RV Lifestyle Amador City One of California’s smallest incorporated cities, with a population of just over 200 residents, Amador City is a little city with a lot to offer. The original mining-era buildings are now home to unique shops including Victorian clothing, customquilts, local handmade gifts, shops offering unique house and garden items, and antiques and books from the Gold Rush Era. You will also find wine tasting, an old-fashioned soda fountain and lunch counter, an artisan bakery and gourmet lunches and dinners. The Imperial Hotel (from 1878) affords visitors an opportunity to stay the night and enjoy Amador City’s Gold Country small-town way of life. It all started upstream from today’s town site. Jose Marie Amador, a wealthy California rancher, mined along this nameless creek in 1848-49. There, gold outcroppings were discovered on both sides of the creek. Soon, the creek, the town and a new county carried Amador’s name. As the “easy” gold was mined on the upper part of the creek, mining and encampments gradually moved to South Amadore, where French Gulch flows into the creek. This is the current site of Amador City. Founded in 1853, the Keystone Mine was the city’s most-famous gold mine and a major reason for the town’s growth. It reached a depth of 2,680 feet and, before closing in 1942, produced an estimated $24 million in gold. Amador City’s oldest structure, built around 1855, is the centre portion of the Amador Hotel. The stone Fleehart Building (now the Whitney Museum) dates from the 1860s. EUREKA Exploring California Gold Country Stretching from El Dorado County south to Mariposa County, the Mother Lode is a continuous 120-kilometre-long zone of hard rock gold deposits. In the spring 2016 issue, we introduced the California Gold Rush Trail. In this issue, we’ll continue our tour of the Gold Country and explore Amador County. Although most of the mining camps faded after the mines closed, tourism has brought some of them back to life. 24 | www.snowbirds.org
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