Little York, California

California

The town's name was decided by a vote of miners, and the New Yorkers beat out the men who wanted to call it St. Louis.

historicalengineeringdisaster

The miners took a vote on what to call the place. Men from New York and the East won. Men from Missouri and the West lost, and their choice, St. Louis, never stuck. So the camp on Lowell Ridge became Little York. By eighteen fifty-two there was a plaza with stores, butchers, breweries, saloons, a shoemaker, a church and a theater. About six hundred people lived there. Gold turned up in the public plaza itself, where a single pan yielded forty-five dollars. Under the ridge ran a buried river channel of gravel hundreds of feet wide, with a blue sheen to the rock. It was called one of the richest gold-bearing gravel channels in the Sierra. In Scott's Ravine, a man could regularly take out twenty dollars a day by hand. One report from eighteen fifty-four said a company of four or five men frequently took out two or three hundred dollars in a day.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
It was named Little York by a vote of the miners, with the miners from New York and the East besting the miners from Missouri and the West, who wanted to call the town St. Louis.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Rollins Dam 5.8 mi The groundbreaking ceremony for Rollins Dam was the demolition of a railroad trestle that had carried three hundred million dollars in gold and silver.
  • Remington Hill, California 7.2 mi A man who helped build the ditches here made a million dollars, lost every cent, and died in the poorhouse.
  • Maybert, California 14.4 mi To get rid of squatters, the Forest Service burned the last cabins of Maybert to the ground.
  • Middle Fork American River 21.2 mi Rafters on the Middle Fork shoot through a tunnel that gold miners blasted through solid rock in the eighteen fifties.
  • Sugar Bowl Ski Resort 29.9 mi Goofy's famous holler started as an Austrian ski champion's yodel on these slopes.
  • Loomis, California 31.2 mi One man here was the entire town: saloon keeper, railroad agent, express agent, and postmaster all at once.