A history of Yreka,
then and now
Postcards, papers and photographs of Yreka from public archives, woven together by decade. Neighbors fill in the gaps.
The story
from WikipediaRead it all ↗In March 1851, Abraham Thompson, a mule train packer, discovered gold near Rocky Gulch while traveling along the Siskiyou Trail from southern Oregon. By April 1851, 2,000 miners had arrived in "Thompson's Dry Diggings" to test their luck, and by June 1851, a gold rush "boomtown" of tents, shanties, and a few rough cabins had sprung up. Several name changes occurred until the city was called Yreka. The name comes from wáik'a, a word meaning "north mountain" or "white mountain", the name of nearby Mount Shasta in the Shasta language.
Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Timeline
built from the dates on the items belowFinish Yreka’s story
Most archives stop around 1920. The photos from after that are in family albums, not libraries.
2 of 10 decades since 1900 have photos 🔁Retake an old viewChavis Creek, camp 14th, 1859: stand where they stood+15 📦Share a family photoSign in to add one+10Famous people from Yreka
See all 10 →
Yreka, decade by decade
1990s
Then & now
No then-and-now pairs yet. Take a photo from the same spot as Chavis Creek, camp 14th (1859) and it appears here side by side.
🔁 Retake this view · +15Stories next door
nearby towns’ historyFrom Wikimedia Commons (5) and the Library of Congress (1). Images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.