Off Green Valley Road in El Dorado Hills, a small fenced cemetery holds the dead of the gold towns now under Folsom Lake. Thirty-six of its graves came from Negro Hill. For fifty-seven years their headstones did not carry that name. They carried a slur, cut there by the federal government.
The camp
Negro Hill stood on the north bank of the South Fork of the American River, across from Mormon Island. Paolo Sioli's county history of 1883 sets out how it began. Mormons worked the riverside of the hill in 1848, and Spanish-speaking miners the ravine on its south side. In the fall of 1849 August Newhall of Lynn, Massachusetts, a Black miner named Kelsey and other Black men opened a sand bank at the mouth of that ravine, and it paid a company of five more than three hundred dollars a day. The spot became Little Negro Hill.
In the spring of 1852 miners found pay dirt on a broad flat behind the river, and within a week every foot of it was staked. Two Black men from Massachusetts opened a store and boarding house there, and a Black village grew up around it that the camp called Big Negro Hill. White merchants built on another part of the flat, Dewitt Stanford, Leland's brother, among them. In the fall of 1852 or the spring of 1853 Chinese miners came and built a quarter of their own. By the end of 1853 Sioli counts a thousand to twelve hundred people, with stores, saloons and dance houses by the dozen, and ditches from Salmon Falls soon brought water to sluice the top of the hill.
James Williams came up the river in May 1851. In the narrative of his escape from slavery, published in San Francisco in 1873, he wrote that the first place he reached in the mines was called Negro Hills, and that he worked there some time and made nothing but his board.
What the history also records
Sioli kept the violence in, though he told it as anecdote. In 1852 a Black man named Andrew Jackson was accused of taking a ten-dollar specimen and some clothes from the blacksmith's house, and a mob hanged him from a tree near the Black quarter before noon. Some years later a crowd of drunken white men attacked the Black quarter and one man was killed. The men arrested for it were tried at Coloma and acquitted.
Business held up for five or six years. Then the claims passed little by little to Chinese miners and the trade fell away, and by Sioli's time the few white men still in the district had nearly all turned to farming.
The dam
The Army Corps of Engineers began Folsom Dam in October 1948 and first stored water behind it in February 1955. Before the lake rose, the Corps moved burials from thirteen cemeteries and private plots to the new Mormon Island Relocation Cemetery. From Negro Hill came thirty-six people, none of them known by name, most likely buried between 1850 and 1870.
The Corps wrote the town's name as a slur in its relocation plan, its maps, its contracts and its deeds, and cut it into the concrete markers it set over the reburied. When the Associated Press obtained the files in 2011, the Sacramento District's commander said the Corps was deeply ashamed and regretful. Its statement gave no reason for the word and said the Corps had no legal means to replace the stones.
The stones
The fight to change them had already run for years. A 2009 Eagle Scout project to replace them collapsed after the activist Michael Harris objected that Black residents had not been asked. In May 2011 El Dorado County's supervisors voted unanimously to do it, at a cost of about eighteen thousand dollars. That October, inmates in a California Prison Industry Authority program set new granite markers on the graves. The new stones read: Unknown. Moved from Negro Hill Cemetery by U.S. Government, 1954. Two of the old stones went to the California State Archives.
Harris had asked for more than new stones: the state landmark restored, and a monument setting out how the slur came to be attached to them. The bronze for Negro Hill and its neighbors has been missing from Green Valley Road since at least 1996.
Downriver, the state has been working through the same kind of question at another camp. In June 2022 the State Park and Recreation Commission voted unanimously to call the Negro Bar day-use area at Folsom Black Miners Bar while it studied a permanent name, citing an 1850 report of Black miners taking gold there in 1848.
Negro Hill itself is near the bottom of the lake. The name the miners lived under is on their graves now, written plainly, and two of the stones that carried the government's word for them are in the state archives.