Eureka, Humboldt County
Eureka was founded in 1850 on Humboldt Bay, and its name, Greek for I have found it, is also the state motto. Lumber barons filled the town with ornate houses, none more elaborate than the Carson Mansion, a towered redwood showpiece completed in the 1880s. On the bluff south of Old Town stood Fort Humboldt, where a young Ulysses S. Grant served as a captain in 1854.