Three Hours in the Old West

Late entry for Thursday:

We arrived in Jacksonville and lapped the town center a couple of times looking for the specially sign-posted RV parking. Eventually we took a bus parking space and hoped for the best (and it was fine).

Our aim was to start with the town museum, then do a walking tour of the town. Alas the museum didn’t open for another hour, so instead we walked up the hill to the historic cemetery. There was a lot of complaining from the small set – it was very hot – but when we got to the cemetery they found it pretty interesting. The cemetery is divided into sections: Catholic, Jewish, City, Freemasons, “Independent Order of Red Men”, and so on. Some of the gravestones commemorate the original settlers in the area: We found a sprinkling of people who had arrived (and died) in the 1850s.

Three things struck us:
(1) There were a lot of very ornate stones that must have been expensive to set, a sign of how important the memorials were to the families. We found one stone that was obviously homemade which had been set in 1930 – Little Starlet realized that this was probably because of the Depression. (So “Annie” was good for something.)
(2) There were a lot of babies and small children in the cemetery, some born and died on the same day, many age 5 and under. The kids found this sad.
(3) People had come to Jacksonville from a wide range of places, including Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Ireland; and from New York, Kentucky, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. We didn’t spot anyone from Great Britain or California.

Back in town we had lunch at the “Bella Union” Italian restaurant and walked down the main street, taking a quick look at one of the town wells and many photos of the Wild West frontages. It was quite like Angels Camp on the way to Bear Valley.

We popped into the museum for 45 minutes. It was staffed by a boy and girl aged about 14, both of whom seemed very keen for us to enjoy our visit and fully appreciate their town. It was really pretty sweet. The museum itself was worth the time, with a nicely done display of pioneer materials, information about mining, life in the old town, and the local Ansel Adams, a man called Peter Britt. Jacksonville came to life as a mining camp in 1852 when gold was found. By 1855 most of the gold had gone, and the miners went too. It then turned into a logging and wool town, and also developed a fruit farming hinterland (especially pears). The railroad bypassed Jacksonville in the 1880s and the town got stuck in a time warp.

It was a nice little diversion which didn’t take us too far out of our way, and pleasantly rounded off the cultural portion of our trip.