164 



GEOLOGIC GUIDEBOOK ALONG HIGHWAY 49 



[Bull. 141 



NORTH SAN JUAN 



North San Juan is composed almost entirely of brick structures. 

 All of them date from the 1850 's. The 49 'er Cafe on the corner is the 

 old Wells Fargo Company Office. The adjoining two story building, now 

 a store and bar, is the Masonic Hall (Fig. 162). What is now Bryan's 

 Garage was the San Juan Times Building. The main structure is brick, 

 but attached to the rear is an addition built of rough granite rubble set 

 in lime mortar (Fig. 163), one of the very rare examples of stone con- 

 struction in this brick town. Nowhere is the brick architecture better 

 displayed than in the two story building just east of the 49 'er Cafe, 

 with cast iron grillwork running around the face about halfway up the 

 side (Figs. 164, 165). Two of the arched brick doorways have been, 

 joined with a wooden arch toadmit automobiles when the building was 

 converted to a garage. The lower floor originally housed a store and 

 the upper floor was occupied by offices of the various focal hydraulic 

 mining companies. Across the street is a row of single story commercial 

 buildings such as may be seen in nearly every other Sierran Gold Belt 

 town. 



The bricks were made locally and appear to be unusually firm. Their 

 excellence is in part due to the good clay and the tempering material 

 which is decomposed granite. 



Just above North San Juan near where Highway 49 crosses the 

 Middle Fork of the Yuba River can be seen the remains of the Freeman 

 Toll Bridge. On each side of the river still stand the huge quarried granite 

 abutments. On the north bank is a fine old building built of well dressed 

 granite blocks, and in the general vicinity a number of well made dry 

 rock granite boulder fences made by Chinese in the 'sixties. 



DOWNIEVILLE 



This Gold Rush town marks the northern limit of our survey. The 

 Courthouse which burned recently still exhibits remnants of its stone 



basement and separate outbuilding of boulders and brick. The iron 

 cell-blocks, reminiscent of the Knights Ferry jail, stands amid the court- 

 house ruins. The Pioneer Museum building made of carefully selected 

 schist slabs and with brick doorframes (Fig. 166) dates from the early 

 'fifties. In the rear of the frame Ponta Hotel is a stone celler (Fig. 167) 

 built of schist slabs and river boulders held in mud mortar. This struc- 

 ture dates from the 'sixties. Downieville is built in a steep walled canyon 

 with a narrow bottom, and the standard method of securing building 

 space has been to erect retaining walls to form flat terraces. Excellent 

 dry-laid terrace walls may be seen on both sides of the river ; a typical 

 example is shown in Fig. 168. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



AVERILL, CHARLES V., and others, Placer mining for gold in California : California 

 Div. Mines Bull. 135, 377 pp., 1946. 



BORTHWICK, J. D., Three years in California : W. Blackwood and Sons. 384 pp.. Edin- 

 burgh and London, 1857. Reprinted 1917 as The Gold Hunters edited by Horace 

 Kephart : Outing Pub. Co., Cleveland and Xew York. 



BUCKBEE, EDNA B., The saga of old Tuolumne : R. R. Wilson, 526 pp., Xew York, 1935. 



CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, Centennial papers : Spec. Pub. 21, 56 pp., San 

 Francisco, 1947. 



DBURY, AUBREY, California, an intimate guide : Harper and Bros. : 592 pp., Xew 

 York, 1947. 



GLASSCOCK, C. B., A golden highway : The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 313 pp., Indianapolis, 

 1934. 



JOHNSTON, PHILIP, Lost and living cities of the California gold rush, California cen- 

 tennials guide : Touring Bureau, Automobile Club of Southern California, 61 pp., 

 Los Angeles, 1948. 



RENSCH, H. E., HOOVER, MILDRED B., and others, Historic spots in California, valley 

 and Sierra counties : Stanford Univ. Press and Cambridge Univ. Press, 568 pp., 

 Palo Alto and Cambridge, 1933. 



STELLMAN, Louis J., Mother lod*, the story of California's gold rush days : Harr- 

 Wagner Pub. Co., 304 pp., San Francisco, 1934. 



WESTON, OTHETO, Mother Lode album: Stanford Univ. Press., 177 pp., 2 plates, 204 

 photos, Palo Alto, 1948. 



91294 5-48 5M 



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