Dutch Flat: Gold, Hydraulics, and the Railroad

Dutch Flat was named for German immigrants, not Dutch ones. Joseph and Charles Dornbach, from Germany, staked claims here in the spring of eighteen fifty-one, and the settlement took their nickname: Dutch Charlie's Flat. By eighteen fifty-three, more than six thousand people had arrived, including roughly three thousand five hundred Chinese miners.

Hydraulic mining took hold in the years that followed, reaching industrial scale in the eighteen seventies. Then, in the eighteen sixties, Central Pacific Railroad engineers used Dutch Flat as a supply base while surveying the Sierra Nevada route. The town that gold built helped build the transcontinental railroad.