USA > California > Merced County > A history of Merced County, California : with a biographical review of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present > Part 30
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This freighting and staging business employed hundreds of men and thousands of horses. Merced County farmers raised a lot of hay, for which the teaming business furnished a market; and Merced County stockmen raised a good many of the horses and mules, and there were a lot of both used. There were also, as we have seen in the case of Peter Fee, some oxen used. J. M. Montgomery and a lot of others raised oxen. The oxen, however, went pretty early, except in the logging in the lumber camps, where they were used up into the present century.
Everything, as we have seen, came out of Stockton. The best teams would haul about a ton to an animal. It was a pretty level haul from Stockton to Snelling's. The freight rate in the fifties was about $30 a ton. They made, as we have said, about twelve or fifteen miles a day, and this made frequent stopping-places necessary. And they were there, every two or three or four miles, ranch houses usually, with the ranch sometimes the main thing, and sometimes the accomodation of travelers being the chief occupation of the owner, as the fates and his gifts willed it. Peter Fee kept travelers, as he tells us in his dairy ; and he also tells us of a number of others, where he sometimes stayed when he was on one of his frequent teaming trips-Young at the ferry, Dingley up towards Knight's Ferry, with whom Fee 'swopt oxen," the Dutch Ranch, and so on. John Loftus Ivett, on his ranch above Snelling, kept a house of entertainment for travelers and team- sters and a trading post also, where little local teamsters would haul in
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wool and other local produce in small loads and Ivett would make up big loads to send out to Stockton.
Necessary adjuncts of these stopping-places were of course large stables and corrals ; and they were in many cases adjuncts of hotels in the towns too, as we learn from the early hotel advertisements in the Snelling papers. Many men who had products to sell had also teams and wagons to deliver them with, as had Greeley with his sawmill and William Nelson & Son with their flour mill. Henry Nelson tells of hauling flour to pretty much all of the foothill towns from Sonora to Grub Gulch with their own team; and in the summer of 1872, after their mill had burned up and they had the team on their hands with nothing in their regular line to do, he came over to the new town of Merced and hauled wheat from the region about Planada and Tuttle to the new warehouse at Merced, with a Chinaman to help him load the sacks. He also went out and bought wheat along down the Merced, and some of the first wheat that was raised on the site of the town of Merced, and hauled some of it to the mill himself.
The railroad, the Central Pacific, the first one, came in 1872; and this did away with the freighting by team from Stockton. But there was a great deal of teaming for many years later, of course; the com- ing of the railroad simply moved the starting-point further south, first to Modesto, then to Merced, and so on down the line. Out of each of these towns went the traffic to the hills, and by and large it went by wagons. Even today the hills are but partially served by railroads. and the regions between the railroads were served by teams until these gave way to automobiles and trucks. The last of the freighters by team out of Merced was "Vic" Trabucco, who for twenty years or more has hauled the merchandise for the Trabucco store in Mariposa from Merced, and who only three or four years ago replaced his four- horse team with a truck. For purely local hauling, of grain and hay from the ranches to the railroad, the trucks have not yet wholly re- placed the horse and mule teams, and the same is true of the harvest- ing ; only five years ago a thirty-two-animal harvester was used on the land where the California Packing Corporation's four-thousand-acre orchard is now flourishing.
The Central Pacific, as we have seen, was completed in 1872. The West Side Railroad and the Oakdale Branch were built in 1890; the Valley Road, or Spreckels' Road, now the Santa Fe, was built in 1896; and the Yosemite Valley Railroad, in 1907; while the Tidewater Southern came into the Hilmar country in 1917. We have told the story of the Central Pacific in considerable detail, for it was significant of the change from cattle to grain, and that change marked a funda- mental change in the character of the county, since it was a determining factor as to the direction its growth should take. Of none of the later
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railroads can anything like this be said; they all added to the con- venience and completeness of transportation, but no one or all of them could turn the county's course aside essentially from the lines in which it had been cast when the wheat men had once replaced the cattle men.
The freighting from Merced into Mariposa County continued then to be a big industry after the Central Pacific came. It was mostly freighting to the hills. The product there was chiefly gold; and neither it nor any of the lesser products had much bulk, except lumber and wood. Lumber shipped up the San Joaquin began pretty early to com- pete with lumber from the Sierra Nevadas, and after 1872 the outside lumber came in by rail. Hauling lumber from the mountains was diffi- cult and expensive. This fact led to the construction of the Madera Flume in the early seventies, shortly after the railroad was completed; and in Steele's paper of that time we may read of the plan to build this means of conveying lumber from the mountains, and how it was to reach the railroad "at a point between Berenda and Borden"-from which we may infer that both these stations are older than Madera itself, which derives its very name from the timber for which it was the terminus on the railroad. Merced men were largely instrumental in the founding of Madera, prominent among those who took part in the flume enterprise being J. M. Montgomery and J. B. Cocanour -and they lost a lot of money in it, too, which is no criticism of the soundness of the project itself.
