Nevada City is a town that speaks history at every turn, the place where miners settled after striking gold along Deer Creek in 1849. A stroll along its downtown is like a trip back in time. The streets are lined with Victorian storefronts and Greek Revival homes, thanks to a 1968 ordinance that preserved the streetscapes and locked the architecture in place.
Today, the mining era is long gone, but its story survives just four miles down the road at Empire Mine in Grass Valley. This is where a century of hard rock mining left behind 367 miles of tunnels and a stone English country estate built from the mine’s own waste rock. The ore might be gone, but the towns remain nearly unchanged.
Spend an afternoon here, and you will leave with a different sense of how gold shapes a place.
Tips
- Walk along Broad Street, the most intact Gold Rush streetscape in California. Start at the 1865 Nevada Theater, stop into the 1861 Firehouse Museum, then follow a smartphone-guided tour of the historic district covering architecture and history from the 1850s onward. The tour takes about 90 minutes total.
- Visit the Empire Mine State Historic Park at Grass Valley. Admission is $5 per adult with free parking. Join a living history tour of Bourn Cottage and the mineyard on weekends, from May through October.