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The post office came to town in 1852, with Dwight Crandall serving as the first postmaster. Other businesses included an Adams Express office, stores, saloons, hotels, bakeries and restaurants, doctors, lawyers, blacksmith, barber and numerous other professions, sordid and mundane. In September of 1854, Sutter Creek incorporated as a town which shows there were at least two hundred inhabitants at that time, as that was the required number for incorporation.

Sutter Creek Methodist Church, built in 1862, with additions later, topped by tower in 1976

From that point on the town never looked back, enjoying immense prosperity for years to come due to its location, in the midst of some of the most active and profitable deep quartz mines in the Gold Country. Mines such as the Central Eureka, the Old Eureka, the Lincoln, the Wildman, the Mahoney, and the Hayward produced millions of dollars in gold. The famous mines attracted and helped create famous people, such as Leland Stanford, Alvinza Hayward, and the "Witch of Wallstreet," Hetty Green...

Two brick buildings to right of theater are among the oldest stores here, dating from 1865

Receiving an interest in the Union Mine as payment for a merchant's debt, Leland Stanford left his grocery business in Sacramento to travel to Sutter Creek when news of the mine's losses reached him in the late 1850's. By this time the mine had been renamed the Lincoln, and after working the claim for a while with poor results, Stanford decided to sell the mine for $5,000, provided he could find a buyer. Robert Downs, the mine foreman, persuaded Stanford to give the mine one last chance and as fortune would have it, the chance payed out. .

The Ratto Theater was built in 1919.

All graphics created and owned by Ray and Cheryl Herndon