Gold Rush Days

Jill's Journal: Sacramento has got a good thing going. We had the most wonderful family day yesterday at Gold Rush Days. Held every Labor Day weekend for the last 12 years, Gold Rush Days takes Old Sacramento to a new level. Or an old level. The 1850s when California was a brand-new state, to be exact.

Old Sacramento is wonderful on any day: it’s a four-block radius, or 28 acres, of old-time buildings, cobblestone streets, wooden sidewalks, and old-fashioned candy shops (with plenty of modern-day merchants thrown in the historic buildings as well). This is the heart of Sacramento as it used to be and 53 of the buildings here date to the 1800s. Old Sacramento is a National Historic Landmark and a California State Historic Park.

But during the four days of Gold Rush Days, the clock in Old Sacramento truly gets turned back to the 1850s. The city takes more than 200 tons of dirt to cover the streets and make it look like even more like it did in the 1850s. That means no cars. Instead, dozens of horses, mules, donkeys, wagons, and stagecoaches abound. There’s hundreds of costumed performers dressed in 1850s-era clothing. There’s gunfights. There’s Union army camps. There’s old-time bands and bluegrass pickers playing music from the 1800s. The Pony Express runs through town. It’s like stepping back in time and talking a walk through history. This is nostalgia at its best. The girls absolutely loved it. Rob and I did too.

Old Sacramento Schoolhouse Museum isn’t an historic building, but is recreated to look like one. The girls loved sitting in old desks and being able to write on slate boards.

The Pony Express Monument is a fixture in Old Sacramento. The National Pony Express Association recreated the excitement of rides through town during Gold Rush Days, which was fun to see. About 750 of this group’s members annually re-ride the 1,966 mile, eight-state route from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento over a 10-day period. I so want to do this!

Here’s an example of the leather mochila with its four cantinas, or pockets, used to carry letters and telegrams.

I told Rob that growing up in Southern California, I’d never heard two good words about Sacramento. (Northern Cal and Southern Cal don’t always see eye-to-eye…they really should be two different states!) However, we’ve found Sacramento to be a diverse city with a lot to offer. And now Gold Rush Days has completely won me over. If one is here looking for what makes a place unique, this is a great town.

California State Railroad Museum

Jill's Journal: Opened in 1976, California State Railroad Museum is considered to be the preeminent railroad museum in North America. It boasts 225,000 square feet of exhibits, including 21 restored locomotives and railroad cars.

This is another spot in Sacramento that Rob remembers coming to with his Dad when he was around our girls’ ages, so it was special to revisit it and to be able to share it with his own kids.

Highlights include a Pullman sleeping car and this dining car featuring a galley kitchen and displays of railroad china. It really gives one a sense of the days when train travel was treated as a first-class mode of transportation.

This was so interesting: the Last Spike, or Golden Spike, was the ceremonial final spike driven in the Transcontinental Railroad on May 10, 1869. Made of 14 ounces of 17.6-karat copper-alloyed gold, it is now on permanent display at Stanford University. The brainchild behind using a spike of gold was San Francisco financier David Hewes (who, along with Leland Stanford, drove the Last Spike at the railroad’s completion in Utah Territory). Unbeknownst to anyone except the jeweler who made it, Hewes had an identical second Golden Spike made at the time. Hewes and his descendents kept this “Lost Spike” for 136 years before finally making it public in 2005. The Lost Spike is now here at the Railroad Museum.

Wind Back the Clock…

Jill's Journal: We wound back the clock and stepped back in time today for Gold Rush Days at Old Sacramento. What a fantastic event! It’s pure luck we were here during this annual four-day celebration of 1850s California and we’re so thankful we were. To my surprise, there is much to enjoy about Sacramento, but this has got to be the very best thing of all. More tomorrow, as there are so many pictures to go through!

