Elk California

Elk was originally called "Greenwood" after early homesteaders, the Greenwood brothers,[2] sons of mountain man Caleb Greenwood, one of the rescuers of the Donner Party. When the post office was opened, in 1887,[2] there was already another Greenwood in California so it was called Elk Post Office. Eventually the name came to refer to the town. It is an outgrowth of an earlier town called Cuffy's Cove. When pioneer lumberman Lorenzo White was unable to reach a satisfactory deal with the owners of the lumber chutes at Cuffy's Cove to ship out his redwood product, he constructed a wharf out along a string of rocks in the center of what is now Elk.