I borrowed the above photo from “Awesome People of Chico” on Facebook. I’m not sure where the original is, but it shows just what a rough-hewn town Chico was in the 1860s.

The second house in Chico was built by Dr. S.M. Sproul in 1861-62. He had come across the plains with the Barham family in 1855. Mrs. Arabella Barham told the story for the Chico Enterprise-Record in 1918.

Dr. Sproul was the second person to have a completed house in Chico. He moved here from Butte creek. All of the townsite from the corner of Fifth and Main streets south and east was known to the old settlers as the Woods Field for it was sprinkled with many little oak trees and some underbrush. He got his lumber from Hupp the same time as we did but we built more rapidly than he.

Unfortunately I can’t find a photograph of the Sproul House.

Bidwell’s offer to give lots to anyone who would build on the Chico townsite started a little building boom and soon houses were springing up on every side. The first store building was erected by Charles and Edward Pond, brothers, who conducted a general mercantile business. The store still stands at the corner of First and Main. It is now used as a blacksmith shop.

Which corner it was on I am not sure, but Bidwell’s plan to get settlers off his ranch and into a town was working out. He surveyed the town and laid out the streets.

Main street was the first street laid off. Of course it was already a road but such a poor one that the mud was knee-deep in the winter months, being constantly churned up by the stages and heavy freight teams.

The Valley House was the first hotel in Chico. It stood where the Union Hotel now is. You could scarcely call it a hotel as it was a very small affair but it did a big business. Dick White and his wife ran it. The stages all stopped there and their presence was always make known by the stage driver, who tooted a horn. No sooner was the first toot heard than the people would all come from their homes and hurry to the Valley House to hear the news. The stage drivers always had a lot to tell and about a third of it was true.

Until the Valley House opened for business, John Bidwell’s old adobe on the north side of Chico Creek was the only hotel on the Shasta-Marysville Road in Chico. On Rancho Chico that is, not in the town of Chico. Over the next few years, Chico grew and developed rapidly. Looking back from 1918, Mrs. Barham concluded:

When I look back over the vista of sixty years I can hardly realize the changes that have occurred, they have been so gradual. Those were great days. Everything was new and we were in a strange country but times then were pretty much as they are now with everybody working to make a living and we encountered hard times as we do now.