History of the Markham Ravine and the Town of Lincoln 

The first mention of Markham Ravine we have discovered in historical records dates back to 1872, when the ravine was referred to as Markham Slough. Long-time residents of Lincoln recall that they always knew it as Markham Slough until about twenty-five years ago when the slough evolved into being called a ravine.

A geographical description of the Markham Slough, aka Ravine, today reflects an origin within the lower elevation hills northeast of the City of Lincoln, near Garden Bar, Mount Pleasant and Fruitvale Roads. Land uses in this area include rural residential with large parcels, usually greater than 5 acres, and mixed farming and ranching. Presently, the channel at this end is poorly defined and, due to runoff from irrigation and seasonal flows, supports a predominance of wetland vegetation. Long-time residents, however, report that there have been years in which the flow of water within the Markham Slough at its upper end was sometimes quite substantial. Near SR 65, just north of the Gladding, McBean clay factory, the Markham Ravine channel becomes more distinct and proceeds westerly to flow through industrial, light industrial, and rapidly urbanizing areas located within the western side of Lincoln.

The Markham Ravine, near the water treatment plant, also flows to the south and east towards Joiner Parkway. West of the airport, the primary ravine channel passes through a mixture of farms and ranches, including pastures used for grazing as well as rice and other grain farming. In this reach of Markham Ravine, the channel generally has no flow, but does support water from irrigation return flows and seasonal surface runoff from rainfall and floods. Riparian and wetland vegetation are associated with the ravine channel at this point in location. Markham Ravine empties into the East Side Canal approximately one mile north of the Auburn Ravine.

The cultural history of the Markham Ravine and greater Lincoln area is fascinating. The Markham Ravine/Slough has played a significant role in the history of Lincoln as we will describe throughout this text. We have done extensive research, utilizing written documents and resources located at the Placer County Historical Society, Placer County Archives and Research Center, Lincoln News Messenger archives, Maidu cultural organizations, as well as various museums and historical societies.  

Perhaps our best source of information and knowledge thus far has been personal conversations with three long-time Lincoln resident historians. The first is Jerry Logan, His family has lived in this area for many generations. He has written numerous articles for our local newspapers, under the title "Tales of Western Placer County." He has also written two volumes of books, entitled "Western Placer County and Lincoln According to History." He continues to make presentations at numerous historical society meetings throughout Placer County. The second Lincoln resident is Bill Wyatt, who retired after nine years as an historian for Gladding, McBean. The third Lincoln resident historian is Wes Freeman. Wes spent most of his boyhood exploring the Lincoln environments with a particular focus on the Maidu Indians. In fact, he has never ceased his explorations. Wes has a household museum of cultural artifacts and a personal library of hundreds of books and reference materials related to our area's cultural anscestors. The Markham Ravine Neighborhood Committee extends a personal thank you to Jerry, Bill and Wes, without whom this Lincoln historical perspective could not have been written.

The larger Central and Northern California regional area was first settled by both the Maidu and Miwok Indian cultures centuries ago. The Miwok villages were actually spread throughout the high Sierra and the Coastal mountain areas. The primary Indian residents of the Central Valley of California and the eastern Sierra foothills, including the Lincoln area, were the Southern Nisenan Maidu. Nisenan sites included villages, seasonal camps, quarries, ceremonial grounds, trading sites, fishing stations, cemetaries and river crossings. Nisenan Maidu villages ranged in size from fifteen to twenty individuals to larger groupings of five hundred. A village site could consist of three to fifty houses. Houses were domed structures covered with earth and tule or grass, and measured ten to fifteen feet in diameter.

The local Maidu Indians settled throughout the Lincoln area. There is some debate regarding the actual location of the primary Maidu village within Lincoln. Wilson and Towne published a book in 1978, entitled "Selected Bibliography of Maidu Ethnography and Archeology." This books suggests that the village was located at a site now known as Twelve Bridges and Sun City Lincoln Hills. Wilson and Towne refer to this Maidu village settlement as Ba Mu Ma. Wes Freeman, however, states that he has not ever been aware of any archeological evidence that a Maidu village was located at precisely this location. He states that there is more evidence that a primary Maidu village site was located further up the hill towards Auburn along present day Highway 193, near Sierra Collge Blvd. Maidu Indian villages were usually located on low rises along major watercourses, which more befits this latter location.

