Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Loyalton, CA

Loyalton is the only incorporated city in Sierra County, California, and at 740 residents in the 2020 census it is also the county's largest community.

Loyalton sits inside California's second-least populous county - Sierra County counted just 3,236 people in the 2020 census.

Loyalton was incorporated on August 21, 1901, the same year the Boca & Loyalton Railroad reached the town.

Loyalton began as a settlement called Smith's Neck, and its name was changed to Loyalton during the Civil War to express the area's loyalty to the Union.

The first settlers around Loyalton were largely Swiss and Italian immigrants who established farms in the Sierra Valley starting in the late 1850s, alongside sawmills that supplied timber to miners in California and Nevada.

By 1907 Loyalton was a booming lumber town with four sawmills and three box factories, though its last sawmill finally closed in 2001.

Loyalton once stretched across roughly 52 square miles - among the largest city areas west of the Mississippi - because its founders drew huge boundaries to keep liquor sales away from the 'dry' city; today the city covers just 0.36 square miles.

Loyalton lies at an elevation of about 4,951 feet along State Route 49, the Gold Country Highway, roughly 50 miles from the county seat of Downieville.

Because Loyalton is Sierra County's most populous community and only city, the county Board of Supervisors alternates its meetings between Downieville and Loyalton.

The 2020 census counted 740 people in Loyalton, down from 769 in 2010 and a peak of 1,030 in 1980; at the 2010 census the city had 308 households, about 73% of them owner-occupied.