Two men sit on Main Street in Amador City in the 1950s. The Imperial Hotel sits in the background. photo courtesy to the ledger dispatch Photo by: Courtesy to the Ledger Dispatch

Editor's note: This is the fourth in a five-part series highlighting Amador County cities in the 1950s.

From all accounts, the central district of Amador City in the 1950s had become a virtual ghost town, with most of Main Street shuttered and boarded up as a result of the need for manpower in the Second World War.

People still whooped it up at the Lawtons' saloon in the Amador Hotel, especially when the Clampers came through on their way to the wide-open city of Jackson. Otherwise, the little city was very quiet.

As the site of Amador County's first gold harvest, the community that bears Jose Maria Amador's name can trace its history back to 1848. The village along the creek was known by various names, such as Amadore's Creek, Amadore's Crossing or South Amador, until 1915, when the residents of the prosperous gold-mining town chose to incorporate and become Amador City, now recognized as the smallest city in the state of California, with an area of less than a third of a square mile. By whatever name it has had at various times, the community saw its fortunes ebb and flow with the precious element, gold, for nearly 100 years.

Amador City was blessed with abundant gold, initially in the creek, but rapidly and far more substantially in the hard-rock mines called Keystone, Spring Hill, Original Amador and Bunker Hill. The town also benefitted from its strategic location along the busy route from Sacramento to the productive mines in Sutter Creek and Jackson. The city was bustling and prosperous until the fateful federal War Production Board Order L-208 of 1942, which closed nearly all gold mines in California by taking the miners off to war, casting a pall over all of the mining areas in the Mother Lode.

Lacking any other natural resources or significant industries, Amador City was particularly hard-hit, declining in the 1940s to enter the decade of the 1950s with nearly all of its downtown commercial district locked up and abandoned. Repeal of the Order in 1945 didn't lead to re-opening of the mines. They had filled with water, which compromised the integrity of the timbering. Added to that was a double whammy - the cost of labor had grown exponentially, while the price of gold remained fixed.

Homes in the city were not abandoned. A listing in the 1944 Hammond Atlas shows a population of 249, a number that has fluctuated through the years, stabilizing somewhere near today's official tally of 208 residents. A number of families have called Amador City home through boom and bust to bloom again.

Born in 1949, Richard Lynch has lived in Amador City his entire life. His family has been in the city since 1907, when his grandfather, Dr. George Leslie Lynch, moved into a little house on Main Street that backed up to Amador Creek. His father, Richard Leslie Lynch, was born there in 1909.

"We were lucky to have a good doctor in town," said lifelong resident June Biagi. "Dr. Lynch didn't practice in town, but he was available to advise all of us."

Last year, Lynch ended an eight-year stint as mayor of his home city. Lynch's recollections of the 1950s are vivid, as might be expected of someone who boarded the school bus every morning in front of Art Bennett's general store, next door to his family home.

"My older sister went to school here in town," Lynch said, "but it closed before I reached school age. I had to ride the bus to Sutter Creek." He remembers his fellow passengers - kids named Vaira, Vasquez, Biagi and Woods. "They were the permanent residents. Other kids came and went, staying maybe a month or six weeks. They were with seasonal labor families."

Two of Lynch's busmates were June Biagi's offspring, Del and Marjorie. June recalls the closing of Amador City Elementary School, which operated into the early 1950s in the schoolhouse at the top of School Street (now city hall).

"The school couldn't afford a second teacher," she said, "and the voters turned down a plan to send the upper classes to Sutter Creek (which would have allowed the Amador City school to continue teaching its lower grades)."

Michael Vasquez was born on God's Hill, where he lives today, across the road from his childhood residence. "The fifth generation of Vasquez' is living in that house now," Vasquez calculated. "My grandparents, Efimenio and Helen, bought it in 1939, then sold it to my parents, Joe and Esther, in 1952. I bought it from them in 2001 and sold it to Gary Vasquez in 2006. His son Luke is living there now, representing the fifth generation."

