The Hangman's Tree
Placerville, California, United States
The preserved trunk of the oak from which three men were hanged in 1849, embedded in a Placerville building facade and kept as the emblem of the town once called Hangtown.
Placerville was "Old Hangtown" before it was anything else, named for the vigilance-committee hangings of 1849 at the start of the gold rush, and the town kept the evidence: the trunk of the oak from which three men were hanged was preserved and built into a building on Main Street, where a dummy effigy still hangs from it and a California Historical Landmark plaque tells the story plainly.
The tree is grim history rather than gentle legend, and the honest frame matters: frontier "justice" of this kind was mob law, frequently without trial, disproportionately applied. The community meaning that persists is partly pride in endurance, partly unease, and the ghost lore that gathers on the facade after dark is one of the ways Placerville keeps arguing with its own founding. As an urban sacred place it belongs to the category of sites a city keeps in order to remember what it did.
Visiting
Main St, Placerville CA; the site is viewable from the public sidewalk at any hour, in the heart of the historic old town.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories