San Andreas gets peek at restored ‘oldest courthouse’

Calaveras County has staked its claim to the oldest courthouse in the state, dating back to the Gold Rush days when a tent could stand in for a bar, or a house of justice. 

The Calaveras County Historical Society unveiled the original county courthouse, as restored by Mountain Ranch historian Wally Motloch, at the county museum in San Andreas Wednesday, 159 years to the day after the first Court of Sessions meeting in the newly created county. The building was shipped as a kit from Guangzhou, China, as the county lacked sawmills at the time.
  

Its assembly (guided by Chinese-language instructions meant for Chinese laborers) was not quite complete for the first meeting of the Court of Sessions, akin to today’s Board of Supervisors, Motloch said. So the tent housing the local bar in Double Springs, the first county seat, stood in, he said.

No word on whether whiskey was still being served while court was in session.

The camphor-wood structure was ready the next month and district court judges began to visit from Sacramento.

Jeff Tuttle, president of the Historical Society, is also the modern-day district attorney in Calaveras. Tuttle awed at the building his predecessors practiced in.

“It’s remarkable that a wood-frame structure like this put up in 1850 …” Tuttle paused. “I don’t know how it survived.”

He and Motloch credited Jody Taylor and her family, of Double Springs, descendants of Alexander Wheat, on whose property the courthouse first stood, for its preservation.

That, and the pungence of camphor wood providing natural termite resistance helped, they said. 

Motloch and Valley Springs resident John James lovingly labored on the old building for the last two years to prepare it for transport from Double Springs.

“This was no work,” Motloch said. “I got up every morning ready to do something that needed to be done.”

James carefully wrapped areas where the Chinese-script instructions remained for protection during transport and the pair made sure to preserve the original paint, likely consisting of pig’s blood and linseed oil, as best as possible, Motloch said.

The museum exhibit is divided into a courthouse side and a post office side, as the building played the latter role for nearly a decade after the county seat moved to Jackson, then a part of Calaveras County, in 1852.

“There was a lot of activity in this little building,” Motloch said.

He asked a seamstress to sew a period-appropriate 31-star flag to hang out front of the old courthouse and San Andreas artists Lori and Peter Kelly are scheduled to complete a painted mural in the rear of the old building June 25, in time for the exhibit’s official grand opening.