A Colorful Gold Rush History
Many of the artifacts from the town's past are showcased at the Placerville Historical Museum, run by the El Dorado County Historical Society. The museum, in what had been the Fountain-Tallman Soda Works -- the oldest building in town not destroyed by fire -- used to be a center for soda manufacturing. The brick walls of the building, cast in 1852, are more than 2-feet thick so ice and soda supplies could have been kept cool.
The estate of lifelong Placerville resident Stella Tracy paid for the building of the museum more than 20 years ago. The upstairs is dedicated to her turn-of-the-century furniture and photos, while the downstairs exhibits an array of 19th- and 20th- century memorabilia. In the center of the room sit a soda-water machine from 1894 and an 1890s-era washing machine. Everything from a Placerville Druids membership pin to the footwear of Snowshoe Thompson, one of the town's well-remembered characters, fills the tiny room.
The curator regales me with Snowshoe's story. Between 1855 and 1868 Norwegian warrior John "Snowshoe" Thompson was the only mailman brave enough to traverse the Sierra Nevada to deliver letters between miners and their families. Before him, the town's main carrier quit -- after his partner had been killed, his mules froze to death in a blizzard, and his horse died in a snowstorm. Snowshoe hauled up to 90 pounds of letters every two weeks up 8,000 feet and then down to near Carson City, Nev. I can only imagine Snowshoe's loud guffaw at today's mail carriers who boast about delivering mail through snow, sleet, rain, and hail.
At the center of Main Street the Bell Tower, another of Placerville's historic symbols, rises above a former plaza where the whole town used to congregate. Now car traffic surpasses foot traffic, but the Bell Tower still signifies a critical time in the town's past. It was first conceived in 1856 to serve as a fire alarm after three fires burned down much of Placerville's business district within five months. But the 50-foot tower, which in 1898 replaced the original wooden one, was almost destroyed in 1965 in a car accident and was renovated five years later.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/1999/10/22/placerville.DTL
