Jacksonville: The Town Under the Reservoir
Near Groveland, California
The town of Jacksonville no longer exists. It was a substantial gold rush settlement established in eighteen forty-nine on the Tuolumne River, a community that at its peak had a courthouse, churches, hotels, and a permanent population large enough to send a company of men off to the Civil War. Jacksonville survived the end of the gold rush by becoming a farming and ranching community.
What it could not survive was water. The original Don Pedro Dam was completed in nineteen twenty-three on the Tuolumne River below Jacksonville, and the reservoir that formed behind it submerged the lower parts of the town. But it was the New Don Pedro Dam, a much larger structure completed in the early nineteen seventies, that finished the job.
The reservoir behind the new dam is one of the largest in California, and it now covers the site of Jacksonville almost completely. In drought years, when the water level drops, the old townsite occasionally becomes visible again, a ghost in the landscape, stone foundations and the outlines of streets emerging from the mud. Divers have explored the submerged ruins.
Photographs taken in low-water years show how completely a community can disappear. Jacksonville is one of several California towns swallowed by the reservoir system built around the gold rush waterways, drowned not by mining but by the accumulated weight of California's thirst for water in the valleys below.