Maidu Indians were primarily gatherers and hunters. They gathered food from the abundant food supplies all around them. Deer, rabbit, insects and salmon were the chief source of animal protein. The Maidu were not farmers because the land was already rich in natural food resources. They seldom needed to migrate more than a few miles from their village communities. The Euro-American settlers oftentimes referred to the Maidu as "diggers" because of the nature of their constant digging around the ground for natural food supplies, including acorns.

The primary food staple and diet of the Maidu was acorns, harvested from the oak trees which once flourished throughout Central California, and particularly within western Placer County and the Lincoln region. One can still find the remnants of the significant acorn harvesting activity in the continued presence today of large flat granite rock outcroppings punctuated with numerous mortar holes. Archeologists suggest that some of these "grinding rock" bedrock mortars date back 1400 to 2000 plus years. The mortars vary quite markedly in their size, shape and depth. These mortar holes are not caused by natural events, such as water flows. They have been carved over centuries of time for purposeful uses such as grinding acorns and other food resources. 

The Lincoln Maidu Indians' land settlement area was also rich in salt deposits, with a large salt flat located near present-day Ferrari Ranch Road and Highway 193. Salt became another staple for Maidu Indian food. Salt also became a commodity for economic trade, along with beads, woven baskets, ceramics and animal furs.

The Maidu village lands within the Lincoln area included portions of the Markham Ravine and its' tributaries, although the Ba Mu Ma villager's primary water source was more than likely the Auburn Ravine. While the water flow within Markham Ravine was oftentimes minimal it was still useful to the Maidu villagers as a food source and for their acorn harvesting activities.

It is interesting to note at this point of discussion that the Maidu Indians were not the first ethnic or linguistic inhabitants of the Lincoln area. That distinction belongs to those who lived here during the Windmiller and Martis periods, dating back to 6000 BC. But, this is a subject for another research project, perhaps performed by a Lincoln High School student?     

By the early 1800s the Lincoln area was rich with Maidu heritage and culture. However, the Maidu Indians first contact with Euro-Americans in the 1830s brought diseases that severely decimated much of the Maidu population. The gold rush of 1848 and 1849 was the harbinger of further devastation to the native Indian population. The miners and settlers coming into the area were predators of the Indian native's traditional animal food sources, resulting in starvation and death for many of the Maidu still remaining. 

Perhaps even more importantly, the Indians occupied lands which were desired by the significant number of new Euro-American settlers. In 1851 and 1852 the US Congress required the establishment of 18 treaty agreements, encompassing all of the California Indian tribes. In essence these treaties stripped them of their village home land rights and entitlements. While the treaties also guaranteed to the Indians rights to relocation to reservations located within other less than desirable lands, these rights were never ratified and seldom recognized until 1905. By that time it was too late. The approximate 800 acres of land where the Ba Mu Ma Maidu village once flourished within the Lincoln area was acquired in 1857 by George Whitney and evolved into the 20,000 acre Spring Valley Ranch developed by J. Parker Whitney. 

While the Maidu Indian population within Lincoln and Western Placer County had declined quite rapidly during the twenty years between 1833 and 1853, there is still evidence of an Indian presence in the Lincoln area throughout the following fifty years. Some Indian reservations were actually established throughout Central California, following the 1852 treaties, but none were created within the larger Lincoln area. Verbal accounts passed down through the generations of Lincoln area residents described migrant bands of Indians still traveling the Western reaches of the Markham Ravine during the 1880s, harvesting acorns for food and conducting trading endeavors. It is not certain, however, that these migratory Indian bands were descendants of the Lincoln Ba Mu Ma Maidu village, or related to another Maidu Indian village. It is reported that these Indian groupings would annually migrate eastward towards Lincoln from the town of Verona (then known as Vernon), just west of highway 99, where the Feather River joins the Sacramento River. Today one can still find remnants of bedrock mortars at the western end of Markham Slough, an indicator that an acorn harvesting activity was still intact, albeit very limited.

Today there are still some Maidu tribal members remaining in Western Placer County. They are living primarily in the Auburn area. The few remaining Indians of Maidu and Miwok descent are now organized as the United Auburn Indian Community. 

