This early postcard dated 1900 shows the Hall Of Records and the County Court House (formerly the state capitol building) of Sacramento, California as it looked in 1895. Sacramento History Online has this same postcard and a nice history of the buildings and the City of Sacramento written with it.
This is a great view of a main street in Sacramento in 1895 when the California Gold Rush was still on. In this old postcard, you can see several horse drawn carriages parked in front of the Hall of Records and Court House, their owners attending to business within.
Sacramento became a city due to the efforts of John Sutter and James W. Marshall. Gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill by James Marshal in 1848. The gold fever spread bringing hundreds of thousands of people from the Eastern U.S., Canada, and even Europe into Sacramento after gold. Sutter’s Fort was established by Sutter in 1839 and greatly helped keep law and order in the quickly growing Sacramento area. During the California Gold Rush, Sacramento was a major distribution point, a commercial and agricultural center, and a terminus for wagon trains, stagecoaches, riverboats, the telegraph, the Pony Express, and the First Transcontinental Railroad. It was the center of a dramatic time in American History, although looks deceivingly sedate in this postcard.
Sacramento is the capitol of California as well as the county seat of Sacramento County, CA. Seated alongside the Sacramento River and close to the American River, it also sits at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. US Rte. 80 runs through Sacramento, up over the mountains to Truckee, California and down the Eastern slopes into Reno, NV. This is a common throughway for people living in San Francisco or Reno to travel between the two cities. From Truckee one can venture to Lake Tahoe making it just about a two hour drive ( in good weather ) from Sacramento to the lake, a common resort site for people living in San Francisco, Sacramento, or Reno.