From Garrote to Groveland: A Town That Changed Its Name

The town now called Groveland was known by a different name for its early years, a name that told you something about the kind of justice that prevailed in the early California gold fields. When gold seekers flooded into the Sierra Nevada foothills during the gold rush, a camp sprang up here in the hills between the San Joaquin Valley and the high country beyond, and someone gave it the name Garrote. The Spanish word for execution by strangulation.

The naming is traditionally attributed to an early event when a horse thief, or perhaps a suspected murderer, accounts differ on the charge, was hanged from a tree near the camp. Whatever the facts, the name Garrote stuck to this place for many years, through the placer mining boom and the quartz mining that followed it, through the construction of the wagon road to Yosemite that passed directly through town, and through the gradual transformation of the camp into a settled community. Later the town renamed itself Groveland.

One story credits a man named Benjamin Savory, who wanted to attract respectable settlers and tourists heading for the newly famous Yosemite Valley and felt that a name meaning strangling death was the wrong advertisement. Groveland, suggesting a pleasant grove of trees and the kind of domesticity that tourists expected, was the chosen alternative. The strategy worked reasonably well.

In later years, Groveland had hotels, a general store, a school, and a steady stream of travelers passing through on their way east into the mountains. The gold was largely played out in the placer diggings by then, but the town had found a new identity as a gateway, a place you passed through on the way to something astonishing. State Highway One Hundred Twenty, the main road from the Central Valley into Yosemite's northwest entrance, still runs through Groveland's main street, and the town still makes its living as a stop on the way to the mountains.