Early on in the California Gold Rush, one new “gold strike” after another sent fortune hunters scrambling farther afield from the original discovery site at Coloma. The site that became Marysville was at the end of steamboat navigation on the Sacramento River, a landing place for eager prospectors headed for newly-discovered, rich lodes on the Yuba and Feather Rivers. But as a viable, flourishing gold rush town, Marysville came to the party a bit later than some others.
San Francisco’s premier newspaper, the Daily Alta, excitedly announced its existence as “yet another new city” on January 25, 1850. Yubaville, as it was then named, had been surveyed and laid out around the first of the month, contained a population of 200, and—in the Alta’s editorial opinion—had a bright future as an inland trading post, not only for its strategic location, but also because its residents had already elected a mayor and organized a court of justice.
Back in the mid-1840s, though, the site had been a working ranch. In 1843, Swiss immigrant John Sutter, who had previously received a large Mexican land grant, leased a part it to Theodore Cordua, a native of Mecklenburg, Germany. Cordua grew crops, raised livestock, and established a trading post he called New Mecklenburg. The following year, Cordua received his own land grant from the Mexican government, 31,000 acres adjacent to the leased land, officially known as the Rancho Honcut. Like others in the general vicinity, Cordua prospered until the gold discovery ruined him: his workers abandoned him, his crops went unharvested, and unscrupulous gold rushers stole his supplies and livestock. Soon thereafter, Cordua’s land passed on to others, in a somewhat convoluted chain of ownership.
In October 1848, Cordua sold one-half of his land to his former employee Charles Covillaud—who had married Donner Party survivor Mary Murphy—and in January 1849, sold the other half to Covillaud’s wife’s brothers-in-law, William Foster (also of the Donner Party) and tall, handsome Michael Nye, new husband to Mary’s widowed sister Harriett Murphy Pike. Within months, Foster and Nye sold their interest to Covillaud. In October, 1849, Covillaud acquired new partners by selling most of the ranch to Jose Ramirez and John Sampson, men who had come up from Chile, and French frontiersman Theodore Sicard, the discoverer of Sicard’s Bar on the Yuba River.
In short order, the new partners were selling goods, acquired in Sacramento, to miners who debarked on their land; more, Covillaud conceived the idea of locating a real town there. Over the early objections of Ramirez and Sampson—who felt the arrival of new merchants would undermine their own sales—Covillaud paid John Sutter to release any claim he had on the desired location. In January 1850, the partners together hired a French surveyor to create a plan for the town. One of the first residents, attorney Stephen J. Field, not only purchased 65 lots and drew up proper deeds for future buyers, but was elected Alcalde (mayor, justice of the peace, and general civic executive) after just three days in camp. Fields established a successful legal practice in Marysville, which led, seven years later, to his election to the California Supreme Court. In 1863, President Lincoln appointed Stephen J. Field to the United States Supreme Court.
But in 1850, inter-community communication was largely by stagecoach, so probably when the Daily Alta editors published their enthusiastic announcement of Yubaville in late January 1850, they didn’t know that—a week earlier—residents had voted to rename their new town Marysville, in honor of Charles’s wife, Mary Murphy Covillaud. Marysville’s first newspaper, the Daily Herald, appeared in August, 1850, reporting that Theodore Sicard had sold his interest in the town the previous spring, to newcomers.
A post office was established in 1851, Marysville was incorporated on February 5, 1851, and by 1853, its tent city had been replaced by brick buildings. Other improvements included mills, iron works, factories, machine shops, schools, churches, and the first Macy’s in California, established in 1850 by brothers Rowland and Charles Macy as a dry goods store on the corner of D and Front Streets. However, the Macys dissolved their partnership before the end of September, 1850. The name “Macy & Co.” was purchased by E.W. Tracy who continued to use the name six months after purchasing it. Rowland returned east to later found the more famous retail store, Macy’s, but Charles stayed on, as an agent for Adams Express, and is buried in Marysville.
By 1857, the population had risen to almost 10,000. Marysville’s founders imagined it becoming the “New York of the Pacific,” but although over $10 million in gold was shipped from its river banks, that was not to be. Vulnerable to flooding caused by hydraulic mining, Marysville built a levee system, still currently maintained, that effectively sealed it off; making further city growth practically impossible.
Nowadays, with a population only slightly higher than it was in its gold rush heyday, Marysville promotes itself as “California’s Oldest Little City,” by linking its existence back to Theodore Cordua’s New Mecklenburg trading post.
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