Call it a history lesson paved in gold. A Yuba City man, 94, sent a letter to CBS Sacramento inviting us to tour something that played a big part in his life and the region — a gold dredge. 

One of the last of its kind, it sits on a gravel site roughly seven miles east of Marysville, and without it, the site might not be there today. 

A gold dredge is a specialized type of dredger, which was primarily built to extract gold but with the intent of the leftover granular materials to be used on the back end for other purposes. 

"So few people that live here now have ever heard of a gold dredger. It's right here in their backyard and they've never come out," Yuba City resident Ted Chastain said. 

Chastain is a long-time resident of the Yuba-Sutter region. I met him for breakfast as he described memories of working on a gold dredge in the Marysville area in the 1950s.

Then he took us on a tour to the Teichert Aggregates plant near Marysville. He speculates he might be the last living person to be able to tell the tales. 

"I'm older than dirt. I'm 94 and a half years old. I'll be 95 on June the 7th, if I live that long," he said. 

Chastain wants to keep the history of gold dredges alive. 

"History is interesting to most people, and the history to this is about to be lost," he said. 

He says gold dredges were the mainstay of the area's economy back in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

"During the depression of the '30s, they said the payday at the Hammonton kept Marysville alive. It's important to know what's around you and how it came to be and what's happening with it now," he continued. 

The Teichert Aggregates plant is still reaping the benefits of the more than 100-year-old dredge that is no longer in operation. 

"The way that we are able to mine it currently is a result of the work that these dredges produced," said Lloyd Burns, the general manager of Western Aggregates. 

Burns added, "We're going back through and excavating the gravel and the sand and we use it for construction materials." 

Gold dredge 17 sits on the gravel site near Marysville. After decades of being dormant, it became operable again from 2009 to 2013 before retiring for good. 

But Teichert Construction, founded in 1887, continues to profit from it. Construction materials used from here to Sacramento and beyond have been produced by the site. 

"The gold dredging is all over with, but the gravel is making more money than they ever did off the gold dredging," Chastain said. "I've had a good life, but I treasure my memory of working here on the gold dredger."