Coming Events
Upcoming Speaker Night Events
The Historic Sluice Box
with David Lawler & Hank Meals
Nevada County Historical Society is pleased to present David Lawler, geologist and Hank Meals historian, speaking on “The Sluice Box’: THE MOST COMMONPLACE GOLD RECOVERY TOOL OF THE 19TH CENTURY.
Included will be a slide show presentation on the sluice, a gold recovery device that was used everywhere in the mines.
AND, recently, an “atmospheric river” revealed a sophisticated streamside sluice that’s been buried for over 150 years. The sluice has provided a lot of information on 19th century mining techniques, and it has been salvaged to soon provide an exhibit for the Nevada County Historical Society History Center.
Don’t miss this resourceful adventure story.
When: Thursday, November 16th at 7:00 PM.
Where: The Sierra Presbyterian Church located at 175 Ridge Road, Nevada City.
Admission: FREE and open to the public, this event last one hour.
Free refreshments offered after the presentation.
For more information contact Daniel Ketcham @ (530) 477-8056 or President@NevadaCountyHistory.
California, A Slave State
With Jean Pfaelzer
When: Thursday, January 18th at 7:00 PM.
Where: The Sierra Presbyterian Church located at 175 Ridge Road, Nevada City.
The untold history of slavery and resistance in California, from the Spanish missions, indentured Native American ranch hands, Indian boarding schools, Black miners, kidnapped Chinese prostitutes, and convict laborers to victims of modern trafficking.
California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives—the first slaves transported into California—and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California’s carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers.
By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers.
Slavery shreds California’s utopian brand, rewrites our understanding of the West, and redefines America’s uneasy paths to freedom.
Admission: FREE and open to the public, this event last one hour.
Free refreshments offered after the presentation.
For more information contact Daniel Ketcham @ (530) 477-8056 or President@NevadaCountyHistory.
Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West
With Chris Enss
When: Thursday March 21st at 7:00 PM.
Where: The Sierra Presbyterian Church located at 175 Ridge Road, Nevada City.
Time To Go Back to School…Way Back
“Throughout history teachers have been at the forefront of all civilizations, educating and inspiring the next generation and keeping societies moving forward. Frontier Teachers artfully captures that pioneering, resilient, and enduring spirit of teachers that lives on today.”
David A. Sanchez, Former President, California Teachers Association
If countless books and movies are to be believed, America’s Wild West was, at heart, a world of cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and gunslingers, scruffy settlers, and mountain men—a man’s world. In the new book Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West, New York Times bestselling author Chris Enss, takes on this stereotype, telling the stories of seventeen courageous women who faced down schoolrooms full of children on the open prairies and in the cattle and mining towns of the Old West.
Frontier Teachers Book CoverBetween 1847 and 1858, more than six hundred women teachers traveled across the untamed frontier to provide youngsters with an education, the numbers grew rapidly in the decades to come, as women took advantage of one of the few respectable career opportunities for ladies of the era. The dozen women whose stories are movingly told in the pages of Frontier Teachers demonstrated the utmost dedication and sacrifice necessary to bring formal education to the Wild West. For many students, their women teachers were heroic figures who introduced them to a world of possibilities—and changed America forever.
The national launch of Frontier Teachers took place at Mount St. Mary’s Academy in Grass Valley, California, on Saturday, July 29, 2023, from 10:30 A.M. to 2 P.M. In 1863, five nuns from the Sisters of Mercy Convent arrived in Grass Valley to help care for and teach school to orphans who lost their families traveling West. They were the first women to take on such a task in the Gold Country. Their story is one of more than a dozen tales of resolute educators included in Enss’ book Frontier Teachers.
Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West is available at fine bookstores everywhere, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, and nbnbooks.com. Visit chrisenss.com for more information.
Admission: FREE and open to the public, this event last one hour.
Free refreshments offered after the presentation.
For more information contact Daniel Ketcham @ (530) 477-8056 or President@NevadaCountyHistory.