By Mike Roberts | Village Life staff writer | May 11, 2009 14:18
Visitors take in the history Saturday at the third annual Clarksville Day celebration. This year the event was held at the old town site. Village Life photo by Mike Roberts
The third annual Clarksville Day celebration brought the old town site to life last weekend.
Betty January and her intrepid band of local historians got permission to hold the confab on location, which is normally behind a locked gate on private property.
Last year's event at the safe but prosaic El Dorado Hills Library attracted an estimated 200 visitors. The attendance in the old ghost town this past Saturday was closer to 3,000.
By noon the parking lot was full. Pioneer family descendants mingled with amateur historians, history reenactors and regular folks interested in learning about Clarksville , the ranching community that predates El Dorado Hills.
The area's rich history began with the nearby gold rush in the mid 1800s and the resulting commerce that passed though the strategically located community. The Pony Express used the nearby Mormon Tavern as a staging area during their brief existence from 1860 to 1861.
Pony Express reenactors were on hand Saturday passing the mochila, or mail pouch, at full speed without breaking stride. Between handoffs they offered pony rides to the kids.
The Lincoln Highway , affectionately dubbed “ America 's main street” came through Clarksville in 1918, ushering in the named highway era of American transportation history. Highway historians talked up the significance of the local stretches of original concrete.
Mike Lester and his extended family are Clarksville 's last residents. They held a birthday party for his grand-daughter, 9-year-old Rhiannon during the festivities.
Lester greeted the pioneer family descendants, including Madeline Mosely, who gave him a hug and called him a “newcomer.” Mosely's father owned Clarksville 's last business, a combination gas station, store and restaurant. She came to Clarksville as a girl and remains a rich source of Clarksville history.
Centenarian Eleanor Cavitt, another Clarksville descendant, was too ill to attend, and was missed.
Many Clarksville descendants attended the United School in Clarksville . When the school closed, Jess Tong dragged the schoolhouse about a quarter mile east and turned it into the picturesque red barn that is now visible from Highway 50.
The school's woodshed still stands - barely - on the old school site, evoking images of stern schoolmarms applying traditional behavior modifications techniques (with a hickory switch) to a disobedient Tong, Euer, Joerger, Wilson or Walker child.
Most of Clarksville is now owned by developers Ken Wilkinson and Jim Brunello, who purchased the 100-acre Tong Ranch in 2006 and couldn't say “no” to January. They generously offered up the old town site on the condition that the Historical Society make it safe for the public.
Most folks would think twice before committing to cleaning up a 150-year-old ghost town full of decrepit buildings, rattlesnakes, open wells and five-plus generations of rusty Tong family artifacts, aka “junk.” But not Betty January.
She's a tough woman to refuse. January quietly asks the right people for help, and invariably gets it. The next thing you know, El Dorado Hills has a library and Clarksville has its own historical society. In 2005 January convinced her friends John and Fran Thompson, John and Pat Thomsen, Hal Erpenbeck, Melinda Peak and others to help out. The rest, as they say, is history.
Developer Wilkinson, an active historical society member himself, spent several days under January's spell child-proofing Clarksville , mowing the overgrown fields, pulling down miles of barbed wire fencing, covering the numerous open wells and sealing up the old buildings.
January called in her chips during a couple of fruitful but exhausting cleanup weekends, filling huge waste bins donated by Waste Connections.
The weekend before the big event was to be the last big push, but Murphy's Law of history celebrations intervened. It poured rain all weekend. When the rain cleared, “We really had to scramble,” said January.
When May 9 finally rolled around, Clarksville was dressed in its finery and ready to accept callers. A small army of volunteers and exhibitors were prepared for the onslaught. Parking attendants kept non-essential vehicles off the old Lincoln Highway . Boy Scouts were posted at each historic home, ready to explain who lived there and how they fit in to Clarksville society.
Clarksville 's two cemeteries, both normally off limits on private property, were wide open Saturday and offered visitors a rarely seen bit of history.
Visitors also enjoyed old time music by Alan Fuller, Jenny Rutherford and Cowboy Hayes. The costumed trio might have stepped out of an 1860s Clarksville saloon. Cowboy Hayes laced the performance with comedy and bits of first person living history.
The Mormon Battalion fired their 1790 replica Spanish mountain howitzer cannon several times throughout the day, and shared their colorful history with passers by.
Model As and Model Ts tooled up and down the Lincoln Highway from Placerville 's “Hangtown A's” Club and the Towe Auto Museum .
A pair of regal Percheron “forest horses” shuttled visitors by wagon from the parking area along White Rock Road to the old town site.
Russ Kurz was back this year showing kids how to pan for gold. A miner himself, Kurz uses genuine gold flecks he pulls from the American River to seed his demonstration sluice. More than 500 children took a turn at his gold pans throughout the day; many left with a genuine “nugget.”
At the end of the day January stood in the Tong barn surrounded by friends and admitted that she was running on fumes, but delighted at how the event came off. No 911 calls were necessary all day. Even the rattlesnakes obliged, keeping their heads down for the day, no doubt at January's request.
“I'm so happy with how it turned out,” she said. “We couldn't have done it without all the sponsors and volunteers.”
mroberts@villagelife.com