Into the hills, so long as the mines were active, there was much freight to go, all that fed and clothed and furnished the houses of the population there ; and we have seen that that population was large enough so that Mariposa had an Assemblyman to herself, while Merced and Stanislaus shared one between them. And there was mining machinery, exceedingly heavy hauling-stamp mills, engines, boilers-you may find some of it up there today, rusting away in places where you marvel how they ever hauled it. Just for a sample, there was the famous old Hite Mine at Hite's Cove on the South Fork. John Hite had fifty stamps there in the seventies, and they say took out a million dollars. He built a road, a grade twisting down the side of a point for three miles, to get to it; the grade was so crooked and steep that old-timers will tell you of a valley teamster who took a con- tract to haul some stuff in there, and who went to the top of the hill and took one look and then departed and returned no more. There were mines around Mariposa, Hornitos, and Coulterville and along the river, and the sum total of heavy machinery that went in to them was appalling-and all by teams.
Just as Alvin Fisher, C. H. Huffman, and Hughes & Keyes had done out of Stockton, there were men who freighted out of Merced and acted as commission merchants and purchasing agents for numer-
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ous companies, associations, and individuals up in the hills. Ladd & Stoddard had been in the business out of Stockton, and Stoddard & Hubbard were in it out of Merced. The business was later absorbed by E. M. Stoddard. Stoddard was purchasing agent for a number of years for John R. Hite, buying and hauling up to Hite's mine the flour, potatoes, and supplies in general that the mine needed. And he had a very valuable contract to do the hauling for the Chinese Six Companies, to many places in the mountains. At Mormon Bar there were thousands of Chinese to whom he hauled supplies. Every once in a while they would send out a load of human bones, being shipped some to China for burial.
For the first few years of Merced's existence the mountain freight- ing was the big thing. Then along about 1880 the mines began to be worked out, and the Chinese Exclusion Act put an end to the Chinese business. Meanwhile the passenger business was growing. The stages from Stockton to Mariposa had been operated from the beginning by the Alvin Fisher lines, and this continued until Fisher died and his business was sold out in 1874 in Merced. Fisher was a factor in the Yosemite business up to his death, and that was growing. Upon the sale in Merced in 1874, the interests of the Fisher estate were bought by a group of men headed by M. McClenathan, who had followed the livery and teaming business south with the railroad; A. J. Meany and C. S. Peck were among the group who were with McClenathan. They ran a stage by Coulterville for three or four years in Yosemite. Mean- while, in 1875, Washburn Brothers (A. H. and John), had built a road into Yosemite from Clark's Station, now Wawona; and along about the end of the seventies they induced the railroad company to build the branch to Raymond and make that the jumping-off place for the Yosemite travel. McClenathan entered into an arrangement with the Washburns to haul to Wawona such traffic as got off at Merced, and the route by Coulterville was abandoned for a number of years. The passenger business continued to increase, and the freight business to decrease as the population of Mariposa County decreased.
McClenathan died in 1886, and E. M. and D. K. Stoddard bought his business in July of that year. McClenathan's stables were where the Hotel El Capitan stands today. Within a few weeks after the Stoddards had bought the property the stables burned down. They were rebuilt. E. M. and D. K. Stoddard continued the arrangement with the Washburns which McClenathan had made to carry passengers from Merced to Wawona. In 1896, when the Valley Railroad, the Santa Fe, was completed, they established a rival passenger business to the Central Pacific's, and Stoddard & Son made an arrangement with the new railroad to carry their passengers into Yosemite by way of Coulterville. They did about forty per cent of the business, against
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about sixty per cent by the Central Pacific and the Washburns, by Wawona. The business by way of Coulterville and also that by way of Big Oak Flat had languished during the intervening years; the Southern Pacific routed the bulk of the travel by Berenda and Ray- mond and Wawona.
Then years after the Santa Fe came, the construction of the Yo- semite Valley Railroad was begun. E. M. Stoddard then turned the business over to his son, and D. K. Stoddard moved his headquarters for a brief time to Merced Falls, and in the spring of 1907 on to the terminus of the new railroad at El Portal. Under a five-year contract he carried on the stage business from there into Yosemite until 1911, when the stage line was sold to the Yosemite Valley Railroad Com- pany and they began in the spring of 1912 the use of automobiles, using part machines that year.
The best year in the history of horse-drawn stages into Yosemite was 1910, when about 16,000 passengers were carried into the Valley. The greatest day, however, occurred in the previous year, when, on June 6, 1909, they took 601 passengers from El Portal into the Valley in 68 stages, with 272 horses. It was a Knights of Columbus Excursion, a one-day run, worked up by J. B. Duffy, now general pas- senger agent of the Santa Fe west of Albuquerque; he was then an excursion agent for the Santa Fe. The 68 stages consisted of 48 regu- lar ones belonging to this run, 4 with teams and drivers borrowed from the government, 12 borrowed from Wawona, and 4 borrowed from Coffman & Kenney. They had them all lined up, each with a big number on, and the passengers were assigned to their stages by number before the train arrived at El Portal. The saloons at El Portal were closed for the occasion, so that no driver might be late or befuddled; and the whole party was loaded in about twenty min- utes and everybody was landed in Yosemite without mishap. On Octo- ber 7 of this same year they took in President Taft and party, seven stages in all, including amongst other the President, Governor Gil- lette, United States Senator Flint, Congressmen Inglebright, Need- ham, and Mckinley, Shaw, the President's secretary, and Butts, his body guard. Henry Hedges drove the stage "Loya," with a team of four browns, which carried the President and his immediate party. Following were six other stages with the rest of the party, including a lot of railroad and telephone men.
