Groveland
California, USA · Pine Mountain Lake · Highway 120
6 places pinned — click any one for its story.
The place
Groveland is the quiet way into Yosemite — a one-street Gold Rush town on Highway 120 that never quite died after the gold did, thirty minutes short of the Big Oak Flat entrance. The Iron Door Saloon anchors Main Street, still pouring drinks behind the same two cast-iron doors that carried it through the fires of the 1850s. We stayed at Wanderhaus, a lakeview chalet inside the gated Pine Mountain Lake community, and it worked well enough to become a standing family rental rather than a one-off.
On the drive in we stopped at Rainbow Pool on the South Fork Tuolumne, a series of granite pools under a small falls that has been pulling travelers off this road since the stagecoach days. The boys hiked Yosemite the next day — short and not strenuous, avoiding the Valley traffic entirely — before we headed back down 120 to the lake.
Places I visited
History & facts for each spot — with a “then & now” archival photo where one exists. Every one has its own page; open it for the full write-up and all the photos.
A Gold Rush town founded in the 1849 boom, first known as Garrote for the rough vigilante justice handed out here. James Tannahill became postmaster in 1863 and gave it the gentler name Groveland. Today the town's whole second act is its position 30 minutes from Yosemite's Big Oak Flat entrance — a quiet main street of…
Full history & photos →A one-room Neoclassical frame jailhouse built in 1895 to hold Groveland's hard-rock-mining-era troublemakers — mostly drunks — until they could be walked to Justice Court, or hauled to the county seat in Sonora. It sat neglected after 1930 until the Pine Mountain Lake Garden Club adopted the lot in 1992 and turned the…
Full history & photos →A Main Street building dated 1918 — the year before the American Legion itself was founded by AEF veterans returning from World War I — carrying the Legion's gold-and-blue emblem over its door, marking it as Groveland's post hall.
Full history & photos →The oldest liquor-serving establishment in California, by its own plaque. Peter King built it in 1852 as "The Granite Store," a general mercantile serving the thirsty with the obligatory plank laid over flour barrels for a bar. Postmaster Jim Tannahill bought it in the 1860s and ran the town's post office out of it for…
Full history & photos →Read more on Wikipedia →A gated lake community off Highway 120 where we stayed at Wanderhaus, a lakeview chalet — central heating, a fireplace for winter trips, a $50 per-vehicle gate fee that covers the marina, pool and lake for the season. Base camp for the family's recurring Yosemite runs; this was the first of what became a standing renta…
Full history & photos →A swimming hole on the South Fork Tuolumne River, about 13 miles east of Groveland on Highway 120 — a stack of granite pools under a 15-foot falls, with a rounded dome rising straight out of the water on one side. It was a stagecoach toll stop in the 1850s and later a full resort until a 1958 fire burned it down; what'…
Full history & photos →
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