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.
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.
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.
