Placer County, California

Placer County (/ˈplæsər/ PLAS-ər), officially the County of Placer, is a county located in the U.S. state of California. As of the 2010 census, the population was 348,432. The county seat is Auburn.

Placer County is included in the Sacramento-Roseville-Arden-Arcade, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area. It is located in both the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada regions, in what is known as the Gold Country. It stretches from the suburbs of Sacramento to Lake Tahoe and the Nevada border.

Etymology

The discovery of gold in 1848 brought tens of thousands of miners from around the world, in addition to many more thousands intending to provide goods and services to the miners. Only three years after the discovery of gold, the fast-growing county was formed from portions of Sutter and Yuba counties on April 25, 1851 with Auburn as the county seat. Placer County took its name from the Spanish word for sand or gravel deposits containing gold. Miners washed away the gravel, leaving the heavier gold, in a process known as "placer mining".