Callahan, California


Callahan is an unincorporated community in Siskiyou County, California, United States. Callahan is located on California State Route 3 south-southeast of Etna. Callahan has a post office with ZIP code 96014. As of 2009 it has a population of 50~.

History

The post office opened as Callahan's Ranch in 1858 and changed its name to Callahan in 1892. The community was named after M.B. Callahan, who opened a travelers' stop in the community in 1851.

The last lynching in California

A story about Callahan is as follows: "On January 6, 1947, school children at Callahan's one-room schoolhouse were greeted by the body of a dead African American man, strung up from a nearby telephone pole. A calfskin was wrapped around his shoulders and he was riddled with bullet holes. The January 10, 1947 edition of the Western Sentinel newspaper carried a front-page story about the lynching, identifying the man as a butcher from Weed, California. The January 12, 1947 edition of the Etna Gazette also carried the story. All copies of the newspapers were subsequently destroyed, including copies from the Siskiyou County Library. The identity of those responsible for the destruction remains a mystery. It was the last known lynching in California. The crime has never been solved."
In fact, there was no newspaper called the "Etna Gazette" and if a lynching had actually taken place in California in 1947, it would have been national news and would have been published throughout the country. Not a word of any such event is mentioned in any California newspaper in January 1947. The last lynching in California took place in Yreka in 1935 and was a major news event.

Climate

This region experiences warm and dry summers, with no average monthly temperatures above 71.6 °F. According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, Callahan has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate, abbreviated "Csb" on climate maps.