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Placerville noose scandal: Sundown town or just hard-on-crime? How a tiny city became a national battleground

Formerly known as Old Dry Diggings, Dry Diggings, and Hangtown, the town's logo has become the talk of the town
UPDATED JUL 31, 2020
Placerville logo (City of Placerville)
Placerville logo (City of Placerville)

The noose has become a controversial subject ever since the Bubba Wallace controversy made headlines. Barely a month later, a California city logo is under the scanner for depicting a noose. Set in the country seat of El Dorado County, Placerville is a charming California “gold rush” town named after the placer gold deposits found in its river beds and hills. 

Formerly known as Old Dry Diggings, Dry Diggings, and Hangtown, the town's logo has become the talk of the town. In the Placerville city seal, the logo has a noose hanging from the tree behind the miner and it's quite eerie for the small town — with a population of a little over 10,500 — to have a history of lynching. According to reports, the City Council is going to take a decision on whether to keep or lose the noose. 

In a string of tweets, the Los Angeles Times reported, "When city council voted to postpone a decision to keep or lose the noose, the local paper received a lot of strongly-worded letters. What did the people say? Well, they used a familiar argument: Old Hangtown is what Placerville got nicknamed before it was much more than an improvised 19th-century mining camp."



 

Now, at the heels of the brewing controversy, several Internet users feel it's time to lose the noose. But what is the history behind the numerous names and background of the logo of the town? In 1848, James W Marshall hopped upon gold at Sutter's Mill in nearby Coloma, California and that gave birth to the name Dry Diggin's in reference to how the miners moved cartloads of dry soil to separate the gold.

Just a year later, in 1849, the town earned its most common historical name, Hangtown. Now, onlookers would question that as a startling name, but it has a history to it. As per the museum guide at the Fountain & Tallman Museum, three hangings occurred after three men on horseback came into town with guns ablaze. But, the name stuck for a long, long time. 

The next year, upon the request of local churches, a more friendly name was to be bestowed upon the town. However, it was not changed until 1854 when the City of Placerville was incorporated. It was named Placerville and at that time, it was the third-largest town in California. In 1857, the county seat was moved from Coloma to Placerville.

Placerville (Getty Images)

However, the name Hangtown — which was incorporated in several businesses, shops, and a local Little League baseball team — has come into prominence again in times of the George Floyd protests and Black Lives Matter movement. To bring that into notice, local residents feel the historical period when Hangtown became the nickname due to numerous executions by hanging, roughly in the mid-1800s, should not be held forth as something to be “celebrated” and urged city leaders to make some changes.

City leaders have been asked to eliminate Hangtown references and depictions of hangman’s nooses. So now, will the city eliminate “Old Hangtown” from the welcome sign that greets eastbound Highway 50 travelers? Reports say the sign was installed by the local Rotary Club. What's more, the redesign eliminates the noose but the name “Old Hangtown” remains intact.

On Twitter, many have expressed their disgust at the logo. One tweet said, "I’ve been to that city a million times and my ex was from there so we’d visit her family regularly and I never noticed the noose until now. They should remove that thing immediately." Another posted, "The logo in the seal likely depicts the use of nooses to serve out criminal sentencing, which was common during that era and dates back to the medieval times for all races. Hate based lynching is very wrong, but here...I think you are just reaching for a shock value story."



 



 

If approved by the council, the old seal will be removed from all city “documents, facilities and other assets” and theoretically replaced with the newly designed logo. At the last meeting, council members reportedly said they wished to hear from the public as to whether Hangtown should be struck off as the nickname of the town or still be retained. But will removing the image of the dangling noose from the logo strike it off from minds? 

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