 Gold Country |  Malakoff Home |
Murphys Grammar School holds the distinction of being California’s oldest school building in
continuous use as a school. The structure was built in 1860 on land donated by Dr. Jones, some of
the work contributed by local residents, with the final cost coming to $4,000. The building is
forty by sixty feet and has two rooms, the back room being enlarged at some later date. When the
school was first constructed there were no trees on the hill, so the school board transplanted a
number of pines that still shade the surrounding playground, and which prompted the students to
call their school the “Pine Grove College.” A former student of the Murphys school was Dr. Albert
Michelson who lived here as a boy when his father ran a clothing store. Michelson won America’s
first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1907 for his work in determining the velocity of light, which
later aided Einstein’s development of his relativity theories. It is located at the top of the
hill on Jones Street.
Gold Country | Malakoff Home |