Coulterville Main Street Historic District

Main Street in Coulterville, a foothill town west of Yosemite National Park, forms a commercial district of twenty-five structures that preserves much of its appearance from around 1900. Its buildings record the town's nineteenth-century pattern of boom, fire and rebuilding: a dozen of the contributing structures stand on brick, stone or adobe shells from the 1850s and 1860s, topped with wood-frame additions built after the 1899 fire. Notable buildings include the three-story Jeffrey Hotel, rebuilt in 1903 to house President Theodore Roosevelt's party, the 1851 Sun Sun Wo Company adobe store, one of the oldest surviving structures tied to Chinese immigrants in California, and Candy's House, the last remnant of the old red-light district. The district also reflects the town's role in Yosemite tourism, since the Coulterville turnpike was the first stagecoach road to reach the valley floor. Few Highway 49 towns have kept their historic character as intact.