Californie

1850 · 2853 — N.p. possibly Marysville: R.A. Eddy 1850. Very good. Single folded quarto sheet on blue wove paper with a large engraved street scene on one page a later pencil drawing of a floral embellishment on an interior page with the remainder blank. Slightly trimmed with minor loss to sky section minor creasing and dust soiling a handful of short repaired closed edge tears. An unusually obscure Gold Rush-era pictorial letter sheet featuring a detailed scene of a crowded Marysville plaza before the city caught fire on August 30 1851. The work was produced by Marysville bookseller and stationer R.A. Eddy and depicts a busy scene in Marysville with horses wagons and people carrying bundles in the foreground and the buildings of the frontier town in the background. The buildings are identified from right to left as follows: Stage Yuba House Magnolia El Dorado Exchange Eddy Book the publisher Sites Jones Shafer St. Louis Hotel Bartlett. This scene was also issued under a slightly different title View from the North Side of the Plaza Marysville. Both titles appear to be very rare with one copy of the alternate title in OCLC at Yale and two others per Baird at the British Library and in a private collection; the only two copies of the present work we could locate reside in a scrapbook at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and in the de Young Collection at the Society of California Pioneers.<br /> Baird 280a. Clifford 290. R.A. Eddy unknown