Visit Dates: May 31 AND July 23, 2021
Sometimes (often?) I run into problems finding these old buildings. Despite the picture in Geologic Guidebook, use of old maps, internet searches, and the like, I just can't always find the old structure. Usually this happens when searching out in the countryside, where the survey authors might describe the location as a half-buried stone house that sits just past a grove of oak trees about a mile and half north of town sitting on the left side of some long ago re-routed side road. The buildings in town are almost always easier to find. That said, I didn't think I would have such a problem finding the Wilcox Warehouse in Placerville.
Surprisingly, despite there being photos of over 100 buildings in the 1948 Building Structures Survey, there is only one image for Placerville. In the authors' description of Placerville, they mention the town's many fine brick buildings and houses, a quarry, and they even call out the El Dorado County Chamber of Commerce building which was an excellent structure "made of dressed blocks of rhyolite tuff." However they judged the Wilcox Warehouse as "the nicest of the old buildings...built of carefully selected blocks of andesite conglomerate and schist." Sounds like a really great building, however I'll never know. It seems to have been torn down in the late 1980s or 1990s, to make way for a super great office/retail building, which you can see above. A building that I am sure people will be writing about 100 years from now.
Unfortunately the inventory was just the start of my confusion about where to find the warehouse. The City of Placerville was probably too busy trying to work out that whole "Old Hangtown" issue to notice that the Wilcox Warehouse was on the south side of Hangtown Creek (approximately where "Takeout Delivery" appears on map below) and near where the lost marker had been placed. And the Blair Lumber Company was at a completely different location altogether. On the map below, I believed the Wilcox Warehouse was located at corner of Washington and Spanish Ravine, kitty corner from the Placerville Police Station, while the Thai restaurant is at the corner of Broadway and Mosquito.
Anyway I took my photo of the location that the city told was correct and assumed the building was destroyed and at the location was where they said. However in putting together the post, I did a little more research on the building and found out I was in error about my discovery, as well as confirming that the City had bad info about the location of the building noted in their inventory. But I was just as wrong as the City. Trying to place the building by using an 1910 Sanborn Fire Insurance map, it just did not make sense. The building at the inventory's location was made of brick (red) and used for fuel wood storage. The white building above I figured out was facing completely the wrong direction. Through more digging, I determined that the Wilcox building was south of my incorrect location, across Hangtown Creek. It was at that time identified as a vacant stone building (blue), as seen in the maps below.
The exact location of the Wilcox Warehouse is difficult to precisely identify. Comparing the Sanborn (below) with current days maps it appears that the old Washington Street has been re-routed and is now known as Mosquito Road. Assuming the current-day Washington Street that runs south from the intersection of Main and Spanish Ravine is still located that in the same location as in 1910, then the Wilcox Warehouse was actually sited northeast of the Police Station and the second the two new business buildings. All that said, this image is of that building and was taken while coming back from vacation at South Lake Tahoe, just so I could correct my mistake. Why couldn't they have just picked the Chamber of Commerce building?!?
1 Comment
Sebastian Nelson
7/30/2021 02:22:46 pm
This could seriously be an article in the Mountain Democrat newspaper!
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AuthorMy name is Jeff and I am on a hunt to find historic brick and stone structures along Highway 49. Archives
January 2022
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