24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Mountain Ranch, CA

Mountain Ranch is a census-designated place in Calaveras County, at an elevation of 2,123 feet, that began as a California Gold Rush settlement and is registered as California Historical Landmark #282 under its original name, El Dorado.

Mountain Ranch's post office was established in 1858; in 1868 it was moved to El Dorado Camp, 1.5 miles south, and because California already had an El Dorado post office, that camp took the name Mountain Ranch.

The town preserves three post office buildings: the current one built in 1956, one built in 1923 that was once billed as the world's smallest post office, and the original site, marked by a historical marker whose bell served the local school from 1885 to 1953.

The stone-and-adobe Domenghini General Store, built in 1856, is the town's oldest building; in the 1870s Mountain Ranch was the busy trading center on the road between the Valley Springs railhead and the Sheepranch mining camp.

Mountain Ranch's last gold mines closed in 1942, its local sawmills shut down in the 1970s, and the Calaveras Cement Company plant closed in 1983.

In the 2015 Butte Fire, more than 350 homes on the outskirts of Mountain Ranch burned, but firefighters and local ranchers managed to save most of the downtown.

The 2020 census counted just 223 people in Mountain Ranch, a fraction of the 1,628 counted in 2010, mainly because the census shrank the CDP's boundaries from 41.2 square miles to 3.91 square miles; fewer than 50 people live in the town center itself.

The 2020 census recorded 106 households in Mountain Ranch with an average size of 2.1 people, about 76% of homes owner-occupied, and a median age of 59.9 years.