Tuolumne, on the western slope of California’s Sierra Nevada, developed from a place associated with early Miwok culture, agricultural settlement, and gold mining into a mining and logging town shaped by industry. First known as Summerville and later Carters, it became the site of the West Side Lumber Company’s large sawmill, which operated from 1899 until it burned during a labor strike in the 1960s. West Side’s narrow-gauge railroad hauled logs from deep in the Sierra to the mill, while the standard-gauge Sierra Railroad carried finished lumber to market. Local exhibits, family Bibles, cemetery records, and surviving railroad remnants preserve both the community’s industrial past and personal history.