During the final years of the Great Depression, officials in California set out to build a state park to commemorate the centennial of the discovery of gold in 1848, an event that set off the largest mass migration in U.S. history and transformed the American West. They offered to buy plots of land from a dozen local families and businesses in Coloma, in the Sacramento Valley; this was where John Marshall, nearly a hundred years earlier, had famously found gold. He discovered the precious metal in rocks near a sawmill he was building for John Sutter—a Swiss German businessman and early settler of California—on the banks of the American River. Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world swarmed the Pacific Coast to mine for gold, sparking a vast economic boom.
One of the local landowners was Pearley Monroe, who worked as a janitor in California’s State Capitol building, about fifty miles away. In the late nineteen-thirties, state officials offered Monroe twenty-five hundred dollars for “the place of shifting gravel and flowing water where Sutter’s Mill once stood,” as a local paper put it. By the nineteen-thirties, Coloma had become a faded, rural town, with few economic prospects.
A Black descendant of enslaved Americans brought to California during the gold rush, Monroe was proud of the family’s land holdings. He declined the offer, hoping for a higher price. Monroe’s grandparents had eventually settled as free citizens in Coloma, where they raised kids and fruit orchards and became prominent, suit-wearing members of the community. Monroe inherited his part of the Sutter’s Mill property and bought the rest “on speculation,” according to a news report.
After the state made its offer, Monroe, who had also spurned offers from gold-dredging companies and a local historical group, set his price at ten thousand dollars. By 1941, he had become known in the papers for his stubbornness. “I would rather see the land turned into a park and swimming pool for my people,” he told the Los Angeles Times. That same year, California’s attorney general, Earl Warren—who would later become a famed Supreme Court Chief Justice—moved to condemn the property owned by Monroe and other local families under eminent domain. In 1942, a county judge fixed the government’s price for Monroe’s land at just over three thousand dollars, and forced him to sell.