It is located 2.5 miles (4.0 km) south of Plymouth on Dry Creek,[5] at an elevation of 646 feet (197 m).

The gold started to peter out by 1857 and when a fire destroyed most of the town that year, most of its inhabitants packed up and moved to more successful mines elsewhere in the county.

In the 1960s the post office was located within the Drytown General Store operated by the Bruns family.

From 1959 to about 1994 — before the Mother Lode tourist boom — a summer theater company called the "Claypipers" staged comedic melodramas interspersed with "olio" (song and dance) acts to mostly standing room only audiences.

After a wildly successful summer in adjacent Amador City, the Claypipers bought the century-old building across Highway 49 from the Drytown General Store and remodeled it into a theater with table seating, a bar, stage, wings and sophisticated (for the time) stage lighting system.

The majority of the cast, crew and spectators traveled from communities around San Francisco Bay to this Mother Lode area on show days to be a part of this phenomenon.

The large "Piper's Playhouse" marquee was a familiar sight to anyone traveling this part of Highway 49 during the Claypipers' tenure—now, like the sound of the boisterous crowds cheering the heroes and booing the villains, only a memory.

In the early 1960s, the Claypipers purchased a "fire engine" for Drytown — a well used but serviceable Red Ford 1-Ton pickup truck with built-in 400 gallon water tank and pump — and constructed a "fire station" (garage) building to house it on the west side of the 'T' intersection of Spanish St and New Chicago Road.

In 1963, the 3 man volunteer Drytown Fire Department was called out three times, and saved two of the three homes involved.

The third was fully engulfed in flames before the call came in, but they were able to prevent the adjacent propane tank from erupting as well as the spread of the fire to the very dry surrounding grassy fields.