(Please read our Covid 19 Statement first - Ed) Sitting 43 miles due east of Sacramento on highway 50, Placerville is the heartbeat of El Dorado County, which stretches from the eastern edge of Folsom to the state line in Lake Tahoe.
Originally called Hangtown, there is a dummy hanging from the rafters downtown and a noose on town street signs, because of the frontier justice dispensed at the hanging tree where today's ice cream parlor is. That artwork and dummy has caused no little amount of controversy in these politically charged times but the citizens will point out that it is a historical point of order in this town, not something to do with anything racial (you can make up your own mind on that).
(Note: Last week...the last week of April 2021...the city council voted to remove the image of the noose from all city signs, paperwork, seal, etc. - Ed)
It's location on a major freeway also puts it directly in the crosshairs for development and many fear that this beautiful, historic, Gold Rush era town will someday in the near future become yet another suburb of the capitol with thousands of tract homes like nearby Folsom and El Dorado Hills have become.
After a somewhat lawless start in 1849, the city started to settle down and incorporated with its current name in 1854. It was the third largest city in California. Three years later, the county seat was moved here from nearby Coloma, where James Marshall found the nuggets at John Sutter's mill that kicked off the Gold Rush.
The most obvious attachment to the past is the historic bell tower that sits on an island in the middle of Main Street, smack dab in the middle of downtown.
Like many towns of the time, fires frequently burned through the town. One of the solutions was to have an alarm to call the volunteer fire department to arms. A bell was ordered in 1860, delivered in 1865, and mounted atop a wooden tower to be rung loudly whenever a fire broke out.
A more durable steel tower replaced the wooden tower in 1898. Modern sirens enhanced the bell and somehow the tower and bell are still there, anchoring the center of town.
Find a place to park nearby and you can spend some time exploring this old, historic downtown.
Going west, you'll come across one of our favorite dive bars, the Liar's Bench, where Tim and I like to have a beer while waiting for Letty to do her shopping in the yarn shop next door, Lofty Lou's. Keep going and you'll come across one of our favorite casual restaurants, the Buttercup Pantry.
A little mystery is the remains of this fireplace in the parking lot that we've have not found the story to. What home or structure used to be here?
Inside, comfort food rules the day as you browse through the many antiques and knick knacks on display here.
Going back east on Main Street, look for the dummy hanging above the north side of the street. This marks the spot where the infamous hanging tree was. The old stump is still in the basement of the adjacent building.
Going inside that building, you'll be inside one of Placerville's old saloons but, now, the Hangman's Tree serves ice cream instead of alcohol.
Continuing east on Main, you'll pass several restaurants, a couple more bars and pubs, antique shops, a really great surplus store, the old county courthouse...complete with cannons out front...and you'll end up at a couple of old sodaworks buildings.
Back during the Gold Rush, clean water was not always easy to get. Companies would make soda water to sell as clean drinking water to the locals. Here in Placerville, they also served as ice houses and the walls would be built two feet thick to insulate and keep the ice cold.
Of the two sodaworks building, one is a store and the other is a museum. The Fountain-Tallman Sodaworks is a nice museum of the period, showing how the water was made and displaying artifacts that were found during renovation.
Placerville was, of course, a gold mining town and you can see some of that history a mile north of downtown at Gold Bug Mine Park and Mine. This is also one of the extremely few places where you can take a wheelchair underground and tour an actual mine shaft from the Gold Rush. Click on that link to get a full story of when we visited and toured the mine.
Just east of town is Camino, more popularly known at Apple Hill. Here, you can tour different farms, pick apples (or just eat them), get some cider, and visit a few local wineries.
We like to go at the end of August to avoid the massive crowds that come here during the peak apple season that starts on Labor Day weekend.
One of the bigger and livelier of the historic Gold Rush towns in California, Placerville is one of our favorite destinations. Good for a day or more, it makes a great base for exploring the region.
Darryl Musick
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