Facts about Sacramento, CA. Sacramento, CA, founded during the time of the Gold Rush, is near San Francisco and is famous for its railroad. Sacramento is in the north central part of California about an hour...
Sacramento is in the north central part of California about an hour and fifteen minutes northeast of San Francisco. The population of the city itself is a little under 500,000, but in the metropolitan area, we are approaching 2 million. You can request a visitor's guide on our website at www.discovergold.org or by calling 1-800-292-2334. We have visitor's guides as well as maps of downtown and the outlying regions.
We say that Sacramento is like discovering gold, because it has a metaphoric impact to our history and our current status. The whole region grew up as a result of the discovery of gold just outside of Sacramento by James Marshall back in 1848. That led to all the forty-niners coming out in the great Gold Rush. The area from San Francisco to Sacramento boomed, and now over 150 years later, a lot of people in Sacramento know it as basically a government town or an agricultural area. They are always surprised to see that there are actually 2 million people in this region. We have a lot of hotels and restaurants to support the area as well as a lot of attractions like the largest railroad museum in all of North America, the California State Railroad Museum. Old Sacramento has a collection of buildings that date all the way back to the 1850s right on the river front where lot of the miners first came ashore looking to make their fortunes in places like Sutter Fort. Sutter Fort was owned by John Sutter when gold was discovered. He had his own fort from which he operated his lumber business and agricultural business. It's preserved in our midtown section today.