There are few, but three excellent sources of published written history about the Maidu Indians throughout Central and Northern California. The first book was first written in 1877 by Stephen Powers. It is entitled "The Tribes of California." It was republished by the University of California Press in 1976. In 1882, Thompson and West published a book entitled "History of Placer and Nevada County."  In 1978, as mentioned previously, Wilson and Towne published a book entitled "Selected Bibliography of Maidu Ethnography and Archeology." All three of these books are out of print today, but they can be found and researched through the Placer County Historical Society and the Placer County Museum, located in Auburn. Additional written documentation is contained within unpublished research and educational thesis papers, but the only readily available source for this information is within Wes Freeman's home library.

Unfortunately, however, much of the written historical documentation we discovered relating specifically to the Lincoln area, has ignored the Maidu Indian inhabitants altogether except through brief mention. The initial and major focus of most historical perspectives starts upon the arrival and settlement of Lincoln by the Euro-American culture just after the 1848 discovery of gold. Most of Lincoln's early Euro-American residents, however, were farmers who discovered the agricultural vitality of the land and decided to pursue farming in the lowlands, as opposed to gold prospecting in the Sierra hills above Lincoln.

The Lincoln area really started to prosper when the railroad was constructed through the present day townsite, which was first called Auburn Ravine Station. The town of Lincoln, as it would soon be called, was named for Charles Lincoln Wilson, a San Francisco transportation businessman. Wilson was mainly responsible for arranging the financing needed to extend the railroad line to this area. He was the president of the Sacramento Valley Railroad and a member of the Board of Directors of the California Central Railroad. The Sacramento Valley Railroad (SVRR) was started in 1856, and became the first commercial rail line in the Western United States, carrying the Pony Express mail between Sacramento and Folsom. This railroad was first designed with the idea that it would become a major western leg of a transcontinental railroad from the east coast to the west coast. As it turned out, however, this honor was eventually assumed by the Central Pacific Railroad.

The SVRR rail line extension initially ran from Folsom to Roseville Junction. It was then extended to Lincoln in 1861. The Railroad allowed for substantially greater access to Lincoln, resulting in an economic boom for the residents. The SVRR, however, soon ran out of funds as the power and economic funding shifted to the Central Pacific Railroad company. As a result the SVRR rail line did not extend further to Marysville at that time, as originally planned by Theodore D. Judah. Judah was a civil engineer who designed railroad lines for all of the emerging railroad companies throughout the United States. He was long associated with the big four California businessmen, Huntington, Stanford, Crocker and Hopkins, who became the principal investors in the development and completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. Judah died in 1863 from Milaria and never lived to see the fruition of his transcontinental railroad dream

During the early 1870s coal was discovered within the Lincoln area. Within the next ten years there were two primary coal mines within Lincoln, whose underbelly was marked by numerous mine shafts spreading from north of town through to the present-day 5th Street. It was hoped by many of the residents that the Lincoln area coal mining operations would someday rival those of the Pittsburg, Pennsylvania area. However, it soon became a reality that our coal deposits were too sparse and not as rich in quality as the Eastern counterpart. There was a minimal market for the Lincoln coal at that point in time. Some historians note that the coal discovered in Lincoln in the early 1870s may have been in it's infancy, and not yet aged and solidified as needed for use in an industrial commercial way. There has been much speculation as to why there were not continued efforts to mine the Lincoln coal deposits in later years.

Perhaps an interesting answer to this question lies in the fate which befell several of the Lincoln coal mine shafts in 1883. A fate which forever changed our Lincoln economic history. A fate in which the Markham Ravine played a significant role. Over a period of time a large amount of water at the northeastern end of the Markham Ravine had evidently been seeping into some of the coal mine shafts, eventually causing them to collapse after a major fire in 1883. The collapsed mine shafts were located nearby to the present site of the Gladding, McBean clay pottery factory. Clay deposits had previously been discovered within several of the coal mine shafts in 1873, but not at first seriously considered for extensive mining due to the then-present emphasis on coal mining operations. Charles Gladding was later invited to Lincoln by his cousin, who lived in Sacramento, to inspect the clay deposits more closely. Analysis of the clay determined that the Lincoln deposits were much more significant than initially thought, and that their richness could possibly rival those of China which had been the primary source of clay in the world at that time. Charles Gladding and Peter McBean opened up their clay pottery manufacturing business in Lincoln in 1875. After the coal mine collapses in 1883 the emphasis of mining operations within Lincoln shifted entirely to clay. As they say, the rest is history.

