The Coulterville Main Street Historic District is a historical district located in Coulterville, in Mariposa County, California, United States. This area is defined as the historic downtown area of Coulterville along Main Street (State Highway 49) from the western junction of Highway 49 to the location of the old Chinatown on the eastern end. The district has 25 buildings which are representative of the California Gold Rush era and the early twentieth century. The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 12, 1982, under Criterion A for its role in the early development of mining and tourism in Mariposa County and Criterion C as a well-preserved ensemble of Mother Lode vernacular architecture. Coulterville has also been designated as California Historical Landmark No. 332.
There were three significant fires that destroyed the majority of the buildings in the town of Coulterville and each time they had to rebuild with materials readily available to them in the area such as schist, adobe, and brick. Due to this repetitive loss and rebuilding of the town the Mother Lode vernacular architecture of the district is a layering of masonry ground floors and wood-frame upper floors with iron-shuttered windows and wooden verandas.
Some of the contributing buildings include the Jeffery Hotel ( 1851), where President Theodore Roosevelt stayed in 1903; the Sun Sun Wo Company Store (1851), which is one of the best-preserved adobe commercial buildings in the Gold Country; and the Coulter Hotel (1860), which is currently home to the Northern Mariposa County History Center.
Due to the decline of gold mining prior to the modernization of Coulterville, Main Street was neither completely rebuilt nor abandoned. According to the NRHP nomination form, it "remains much as it was in the nineteenth century in scale and character."
Structures include the adobe and stone buildings constructed in the 1850s, and the wood-framed buildings that date back to after the 1899 fire. There are twelve contributing buildings with masonry shells that date back to the 1850s or 1860s, which were later supported with wood-frame construction around 1900. Some common characteristics of these buildings include walls made of locally quarried schist and sandstone, iron shutters on the doors and windows, corrugated metal roofs, and wooden verandas that project out onto the sidewalk.
George W. Coulter established the supply point for miners extracting gold from the Maxwell Creek placers when he founded the town in 1850. Initially the settlement was a tent city called Banderita (Spanish for "little flag") because Coulter raised an American flag above his tent. In 1852, a post office was established as Maxwell Creek, but the name would be changed to Coulterville in 1853.
The town suffered from three major fires that affected the built environment of the district:
Following each fire, the residents of Coulterville rebuilt their homes and businesses using local materialsâÂÂschist, adobe, and brick. The repeated fires and subsequent rebuilding created the layered masonry-and-frame architecture that defines the district and the type of Mother Lode vernacular architecture described in the NRHP nomination as representative of the architecture of the region.
By the late 1800s the district had become the primary supply point for hard-rock gold mines in the area including the Mary Harrison, Malvina, Louise, and Potosi mines. The district also served as a tourist destination for visitors traveling to Yosemite Valley via the Coulterville Road, which was completed in 1874. After the Yosemite Valley Railroad opened in 1907 and the modern highway along the Merced River was completed in 1940, the district experienced a decrease in through traffic.
The district contains 24 contributing properties and one non-contributing property (the post office built in 1979). Contributing properties include:
Other contributing properties in the district include the Bruschi Warehouse (1860), McCarthy Building (1860), Canova House (c. 1860), and several other residential and commercial buildings along Main Street.
Outside of the district boundaries, in the town center, is located Whistling Billy, an eight-ton Porter locomotive used by the Merced Gold Mining Company to transport ore from the Mary Harrison Mine to the Potosi Mill on a narrow-gauge railroad with extreme grades and sharp curves, starting in 1897.