Our Sacramento logo carries the California bear and star above "Est. 1850," the shared retro emblem of our California towns, drawn in worn black-and-white like a WPA poster or an old crate label. The 1850 date marks both California statehood and the year Sacramento incorporated, and the bear of the California Republic is the through-line that links Sacramento to every other California town we make. The detail that makes this one Sacramento is the river city itself — the Gold Rush cobblestones of Old Sac, the gold Tower Bridge over the river, and the City of Trees that grew up around the capitol.
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.
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.
