If you’ve ever wondered how far it is from here to Timbuctoo, it’s closer than you think.
A new book, "Smartsville and Timbuctoo", chronicles the history of two Gold Rush towns located on Highway 20 about an hour’s drive north of Sacramento. Containing nearly 200 images, many dating back to the 1800s, the book is a kind of pictorial essay, offering a glimpse into what life was like in northern California Gold Rush boomtowns.
The book’s authors, Kathleen Smith and Lane Parker, collected the images - plus many stories - from numerous northern California libraries, museums, archives and from local residents and historians to reconstruct the pasts of the towns.
Smith, a Sacramento native, became interested in the two towns while researching her geneaology. “I knew my ancestors settled in both Smartsville and Timbuctoo during the Gold Rush, but I didn’t know the towns still existed. There really wasn’t any specific history of these places,” Smith says of her initial research. “That’s what made me start digging. I’d heard about the towns and now wanted to know more about them. I wanted there to be something for others to find, and for the contributions of the origional settlers to be remembered.”
Parker became interested in the history of Timbuctoo after reading a brief entry in his great-grandmother’s travel diary. He has been actively researching Timbuctoo since 2005.
“The name itself intrigued me,” Parker says. “When I first started researching, I wasn’t finding much information. But I was finding enough to keep me interested, and enough to make me believe that there was more out there.”
Both Smith and Parker hope the book will “be a valuable resource to everyone interested in California history, gold rush history and especially the history of the eastern Yuba County towns covered in the work.”
When the boomtowns went bust, most residents moved from the area to settle in larger communities such as Marysville, Sacramento and San Francisco. Just like Smith, many Sacramentans can trace their ancestry to Smartsville or Timbuctoo.
Timbuctoo is best known for its exotic name and its historic Wells Fargo Building (now a ruin). Smartsville has gained attention recently after the middle ‘s’ was officially restored to its name by the federal government, nearly 100 years after the post office removed it.
"Smartsville and Timbuctoo" is part of Arcadia Publishing’s “Images of America” series, and is available online and through local bookstores, including Avid Reader at the Tower in Sacramento. For more information about the book, visit www.smartsville-timbuctoo.org.