On March 18, 2026, a small crowd gathered on a gravel path in Mary Laveroni Park to watch GCSD General Manager Pete Kampa cut a ribbon in front of a disc golf basket. It was not a big ceremony. There was no marching band, no ribbon-length photo op for the county paper beyond a short write-up. But the thing being opened that afternoon, an 18-hole disc golf course tucked into 2.3 acres along Highway 120, was the same patch of grass that hosts Groveland's movie nights every summer, sells popcorn out of a snack shack most Fridays, and doubles as parade grounds when Old West Days rolls through town every October.
Groveland does not have a downtown in the way Sonora or Columbia does. What it has is a short commercial stretch along Highway 120 with limited parking and one small shopping plaza to the east, and then it has this park. Increasingly, if you want to know what Groveland is actually doing on any given weekend, you check what's scheduled at Mary Laveroni, not what's open on Main Street.
A Park Doing Four Jobs
Most towns spread their civic life across a few different addresses: a rec center for sports, a plaza for parades, a green space for movies. Groveland's Community Services District runs nearly all of it through one address.
Here's what currently converges on that same 2.3 acres:
- Free summer movie nights at dusk, with concessions sold at the on-site Snack Shack
- A brand-new 18-hole disc golf course, opened this spring
- One of two listed venues, alongside Downtown Groveland, for October's Old West Days Parade
- Ongoing park amenities including EV charging along the Highway 120 corridor
That last detail matters more than it sounds. A 2.3-acre park with EV charging built in tells you this space was designed for people passing through on 120, not just people who already live three blocks away. Groveland's civic center is built for a town whose population, in GCSD's own accounting, holds around 3,000 full-time residents but roughly triples during the summer tourist season. One park has to flex hard enough to serve both crowds.
The Course Groveland Waited For
The disc golf course didn't appear because Groveland suddenly discovered disc golf. It appeared because the county had already built out most of the network around it.
Chris Graham, president of the Tuolumne County Disc Golf Club, put it plainly when the course opened: the club had already installed courses with Blue Zones Project Tuolumne County at Columbia Elementary, Cassina High, and Twain Harte Elementary. Groveland was the gap.
| Course Location | Status | Serves |
|---|---|---|
| Columbia Elementary | Existing | Columbia area |
| Cassina High School | Existing | Sonora area |
| Twain Harte Elementary | Existing | Twain Harte area |
| Mary Laveroni Park | New, opened March 18, 2026 | South county / Groveland |
If you lived in Groveland and wanted to play a round before this spring, your nearest option was a drive north toward Twain Harte or into the Sonora area. Now the county's disc golf map has a fourth point on it, and it happens to sit at the exact spot where the town already gathers for everything else.
The course itself was designed by Graham along with Eric Gilliatt and Kyle Murray, funded through a Blue Zones Tuolumne County grant, and built to work for both ends of the skill range. There's a full 18-hole layout for experienced throwers and a shorter nine-hole option for families and beginners. Two features get mentioned more than any others: a hanging basket built into what locals call the spider tree, and what's known as the top-of-the-world hole, which clears enough elevation to put snow-capped Yosemite peaks in view on a clear day. It's free to play, which is unusual for a course this deliberately designed, and it means the barrier to trying it is exactly zero.
Main Street Changes Hands. The Park Doesn't.
Walk half a mile from the park to the historic Hotel Charlotte on Main Street and you'll find a different kind of change. For years the ground-floor restaurant there operated as Charlotte's Tavern, a pre-prohibition-styled bar and dining room that had itself replaced an earlier concept, Charlotte's Bistro & Bar, back in 2019. As of this year, that space is running as Gateway Tapas & Spirits, now under new ownership, serving small plates and cocktails out of the same historic building.
That's two identity changes in the same storefront within about seven years, which is fairly normal for a highway-gateway Main Street that depends heavily on seasonal tourist traffic passing through on the way to Yosemite. Restaurants in a building like that live or die on whether they can hold both the through-traffic crowd and a smaller base of regulars through the slow months.
Compare that to the Iron Door Saloon a few doors down, which the district itself points to as the oldest continuously operating saloon in California. It has outlasted every restaurant concept that has ever opened next to it. The saloon's stability and the tavern space's turnover aren't a coincidence. One built its identity around history that can't be replicated. The other has had to reinvent itself to match whatever the current owners think will work.
Set next to that, the quiet permanence of Mary Laveroni Park looks less like luck and more like design. A restaurant concept can fail and get replaced within a season. A disc golf course backed by a Blue Zones grant, a parks district, and a county-wide disc golf club is a harder thing to unwind. The park keeps adding programming. The storefronts keep swapping names.
What Fills The Calendar From Here
If you're mapping out the next month in Groveland, most of it still runs through that same park. Old West Days returns to Downtown Groveland and Mary Laveroni Park on October 10 and 11, continuing a tradition tied to the town's mining-camp roots dating back to 1852. GCSD's summer movie series typically runs into September before wrapping for the season, so if you haven't caught one yet, it's worth checking the district's calendar before the last screening comes and goes. And the disc golf course, being new, is still finding its regulars. Early fall, before the weather turns, is a good stretch to walk the nine-hole option if you've never thrown before.
None of this required a new downtown to be built. It required one park to keep absorbing whatever the town needed next.
If you're weighing what a town without a traditional Main Street core actually offers day to day, that's the answer: Groveland doesn't spread its civic life thin. It concentrates it, and Mary Laveroni Park has become the place where that concentration shows up most clearly.
For those of you already living the rhythm of Groveland's park calendar, from movie nights to the new disc golf course, SierraShift keeps close tabs on what's actually changing in this corner of Tuolumne County, on Main Street and off it. If you ever want a straight read on what a specific property or neighborhood shift means for your own plans, reach out and request a free home valuation.
