Sterlingshire: Gold Rush Gateway on the Pony Express Trail

Green Valley Road, passing through what was once called Sterlingshire, lay along a corridor used by travelers heading into the Sierra Nevada foothills during the Gold Rush years.

The Central Overland Pony Express also passed through this area between eighteen sixty and eighteen sixty-one. Riders carrying mail between Saint Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento could cover nearly two thousand miles in roughly ten days, a feat that made newspaper headlines nationwide. Sterlingshire is now a neighborhood of El Dorado Hills. The quiet road here today gives little hint that for about a decade this ground hummed with the movement of riders, coaches, miners, and merchants at the edge of the American rush westward.