Columbia State Historic Park

There is a version of Columbia, California, in which everything interesting happened in about four years. The placer gold was found in the spring of eighteen fifty. By eighteen fifty-two, the camp had roughly fifteen thousand people, its own newspaper, its own express office, and three churches. By the mid-eighteen-fifties, the richest surface gold was gone. The population left. The buildings stayed.

That last part is the important one. In most mining camps, the buildings did not stay. They were torn down for lumber, burned, or simply fell apart. Columbia's brick storefronts and stone buildings were too solid and too expensive to demolish, and the town was too remote from the nearest railroad to have any obvious commercial future that would justify redeveloping the land. So the buildings sat, and the town slowly declined, and decades passed, and the structures survived.

What the state of California eventually found, when it established Columbia as a state historic park, was something genuinely rare: a nearly complete Gold Rush commercial street, with the original buildings still standing and still in rough correspondence to the town as it existed in the rush. The Columbia you can walk through today is the closest approximation to a Gold Rush town that survives intact anywhere in California.

What a walk through it also shows you, if you pay attention to what is not there, is the Chinese quarter that occupied the eastern end of the district. It was erased before the preservation effort reached it. The Chinese miners and merchants who built part of this town are not represented in the park's streetscape the way the white commercial district is. Preservation is never neutral about what it preserves, and Columbia is a good example of that principle in practice.