Old Hangtown

HANGTOWN GALS ARE PLUMP AND ROSY

HAIR IN RINGLETS MIGHTY COZY;

PAINTED CHEEKS AND GASSY BONNETS;

TOUCH THEM AND THEY’LL STING LIKE HORNETS.

HANGTOWN GALS ARE LOVELY CREATURES, 

THINK THEY’LL MARRY MORMON PREACHERS;

HEADS THROWN BACK TO SHOW THEIR FEATURES

HA, HA, HA! HANGTOWN GALS!

THEY’RE DREADFUL SHY OF FORTY-NINERS,

TURN THEIR NOSES UP AT MINERS;

SHOCKED TO HEAR THEM SAY “GOL DURN IT!”

TRY TO BLUSH, BUT CANNOT COME IT.

HANGTOWN GALS ARE LOVELY CREATURES, 

THINK THEY’LL MARRY MORMON PREACHERS;

HEADS THROWN BACK TO SHOW THEIR FEATURES

HA, HA, HA! HANGTOWN GALS!

The above song, “Hangtown Gals,” was written by a creative fellow by the name of John A. Stone, who came out to California in 1850 to strike it rich, but made a name for himself by writing simple little songs about Gold Rush life.  He used a pseudonym, “Old Put,” when he published a book of his songs called Put’s Original California Songster.  This was first published in Sacramento by Gardiner and Kirk in 1854.  Further editions were published by D. E. Appleton and Company of San Francisco, with the most readily available 18th edition of 1868 going for $250 in antiquarian book shops today.  Apparently he knew something about Hangtown, for it inspired a song.

The town was only called Hangtown for about three years, though it has been known as Hangtown all along.  Before that the area was called “Dry Diggins,” because the miners had to cart the dry soil down to the running water to wash out the gold.  The name “Hangtown” took hold when in 1849, three men were tried for murder by a citizens’ jury and a majority decided hanging was in order.  The criminals were hanged from the giant white oak tree that is now the site of the former Hangman’s Tree Tavern.  You can’t miss it, marked by the dummy hanging from a rail of wood off the side of the Main Street building.  The stump of the original tree is still in the cellar.

The town was incorporated in 1854 as Placerville, named after the placer mining going on and at the time was the third largest city in California (Los Angeles was the fifteenth largest).  The name Hangtown didn’t suit the Temperance League or the Methodist Episcopal Church, though businesses to this day enjoy using the name Hangtown and so, in a way, the city has two names.  However, the history of Hangtown, being so short lived, is really the history of Placerville.  The Placerville one sees now on a stroll down Main Street is largely a twentieth century Placerville, though here and there evidence of Old Hangtown survives.

The mining industry went on until World War II, though this was organized as opposed to the original Gold Rush era of 1849 when men came from all over to dig up the hills and pan the rivers.  Back then, Placerville was a tent city.  Soon it grew to a meandering village of plank wood shacks and log cabins that in old photos look like a kid’s toothpick house school project.  Samuel A. Lane wrote in his diary of 1850 that Hangtown was a “great place for gambling and drinking” and that he also attended a temperance meeting on the evening he rode into town.  Gambling and drinking on the one hand and temperance meetings and the Methodist church on the other hand––aside from mining, that was the culture of Hangtown. 

A silver strike in Nevada kept steady traffic going through Placerville and so there were plenty of hotels.  Now we only think of the Cary House, but in the nineteenth century there were many more hotels such as the Placer Hotel at Main and Sacramento Street.  There was also the Ohio House at Main and Sacramento Street, with its flag pole out front of a bright white washed exterior and attractive verandah across the second story.  Inside was a popular bar that boasted the finest wine, brandy and cigar selections around.  There was also the Central House Hotel, the Western Hotel with its own popular bar and restaurant next to the City Hall, and Harry Tom’s on Coloma Street, which was previously known as the Klondike Hotel.  Jacob Zeisz figured he could make more gold brewing beer than mining and started the California Brewery in 1859.  In 1884 he made a trip to Bavaria and was never heard of again.  His wife, Dorothea, turned the brewery into a rooming house and restaurant to support her abandoned ten children.  

1855 was the year the twenty-eight year old John Thompson walked into the post office looking for a job.  The mail was piling up because the post office couldn’t get it over the summit during the snowy winter and John Thompson thought he could carry it over by hiking on foot.  The postmaster didn’t have the authority to give Thompson the contract because he needed the standing contracted carrier to sign over to Thompson, but the carrier had disappeared.  On the hope of the red tape getting worked out eventually, Thompson insisted he could get the mail delivered to Nevada and set out to do so without any pay.  He could snowshoe it to the summit in three days and ski down in two (some reports have him making it to the summit in two days and down in one).  As a native of Norway he understood skiing and so back and forth he went for thirteen years until the Southern Pacific rail road completed its Sierra Nevada route and could carry the mail more efficiently.  He traveled to Washington D. C. to try to make a case for compensation for his work as a postal carrier, but since he never had a contract the Federal Government said he didn’t have a claim and was turned away.  The citizens of his half residence of Genoa, Nevada rallied to his cause and bought him a small ranch and the town marks his importance with a statue today.  On the other end of his route in Placerville there is also a statue to honor “Snowshoe Thompson” at the corner of Main and Sacramento Streets.

The oldest building still standing on Main Street just touches the days of Old Hangtown, for it was built in 1852.  It was the Tallman Soda Factory established by John Fountain and is now the Historical Society museum.  In 1860, the still standing Confidence Engine Building was established.  I always knew it as the City Hall, but apparently it was a fire house originally and the name came from the fact that when the Mountaineer Engine Company bought a used fire engine it had the name Confidence painted on it.  Rather than paint over it they just changed the name of the fire company to match.

