered coq au vin for $6.75. Bar manager Ben Smart could recite his list of 100 drinks on request, and on New Year’s Eve he dressed in a diaper as the new year’s baby. Tom Bender, a trainee on opening day, became manager in 1985 and held the post for 20 years. In 1993 a snail ate through several expensive wine labels; staff decided it was after the glue. Bender put on a “Snail Fest” with the damaged wines and escargot. The Victorian Feast began as one night in 1982 and ran 15 nights by December 2005, with music, a melodrama, and four courses with wine.

The college partnership ended in April 2006. Concessionaires followed: Forever Resorts until 2009, Jeff and Jackie Briggs from 2010 to 2014, and the Segarini family from 2015 to 2020. On December 22, 2022, the Columbia City Hotel Cooperative Corp., a patrons’ co-op of more than 300 members, opened the restaurant and saloon under a state contract. The Victorian Feast goes on each holiday season.

The hotel has its own ghost story. In the 1970s it acquired a carved bed for room one. As the story goes, a woman the staff call Elizabeth died in it in childbirth. Since then doors are said to open on their own, and perfume drifts through the room with no source.

Geraldine McConnell lived across the street from the City Hotel until her death in 2003, at 99. For the last two years of her life, someone from the hotel carried her dinner over each evening.