Columbia Historic Park
— the gold rush, after the noise.
Not only on a wall.
“For a few years one of California's largest towns, before the gold ran shallow and the prospectors moved on. What stayed is a Main Street of brick and boardwalk that never paved over and never widened for cars. The Wells Fargo office still has its scale on the counter. The City Hotel still rents its rooms. A stagecoach makes the afternoon loop. School kids on field trips pan for gold in the same gulch the Hildreth brothers worked in March of 1850. The Sierra foothills hold the heat into evening. The light goes amber against the brick around six.
Columbia Historic Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Columbia sits in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Tuolumne County, California, four miles north of Sonora at roughly 2,140 feet of elevation. Gold was struck on the gulch on March 27, 1850 by Dr. Thaddeus Hildreth and a small party from Maine; within months the town held several thousand residents. By the mid-1850s it was one of the largest settlements in the southern Mother Lode, with dozens of saloons, two newspapers, and a brick row of merchants. The diggings eventually ran shallow, the rush moved on, and most of the population went with it. In 1945 California made what remained a State Historic Park: twelve blocks of original 1850s buildings, the largest single concentration of Gold Rush-era architecture in the state.[1]
What survived the rush is a Main Street of brick. Columbia burned twice in the 1850s, once in 1854 and again in 1857, and the merchants rebuilt the second time in fire-resistant brick with iron shutters at every storefront. The Wells Fargo Express Office, the City Hotel, the Fallon Hotel, and the one-room schoolhouse are all originals from the late 1850s, restored rather than reconstructed. The boardwalks are wood, the storefronts are brick, and the working blacksmith shop on Main still forges hardware for the buildings around it. The street itself was closed to automobile traffic when the park was created, so the proportions of the town read the way they did when stagecoaches were the actual transportation.[1]
The park is open daily and entrance is free, though several in-town experiences are operated by concessioners. Stagecoach rides leave from near the Wells Fargo office on a regular afternoon schedule from spring through fall. The Hidden Treasure Gold Mine offers underground tours by reservation, and gold panning is available at a sluice on Main Street. The City Hotel and the Fallon Hotel both operate as historic lodgings under park concession, with rooms restored to 1850s appointments. Costumed docents work the schoolhouse, the print shop, and the smithy during living-history weekends, particularly around Columbia Diggins 1852, the park's annual early-summer re-enactment of a working camp from the height of the rush. Most shops close by five; the boardwalks are quiet after the last stagecoach turns in.[1]