This small wooden cottage on Mill Street was home to Lola Montez — dancer, actress, and one of the most notorious women of the 19th century — from 1852 to 1856. It is one of the few surviving links to the extraordinary human drama of the Gold Rush: the way it attracted not just miners but adventurers, performers, and people escaping pasts they preferred not to discuss.
Montez was born in Ireland, claimed to be Spanish, and had already lived more lives than most people manage in a century before she arrived here. The cottage itself is modest and now houses a gift shop. The interest is in the story it anchors: the bears she kept as pets, the young Lotta Crabtree she mentored (who went on to become one of America's most celebrated performers), and the sheer improbability of the whole enterprise.