 Historic park: Flames spare ruins in mining town.

“This area is historic and a big asset to the community because of the tourism it brings.” Gerrit Fenenga, senior state archaeologist about Shasta

The historic courthouse museum, general store, blacksmith shop and other ruins in the old mining town of Shasta sat remarkably unscathed Saturday in a sea of charred landscape left by the ferocious Carr Fire.

Now a ghost town and State Historic Park, the oncebustling town was nearly wiped out as the deadly flames surged through Shasta County on Thursday and Friday.

“It’s just fate,” Gerrit Fenenga, a senior state archaeologist, said as he marveled how the fire had spared the onetime commercial center just 6 miles west of Redding.

“We spend a lot of resources to protect these,” he said of the town’s brick ruins, cemeteries and restored buildings. “This area is historic and a big asset to the community because of the tourism it brings.”

But while the buildings of old Shasta were mostly spared, many nearby homes and structures along Highway 299 were not so lucky. Rows of houses nearby were leveled by flames. The surrounding foothills of the Klamath Range were blackened by the charred remnants of the fire surge.

Whenever state historic structures come under the threat of wildfire, Fenenga gets a call to come in and record the toll.

He usually does his assessment a week or more after a fire erupts, but he got called in early — as the Carr Fire still raged to the north and south — because of how historic the buildings are in Shasta.

At its peak, Shasta was a major commercial and social hub of Northern California, with wagons traveling through en route to the goldrich Sierra foothills. Gold was later discovered in nearby Clear Creek, 30 miles south.

By the early 1850s, tents became houses and stores, hotels and saloons sprang up, creating the largest row of brick buildings in the state north of San Francisco. But as the gold dried up in the 1860s and the Central Pacific Railroad opted to cut through Redding, Shasta was abandoned and fell into disrepair.

But several groups worked to restore the town over the years, and it was acquired by the California State Parks Commission in 1937.

“The public likes history, it doesn’t matter what end of the political spectrum you’re on,” Fenenga said. “You want to protect history.”

Thirteen miles northwest of Shasta, the historic town of French Gulch experienced a similar stroke of luck.

“These firefighters were the greatest,” Lissa Carlson said as she smoked a cigarette outside the French Gulch Hotel and Saloon, one of the few establishments in the main town center. Across the street is a family-owned bar that has been there since the 1800s.

As Carlson and a few others

sat on the porch of the saloon Friday night, she said they watched an ominous red hue glowing from the mountains surrounding them.

“It got bad,” said one man who walked out from the saloon Saturday afternoon. While a few homes were destroyed in French Gulch, the fire never made it down to the small town’s church, mobile home park, cemetery or downtown — leaving a place that Carlson’s family has lived in for eight generations mostly intact.

“These firefighters were on point,” she said.

Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Shorty's Eatery was one of several structures left unscathed after a fire in Shasta State Historic Park.