FIDDLETOWN – This tiny Amador County town lost its last Chinese resident more than 40 years ago. Now, a citizens group is saving what remains of the Gold Rush-era Chinatown before it disappears completely.

"People say, 'You're all Caucasians, what do you care about a Chinatown?' " says Elaine Zorbas, vice president of the 98-member Fiddletown Preservation Society. "It's part of the history of our town. We're proud of our town, and we want to preserve the legacy of the Chinese."

A general store, a gambling hall and the Chew Kee store, where Dr. Yee Fung Chung dispensed herbal remedies during the mid-1800s, are all that's left of the Chinese district that once made up half of Fiddletown.

While more than 2,000 people lived here in Gold Rush times – mostly miners and the merchants who catered to them – there are now just 150 residents of Fiddletown proper.

"During the Gold Rush, all these little foothills towns were vibrant, busy, teeming with people. They were a flash in the pan. They had their moment of glory, and faded," says Zorbas.

The local population will swell considerably on Saturday, when the Fiddletown Preservation Society hosts its annual Fiddletown Heritage Day. Organizers expect 300 visitors to drop by for a celebration of local music and history. (Fiddletown is about 45 miles southeast of Sacramento, off Highway 49.)

It's a chance to see the progress FPS members have made since 2001 to preserve the Chinese gambling hall and general store, which sit side-by-side along Fiddletown Road, the town's main street. A half-million dollars in grant money and private donations allowed them to stabilize the crumbling structures and prepare them to be used someday as museums.

Apparently, the residents of old Chinatown were loath to throw much away, so FPS has a wealth of artifacts waiting in storage.

The Chew Kee store, which opened around 1855, has been a museum since 1980. It will be open for tours on Saturday (and then noon-4 p.m. Saturdays through October).

Fiddletown began as a mining camp in 1849, a year after James Marshall found those infamous gold flecks in the American River at Coloma, about 22 miles away, and the Gold Rush was on. The town's founders, who hailed from Missouri, were avid fiddle players, according to local lore.

In 1878, a prominent resident who had regular business dealings in Sacramento and San Francisco was humiliated to be known as "the man from Fiddletown." So he pushed the state Legislature to change the name to Oleta, after his daughter.

Residents got the original name reinstated in 1932.

California humorist Bret Harte ("The Luck of Roaring Camp") immortalized the community in his 1873 short story "An Episode of Fiddletown." He wrote about the fictional Clara Tretherick and her complicated life in and out of Fiddletown in 1858.

No one is certain if Harte, a contemporary of Mark Twain, ever set foot in Fiddletown, but this is how he described it:

It was a clear morning in early spring that Mrs. Tretherick, unattended, left the hotel, and walked down the narrow street toward the fringe of dark pines which indicated the extreme limits of Fiddletown.

Here she took a cross street or road, running at right angles with the main thoroughfare of Fiddletown and passing through a belt of woodland. It was evidently the exclusive and aristocratic avenue of the town. The dwellings were few, ambitious, and uninterrupted by shops.

Harte also made mention of a local Chinese laundry and Chinese mining laborers.

The prospect of quick riches lured men from China to Fiddletown as early as 1852.

"Like many Anglos, though, they found that gold wasn't always the way to wealth. Being a merchant was a much better way to make money during Gold Rush times," says Zorbas, a retired research librarian.

"You could sell a shovel for $100 a lot easier than digging for gold at $20 an ounce," says Carl McDanel, who manages the building-restoration projects.

By 1853, Fiddletown stretched out over six city blocks and boasted 20 stores, four hotels, five stage stops and a handful of breweries. Chinatown developed on the west end, and before long Chinese accounted for about half the town's 2,000 residents.

Call The Bee's Dixie Reid, (916) 321-1134.