Fred Coleman and the First Gold in San Diego County
Near Julian, California
In the winter of eighteen sixty nine and seventy, a man named Fred Coleman was riding through a creek bed west of where the town of Julian would soon stand. He spotted something glinting in the water. It was gold.
Coleman was most likely born into slavery. After the Civil War ended and emancipation became real, he made his way west, eventually settling in the mountains of San Diego County. His discovery set off one of the largest gold rushes in Southern California history.
Within weeks, eight hundred or more prospectors were streaming into the Cuyamaca Mountains. Coleman himself filed claims and worked the land. The gold rush he started would build a town.
And yet Julian's founding mythology long centered on the Confederate veterans who settled here after Coleman's find, leaving Coleman's role underacknowledged for generations. The Smithsonian Magazine has since documented how this small mountain town became simultaneously a Confederate settler enclave and one of the largest African American communities in nineteenth century San Diego County, with nearly sixty percent of the county's Black population living here by eighteen eighty. The discovery of gold in these mountains was Fred Coleman's contribution.
He was here first, and what came after began with him.
