Gold Districts in Toulumne County

American Camp
The American Camp district can be found north of Columbia around 8 miles on the Italian Bar road. The streams in this area are said to have produced a good amount of gold and the veins in this area have some very rich spots.

Big Oak Flat
The Big Oak Flat district is located in the East Gold Belt of the Sierra Nevada in southwestern Tuolumne County. It consists of the Groveland, Deer Flat and Second Garrotte areas to the east.

The placers in Big Oak Flat were very rich. The deposits have produced more than $25,000,000 in placer gold. This place is called Big Oak Flat because the first gold that was found in this place was close to a huge oak tree almost eleven feet in diameter. The miners got so excited about the finding that they dug up the area around the tree to a depth of five feet undermining the tree and caused it to fall down.

Chinese Camp
Chinese Camp is in western Tuolumne County around 10 miles southwest of Sonora. It was a placer mining center established by Chinese miners in 1849. A great deal of the work was done in the 1850s, however the heaps of soil and gravel turned over in the hunt for gold can still be seen in just about every gulch. The old mining town of Chinese Camp is fairly well preserved.

A large amount of the placer gold was recovered from particularly rich quartzitic gravels of Eocene age. Some of the gold also was mined from gravels of late Tertiary age. Most of the work that was done in the past was done by hydraulicing and ground sluicing; throughout the 1930s there was some dragline dredging. There are some gold quartz veins in the area, however it is known that the Chinese miner was the most thorough miner of them all therefore most likely you will not find a lot of gold in this area. The value of the total yield from placer mining is projected at $2.5 million. 

Columbia
Columbia is a famous placer mining district that is located in the north central Tuolumne County, in the vicinity of the old mining town of Columbia, five miles north of Sonora. It consists of the Yankee Hill, Sawmill Flat, Squabbletown, Brown's Flat, and Springfield areas. The Sonora district is just to the south and the American Camp district is located on the northeast.

Columbia was one of the richest and most well known placer mining districts in California. In 1850 a group of Mexican miners who had been obligated off their claims at Sonora hit it rich in this area. Americans moved in and enforced them to depart. For some time the district was known as Hidreth's Diggings and American Camp, but it soon turned into Columbia, Gem of the Southern Mines.

Throughout the 1850s and near the beginning of the 1860s, the diggings were extremely productive; the production was around $100,000 or more for each week. Columbia was one of the biggest cities in California at this time, with an estimated population of 25,000 to 30,000.

The district slowed down in the late 1860s, however small scale mining kept going on until recent times. The central portion of the old town turned into a state park in 1945 and is now a well known of tourist attraction. A lot of the famous old buildings have been renovated and repaired. The value of the total production of the district has been estimated to have been at least $87 million, however there are those that say that the figure was of $150 million.