15 fun historic facts about Forestville

The roads may have been dirt back in the day, but the tiny hamlet of Forestville looks much the same as it did back in the 1890s, when chairs put the tiny hamlet on the map. But beyond the basic “whosits and whatsits” of Forestville's history lie a few scintillating facts.

Did you know that the town could have been named “Swindle Rig?” According to the late Burton Travis, a town historian whose family settled in the area in 1865, the community was given the scandalous nickname after of a crooked barkeep who worked in town.

When the town's first post office opened in 1872, it was given the much more respectable name of Forrestville after Andrew Jackson Forrister, a saloon owner who purchased first 100 acres in 1866 and filed a plat map with the name “Forrestville” on it in 1869.

No one knows why there is a discrepancy in spelling, or what happened to the second "R" over the years, but we do know that the Forristers didn't stick around to watch the town develop. They hightailed it to San Luis Obispo in 1874 and never came back. A.J. Forrister died in Chico at the ripe old age of 102.

Click through the gallery above to learn more about Forestville's interesting past.

--Columnist Gaye LeBaron contributed to this report.