Volcano California
— — a Gold Rush town the highway forgot.
Not only on a wall.
“A small village in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Amador County, in a bowl-shaped basin off State Route 88. Gold was found in the gulch in 1848; by the mid-1850s the camp held something like five thousand miners, three breweries, and a Thespian society. Most of them are gone now. The 2010 census counted 115 residents. The St. George Hotel, built in 1862 and still operating, stands on the same block as Old Abe, a Civil War bronze cannon. Three miles north, at Daffodil Hill, the McLaughlin family planted bulbs from the 1880s onward; in good years more than three hundred thousand bloom in March.
Volcano California, 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.
Volcano is an unincorporated community in Amador County, California, set in a small bowl in the Sierra Nevada foothills about forty miles south of Placerville. The name comes from the bowl-shaped depression of the townsite, which early miners mistook for an extinct volcanic crater; the geology is sedimentary, not volcanic. Gold was discovered in the gulch in 1848 by soldiers of Colonel Stevenson's New York Volunteers returning from the Mexican-American War. By the mid-1850s the camp held a peak population estimated at five thousand and ranked among the largest of the Mother Lode towns. The 2010 federal census counted 115 residents. The town is registered as California Historical Landmark No. 29.
Three miles north of Volcano, the McLaughlin family began planting daffodils on a hillside above their ranch in the 1880s. Their granddaughter, Mary Ryan McLaughlin, continued the planting through the twentieth century. At peak bloom in March and early April the hill carries more than three hundred thousand daffodils across about six acres of pasture, with old farm equipment, a small chapel, and a wooden barn scattered among the rows. The McLaughlin family closed Daffodil Hill to the general public in 2019 after the access road was overwhelmed; a small number of organised group visits resume in years when conditions allow. The bloom itself runs from mid-March through mid-April most years.
The block running along Main Street holds most of what survived the great mining-town turnover. The St. George Hotel, a three-story brick building completed in 1862, has operated continuously since, with its narrow balconies and painted lettering still intact. Old Abe, a bronze field cannon cast at the Boston Naval Yard and used by the local Volcano Blues militia during the Civil War, sits a few doors down in a brick alcove. A Wells Fargo office, a stone jail, and an I.O.O.F. hall fill out the same block, all built between 1854 and 1872. About half the historic structures listed for Amador County by the Office of Historic Preservation fall within a quarter-mile of the Volcano post office.