Hamilton, California

It was located on the west side of the Feather River, 15 miles (24 km) downstream from Oroville.

The clerk’s office was fixed in the bedroom of Tom Gray’s hotel until a shake shanty could be built.

"The court itself was held in an old house owned by 'Mother Nichols', a widow who lived in a corner of it," wrote Chalmers.

The walls were of great solidity and thickness and so protected with sheet-iron that a prisoner once incarcerated within one of its two gloomy cells left hope of escape behind until liberated by due process of law."

As soon as Butte had its courthouse and jail, however, the citizens of Bidwell's Bar (near Oroville, California) got the legislature to declare that their town, and not Hamilton, was the county seat, on the condition that the citizens of Bidwell's Bar build a new courthouse and jail, which they did, and the county seat was moved upstream on August 10, 1853.