The Yolo County courthouse is in Woodland, and the reason it is in Woodland is that the town that had it first got flooded. In 1862 the county moved its offices here from Washington, which is now part of West Sacramento. Haha. Of all the arguments for relocating a government, losing to a river is the most permanent one.
Let us talk about Woodland. Not the parade and the pretty downtown, although both are real. The version that matters when you are selling a house: the name, the street the town grew from, the courthouse that arrived by flood, and the paper those three things left behind on your block.
THREE DECISIONS ABOUT THIS TOWN THAT WERE MADE BEFORE YOUR HOUSE WAS BUILT
The first is the name, and it came attached to a giveaway. In 1851 a man known as Uncle Johnny Morris settled at what is now the corner of First and Clover Streets. Two years later Henry Wyckoff arrived and built a store he called Yolo City. In 1857 Frank S. Freeman bought the store and 160 acres around it and started giving land to anyone who would clear it and build a home.
Freeman suggested the name Woodland in 1859 and the post office accepted it. The post office itself opened on July 5, 1861, with Freeman as postmaster. By 1870 the town was estimated at 1,600 people, 647 of them registered voters, and signatures were being collected to petition for incorporation. The city incorporated on February 22, 1871.
Why a giveaway from 1857 still matters on your block: a town assembled out of free lots with a condition attached has a lot line history worth reading rather than assuming, and the condition was that something got built. What went up in the 1860s and what was added in the 1970s are two different questions about one parcel, and only one of them is likely to be in a file.
THE TOWN GREW FROM ONE STREET, AND THEN IT TURNED
Before the railroad, people built in Woodland from Main Street northward. In 1869 the California Pacific Railroad ran a line between Davisville and Marysville with a Woodland station near College Street and Lincoln Avenue, and the track was later moved east to East Street, which was the edge of town at that point. After the railroad, growth headed west and south.
So the older part of town here is not a ring, the way it is in some cities. It is a direction, and a fairly specific one. The roads in the older blocks are straight and form a grid, and where a house sits relative to Main Street tells you something about when its block was platted, which is a different question from when the house in front of you went up.
A COUNTY SEAT WORKS ON A TOWN THE WAY AN ANCHOR STORE WORKS ON A MALL
Here is the comparison I use. A county seat is the anchor store of a downtown. It is not the reason anybody drives there, exactly, but everything else arranges itself around it. The offices, the title companies, the attorneys, the place that sells lunch to all of them.
Now let me audit it, because this one walks off the road a little. An anchor store moves because a lease runs out, or because somebody builds it a better building down the freeway. It chooses. The Yolo County seat did not choose. Washington flooded in 1862 and the county picked up and moved to Woodland, and that one bad winter is why the Assessor and the Clerk-Recorder answer the phone in this town today.
There is a second strange thing worth knowing. Woodland is the county seat and it is not the largest city in Yolo County. Davis is. The seat is not a prize for size, it is a line in a record that says where the offices go.
WHAT THAT MEANS IS THE COUNTY IS ON YOUR OWN STREET
For a seller, this is the practical part. Yolo County runs the Assessor, the Clerk-Recorder and Elections as one department, ACE, and its counters are at the Erwin Meier Administration Building at 625 Court Street, here in Woodland. The recorded deed, the assessment roll and the recording counter are in your town. Not a drive to Sacramento, and not something you mail away.
If the house is in Davis, West Sacramento or Winters, it is the same county and a different drive, because those are the four cities Yolo County has. How the offices are arranged in each county around the region is a different article and I am not going to argue it twice.
THE DOWNTOWN BUILDINGS ARE THE OLDEST PAPER TRAIL ON THE BLOCK
Walk Main Street and you are walking the part of town that got built first. The Woodland Opera House went up in 1885, burned, and was rebuilt on the same site in 1895 and 1896 with some of the original bricks and foundation still in place. It was the first opera house to serve the Sacramento Valley. The public library was built in 1905 with Carnegie money and is the oldest Carnegie funded library in California still in operation.
None of that is on your deed. What it does is date the blocks around those buildings, and that is the first thing I want to know about a parcel on the older grid, because it tells me roughly which era of building I am walking into before I walk into it.
WHAT I LOOK AT BEFORE I MAKE AN OFFER ON ONE OF THESE BLOCKS
I start with the paper, since the county is close. The recorded deed and the assessment roll first, then the question that matters more than either: does the house on the ground match the house on the record? On a lot that was handed over with a condition in the 1850s and added to ever since, those two things disagree more often than people expect.
Then the trade, said plainly. A direct sale to somebody like me will usually bring less than a strong listing would bring, because I am taking on the repairs, the holding time and the risk that the paper and the house do not match. What you get for that difference is a date and no showings. What as-is actually covers is on the site, and the process page lists every point where you can still walk away.
We buy houses in Woodland and in ten other cities in the region. The service area page lists them, and it is the only place I make that claim.
Anyway, thanks for being here. Question for you: do you know which direction your block grew from, or is that one of those things nobody has ever told you about your own street?