During this period of economic boom from 1849 to 1900, evolving from the railroad extension to Lincoln and the discoveries of coal and clay, the area's basic and most stable economy continued throughout to be agricultural farming. It was only natural that the Lincoln townsite would develop and flourish at the same time. It was Theodore Judah himself, the primary civil engineer for the railroads, who first surveyed and laid out the original Lincoln townsite in 1859. The actual incorporation date of the City of Lincoln was 1890. 

Over the recent years a lumber mill has been established by Sierra Pacific within Lincoln. This mill is currently the largest lumber harvesting operation in North America. Markham Ravine flows right through the middle of this mill. The lumber mill utilizes the Markham Ravine water flows in their daily operations. Again, Markham Ravine is playing a significant role in the history of Lincoln.

One of the issues raised by the Markham Ravine Neighborhood Committee has been the need to continuously evaluate the quality of the Markham Ravine water downstream from the lumber mill. Representatives from Sierra Pacific state that the water used to keep the cut lumber moist and cool is subsequently pumped into a pit which is separated from the Markham Ravine flow. They further state that the ravine water quality is mandated to be tested on a regular basis and that their has been no damage to Markham Ravine water quality because of the mill operations.  

In summary, some of the most significant historical events throughout the past several hundred years within the Lincoln area have evolved through the economies of acorns, salt, agricultural farming, coal, clay, lumber and the railroad. Throughout this history, the Lincoln area's long-term viability in successfully supporting each of its' resident population groupings, whether Indian or Anglo, has revolved around an agricultural-land base. As Lincoln continues to be one of the fastest growing cities in California with encroaching urbanization, we must not lose our recognition of the continued need to preserve our open space and agricultural heritage.  

We have not yet reflected on perhaps the most burning question of all in the minds of our website readers. Just who was the namesake for Markham Ravine, first known as Markham Slough? None of the written historical documentation researched thus far makes any reference to the Ravine's origins or namesake. Research of the birth, death, voter registration and genealogical history records of Placer County reveals only one Markham as a resident during the past one hundred fifty years, Anne Markham Murphy.  

There is an intriguing possibility which could provide the answer to the Markham Ravine namesake question. There is a significantly large family tree in the genealogy data bases which links the surnames of Doty and Markham. There is no historical documentation we have found that connects a Doty or Markham family in residence in this area. However, there is both a Doty Ravine and a Markham Ravine practically next to each other. Doty Ravine flows from Auburn down to Gladding Road just north of Lincoln. At one time the Doty Ravine was even a rich but short-lived source of gold, the closest-to-Lincoln-as-yet discovered gold deposits. Why would two ravines in very close proximity have these two specific surnames unless relatives within the Doty-Markham family tree had some connections in the Lincoln area? Is there a connection here? Is there a reader of this Lincoln area history who is related to the Doty-Markham family tree, and can shed some light on this question? 

There is yet another intriguing, but less plausible, possibility that perhaps the Ravine was named after the poet, Edwin Markham. He lived much of his later life in Central California and the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was very well known and quite influential. In addition, some of his most famous poems are written as tributes to President Abraham Lincoln. Markham later published a book entitled "Lincoln and Other Poems." For years it had been presumed by many that the City of Lincoln's namesake was President Abraham Lincoln, and not Charles Lincoln Wilson. Is there a connection here? Just another intriguing thought!

Perhaps it is named after Henry Markham, who was the Governor of California from 1891 to 1895? Probably not, because the first written reference to the name Markham Slough was made in 1872. Further research is obviously necessary to confirm the Markham Ravine namesake.  

For more details about the history of the Lincoln and Markham Ravine area please visit the websites listed below. However, there are still many gaps in our knowledge, particularly as they relate to the Markham Ravine namesake and the Maidu Indians who once flourished in the Lincoln area. As you have been reading our abbreviated history above you may have in your possession additional information which will enlighten us regarding our Lincoln origins and history. Students may wish to do some further research to discover more facts and details as a school-assigned project.

If anyone has additional information, historical photos, or stories to share which have been passed along by long-time resident family members, please submit them to webmaster@markhamravine.org. We will incorporate them into our website history menu.

The following are links to websites which will provide additional detailed historical information.

 Maidu Indians:

Miwok Indians:

Indians of California History:

Town of Lincoln:

 Historical Documentation:

 
 
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