The next line started where the last one ended. Four Sacramento merchants — Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker, the "Big Four" — backed Theodore Judah's scheme for a railroad over the Sierra, and in 1863 the Central Pacific broke ground in Sacramento. Crews blasted and bored east through the mountains until, in 1869, the line met the Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah, and the country was bound together by rail. The roundhouses and shops stayed in Sacramento; today the California State Railroad Museum, the largest in the United States, anchors the Old Sacramento waterfront.
The gold itself was found upriver. In January 1848 James Marshall spotted flakes in the tailrace of a sawmill at Coloma, and within a year the world arrived. Sacramento, sitting at the head of river navigation where the goldfields met the water, became the great supply hub of the Rush — the Embarcadero port, the wholesale houses, the wagon roads up into the Sierra. The city was platted at the end of 1848 and incorporated in 1850, the oldest incorporated city in California, a boomtown built to outfit a gold rush.
Why People Visit Sacramento
Sacramento rewards travelers who want history, rivers, and shade rather than a beach — the Gold-Rush waterfront, the railroad that started here, the capitol, and a walkable grid under a famous tree canopy. People come for Old Sacramento and the Railroad Museum, for the Capitol and the gold bridge, and for an easy California day where frontier history and a leafy capital city sit side by side at the meeting of two rivers.
