Knights Ferry

Knights Ferry is a small Gold Rush river town on the Stanislaus River, where the river leaves its canyon and heads toward the Central Valley. William Knight set up a trading post and ferry here, and gold traffic and nearby placer mining made it a major crossing and commercial center in the 1850s. It was the Stanislaus County seat from 1862 to 1872. Main Street and the terraced hillside behind it still hold buildings from that era, among them the hotel, the General Store operating since 1852, the Odd Fellows hall, Gothic Revival houses and two Classical Revival buildings built by Abraham Schell. At the east end stand the ruins of David Tulloch's 1862 stone grist mill beside the long covered bridge built after the 1862 flood. Floods, alterations and a few mobile homes have affected the setting, yet the district keeps much of the feeling of an early mining and trading town.