Big Oak Flat and the Tree That Named a Town

A short distance from Groveland along Highway One Hundred Twenty lies a place called Big Oak Flat, and the name is the obituary of a tree. In the gold rush years, a group of miners dug their way around the roots of an enormous white oak that had stood as a landmark in the foothills for generations, undermining its root system in the search for gold-bearing gravel beneath. The tree, which had been large enough to be known simply as the Big Oak, was undermined by the digging and was eventually lost.

The flat where it had stood was already giving its name to the settlement growing up around the diggings, and when the tree was gone the name remained as an accidental monument. Big Oak Flat at its peak in the early eighteen fifties was a genuine mining town, with a hotel, stores, a post office, and a diverse population of American, Mexican, Chilean, and Chinese miners all working the same gulches under very different legal and social conditions. The richest placer claims were staked by American miners who enforced their claims by exclusion.

Others worked the tailings, the gravel already processed once, and found enough to stay. Today Big Oak Flat is a small community on California Highway One Hundred Twenty, its gold rush origin largely invisible beneath a century and a half of ordinary living. The tree that gave it the name is remembered only by the name itself.