![]() Monroe’s grandparents had eventually settled as free citizens in Coloma, where they raised kids and fruit orchards and became prominent, suit-wearing members of the community. He declined the offer, hoping for a higher price. By the nineteen-thirties, Coloma had become a faded, rural town, with few economic prospects.Ī Black descendant of enslaved Americans brought to California during the gold rush, Monroe was proud of the family’s land holdings. In the late nineteen-thirties, state officials offered Monroe twenty-five hundred dollars for “the place of shifting gravel and flowing water where Sutter’s Mill once stood,” as a local paper put it. One of the local landowners was Pearley Monroe, who worked as a janitor in California’s State Capitol building, about fifty miles away. Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world swarmed the Pacific Coast to mine for gold, sparking a vast economic boom. He discovered the precious metal in rocks near a sawmill he was building for John Sutter-a Swiss German businessman and early settler of California-on the banks of the American River. ![]() They offered to buy plots of land from a dozen local families and businesses in Coloma, in the Sacramento Valley this was where John Marshall, nearly a hundred years earlier, had famously found gold. history and transformed the American West. ![]() During the final years of the Great Depression, officials in California set out to build a state park to commemorate the centennial of the discovery of gold in 1848, an event that set off the largest mass migration in U.S. ![]()
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