Pictures from the Past
History of Strawberry
Strawberry is a small unincorporated town located on the South Fork of the Stanislaus River in Tuolumne County. In the 1850s and 1860s—as emigrants moved into California from parts east—they were delighted to find wild strawberries growing at the nearby Strawberry Flat, now the location of the manmade Pinecrest Lake.
At an elevation of 5,325 feet, Strawberry can rightly claim its place among the many mile-high towns in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Strawberry Flat Ranch was established in 1853, just three years after California became a state. Soon after, the area became a popular recreation area—especially for residents of the Central Valley in the summer. Escaping the heat, they loved to hunt, fish, and camp on the ranch and its surrounding area. Sometime in the 1870s, John McDonald established the first resort in Strawberry, which was eventually acquired by Ed Parsons in 1886 and transformed into a premier resort retreat on the Sonora Pass.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the resort was owned by the Conlin family, which also owned significant property in the area. Sadly, the resort burned to the ground in the 1940s and was never re-built.
In the 1960s, ABC carried a popular series entitled Big Valley, focusing on the exploits of the Barkley family in Stockton, California. One of the three sons in the series, Heath Barkley (played by Lee Majors), was thought to have hailed from Strawberry.
Today Strawberry is a quiet hamlet located just west of its larger and much busier sister community of Pinecrest. Strawberry’s population is 87, but swells into the several hundreds during the peak summer tourist season.