Jun 27, 2024 - Sale 2675

Sale 2675 - Lot 69

Price Realized: $ 1,875
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
(CALIFORNIA.) Pollard & Britton's Lith.; after G.H. Goddard. Columbia, January 1852. Lithograph, 10½ x 15½ inches; folds, light conservation including ½ inch of restoration to upper right corner, light foxing and soiling, stabilized with paper backing. San Francisco. CA: G.H. Goddard, 1852
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Additional Details

The first and perhaps only lithograph view of an important early Gold Rush boomtown in Tuolumne County, known for its profitable mining and its numerous gambling establishments. Dozens of houses and stores are shown, with numerous charming details: laundry out to dry, men working at a sluiceway in the middle ground to the right, and a man leading a mule laden with camp gear. A bonneted woman appears in the foreground, an unusual sight. Just the year before, the town had greeted the arrival of its first white woman with a brass band and a parade of more than 6,000 men (see Hazen, The Music Men, page 2).

The artist George Henry Goddard (1817-1906) was a failed miner himself, opened a drug store in Columbia by January 1852, and published three views of mining towns that year. He later published an important map of California, as well as other California views after 1868.

This example has a few inked manuscript notations. The original owner has annotated several houses in the foreground with numbers, probably keyed to a letter which is no longer extant. At the far left, a house is marked "No. 1", with "My Cabbin" written in the margin.

The work was copyrighted on 25 March 1852, just the tenth printed work to be so registered in California (Greenwood, page 482). Peters, in California on Stone (page 180 & plate 89) described this as a letterhead. He reproduced what he described as "the only known copy," which had a letter written on verso dated 28 July 1852. Listed in Reps, Views and Viewmakers 76, and pages 180-181. None traced at auction since 1994.