Pinacate, California

5 min read

State: California
County: Riverside County
Coordinates: 33.760° N, 117.233° W
Founded: 1882

In the spring of 1882, a small rail siding appeared on a dry plain east of the Pinacate Mining District in western Riverside County, and for three brief years the settlement that grew around it was called Pinacate, California. Named for the dark, odorous pinacate beetle that scuttled across the San Jacinto Valley, the town vanished in one of the strangest ways a western town can vanish: its residents packed up, walked two miles north along the California Southern Railroad, and built a new town on top of the old one's memory. The new town, Perris, is now a city of more than 80,000. Pinacate is a name on a middle school, a station platform rebuilt into a museum, and a footnote in the legal history of California land titles.

01A Railroad Town Born in the Cajon Pass Rush

The California Southern Railroad reached the San Jacinto Valley in 1882 as part of an urgent push to link San Diego with the Santa Fe network at Barstow by way of Colton and the Cajon Pass. Train service between Point of Rocks and San Diego opened on May 1, 1882, and the first through train from National City reached Colton on August 15 that year, according to the San Diego Railroad Museum's history of the line. Settlers followed the rails. The railroad sold parcels from its federal land grant, and homesteaders staked claims on the flat mesas east of the low hills that held the gold veins of the Pinacate Mining District. At its height the siding at Pinacate reportedly supported a population of around 400, with a depot, a store, and the scattered farmhouses of wheat and barley growers who had arrived on the new trains.

The district itself had been worked in fits and starts since the 1850s, when placer miners washed gravel from the arroyos southwest of the future townsite. The 1874 discovery of the Good Hope vein, eventually sunk to a depth of 575 feet, gave the region a harder industrial spine, and the California Southern's arrival in 1882 promised a fast way to move ore, supplies, and the men who worked the Good Hope, Santa Rosa, and Santa Fe mines. Pinacate, the beetle-named siding, sat a few miles from those workings and was expected to become the valley's commercial center.

02Why Did Pinacate Disappear So Quickly?

The end came not from a fire, a flood, or a played-out mine, but from a courtroom. Contemporary railroad histories describe a land title dispute that clouded ownership of the original Pinacate townsite in 1884 and 1885. Rather than fight the claim, the California Southern's chief engineer, Fred T. Perris, platted a new townsite two miles to the north on land the railroad controlled outright. In 1885 most of Pinacate's residents loaded their houses, their fences, and their storefronts onto wagons and moved up the line to the new plat. The town they built there was named Perris in the engineer's honor. The Perris station came online in April 1886, and Pinacate as a civic entity effectively ceased to exist.

A handful of things stayed behind. The Pinacate siding remained on the railroad's timetable as a flag stop. The beetle that gave the place its Mexican-Spanish name, Eleodes, kept walking stiff-legged across the dust. And the Pinacate Mining District, which was never tied to the townsite's fortunes, continued to produce. Good Hope and its neighbors worked intermittently until roughly 1903, and mid-1930s rehabilitation efforts at the Good Hope ended when the shaft flooded. In total, the district is credited with about 104,000 ounces of gold through 1959, according to mineral-industry records compiled on Mindat.

03Can You Visit Pinacate Today?

Yes, in the sense that the ground where Pinacate stood is still there, tucked between Perris and the low hills that hide the Good Hope Mine. No, in the sense that almost nothing from the 1882 settlement survives above ground. The clearest trace is the Pinacate station site itself, which was preserved, expanded, and eventually absorbed into what is now the Southern California Railway Museum, known until recently as the Orange Empire Railway Museum. The museum sits on Perris's southern edge along the old California Southern alignment and runs heritage trains over track that still threads through the former townsite. Visitors can ride a historic Pacific Electric car across the same ground the beetles once owned, and the museum's collection of California Southern and Santa Fe equipment makes it the single best place to understand the rail corridor that made, and then unmade, this particular ghost town.

The name also survives in Pinacate Middle School, which serves students in Perris Union High School District. That is a common fate for vanished California place names: the town itself gone, its name recycled for a school, a road, or a water district board seat.

04What Remains of Pinacate Today

On the ground, Pinacate is mostly an absence. There is no standing commercial building identifiable as a Pinacate structure, no cemetery under that name, no post office with Pinacate in its postmark. What remains is indirect and, for that reason, a little more interesting than a line of collapsed foundations. The siding platform survives under the Southern California Railway Museum's operations. The 1882 railroad right-of-way, still in use, cuts through the vanished townsite. Two miles north, Perris itself is the largest surviving artifact of Pinacate, built with Pinacate's people, Pinacate's lumber, and in many cases Pinacate's actual houses hauled up the line in 1885. The Pinacate Mining District in the hills to the southwest still bears the name, as do mine dumps, adits, and the flooded lower workings of the Good Hope.

Drive the back roads between Perris and Lake Elsinore on a hot afternoon and the dark beetles are still there, raising their tails in warning at every footfall. They outlasted the railroad town that borrowed their name, and, short of a bulldozer, they will likely outlast its replacement too.

Riverside County, California · Primary industry: railroad siding and gold-mining service town

Sources (7)

Keep exploring

The nearest towns to Pinacate first, then the ones readers look for most.

Browse all towns