Gold and Agriculture: California's Economic Engines

From the Bay Area to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, it's a short drive across the Central valley, and the economic history of Northern California is laid bare. Leaving San Francisco via I-80, you emerge past the Oakland Hills and into the Central Valley, a mixture of agricultural fields and suburban office parks, where land is cheap, buildings sparser and car miles driven accumulate.

The Central Valley has pleasant weather year round - great weather, really. It provides this farmland to the world with 2-3 growing cycles per year. Times have been rough lately, with the current three-year worst-in-a-century drought, labor shortages due to the immigration clampdown, and tough environmental laws. Any romantic connection you may be inclined to have, from reading too much Hemingway or Kerouac, should be suppressed immediately.

In the lowland of the Sacramento Delta, Tahoe traffic fills the roads between Thursday night and Monday morning. You can stop off in Davis, home of the UC Davis Aggies. Davis is a pleasant little town with shady retail offerings, gracious sidewalks, a slow pace, lots of bikers and a lovely central green with a small corner building housing the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame.

Beyond Davis, The highway leads northeast around Sacramento and into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the discovery of gold in the late 1840's shaped nearly a century of California history, building towns, driving immigration and making San Francisco the financial and cultural capital of western America, with iron high rise buildings and banks backed by every country along the Pacific rim.

A small group of gold rush era towns are known as the “gold chain”. Nevada City sits in this area, by Deer Creek. The City of Nevada City is a very small town with about 3,100 residents, down from 10,000 in 1870. The small downtown area, 2 blocks wide and 4 blocks long, slopes down hill, southeast, to Deer Creek. The buildings tend to be wood Victorians, some quite expressive, with some brick commercial buildings mixed in. The front porches of the houses transition to colonnades at the shops and century-old hotels. Vestiges of Nevada City's former prominence as a County Seat can easily be found - there's a Masonic Lodge, an Odd Fellows Hall, a couple of theaters, and more saloons than Dublin. Even an historic small Chinese quarter. Believe it or not, this town has 4 bookstores! Which is more than downtown San Francisco…  

 

Today, the town is a center for the local food / slow food movements, and a weekend getaway town for people from the Bay Area, Sacramento region, Reno, and other Central Valley locales. The real relic of the town’s legacy if the closed Empire Mine, just out of town, which is now reopened as a California State Historic Park.

To round out a weekend road trip we stopped in Chico, not really on the way but not too far either. Home of CSU Chico, it’s very similar to Davis and other small California towns with pleasant weather, a decent historic downtown centered on a plaza, and most importantly a college and all that comes with it. Not too many scholars were about town this holiday weekend, so it still had a mid-winter vibe, with a low sun, long shadows, youngish guys in shorts and a group of veterans congregating in the plaza.