Santa Clarita audiotours

California's gold rush of 1849 gets all the attention, but the first documented gold discovery in the state happened here in 1842, in Placerita Canyon, six years before James Marshall found his nugget at Sutter's Mill. A settler named Francisco Lopez reportedly discovered flakes of gold among the roots of wild onions he was digging under an oak tree. That oak, called the Oak of the Golden Dream, still stands in Placerita Canyon State Park, patient and largely unvisited by the millions of people who drive past on Interstate 5 each year.

Santa Clarita was incorporated only in 1987 from four separate communities, but the valley it occupies has been a film location since the earliest days of Hollywood.

Silent-era stars William S. Hart and Tom Mix had estates and ranches here, and Hart's home is now a museum in the hills above Newhall. The area suffered one of the worst civil engineering disasters in American history when the St. Francis Dam failed in March 1928, sending a 120-foot wall of water through the canyon and killing at least 411 people. Newhall's old downtown, around Market Street and Lyons Avenue, holds some of that historical residue in its storefronts and the restored Mission-style architecture.