Bidwell's Bar: The Gold Rush Town Under Lake Oroville, California

On July 4, 1848, just months after gold was found at Sutter's Mill, a pioneer named John Bidwell found gold on the Middle Fork of the Feather River in Northern California. Word spread, and the miners came. A tent camp grew on the riverbank and took his name: Bidwell's Bar. It grew fast. By 1853, the camp was putting up real wood-frame buildings, and in August of that year it became the seat of Butte County, with a courthouse of its own. The county's first newspaper, the Butte Record, was founded there that November. The population was said to be at least 2,000. Crossing the river was a constant problem, so the town invested in a bridge. An earlier crossing was destroyed in a flood, and the replacement was ambitious: an iron suspension bridge, its parts made in Troy, New York, and shipped all the way around Cape Horn to California. Completed in the mid-1850s at a cost of about $35,000, it was 240 feet long and the first suspension bridge in California. Bidwell's Bar faded almost as fast as it rose. By around the time the bridge was finished, the easy gold was running out and miners were moving on to a nearby camp called Ophir, the town that became Oroville. In 1856, the county seat moved to Oroville too. That year, the San Francisco Bulletin called Bidwell's Bar "Another Deserted Village." The town never came back, but the bridge kept working. It carried traffic across the Middle Fork for about a century, until 1954. In the 20th century, the old site became a popular park and swimming hole. Then came Oroville Dam. Construction began in 1961 on what would become the tallest dam in the United States, and the canyon behind it was going to flood. Preservationists weren't willing to lose the bridge. In the mid-1960s, it was taken apart and rebuilt on higher ground at Bidwell Canyon, along with its stone tollhouse. In 1968, the waters of Lake Oroville rose over what remained of Bidwell's Bar. Today the townsite of one of California's first Gold Rush camps sits somewhere beneath the reservoir. Above it, the bridge its miners crossed still stands, and people can walk across it.