Placerville
El Dorado County

The road out of Coloma is particularly sinuous as it slithers toward Placerville, the county seat of El Dorado County. The nine miles interval can take nearly an hour to travel on occasion depending on traffic, weather, and how much you want to soak in.
In every direction there is a revelation and a remembrance. The Marchini pear orchards soothe the eye as the picker's huts slumber in the shade. The road cruises above an apple orchard like a crow riding the thermals. The incongruous vision of nearly a mile of fence posts topped with old cowboy boots passes by on your left. And everywhere is the red dirt. It is hidden in spots by the vegetation planted by residents, blocked from view by construction and barriers, but it is there. Enduring. Abiding. Alluring like a beautiful women's makeup. Mysterious like a smile at midnight.

About a mile from downtown Placerville, Highway 49 passes through a residential area mixed with Victorian and contemporary structures, but many have a similar characteristic -- they either rise well above the roadway on the sloped hillsides or drop below eye level on the contrary side of the incline. There are seemingly no flat spots in Placerville.

The Mother Lode Mother Road crosses Highway 50 at this point. This roadway is an interstate highway of sorts as it stretches from California to the Atlantic shore, but follows the continental backway rather than the throughway. It is sometimes described as the first transcontinental highway, dating from the turn of the 20th century. A couple of stoplights allow Highway 49 and local traffic to cross, the only signals for hundreds of miles along Highway 50.

Past this hurrying parade, Placerville pops into view. The main street is amazingly called Main Street. rather uncommon in Gold Rush towns. The thoroughfare is agreeably crooked and follows historic mule pack train trails. It features a fork at town center that is marked by a venerable fire bell tower. The fork is symbolic of Placerville's mindset -- for the town mixes the old and the new in a curious but acceptable fashion. The downtown feature storefronts with old western style facades and are a palette of earth tones -- brown, green, and bluish. But the old buildings have new contents. It is a reverse facelift in a way. Instead of a new face on an old exterior, it is an old surface with fresh interiors. The businesses are typical of the larger Gold Country towns, with an emphasis on tourism and free enterprise in full riot. There are several bookstores, antique shoppes, restaurants, art galleries, consignments shops, and home furnishing emporiums. There are a number of saloons -- some are dark hard-drinking dens and others are yuppie body bars. Three interesting structures are the Placerville Hardware Store, the Cary House Hotel, and the County Courthouse. The Placerville Hardware Store touts itself as the "oldest continually operating hardware store west of the Mississippi." The jury is probably out on whether that is true, but it certainly looks likes it has been in operation for almost 150 years. It is a classic old-style establishment, not your up-to-the-minute chrome-bedazzled supermarket of nuts-and-bolts. The imposing three-story red brick Cary House dates from 1860. It was from the second-floor balcony that the famous newspaper editor Horace Greeley delivered a rousing speech about his hair-raising, rough-and-tumble stagecoach ride from Genoa, Nevada, to Placerville.

The County Courthouse is a stately faux classical style government building that emits a cool efficiency. It stands in contrast to the warmer, homier aspects of the rest of town.

Across Main Street is the Hangman's Tree Historic Spot. This saloon refers to Placerville's earliest incarnation as Hangtown. The Gold Rush boomtown had a string of lynchings and was known by this macabre moniker until 1854. The bar marks the spot of the Elstner's Hay Yard hanging tree. A plaque of the wall indicates that the tree's stump is still under the building. Just so you don't miss the point, a life-size dummy victim hangs from a noose above the entrance.

Placerville also is celebrated as the originator of the "Hangtown Fry." The story goes that a placer miner struck it rich. He approached a local restaurateur and asked what were the three most expensive items on the menu. When informed that the three were eggs, bacon, and oysters, the miner exclaimed, "Well, fry 'em up!" and the Hangtown Fry was born. Some places in town still serve up this tantalizing concoction.

It is the geobiographical stew that gives Placerville additional interest. This blending of noteworthy personalities and legendary landscape provides this Gold Country town with a certain stature that others are hard pressed to match. All the Mother Lode towns have claims to fame, but Placerville had a more frequent intersection of celebrity and location.