Blue Star Memorial Highway A tribute to the Armed

Auburn, CA

Bloomers Cut, sliced through the earth of the Bloomer Ranch near Auburn in 1864, was one of the great engineering feats of the Central Pacific Railroad as it pushed east toward the Sierra Nevada. Crews—largely Chinese laborers whose grueling work drove the transcontinental line—carved the deep passage by hand and black powder, and it survives virtually unchanged today. It was an early and celebrated obstacle overcome on the way to linking the nation by rail.

Lincoln, CA

This marker honors Colonel C. Lincoln Wilson, the founder of the city of Lincoln, California, and a builder of the state's earliest railroads as first president of the Sacramento Valley Railroad and founder of the California Central Railroad. In an age when rail lines determined which towns flourished, Wilson laid out a community that took his name and grew along the tracks he helped bring to the Sacramento Valley.

Lincoln, CA

The earliest maps of Lincoln, California, show that city founder Charles Lincoln Wilson set this location aside as a public square, but with no funds to develop it, the town trustees voted in 1897 to sell the land. A horse watering trough came to mark the spot—a practical fixture of everyday life in a horse-powered Gilded Age town. The site's history reveals how a young Western community's grand civic plans bent to the hard realities of frontier finances.

El Dorado County, CA

In the 1850s and '60s, Green Valley Road was a bustling artery into the Sierra foothills, funneling gold-seekers, freight, and travelers toward California's mining country. The Central Overland Pony Express thundered past this spot on its famous relay between Missouri and Sacramento, and roadside inns sprang up to feed and shelter the constant stream of riders, teamsters, and stagecoach passengers. For a few short years this stretch of dusty road was the beating heart of the Gold Rush frontier.