But in the 1950s, there wasn't much work to be had in Amador City. "In the 50s," Vasquez asserted, "the mill (American Forest Products, in Martell) was everything. Either you worked 'up in the woods' or 'at the plant.'"

With the gold mines gone, he explained, the county's major employer was the sawmill, where his father worked as a grader. Biagi's husband, Alvin, worked for Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and her dad worked for the county. "He was a cat-skinner," Biagi said, "and he should have made good money, but when it rained, he didn't get paid. The unions changed that."

Both Lynch and Vasquez spent much of their free time playing in the town's abandoned buildings. "We had access into all of them," Lynch confessed, "but we didn't vandalize."

Vasquez echoed Lynch, saying, "We used to go through all the buildings, playing hide-and-seek. They all had secret entrances."

Not every building was abandoned, but notable examples were the block of four buildings on the west side of the highway, the Imperial Hotel and the brick and stone structures to the south of Keystone Alley and the Amador Hotel.

Businesses that survived into the 1950s were few. "Art Bennett had the general store and Standard Oil gas pumps at the north end of town," Lynch said, "and Antonini had a feed store in the eastern half of his building. The post office, which is presently in the Antonini building, may have come in the 50s. The post office had dry goods and popsicle bars in the freezer, while the feed store had the soda machine. Tony Antonini was a musician who played accordion and guitar. If you hit it just right, you'd come at a time when he'd play accordion for you."

There were some memorable characters in town. Lynch spoke nostalgically, saying, "Frank Fish came to town and put in a museum where one is now. He supposedly knew a lot about Superstition Mountain in Arizona. He was a very mysterious guy. He had caged rattlesnakes and tarantulas and secrets about Superstition Mountain that people were after him for. He would patrol the streets with a shotgun at night."

Gary Sherrill recalls men named Raspberry and Louis Bull, the former named for his complexion and the latter for the citizens' opinion of his veracity.

"I remember having to be the chauffeur," Biagi said. "My mother couldn't drive and my grandmother couldn't drive, so if anyone wanted to go to Sacramento, I had to drive them."

One major contribution to the survival of this little city that refused to die was a transformation of the Keystone Mine's administration headquarters into the Mine House Inn, Lynch related, done by the Daubenspeck family at some time in the late 1940s.

True resurrection was delayed until near the end of the decade, when the Sherrill family found Amador City. "We had a turkey ranch in Garden Grove, in southern California," said Gary Sherrill, "and the government told us we were going to have to move, to make way for a freeway."

That was 1958. The Sherrill family came to see some ranchland near Omo Ranch, in El Dorado County, with Gary Sherrill's grandmother's bookkeeper. They made the fateful decision to stay at the Mine House in Amador City, where they were presented with an opportunity to buy a significant percentage of Main Street for $15,000. That's exactly what they did, purchasing four buildings on Main, the house behind them at Pig Turd Alley and Fleehart Street, and the apartment house across from it. At the same time, Sherrill's uncle, Bill Schaffer, bought the building across the street.

"We moved into the little red house," Sherrill said. "My dad, Martin, was a rancher, so he knew how to improvise and fix things." And there was plenty to fix, after the years of neglect.

The Sherrills' first tenant was the Claypipers, an acting troupe that performed melodramas on the stage in what is now The Kitchen Store. Eventually, the Sherrills filled all of the buildings, though no one could say exactly when Gary's brother, Bruce, opened an ice cream parlor that he called the Minors' Saloon, perpetuated in the Buffalo Chips Emporium that remains a major locals' hangout today.

Sherrill was already 18 when he came to town, so he never got to ride the school bus with the Lynches, Biagis, Woods', Vasquez' and Vairas. He does recall the lack of activity: "You could have had a bowling green in Amador City and no one would have come by to disturb you."

"We never locked doors or had any crime or vandalism - nothing like now," Biagi concluded. "I don't think anybody set fire to anything. Liquor was the only drug."



Links to other stories in the series

Jackson in the 1950s

Plymouth in the 1950s

Ione in the 1950s

Sutter Creek in the 1950s