Incorporated: January 1908

Yuba City was born of the Gold Rush and has survived many hardships to

become the dominant city in the region. Sam Brannon, a sharp merchant

who understood the profit that a population boom could bring to

California, used his newspaper to spread the news of gold discoveries

along the American, Yuba and Feather rivers, sparking the migration

of half-a-million people to California. Wishing to establish a major

mining supply center on the west side of the Feather River, Brannon

and two other men laid out a city in blocks and squares, leveling the

native burial grounds of a large, displaced village of Maidu, known as

the “Youboom.” It was Marysville, on the east side of the Feather River

facing the mountain mining camps, that became the major supply

center, not Yuba City. After fire destroyed its downtown in 1907, Yuba

City incorporated and established a fire department. On Christmas Eve

1955, 40 people drowned in the worst flooding in the Sacramento Valley

in the 20th century.. In the 1970s, Yuba City surpassed Marysville as a

center of commerce and has a diverse, progressive population. Yuba City

is the birthplace of John J. Montgomery (1858) who, in 1883, piloted the

world’s first heavier-than-air flight off a cliff near San Diego, more than

20 years before the Wright Brothers did it with an engine.