The town of Boca in the Sierra Nevada named after the Spanish word for mouth

The town of Boca was located in the Sierra Nevada at the junction of the Truckee River and Little Truckee River. The town's name refers to this river-mouth location: Boca means mouth in Spanish. All there is left today of Boca is a cemetery and a few other remains.

Boca started as a construction camp in 1866, when the Central Pacific Railroad was laying tracks over the Mountains. For a short period, Boca was a bustling town with a lumber and ice industry. During the pre-refrigerator days ice was harvested.

An interpretive board along the quarter-mile-long Boca cemetery trail informs today's visitor that this town once featured a brewery, producing lager beer that even won awards at the 1883 Paris World Fair. The Boca Brewery employed up to 35 men, mostly German, and had an annual production of 20,000 to 30,000 barrels with shipments throughout the west. Unfortunately, a fire destroyed the brewery in 1893 and Truckeemünden soon became history, not only due to the lack of beer, but also as a result of the lack of lumber, since almost every nearby tree was cut and forest conservation was not part of the Zeitgeist of a late 19th-century small town in the High Sierra.

Keywords: California, Nevada, Comstock mining era, history of breweries

Reference
Boca Cemetery Resoration Project, May 29, 2004. http://www.k9forensic.org/boca.html.