Caldor (previously Dogtown) was a

company town A company town is a place where practically all stores and housing are owned by the one company that is also the main employer. Company towns are often planned with a suite of amenities such as stores, houses of worship, schools, markets and re ...

El Dorado County El Dorado County (), officially the County of El Dorado, is a county located in the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 191,185. The county seat is Placerville. The County is part of the Sacramento- Roseville-A ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. Caldor was linked to Diamond Springs by the

Diamond and Caldor Railway The Diamond and Caldor Railway was a common carrier Narrow gauge railway, narrow gauge railroad operating in El Dorado County, California, in the United States. The 34-mile railroad was primarily a logging railroad but also operated some passenge ...

. The community was named for the California Door Company, which owned and operated the town.

Geography

Caldor was located in southern El Dorado County, miles southeast of the nearest extant community, Grizzly Flats. The town was situated at the confluence of Dogtown Creek and its tributary McKinney Creek, nestled in a narrow valley between Plummer Ridge to the north and a spur of Big Mountain Ridge to the south. The townsite sits at an elevation of about .

History

During the

California Gold Rush The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) was a gold rush that began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California fro ...

, a settlement called Dogtown was established, and a sawmill was built. It was located northeast of Newtown. A reference to the town can be found in the Mountain Democrat newspaper, in which Jake Schneider of Pleasant Valley moved to Dogtown in order to open a butcher shop. In 1900, long after the town had been abandoned, the California Door Company bought a tract of forested land in the El Dorado County Hills. This tract included the former Dogtown townsite, and the company built a town on site to house the workers needed to operate the mill, which they soon replaced with a much larger one. Worried about the connotations of the name "Dogtown" and the effect such a name would have on the reputation of the company, the company directors renamed the town Caldor – California Door Company. In 1904, the company built a railroad from Caldor to the town of Diamond Springs. From then on, hundreds of men were employed in Caldor, producing 20 million board-feet of lumber a year. In 1906, the town housed 120 men and their families. In 1923, the sawmill burnt down. It was not replaced. After the fire, the company transported the logs to a mill in Diamond Springs, about away at the other end of the railroad. Decades later, in 1953, the railroad was no longer being heavily used, the logs instead being transported by truck, and so it was removed. Around this same time, the California Door Company had almost used up its timber resources in the land it owned around Caldor, so the community's life began drawing to a close. In 1955, to supplement the dwindling supply of wood from Caldor, the company began importing

mahogany Mahogany is a straight-grained, reddish-brown timber of three tropical hardwood species of the genus ''Swietenia'', indigenous to the AmericasBridgewater, Samuel (2012). ''A Natural History of Belize: Inside the Maya Forest''. Austin: Unive ...

logs from the

Philippine The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no), * bik, Republika kan Filipinas * ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas * cbk, República de Filipinas * hil, Republ ...

island of

Mindanao Mindanao ( ) ( Jawi: مينداناو) is the second-largest island in the Philippines, after Luzon, and seventh-most populous island in the world. Located in the southern region of the archipelago, the island is part of an island group of ...

, away across the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

to be processed at Diamond Springs.

References

{{authority control Unincorporated communities in California Unincorporated communities in El Dorado County, California