Built where the Nisenan village of Ustumah once stood, Nevada built itself around gold and water with the first sawmill and the Gold Tunnel on Deer Creek arriving in 1850, and it became the engine of California’s mining world. The town was incorporated in 1856 and added “City” to the name in 1864 to avoid confusion with California, a neighboring state.Walk through historic downtown, and you can see history in clapboard, carved gingerbread, and the lofty windows of buildings that once financed dreams.
Nevada City, however, refuses to be only a museum. Its downtown is one of the best-preserved Gold Rush centers in the state, where venues like the Nevada Theatre, which once hosted Mark Twain, later hosted music acts like Motley Crue. Victorian porches and a bell-tower firehouse keep company with intimate restaurants and wine-tasting rooms; galleries and carefully restored homes sit against a backdrop of pines where the creek melodiously passes by.
This destination is both quiet and vibrantly alive: a town that remembers its urgent, messy beginning without sentimentalizing it, and that now offers the kind of small pleasures — good wine, good food, good company — that make the city’s history worth visiting.