Fort John, Amador County Ghost Town

In natural beauty there is not one of these sites that equals Fort John. A little U meadow at the bottom of a slot canyon is bounded on one sideby the babbling headwaters of Amador Creek. Enough of the virgin forest, supported by dense second growth, clothes the canyon walls at north and south with a veritable fairyland, the light filtering down through the greenness ISO feet overhead inspires rever­ence when one penetrates to these sylvan depths of a great cathedral of nature.

On the meadow wild rose, columbine, and a dozen other of the wild flowers of the Sierra bloom and proliferate in wild abandon. Remnants of old orchards set their blossoms in spring, in cadence with their wild relatives. One old almond tree has attained a diameter of 3 feet at its base and is still growing. Its fruit, no doubt, has long since reverted to the wild and turned bitter, as almonds always do when not tended and cultivated. A road that hugs the north wall of the canyon accesses the site from the east.

A mile or so of its lower reach was formed by blasting the granite out of the sheer face of the mountain, building a retaining wall at the lower side from the frag­mented stone-this wall in its entire length being from 5 to 50 feet in height-and finally filling in the space between the cliff and the wall with earth. The labor and explosives that went into this are something to contemplate and bear witness to the one-time importance of the place.

There is no evidence upon the crowned surface of the roadbed that an iron tire of a horse-drawn vehicle or the rubber tread of automotive equipment has turned here in the last seventy-five or perhaps one hundred years.

There is a maze of filled-in cellars, wall footings, and foundation outlines, and one structure that, in this whole series has no counterpart. It is made of fieldstone mortared in adobe and inlet into the grade at the north. There is a discernible wall above it, and up the slope there is the base of a much larger building of which this structure served as a lower story. In its present ruined state one can note that it carried a topping of massive timbers covered by at least 2 feet of earth. Fire slits are placed in the wall in such a manner that a complete sweep of the area adjacent is obtained by intersecting lines of aim. Observing the embrasure openings in their rear or interior faces it would appear, and this is only an estimate, no protractor or azimuth being at hand, that the traverse or arc of small arms fire would be about sixty degrees.

A trapdoor through the earth deck would enable men to assemble for a last ditch stand, safe from fire and able to mount a murderous counter offensive from the loopholes. The larger building above it probably functioned as arsenal, maga­zine, guardroom, and, of course, the point of final resistance. Based on the physical evidence, this must have been a much more important post than Fort Ann. Apparently, no information can be located as to how many men were stationed here, how long they remained, or when the site lost its military significance. When we turn from field exploration to documentary, we encounter an odd twist, the statement that in 1850 by one account, twenty-nine miners assembled and formed the first temperance society in California. This organization grew and grew, and, if we are to credit their press releases, doubtless overly optimistic, they really had the Demon Rum on the ropes.

A disproportionately large amount of news items originating thereabouts in the 1850S and early 60S is given to the expansion of the Temperance People's activities. The claim of a membership of from five to six hundred persons in the Society is made as early as 1854. In the mid-1860's, as good a point as any to close this brief account, mention is made of an approximate one thousand people who gathered at the town hall to pay their disrespects to John Barleycorn.

Information, photographs courtesy of the Amador County Archives, The Historical Marker Database, The Chronicling America Database, and Larry Cenotto, Amador County's Historian