Rocklin: The Granite Town That Built California and Erased Its Builders

Rocklin's name is a corruption of Rockland, and anyone who has seen the bare granite outcrops that push through the ground here understands why early settlers reached for that word. The stone that defines this foothill community is not just geology, it drove two defining chapters of local history.

The Central Pacific Railroad arrived at Rocklin in May eighteen sixty-four, and this is where something important happened: Rocklin was an early rail stop and base on the Central Pacific line as the push into the Sierra Nevada began. Chinese laborers by the tens of thousands worked the grades, the tunnels, and the cuts east of here. At peak construction, an estimated fourteen thousand Chinese workers were employed on the Central Pacific alone, paid thirty to fifty percent less than white workers and responsible for their own food while the railroad provided white employees with room and board in rail cars.

After the transcontinental was complete in eighteen sixty-nine, Rocklin's granite became its own industry. The stone quarried from these hills went into the California State Capitol building in Sacramento and into structures throughout San Francisco. By nineteen twelve, nearly two thousand train carloads of Rocklin granite left town in a single year. At the peak, twenty-two separate quarries operated in the area.

The Chinese workers who had built the railroad were not welcomed into what came after. In September eighteen seventy-six, a group of Chinese residents near Rocklin was forcibly expelled following accusations of a local crime. The community that had carved the path for the transcontinental railroad was driven out of the foothill town that railroad had made possible.

Rocklin today is a growing Sacramento suburb. Traces of the old quarry landscape are still visible in exposed granite bosses and rock cuts scattered through the newer neighborhoods, reminders of the stone that built the state and the people whose story was cut away with it.