Famous Silver Dollar Saloon

Now festooned with a red and silver sign stretched across its front that’s lit with all-around, bright bulbs at night, the famed Silver Dollar Saloon in Marysville is a busy place, attracting an enthusiastic clientele of townie regulars and day-trippers alike. That’s partly due to its 19th century ambiance inside—and partly because of its wild past.

In its lifetime the Silver Dollar has been a hotel with a long-running, illegal brothel upstairs; a neighborhood watering hole, a short-lived pizza joint, and a restaurant of dubious reputation. In the late 1960s-early 1970s, it was the Guadalajara Café, owned by Natividad Corona, the half-brother of local serial killer Juan Corona—who allegedly mutilated one of his victims in one of the café’s restrooms.

Some people believe the place is haunted. Well, perhaps. Certainly, if walls could talk, the stories would go on and on, because the Silver Dollar Saloon is one of the oldest historical landmarks in Marysville.

According to former owners the Nicoletti family, the Grand Hotel— its original name— was built in 1854. At the time, it faced Front Street, along with several other establishments; but when that street became part of the city’s new levee system in 1862, all of those businesses were forced to turn the backsides of their houses into their front sides. Likely, this was a costly inconvenience for most proprietors. The Grand Hotel, though, was already reaping the economic benefits of operating a brothel on its second floor.

Given that California’s population throughout the 1850s decade was 92% male—mostly young male fortune-seekers far away from the social restraints of their homes—the brothel must have been as prosperous as the many others in Marysville itself, and other California Gold Rush towns. Joseph Ferrie, the current co-owner of the Silver Dollar, says the brothel opened in 1860, and lasted until sometime in the 1970s.   

Today, the establishment’s upstairs rooms have been turned into a museum, “fixed up” to honor its enticing soiled doves of days past. Downstairs, art-and-artifact covered walls, Victorian-style chandeliers, and local antiques, create a warm environment for relaxation among old friends and new acquaintances, in a saloon still famous, after all this time, for its stiff drinks and good food.