[California Pictorial Letter Sheets]

View from the West Side of the Plaza, Marysville [caption title]

[N.p., possibly Marysville]: R.A. Eddy, [ca. early 1850s]. 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. Very good. Item #2853

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.
Baird 280a. Clifford 290.

Price: $1,750.00