Grass Valley (Images of America)

The paperback pages / images are of higher quality than the hardback - at least for the one book I bought in Hardback, returned, received a replacement and just kept it even though the photos are nothing compared to the paper back versions. I actually bought this book unknowingly already owning it. It's a great book, love the photos and will gift this to someone. I love these books, but please don't get the hardback books - the paper is less glossy and the photo quality is just awful. To be clear, the Grass Valley book I bought was paperback and great. Love it.

Excellent condition.

i bought this book because i was raised in nevada county.pretty informative.it got 5 stars because its home.i would recommed amazon.com to everyone.condition is as desribed the prices are fair.they get a thumbs up from me.thanks

Girlfriend loved it

I love this book...it is very informative about Grass Valley and it's history. It made a very nice gift for mom.

Nice book!

I was drawn to this local pictorial history, "Grass Valley" (2006) through my study of the American idealist philosopher, Josiah Royce (1855 -- 1916). A friend and colleague of William James, Royce taught at Harvard for over thirty years. He was born in Grass Valley to pioneers without money who had travelled across the country in search of a better life. Royce spent much of his boyhood in Grass Valley as a shy, bookish, child in a rough and tumble new mining community. Near the end of his life, Royce wrote an autobiographical sketch and commented on his earliest years:"I was born in 1855 in California. My native town was a mining town in the Sierra Nevada, -- a place five or six years older than myself. My earliest recollections include a very frequent wonder as to what my elders meant when they said that this was a new community. I frequently looked at the vestiges left by the former diggings of miners, saw that many pine logs were rotten, and that a miner's grave was to be found in a lonely place not far from my own house. Plainly men had lived and died thereabouts. I dimly reflected that this sort of life had apparently been going on ever since men dwelt thereabouts. The logs and the grave looked old. The sunsets were beautiful. The wide prospects when one looked across the Sacramento Valley were impressive, and had long interested the people of whose love for my country I had heard much. What was there then in this place that ought to be called new, or for that matter, crude? I wondered, and gradually came to feel that part of my life's business was to find out what all this wonder meant."Later in his Autobiographical Sketch, Royce identified the idea of community as the driving force behind his philosophical thinking, and he identified his Grass Valley boyhood as an important source of the development of his understanding of community: "I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered about the Idea of the Community, although this idea has only come gradually to my clear consciousness. This was what I was intensely feeling, in the days when my sisters and I looked across the Sacramento Valley and wondered about the great world beyond our mountains."Claudine Chalmers' book on Grass Valley aptly captures the sense of Grass Valley as a community from its earliest days to the present. I think Royce would have loved the book, both because it covers his home town and because of its focus on community. Royce in included twice in the book. His portrait appears together with a brief biography (p.42) Later in the book, there is a photograph of the local library which was constructed on the site of Royce's birthplace and which, in 2005, was named after Royce. (p. 106)Grass Valley is located in northwestern California in Nevada County. Claudine Chalmers, a PhD in history, was born in France and later fell in love with California's Gold Country. French immigrants played an important role in the early development of Grass Valley, and the community has always been home to a diverse populace. Chalmers is the author of several books on the history of the gold country and on the French presence in California. Her book on Grass Valley shows her deep love for and knowledge of the community. Part of the Images of America series of pictorial local American histories, "Grass Valley" combines rare images of the community with Chalmers' commentary and discussion.Chalmers' book starts with the early Indian inhabitants of Grass Valley before it became the site of the second California Gold Rush. In the early years, settlers came individually, as did Royce's parents, and dug "coyote holes" to try to extract gold from quartz rock, a risky, hazardous, if lucrative occupation. With the pioneers, came the rudiments of a town. Early primitive techniques of mining gold soon gave way to larger, more sophisticated means which required large infusions of capital and large corporations. The Grass Valley community soon prospered through its gold and other mineral wealth. It became home to large influxes of immigrants. A local government was established, supporting businesses, including the ubiquitous taverns, grew, and schools, churches, parks, and newspapers, helped create a sense of community life.In the early years, the community survived two large fires and then rebuilt itself. A narrow gauge railroad soon was built primarily to bring the gold to market. Streets were paved and a street car system provided transportation before the advent of the automobile. The city was home to a Chinatown as well as to other ethnic groups. The gold market drove the economy of Grass Valley until WW II. After a decline, Grass Valley reinvented itself and today makes a great deal of its historic past.Like America as a whole, Grass Valley showed it could have room both for bustling, entrepreneurial activity and for the rarer life of art and of the mind as exemplified most famously by Josiah Royce. So too, the early days of Grass Valley frequently approached lawlessness, but with time Grass Valley's residents learned to govern themselves and to live together as a cohesive community. From the mid-19th Century, Grass Valley had a modern character, for its day, and integrated the present with its frontier past. From Chalmers' account, today's Grass Valley properly keeps alive its history and sense of itself as a community while moving forward.I enjoyed thinking about Royce in reading this book and learning about the town in which he grew up. There is much to be learned from Royce about the nature of community and much to be learned about studying local communities themselves, such as this account by Chalmers of Grass Valley. Arcadia Publishers, the publisher of the Images of America Series, kindly sent me a copy of this book to review.Robin Friedman

This books provides a vastly informative history of the famous gold-mining town, Grass Valley. As a Grass Valley native, I found Dr. Chalmers' book to be not only extremely interesting, but full of facts I didn't know. She gave excellent descriptions and detailed maps of the town's rich gold-mines, which were found to provide some $350 million in gold alone between the years of 1848-1965, as well as captivating biographies on the fascinating people who made this town what it is today, including the infamous writer and lecturer, Mark Twain, and well-known Cherokee writer, Yellow Bird (John Rollin Ridge). Using actual artifacts and historical images from both private and public collections, Dr. Chalmers' history of Grass Valley will provide any reader with an entertaining and factual knowledge of this charming gold-mining town in the foothills. I highly recommend it!

I received the book yesterday.When I first leafed through it, I immediately had 10 loose pages in my hand.Then it became more and more. The book has unfortunately a very bad quality. I am very disappointed.