Visitor Center & Museum in North Bloomfield
Visitor Center

Malakoff Diggins Park Headquarter (June 2019)

The town of North Bloomfield is located in the heart of today's Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park. In the center of the once thriving town you will find the charming Visitor Center & Museum & Park Headquarter, from where most visitors start their walk around the townsite—a ghost town too well preserved for looking like one, at least not before you make it past the cemetery to the North Bloomfield School building and the St. Columncille's Church.

The museum is open from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It features displays on pioneer life in North Bloomfield and the mining activities that happened around town. The Diggins site was California's largest hydraulic mine during the Gold Rush days. But not for very long, since this particular method of mining was ended by the first environmental lawsuit in the United States—a result of legal battles between mine companies and the downstream agricultural towns of Marysville and Yuba City, including Yuba County landowner Colonel Edwards Woodruff. Robert M. Wyckoff writes in the booklet with the title “Hydraulicking North Bloomfield and the Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park” (third printing October, 2005) how the years of bitter court battling came to an end on January 9, 1884:
Judge Sawyer [Federal Court Judge Lorenzo Sawyer] decided the case of Wooruff vs. The North Bloomfield Mining Company by issuing a perpetual injunction. All mining was to cease unless it could be done “so as not to injure the valleys.” For a number of years a certain amount of hydrauilic mining continued illegaly.
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