Driving past Merced Falls on the way to Lake McClure doesn’t usually inspire thoughts of a bustling mini-metropolis with its own movie theater.
But a new exhibit opening at the Merced County Courthouse Museum highlights a slice of Merced County’s past as an industrial center and showcases a new collaboration between the museum and the UC Merced Library and a graduate student.
Between 1912 and 1943, Yosemite Lumber Company (YLC) operated a booming lumber mill in Merced Falls, with 1,000 or so workers. The town had company housing for workers and executives as well as non-company residents, a local store and a movie house that showed talkies.
“Most people would never know all this existed out there,” said museum Treasurer Grey Roberts, a UC Merced Board of Trustees member. Roberts’ family is from Merced Falls, and he has contributed a large number of old and beautifully preserved photos from the turn of the 20th century, when his family owned and ran a boarding house and a stage-coach stop in Merced Falls.
In the late 1800s, there were wool and flour mills, but they burned down in the mid-1890s and it wasn’t until YLC decided to leverage the Yosemite Valley Railroad to haul the massive trees workers harvested near El Portal down to Merced Falls that a new mill was built.
These days, all people can see are the remnants of the old railroad line along the Merced River on the way in to Yosemite, or the ruins of a few buildings in Merced Falls. And many people think the only industry here — ever — is agriculture.
But the new exhibit, which opens today (March 8) and runs through June 10 at the museum in downtown Merced, brings to life the story of the YLC, the thriving little industrial town of Merced Falls and the railroad, and what life was like in Merced Falls from the late 1800s until the lumber mill and the railroad closed.
