The Central Sierra Me-Wuk thrived in the forests and open lands until explorers and travelers found gold in summer 1848 at the site of Woods Crossing, the first gold mining settlement in what was to become Tuolumne County.  The discoverer of gold was an Oregon prospector, Benjamin Wood and his party, which included James Savage. They called their camp Woods Crossing, and the creek Woods Creek.  About a year later when easily found gold disappeared, the settlement began to move a mile east to the site of present-day Jamestown.

 

Among others, Colonel George James became a gold speculator with Native Americans and miners working for him.  He had a lavish lifestyle with a huge, well-stocked tent and trading post so the town was named in his honor after Colonel James plied them with champagne.  When Colonel James suddenly departed in the night leaving many miners and investors unpaid, they angrily changed the name of Jamestown to American Camp.  That name did not catch on so the name went back to Jamestown or “Jimtown”.  Later in 1850 there was a movement to form a new camp in the northern portion of Jamestown and call it Georgetown, but citizens voted on May 25, 1851 to call both camps by one name, Jamestown, which has remained ever since.

 

Gold Fever brought people from all over the world to the area and many small settlements and towns sprang up as a result.  Places with names like Campo Seco, Yorktown, Poverty Hill and Algerine Camp have disappeared with only a street or road name to remind us of its existence.  Under the mining laws of the Jamestown District, which were enacted in November 1853, “Each miner shall be entitled to one claim of 100 square feet, and no more.”  Other provisions included “All claims hereafter located, must be ditched around them, one foot wide and one foot deep, within three days from the time of location, and notice placed upon them, unless the owners are constantly at work upon them, in which case, stakes at each corner will be sufficient.”  Claim jumping did occur and murders took place as a result.

 

Jamestown was a center of mining, transportation and trading activity, which grew fast as a result.  In town there were many businesses such as a bank, livery stables, doctors offices, drug stores, butcher shops, hotels, saloons, Masonic Hall, bakery and others.  In 1852, the Jamestown Methodist Church was founded and the pre-1861 church building is still in use.  Author Prentice Mulford wrote about teaching there in 1862.  “My school house was the church, built and paid for partly by the gamblers and partly by the good people of Jimtown 'for the use of all sects’ on Sundays, and for educational purposes on week days.”  

 

As gold mining went up and down through the years and hard rock mining came into play, like the Harvard Mine, many fortunes were made in Jamestown.  There have been hard economic times for the town but it has never become a ghost town. Most recently an open pit mine was used to extract gold near the original gold discovery site but closed in 1996 when the price of gold made it unprofitable.

 

Jamestown, like many other such towns, went through a succession of booms and busts. Many towns in the area simply disappeared after the easy pickings of the Gold Rush ended. Jamestown survived, going through two major boom periods, although both eventually fizzeled out, and it never grew as large as its bigger sister, Sonora, which became a business and government center and also sustained itself after the placer mining ran out by rich underground "pocket mines" beneath the city.

 

Jamestown was named for a man named Col. George F. James, a flamboyant attorney who came here from San Francisco with an entourage. He set up shop in a tent near Woods Creek and sold groceries, mining equipment. (The tent at the far right of the drawing here may have been James') He became the town's first alcade, a sort of combination mayor, judge, city clerk, and advisor to all that was part of the Mexican legal system in force at the time. James persuaded the town's population to invest in various schemes that did not pan out, and disappeared overnight, leaving many unhappy residents.

 

Jamestown enjoyed a second boom beginning in the late 1880s. It was known that gold could be found underground, but most of it was embedded in quartz rock. Although some of it, like that in the "pocket mines" of Sonora, was concentrated gold, most of it was lower grade, with relatively little gold per ton of quartz rock. There were a few quartz mines in the 1850s, but the effort faltered because of the difficulty of getting the quartz rock out and of extracting the gold.

 

However, in the late 1880s, pneumatic drills became available that made it easier to place blasting materials. Better techniques for extracting gold from the quartz rock were also developed, including chlorination, and another process, in which gold combined with chemicals, known as sulpherets, were shipped by wagon to furnaces in the San Francisco Bay Area that could recover the gold.

 

Jamestown was at the center of most of the new underground quartz mines, and it boomed again. This boom grew larger for Jamestown when, in 1898, a stream railroad was built to connect the relatively isolated foothills area to the Valley. The railroad first connected Jamestown to Oakdale, 35 miles to the west, which was already part of an extensive railroad network. Jamestown was picked to be the headquarters for the railroad, and many of the workers for the railroad lived in Jamestown, and a roundhouse (which can still be seen today) was built a few blocks from today's downtown.

 

The railroad made it easier, faster, and cheaper to transport quartz ore for processing to the chlorination plants and furnaces, and lumber, which began to be cut and shipped out in greater quantity in the early 1900s, to the rest of California. Supplies were shipped back to the county. Passenger service was also popular, with high school students traveling to school from all over the county to the train station in Sonora, and then walking up the main street to the new Sonora High School north of town.

 

Branch lines for the railroad were built from Jamestown to Sonora, to Angels Camp, and to Tuolumne City. Additional rail lines, financed by the same people who built the Sierra Railway, were built to extend the railroad deep into the forest. From Tuolumne City, where there was a lumber mill, a railroad was built by the West Side Flume and Lumber Company (they abandoned the idea of using a flume to transport logs, but kept the name). From Standard, a few miles east of Sonora, another lumber mill was built, and the Sugar Pine Railroad was built, again deep in the forest through what is now Twain Harte and extending to Lyons Reservoir and to branch lines in many parts of the forest where there were lumber mills.

 

Jamestown's boom persisted into the nineteen teens, but higher costs and shortages of needed supplies--many caused in part by World War 1, made mining more difficult, and mines began closing down. By the end of World War 2, only a few mines were still operating. The Sierra railroad's extensive rail network begain shrinking, faced by competition from motor trucks. The lines to the forests were abandoned, as was the line to Tuolumne City and to Angels Camp.   

 

However, the Sierra Railway itself, unlike the vast majority of other short railway lines, survived, and it continues today, mainly hauling (with diesel locomotives) lumber and lumber products from mills in Standard and Chinese Camp to Oakdale. Jamestown itself has also survived. It was the area's Red Light District until the 1950s, when Governor Pat Brown, then Attorney General, shut that form of entrepreneurism down. Jamestown's economy today is mainly tourism.