On Hwy-49, 23 miles East of Auburn. Grass Valley grew fat on the profits of the Empire Mine in the late 1800s, even though many of its inhabitants were migrant Cornish tin miners who labored for a few dollars a day. Set in a lush meadow, today’s Grass Valley is a pastoral town with many balconied 19thC buildings still lining its streets – several of them are appealing bed-and-breakfast spots. Another legacy of the mining times are the Cornish pasties – meat and potato wrapped in pastry which the miners munched underground – sold as an exotic dish in local shops and restaurants. Besides pasties, the Cornish arrivals brought new ideas in mining technology, the impact of which is assessed at the North Star Mining Museum (https://www.nevadacountyhistory.org/mining-museum.html), intersection of Highways 20 and 49. The museum carries detailed displays on mining techniques and also keeps a Pelton Wheel – an ungainly forerunner to modern water turbines – in working order.

An unlikely settler in Grass Valley was Lola Montez, a vivacious European dancer and a former lover of the King of Bavaria who toured her racy “spider dance” across the U.S. before arriving here in the 1850s (she moved on after her husband shot her pet bear). A replica of Lola’s home at 248 Mill Street now houses the local tourist office and disappointingly few mementoes of her eventful life. Round out a day in Grass Valley by taking a snoop around the Grass Valley Museum, corner of Church and Chapel Streets, a collection of general historical displays inside the town’s 1865 schoolhouse.

Detour – Rough and Ready

Although little remains of the settlement, there is a curious site 4 miles west of Grass Valley just off Hwy-20, where Rough And Ready became the only town ever to secede from the U.S. Angry at the imposition of a miners’ tax, its citizens elected to leave the union on April 7, 1850. Demoralized by an independent republic’s inability to import liquor from the U.S., however, they rejoined on July 4th.