El Dorado Hills
Left : A photo from Betty January ’ s collection of memorabilia featuring Clarksville ’ s historic one-room schoolhouse . Right : After the school closed in the 1950s , the Tong family relocated the structure to its ranch nearby and added stalls to both sides of the barn . Today , the Tong barn still stands and serves as the center of attraction for the annual Clarksville Day celebration in May .
PHOTO COURTESY OF BETTY JANUARY ( LEFT ) PHOTO BY RYAN ANGEL MEZA ( RIGHT )
situated , it had infrastructure , it ’ s pretty . I ’ ve watched it grow with interest ,” she says .
When January arrived , she joined a community group called the El Dorado Hills Newcomers Club , which helps orient new people to the area . Through fellow members , January became aware the county library — housed within the Oak Ridge High School library — didn ’ t have enough space . She made it her mission to get the library its own facility and founded the Citizens for a Community Library , now the El Dorado Hills chapter of Friends of the Library . That group successfully advocated for the county Board of Supervisors to construct the 16,000-square-foot El Dorado Hills Branch of the county library system in 2006 on land owned by Parker Development Company .
January later founded the Clarksville Region Historical Society , a nonprofit organization that preserves historical documents , sites and artifacts from Clarksville , the 1850s mining town on which El Dorado Hills now sits . The society hosts the Clarksville Day celebration each May , featuring historic exhibits and reenactments such as the remounting of the Pony Express .
Since those frontier days , El Dorado Hills has grown to more than 45,000 residents , which January sees as the fulfillment of the high expectations developers such as Bill Parker ( Serrano ), Tony Mansour ( El Dorado Hills Town Center ) and Michael McDougall ( The Promontory , Carson Circle and Valley View ) set for the region .
“ Prior to Serrano , people moved to Cameron Park — that ’ s where all the activity was ,” says January , 89 . “ When my second husband , Jim , moved up here in 1989 , he noticed that there was only one signal light in all of El Dorado Hills . But that changed when Parker put in Serrano — it brought people here and growth started to get faster . People think at my age that I wouldn ’ t want change , but our county needs growth to survive .”
January is trying to get some of that growth to benefit her age bracket with the proposed construction of the Center
114 comstocksmag . com | November 2020