Coarsegold: Named for What Was in the Ground
Near Oakhurst, California
About eight miles south of Oakhurst on Highway Forty One, the small community of Coarsegold takes its name from one of the most vivid episodes in Sierra Nevada mining history. In the eighteen fifties, placer gold miners working the streams in these foothills discovered gold in an unusual form: large, coarse flakes, far bigger than the fine gold dust common in most placer operations. The discovery set off a rush to the area, and the community that sprang up around the miners' camps took the name Coarsegold, naming itself for the particular quality of the metal in the ground.
Placer mining worked the streams through the eighteen fifties and eighteen sixties, and then hard-rock mining followed when the easy surface deposits were exhausted. By the eighteen seventies the main rush had passed, and Coarsegold settled into the quieter role of a small ranching and farming community in the foothills. It never grew into a proper town the way some mining camps did.
Today Coarsegold is a small community along the highway, and the Chukchansi Gold Resort and Casino operated by the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians continues, in its own twenty-first-century way, the tradition of finding value in these hills.
