#Marysville

Just weeks after the discovery at Sutter's Mill, Jonas Spect found gold on the Yuba River, triggering one of the most intense mining rushes in California history.

In just two years, Marysville exploded from a small trading post to the third-largest city in California, serving as the supply hub and jumping-off point for tens of thousands of gold miners.

Chinese immigrants played a vital role in Yuba County's Gold Rush economy despite systematic discrimination, building one of the oldest and most enduring Chinese communities in California.

The largest flood in California's recorded history turned the entire Sacramento Valley into a vast lake, devastating Marysville and reshaping how the region thought about water.

Marysville was named for Mary Murphy Covillaud, a teenage survivor of the Donner Party, whose husband Charles platted the city in 1850 at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather Rivers.

Since the 1880s, the Bok Kai Festival in Marysville has celebrated the Chinese water god with parades, firecrackers, and the famous "Bomb Day" — making it the oldest continuous Chinese cultural event in America.

Marysville's Chinatown, anchored by the 1880 Bok Kai Temple, is one of the oldest continuously existing Chinese communities in California — a rare survivor of the anti-Chinese violence that destroyed most Gold Rush-era Chinatowns.