Calavares County, CA Photo - Angels Camp, California's most famous Gold Rush town

Angels Camp is California's most famous Gold Rush town, thanks to writer and humorist Mark Twain, who made the town in Calavares County the setting for his 1865 short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." The supposed event among jumping frogs is commemorated with a Jumping Frog Jubilee each May at the county courthouse. Angels Camp, which locals sometimes call "Frog Town," has adopted the croaking, tailless amphibian as its symbol, and one finds all varieties of frogs on signs, store advertisements, and souvenirs.

Carol M. Highsmith (born 1946) is a photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed all 50 of the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico for 30 years. She specializes in documenting architecture, ranging from the monumental to the everyday and whimsical. Highsmith is donating her life ’s work of more than 100,000 images, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare one-person archive. Out of 14 million images, the Carol M. Highsmith collection is featured in the top six alongside of Mathew Brady and Dorethea Lange. Credit line: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Credit line: The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.