Pine Woods

Pine Woods. . One of Sutter Creek’s legends is that John Sutter founded this city in 1846 when he established a sawmill on the creek. But modern researchers have discovered he actually sent men into the Sierra foothills at least by 1844 to a place about four or five miles north of here he called Pine Woods.

Pine Woods had no sawmill, but it did have a whipsawyers. From platforms and pits they sawed the giant cedar and pine felled in the area into planks and lumber for flat boats and various improvements at Sutter’s Fort. Besides lumber the outdoor manufactory at Pine Woods also produced charcoal, shingles, pumps, and barrel staves. His hired hands included Indians, overland immigrants, early California settlers and at least one woman and her children. They all traveled to Pine Woods on the trail Sutter’s wagons created or today’s highway 16 to Drytown.

As Sutter’s empire grew, Pine Woods could not produce lumber fast enough. Whipsaws would never out-cut a sawmill. That’s why he sent James Marshall out in 1847 to find another forest beside a stream big enough to power a sawmill. Marshal found such a place at “Culloma valley”. In the race dug to divert the American River’s flow to that mill was gold discovered in January, 1848 at Coloma.

Whether you call it a camp or a settlement, Pine Woods was surely the first such non-Indian seasonal “home” in the lower Sierra. But for a sawmill on the creek, Sutter’s men might have discovered gold in the valley above Sutter Creek, or at Pine Woods, too.