California's Oldest Little City...
Those who founded Marysville and toasted the new city with champagne on January 18, 1850, would be puzzled
by the notion that this historic gold rush town had become California's Oldest Little City.
That's because when the town was laid out in the path of tens of thousands of gold miners and merchants and
capitalists who flocked to the region in the earliest days of the Gold Rush, the plan was for a major metropolis.
In fact, the Kennebec Company, a group of capital investors, planned for Marysville to grow into the
"New York of the Pacific".
And for the first several months, Marysville headed in exactly that direction. At the time of its birth into a
city with a street plan and elected officials, Marysville was a tent city of 300. The population swelled to
1,500 within a month and grew somewhat steadily for several years afterward. For one brief period in 1852,
Marysville was the third largest city in all of California, after San Francisco and Sacramento. As a result of
the largest human migration in world history, Marysville absorbed 50 years of natural growth in a five-year period.
Marysville had the first municipal library and the first municipal cemetery west of the Mississippi. The city was
named after Mary Murphy Covillaud, a Donner Party survivor of 1850. On February 5, 1851, Marysville was officially
incorporated as a California city, the eighth city to incorporate. Stephen J. Fields
became Marysville's first "alcalde" (a Spanish word for an officer who functions as a cross between a mayor and a judge).
He later became the first United States Supreme Court Justice from the American west.
Located at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather rivers, the city was the gateway to the Northern
Mother Lode and the terminus of steamship navigation, which originated in San Francisco. Its future
growth into one of the largest cities in the American West, it seemed, was assured.
So what happened to Marysville's growth? Plans for a metropolis at the confluence of the Yuba and
Feather rivers soon gave way to the realization that yearly flooding was damaging interest in capital
investment and residency. As the city grew, flood damage increased. With great confidence, residents and
businesses erected levees, but repeatedly these levees failed to prevent flooding.
Finally, after the flood of 1875, the levee system erected around the city stopped all flooding. While
her neighbors continued to suffer disaster, Marysville's levees were the strongest in the region and
Marysville solidified its position as the heart of commerce in the Sacramento Valley.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Marysville was the dominant commercial center of the region.
Levee improvements, cheap land and dams have given capital interests confidence in other areas of the valley,
so Marysville's dominance has eroded in the second half of the century.
The same levees that have saved Marysville from flooding for the last quarter of the 19th century and for
all of the 20th century have constrained the city's growth. What was once envisioned as a metropolis is a
charming little city with buildings in its historic downtown dating back to the earliest days of California's
history. And for those who call it home, there is great pride in being from "California's Oldest Little City."