Buying and selling in Penryn

Penryn is a small unincorporated community between Loomis and Newcastle, and it is one of the few Sierra foothill towns that owes nothing to gold. It grew around granite.

Griffith Griffith, a Welsh immigrant, opened the quarry here in 1864 and built the Penryn Granite Works, naming the place after Penrhyn in Wales. Penryn granite went into buildings across San Francisco and Sacramento, including work on the California State Capitol, and in 1874 the state’s first commercially successful granite polishing mill was erected here. Men worked the quarry until 1918. The site is now Griffith Quarry Park — twenty-three acres holding the ruins of that first polishing mill and the quarry holes themselves.

What that leaves is a rural community of acreage and small farms with an unusually specific sense of place. Properties tend toward land rather than square footage, and the same foothill diligence that applies in Loomis applies here: wells, septic, fire hazard designation and access.