Columbia is one of dozens of California towns that sprang up overnight with the Gold Rush and prospectors, stayed on for more industrial mining, and eventually died out with the end of gold mining.
Except it didn’t die. It lives on as both a town and a state historic park, with both inhabiting many of the same spaces, and drawing thousands of visitors each year.
By all rights, the once-roaring ‘metropolis’ should have been a ghost town before World War II; its population had been declining for years, serious mining had stopped, and even a good portion of its buildings were gone, torn down to allow last-gasp access to gold underneath them.
Where once there had been eight hotels, 17 general stores, two firehouses, three churches a newspaper and even two bookstores—not to mention over forty saloons—five cemeteries and 30,000 people, there was only a handful of stores and businesses. The population then and now hovered at around 2000. Even the local school closed down in 1937.
The City Hotel, top picture, was the clue in this week’s One-Clue Mystery, solved by Professor Abe and George G.
But Columbians, it turns out, weren’t interested in becoming just another empty place on the road. In the 1920s, a Columbia Progressive Club was formed, and began pushing to preserve the remaining historic buildings. In 1928, California hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to survey possible new parks for the state’s system; he recommended Columbia as one of the best-preserved gold mining towns.
One of the few private houses remaining inside the historic area
One of the reasons for that situation was a series of big fires in the 1860s, which resulted in many brick buildings replacing wood. At any rate, Olmsted’s recommendation was a kickstart for local efforts, and the Historic Mining Town Preservation League started fundraising.
Between the Depression and World War II, progress stalled, but in July, 1945, Gov. Earl Warren came to town for a parade and the official designation of the old business district as a state park. That’s the parade, in the picture on the left.
Miners beware: signs warn not to drink the water, which is chlorinated like a swimming pool. Don’t expect a lot of gold, either…
The remaining buildings were spruced up and became either exhibits or were leased out to stores that would serve the visitors in a period-appropriate setting. That’s the scene today, complete with costumed docents, a chance to board a stagecoach at the Wells Fargo Express office, and even a chance to pan for gold in a carefully-sanitized trough.
As with many historic villages and reproductions, visitors float on an edge of legend and fact, of history and fantasy, a wish for ‘good old times’ and a glimmer of how hard those times really were. Many of us grew up with a sort of comic-book sense of big events like the Gold Rush.
But with a bit of attention to signs, and no doubt to the museum, closed when I was there by the pandemic, it’s possible to get a truer sense of how hard it was on land and people, and how much harder for some.
The field of rocks above isn’t an accident of geology; as the land around the town began to run out of gold to mine, town buildings were torn down and the land under them stripped of soil in search of ore. Entire hills were reduced to rubble.
Bricks from demolished houses were sold off to build new ones at nearby Copperopolis where a vein of copper ore was found.
