Penryn, California

When Welsh quarryman Griffith Griffith arrived in California, he bypassed the gold fields and looked at the granite bedrock instead. An experienced stoneworker, he recognized something more durable than placer gold: the Sierra Nevada granite along what is now Interstate Eighty. By eighteen sixty-four he had opened a quarry near the Central Pacific right-of-way and named his company town Penrhyn, after the great slate district of North Wales.

The spelling softened to Penryn, but the Welsh connection remains. Stone from Griffith's quarry went into the foundations of the California State Capitol, and the San Francisco Mint. The Griffith Quarry is now a park and museum just off the freeway, a California Historical Landmark honoring the man who looked at a Gold Rush and saw rock.