PML News March 1980

STREET NAME HISTORY
FOX COURT (Unit 7)
Barna N. Fox owned Lot 3 of Block 4 in the town site of Groveland when the town site was surveyed in 1877. He was a miner, still registered as such at the age of 88. He lived to be 103 years old and was buried in the Oak Grove cemetery in Big Oak Flat.

GAMBLE STREET (Unit 7)
John Gamble was Fourth District justice of the peace in 1872 and 1873. He owned two parcels in Big Oak Flat - one of which was the fireproof store of Gilbert and Gamble in Big Oak Flat in which the Wells Fargo had offices - one of two buildings not destroyed by fire that wiped out Big Oak Flat in 1863. The justice court convened in the east end of this iron door building, which still stands alongside the highway.

According to The Big Oak Flat Road to Yosemite, "John Gamble was the early day school teacher, and unusually tall and powerful man with a black spade beard, who did not hesitate to use his fists if necessary to keep order. He was succeeded by his daughter, Lucy; his son taught the school at Steven's bar, so among them the Gamble family trained much of the countryside. There are men and women who can still remember Lucy Gamble sitting atop of a cast iron stool with a horsehair cushion - minus, in the later days, every vestige of horsehair - while the small organ vibrated heroically to the Battle Hymn of the Republic.