Mokelumne Hill
— the stone the fire couldn't take.
Not only on a wall.
“A Gold Rush town on Highway 49, in the Sierra Nevada foothills above the Central Valley. Fifteen thousand people lived here in 1850, the year the placers were so rich miners wouldn't leave to resupply in Stockton. Now there are under seven hundred. The Hotel Léger has been pouring drinks at the same bar since 1851; the stone walls of the I.O.O.F. Hall were the first three stories built east of the California coast. The town burned almost flat in 1854 and what stood up was the stone. Most of what stood is still standing.
Mokelumne Hill, 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.
Mokelumne Hill sits at 1,473 feet in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Calaveras County, on Highway 49 in the run of historic Mother Lode towns north of Sonora and south of Jackson. The 2020 census counted 691 residents in the census-designated place. The town takes its name from the Mokelumne River; the Miwok word translates roughly as 'people of Mokel,' a Native village that pre-dated the gold camp. A group of Oregonians worked the surrounding placers in 1848, and within two years the camp held fifteen thousand people. The town is California Historical Landmark No. 269.
After fire took almost everything on August 24, 1854, the town rebuilt in stone. The Hotel Léger on Main Street started as George Léger's Hotel de France in 1851; when San Andreas took the county seat in 1866, Léger bought the abandoned stone courthouse and folded it into the hotel. Its bar, whose back bar reportedly came around Cape Horn, has been in use ever since. The I.O.O.F. Hall (Landmark No. 256) was reportedly the first three-story building built inland from California's coast. The Congregational Church (Landmark No. 261) is the oldest of its kind in the state.
Mokelumne Hill sits along Highway 49 in California's Gold Country, the Mother Lode road that connects most of the surviving Gold Rush towns. The Historic Hotel Léger still rents rooms and serves dinner from the original courthouse-and-saloon building at 8304 Main Street. The town is small enough to walk in an hour; the surviving 1850s and 1860s stone-and-brick storefronts cluster on Main Street and the side blocks. San Andreas, the present county seat, is six miles south. Sacramento is about 70 miles northwest. The Calaveras Heritage Council maintains the visitor information.