Old Town of Shasta

Shasta was the Queen City of the Northern Mines — the 1849 Reading Springs tent camp that became, within a year, the commercial capital of everything north of the Mother Lode. By 1852 more than $2.5 million in gold had passed through; during the peak years over $100,000 in dust moved through town every week, a hundred freight teams a day on the road that ended at Shasta and became the Oregon pack trail.

The town rebuilt itself in brick after fire leveled it twice in six months — December 1852 and again in mid-1853 — producing the longest row of brick buildings north of San Francisco, iron-shuttered and fireproofed by a merchant class that had learned the lesson twice. It was the county seat, the Masonic lodge's Western Star No. 2 brought across the plains in 1848, the whole apparatus of a metropolis at the edge of the diggings.

The railroad did to Shasta what it did to every town it skipped — the Central Pacific's 1873 terminal went to Redding, the county seat followed in 1888, and the Queen City settled into being a ghost town with the longest brick row in the north still standing. The state historic park keeps the ruins: the brick shells on Main Street, the courthouse and Masonic hall, and the five cemeteries on the hills — Catholic, Protestant, Masonic, Odd Fellows, and the Chinese graves — where 'killed by the Indians' is a frequent inscription.

Old Town of Shasta is the archive's Queen City file — the 1849 northern-mines capital that burned twice and rebuilt in brick, then died when the railroad chose Redding, keeping its brick row and its cemeteries as a state historic park.