The California Museum

Jill's Journal: Our excursions in Sacramento (Sutter’s Fort, the Capitol building, and Fairytale Town) up until today have all been outstanding, so I suppose we were due for a lousy one! The California Museum was definitely a disappointment. Mostly there were a lot of pictures of famous Californians in the “Hall of Fame” and several exhibits that didn’t quite flow smoothly from one to the next (i.e. Californian Women to Water Resources to Japanese Internment during World War II). Maybe we’ve been privileged to visit so many superb museums on this journey that we are holding places to a higher standard? At any rate, visiting The California Museum definitely felt like a waste of time and money. But I suppose an unsatisfying experience every now and then makes one really appreciate all the great museums out there!

We did manage to uncover a few fun treasures. The apron Betty White wore on the Mary Tyler Moore show was one of them.

Peggy Fleming’s 1968 Olympic Gold Medal was another.

This is an exact replica of the Titanic’s wheel and engine wheel; these were used in James Cameron’s movie Titanic. Apparently, to save money, the set for the movie only included the starboard side of the fateful ship. The film for any scene appearing on the port side had to be flopped in post production.

And this dinosaur is the first model of computer Apple made for individuals (around 1980).

Okay, so we did find some fun things at The California Museum!

California State Capitol

Jill's Journal: Is it really September already? I’m not quite sure that’s possible. Where does time go?

The girls and I took a fascinating tour today of the California State Capitol. Mostly completed by 1869, California’s gorgeous Neoclassical-inspired Capitol is based on the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

There was enough action on the tour to hold the little ones’ attention, while our oldest was spellbound from start to finish. Our tour guide had her at “Minerva.” When Jason, the guide, pointed to the state seal in stained glass on the ceiling and mentioned that the Roman goddess Minerva is part of the seal, Erika immediately whispered to me that Rome’s Minerva is the same goddess as Greece’s Athena. Sure enough, that was the next sentence out of our guide’s mouth. How Erika knows that and retains that is beyond me. I can’t remember what we had for lunch yesterday.

Minerva is on the state seal because California was fast-tracked to statehood when gold was found and didn’t go through all the channels, probation, and growing pains other states did. Minerva, as the story goes, was born a full-grown woman and didn’t have to go through childhood, which is why California identifies with her. She appears all throughout the Capitol building. On the seal, Minerva is joined by a California Grizzly Bear (now extinct), a gold prospector, the term “Eureka” (Greek for “I Found It”), the Sacramento River, the Sierra Nevada mountains, and 31 stars representing California’s admission to the Union as the 31st state.

The rotunda of the Capitol is grand and elaborate. It was designed to impress and it succeeds mightily.

All the gold you see in the dome (i.e. the bead-like "frames")? That’s not paint. That’s real, actual, honest-to-goodness gold, all mined right here in Gold Country. They don’t call it the Golden State for nothing.

The girls really liked this statue on the first floor of the rotunda. In place since 1883 and entitled “Columbus’ Last Appeal to Queen Isabella,” the scene depicts Columbus holding a globe. Even though Columbus never came close to California, it is said California better embodies Columbus’ vision of wonders beyond the horizon than any other state.

Here are the girls at the doors to the Governor’s office. He was inside. They thought that was pretty neat.

Erika has been fascinated by the presidency since we went to Lincoln’s birthplace (in July, 2010) and after today, that has carried over into governorship as well. She thought it was so incredibly amazing to see the portrait of Ronald Reagan from his time as Governor of California (far left), knowing that he actually worked here in this very building and went on to the U.S. Presidency.

The lone odd portrait among all the stately ones is the one on the right of current Governor Jerry Brown.

This is the Assembly chamber. The portrait is of Abraham Lincoln and the green color scheme is based on the British House of Commons.

The desks date back to 1869, when government first moved into the Capitol. The 80 assemblymen still vote using the red or green buttons on the top right of the desks.

And the Senate chamber, presided over by a portrait of George Washington. Its red tones reference the British House of Lords. Here, the 40 senators vote by a simple “Aye” or “No.”

We hung out on the front steps of the Capitol for a bit after our tour and peoplewatched. Seeing the Capitol was really a worthwhile way to spend the afternoon. We’ve never been inside any other state capitols. Are they all this nice and the tours so interesting?