California

25 places with something worth saying about them.

• All American Speedway A city sued a racetrack it didn't even own, and a judge declared the place a public nuisance.
• American River In 1862 the American River flooded so badly that California's new governor had to row to his own inauguration.
• California State University, Sacramento The first graduating class at Sacramento State was one student.
• Disappearance of Amanda Campbell A four-year-old rode her bike a block from home in Fairfield and was never seen again, and the man police called their prime suspect later sued the city and won.
• Dixon, California Dixon got its name from a mislabeled freight shipment, and nobody ever bothered to correct it.
• Donner Memorial State Park The pedestal under the pioneer statue at Donner is twenty-two feet tall because that was the depth of the snow.
• Ed Z'berg Sugar Pine Point State Park The cross-country skiing and biathlon events of the 1960 Winter Olympics were held in what is now this park.
• Fair Oaks Bridge Fair Oaks was sold to Chicago bankers and engineers as a citrus colony, and the bridge they were promised never came.
• Graduate Theological Union Volunteers hand-carried three hundred thousand books into a library that wasn't finished yet.
• Lake Tahoe Dam A Russian-born engineer once tried to drain Lake Tahoe's outflow all the way to San Francisco.
• Little York, 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.
• Loomis, California One man here was the entire town: saloon keeper, railroad agent, express agent, and postmaster all at once.
• Maybert, California To get rid of squatters, the Forest Service burned the last cabins of Maybert to the ground.
• Middle Fork American River Rafters on the Middle Fork shoot through a tunnel that gold miners blasted through solid rock in the eighteen fifties.
• Napa River DNA from four young salmon in the Napa River showed their parents had come from the Klamath, hundreds of miles up the coast.
• Peña Adobe Park A graveyard here was left to sheep, with nearly four hundred wooden grave markers still standing.
• Pinole Creek The trout in this creek are native California fish, and the freeway may be what stops them from getting home.
• Putah Creek The Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Green River" is about this creek.
• Remington Hill, California A man who helped build the ditches here made a million dollars, lost every cent, and died in the poorhouse.
• Richmond, California At Richmond's wartime shipyards, workers once built an entire Liberty ship in five days.
• Rollins Dam The groundbreaking ceremony for Rollins Dam was the demolition of a railroad trestle that had carried three hundred million dollars in gold and silver.
• San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge A self-declared emperor ordered this bridge built, then threatened to have the city councils arrested for ignoring him.
• Sugar Bowl Ski Resort Goofy's famous holler started as an Austrian ski champion's yodel on these slopes.
• USS Corry (DD-334) A US Navy destroyer that once escorted a president still lies half-scrapped in the mud of the Napa River.
• University of California, Davis Arboretum One tree here started as a seed taken from the largest Montezuma bald cypress in Mexico.