Yolo: The County Seat Nobody Remembers

The small community you pass through called Yolo was briefly the seat of Yolo County, though almost nobody knows it. In eighteen forty-nine a man named Thomas Cockran built a hotel at a crossing here, and the place became known as Cacheville after a courthouse was built in eighteen fifty-seven. The Patwin people had called this territory yo-loy, meaning abounding in rushes, and that name eventually took hold.

But a few miles south, Yolo City grew faster, got the railroad, moved the county seat to itself in eighteen sixty-two, and renamed itself Woodland. The original county seat, stripped of its courthouse and its importance, quietly became a small farming hamlet and kept only the name of the county it used to govern.