I ride through Negro Bar, on both sides of Lake Natoma, on most of my regular rides. Yesterday, however, was the very first time I rode up the hill to the entrance to capture this sign. The actual town of Negro Bar is now situated far under the waters of Lake Natoma but there are signs and reminders everywhere of its existence.
And now for a little history: Negro Bar is now brought to mind by the state park of that name on the lake's north shore, but the original gold camp was on the south bank of the American River long before Nimbus Dam created Lake Natoma in the 1950s. It was a mining camp named for the African American miners who first worked the gravel bar there in 1849 and in short order became one of the larger gold camps along the lower American River.
Actually, Negro Bar was not a particularly significant spot for African American miners. They were scattered throughout the transient Gold Rush population, said Clarence Caesar, a historian with the state Office of Historic Preservation and a student of African American miners. By 1850, there were only 962 African Americans enumerated by the census in the entire state, and it is not known if the number includes slaves, he said. Three years later, the population of African American miners had doubled, but the overall population had so mushroomed that they still amounted to only about 1 percent of the population.
The word "Negro" or the pejorative N-word occurred often in the names of Gold Rush places, according to historian Erwin G. Gudde, "not because there were large numbers of Negroes but because the presence of a single one was sufficiently conspicuous to suggest" such a name. In the case of Negro Bar, there is no direct record of who the original miners were, but historian Mary Maniery, in preparing a history of Negro Bar for the city of Folsom, found Sacramento County court documents from 1860 that indicate one of the men was named Samuel Smith. Folsom Constable B.N. Bugby testified of Smith, "I think he was one of the Negroes who gave the name Negro Bar," Maniery wrote, telling of a trial in which Smith was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin for murdering a man named Freeland Morton in Folsom.
Another name connected with African ancestry and Negro Bar is that of William Leidesdorff, a Dane born in the West Indies who came to California in 1841 and became a businessman and property owner in San Francisco. He became a Mexican citizen in 1844 and was granted the 35,500-acre Rio de los Americanos rancho along the south bank of the American River from Sutter's Sacramento grant upriver past Folsom including Negro Bar. Leidesdorff died of typhus in 1848 before he could profit from the excitement of the Gold Rush, and Army Capt. Joseph L. Folsom bought up Leidesdorff's holdings.