1856 was a devastating year of three major fires that burned down Main Street and so came the idea of the Bell Tower as a way to alarm the city.  This idea not only served as a solution, but gave the city an iconic central structure and thereafter the area became known as the plaza.  I never heard anyone call it that when I was growing up in the 1970s, but “The Plaza” makes it sound very fancy––much more fancy than it is.  By 1860, Main Street took on the configuration we know today, though most of those buildings are long gone and the street wasn’t paved until the automobile came along.  

A few other nineteenth century buildings that managed to stick around include the very impressive Masonic Building from 1893, which was built from 85,000 bricks hauled from Sacramento.  A famous street level resident of the Masonic was Don Goodrich's Sportsman’s Shop, which sold everything from sporting and hunting supplies to appliances and eventually car tires.  In 1849, the Round Tent Store was literally a round tent that sold mining supplies.  From 1929 and many years after, the square building called “Round Tent Store” that currently stands was a clothing store and now is a restaurant.  Combellack’s Clothing Store has been family run at 339 Main Street since 1888, and it’s amazing that through all the years with the other clothing stores like the Round Tent, Cash Mercantile and Florence's fading away, Combellack’s made it to the end of 2019––where else could a teen rent a tux for the prom?  Pearson’s Soda Works was a one story building in 1859 and it was in 1897 that the second story was added to give it the look we know today.  Bottling soda water was the original purpose, but in the 1970s it was an ice cream soda parlor.  Upstairs was a restaurant that I thought of as fine dining, though its reputation diminished and it went out of business by the 1980s.  For a time, the short lived Main Street Theatre Company produced dinner theater productions upstairs.  Now it is a nifty coffee house, cafe and pub called Cozmic Cafe.

The Mountain Democrat, being established in 1851 as The El Dorado News when it was located in Coloma, is a true original Hangtown era business.  In that same year the paper was moved to Hangtown and became The El Dorado Republican.  The paper was renamed as The Mountain Democrat in 1854 when Thomas Springer sold it to Dan W. Gelwicks and William A. January.  From 1879 it was first located on the south side of Main Street a few doors from the Cary House, but moved to the north side of the street next to the Placerville Hardware to take advantage of Hangtown Creek behind the building to operate a Pelton Water Wheel which powered the presses.  The newspaper was still at that location when I was in high school, but moved to a dead Safeway supermarket on Broadway to enable a much needed expansion in 1991.  During the nineteenth century there were a number of short lived Gold Rush era papers with names like The Empire County Argus, The Times and Transcript, The Placerville Appeal, and the Squatter Journal among others, but The Mountain Democrat outlived them all.

Direct from the days of Old Hangtown comes the strangely famous culinary delight called the “Hangtown Fry.”  The story goes that a miner who struck gold came booming into the El Dorado Hotel (formerly on the site of the Cary House) and wanted to buy the most expensive dish on the menu.  The cook explained that his most expensive ingredients were eggs, bacon and oysters, so the miner directed the cook to make him something out of those ingredients. The result was an omelet of bacon and breaded oysters.  This dish became a menu staple from that time on and when the Cary House replaced the El Dorado Hotel, the dish was kept on the menu.  For years it was the Blue Bell Cafe that famously served the omelet from the 1930s to the 1970s and it has been adopted by restaurants all over.  The 160 year old Tadisch Grill in San Francisco has been serving it all along.  For a time, New York’s 21 Club included it on their brunch menu and it can now be ordered in Brooklyn at the Stone Park Cafe, however they deep-fry their breaded oysters for a twist.  A Food.com recipe for the dish includes nutmeg and parsley into the mix.  Today the Gold Rush delight has appeared as an occasional special at the Old Town Grill and regularly at the Buttercup Pantry (although I understand they don’t use fresh oysters, which diminishes the dish quite a bit).  The original Blue Bell recipe was still being served at Chuck’s on Broadway until it closed in 2013.

305 Main Street, that building with the hanging dummy named George is California Historic Landmark No. 141.  The former bar within closed in 2008, for the building was considered unsafe along with the next door Herrick Building.  After much debate a team was  assembled to restore the site to its 1850s appearance.  The building identifying the all important spot of the great white oak where the criminals were hanged is pretty essential to a town that trades on its old west history.  Since 2017, the old Hangtown Tavern has become Hangman's Tree Ice-Cream Saloon with as much of the old place being preserved as possible––including the historic mural of the town across one wall behind the bar.  

I close with a song, again by J. A. Stone, but in collaboration with J. Brougham, that has a sorrow to it, for it describes the end of the Gold Rush era and in that sense it is about the end of Old Hangtown, which hadn’t really existed for years when the gold mining industry really came to a close.

“The Land We Adore”

THE GLEAM OF THE CAMPFIRES OF EMIGRANT TRAINS

IS SELDOM NOW SEEN ON THE FARAWAY PLAINS,

FROM HIS EYRIE THE EAGLE LOOKS DOWN IN DISDAIN,

AS THE STEAM WHISTLE SHRIEKS OUT ITS STARTING REFRAIN,

OUR CAMPFIRES NO LONGER ILLUME THE RAVINE,

THE PAN AND THE ROCKER ARE RARELY NOW SEEN,

FRIJOLES AND FLAPJACKS, OUR DIET OF YORE,

LIKE A VISION HAVE FLOWN TO RETURN NEVER MORE.

NOW FOND RECOLLECTIONS OF LONG AGO TIMES,

COME ECHOING BACK LIKE THE MUSIC OF CHIMES,

OUR THOUGHTS WANDER BACK TO THE LAND WE ADORE,
BEYOND THE SIERRAS, PACIFIC'S LOVED SHORE.

Hangtown Fry as sold at Stone Park Cafe in Brooklyn, NY.