19th c. Japanese colony in Gold Country

This headline about unlikely political bedfellows Barbara Boxer and Tom McClintock caught my eye, so I clicked on it to find that they've joined forces to support the preservation of land in northern California that was settled by a white entrepeneur and a group of Japanese immigrants in 1829.  Attempts to cultivate tea, mulberry trees and silk worms for silk manufacture, and bamboo were thwarted by inadequate water supply and other problems. However, the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Colony represents the first settlement of Japanese in the US.

These pages are maintained by a descendant of the family who bought the land when the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Colony sold out in the 1870s. http://www.directcon.net/pharmer/Wakamatsu/Wakamatsu.html and http://www.directcon.net/pharmer/NewFaces/newfaces.html

http://www.discovernikkei.org/wiki/index.php/Wakamatsu_Tea_and_Silk_Colony

Senator Boxer has introduced a bill to get the BLM to purchase and preserve  the property.

The location is somewhere between I-80 and U.S. 50 about an hour northeast of Sacramento, near Coloma. Might make an interesting road trip.