The best story in this building is in the floorboards. Through the gold rush the Cary House was the Wells Fargo office in Placerville, and bags of gold and silver were stacked out on the front porch waiting for the company drivers to collect them. Gold dust leaks. It worked down through the gaps between the boards and sat in the dirt under the porch for sixty years. In the 1920s an owner went looking, and what he swept up paid for most of the cost of adding the fourth floor.
William Cary built the place in 1857 after fire took his first inn, the Placer Hotel, and the new one went up as three storeys of brick, advertised as perfectly fireproof. It opened with 77 rooms and was among the first hotels in the area to offer hot and cold baths, which in a town still known as Hangtown was a genuine luxury.
It was not only a hotel. It was the headquarters of the Wells Fargo express office and of the Pioneer Stage Line running between Placerville and Virginia City, so the building sat on the hinge between the California diggings and the Comstock silver.
Horace Greeley spoke from the second floor balcony in 1859. Mark Twain is reported to have lectured here, and Lola Montez and Black Bart are rumoured to have stayed, which is worth treating as rumour rather than record.
The ghost most often named is Stanley Devine, said to have worked the front desk in the late 1800s and to have been stabbed on the lobby staircase.
It is still an operating hotel on Main Street, so you can simply book a room and go and stand on the porch the gold fell through.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