Among the stage drivers were Dowst, Grant, Snediger, George Powell, Jimmie Leonard, and Frank Tryer. They knew their business, and maintained schedules like a railroad. Mr. Stoddard relates that one summer, from April 1 to November 1, they carried the mail from Coulterville to Merced with such regularity that they nearly jarred the government of the United States. They left Coulterville at 5
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A. M. and were due at the post office at Merced at 11: 45. They pro- ceed to arrive at 11 : 45 with such exactness that the post office author- ities back at Washington concluded that Postmaster Charles Harris was drawing on his imaginaion a little when he recorded the time of their arrival. He received instructions to report the exact time of arrival. Still the reports continued to go in "11 : 45." The honor of the stage drivers was touched. They made sure of arriving a little before that objectionable 11: 45 and then waited just long enough so that their arrival was always just at that time. The Post Office De- partment sent an inspector out from Washington, and presently a second one. The record stands that for seven months the mail from Coulterville arrived each day at 11 : 45 a. m.
It must be realized that the coming of the railroads, even after there were four or five of them, still left a lot of hauling and that the roads were bad. They were bad until the day of the automobile had been a reality for several years. It is scarcely a dozen years ago now since the main Valley Highway of the State system was paved through the county alongside of the Central Pacific tracks. Since that time there has been another paved highway built across the county from north to south on the West Side, part of which was built under the million-and-a-quarter-dollar county-highway bond issue voted in No- vember, 1918, and part of which is State-aid road. The State-aid road runs from the Pacheco Pass through Los Banos and by way of Santa Rita out to the Chowchilla Ranch, and thence into Madera County and out to the Valley Highway at Califa. Other portions of the county highway extend from the Chowchilla Ranch to within three miles of Merced, from Atwater to Winton, from Livingston to the American Vineyard, and after a two mile gap, from the new Milliken Bridge north through Irwin and Hilmar to connect with the Stanis- laus County highway to Turlock, from Hopeton to above Snelling, and from the State-aid highway between Los Banos and Santa Rita to Dos Palos and Dos Palos Colony. About nine years ago the por- tion of the State Highway lateral in Mariposa County from Merced to Mariposa was constructed-an excellent mountain road, ultimately to be paved. Three or four years later the part of this lateral in Merced County, about fourteen miles, was built and paved. Within the last three years this road has been extended by the State Highway Commission from Mariposa on about fourteen miles to Briceburg on the Merced River, and for more than a year now has been extended on up the south side of the river by convict labor to connect with the federal road which already leads from El Portal into Yosemite. This will be completed for use in the summer of 1926, and there is a fund already in existence for paving it. The road beyond Mariposa is twenty-one feet wide in the cuts and twenty-four feet in the fills, and
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is well banked on the curves; its highest point in crossing the divide between Mariposa and the Merced River is only 2900 feet above the sea, and it will provide a year-around highway into Yosemite, open to automobile travel fifty-one years after the Washburn Brothers opened their road by way of Wawona. Meanwhile the State has graded the highway across the Pacheco Pass, and there is a paved road from San Juan to the ocean.
All of this marks the approaching fulfillment of a vision of a Yo- semite-to-the-Sea Highway which such road boosters as John R. Gra- ham, Richard Shaffer, Jr., H. B. Stoddard, Frank Barcroft, J. W. Haley, and a number of others have for a number of years been working for, and the fulfillment of a desire which we see cropping up in the columns of the papers of the county every now and then ever since the beginning of the wheat-farming days in the late sixties-a road across the river, connecting the East and the West Sides of the county, extended to a road connecting Yosemite with the Coast High- way and the towns on Monterey Bay.
Only the day before this is written, the county papers carried a story of how Los Banos has joined the newly formed County Cham- ber of Commerce, the last of the various towns of the county to do so, thus completing the roster. You can drive from the county seat to Los Banos now in an hour and a quarter and keep within the speed limit. It is quite a long time since Henry Miller kept a team ready for his service in each town, and J. W. Mitchell spent the greater part of his time driving about with a span of horses and a buckboard over his 110,000-acre ranch. The county reaches from the summit of the eastern Coast Range to the Sierra foothills, but there are probably not two per cent of the people in it who cannot drive from where they live to any other part of the county in less than three hours; and for the movement of freight, either supplies coming in or produce going out, while the roads are not perfect, they are so vastly better than they were twenty years ago, when there used to be from 500 to 1000 horses stabled every night in Merced, that the men who drove those horses would hardly recognize it as the same county.
One form of transportation which in one sense of the word did not affect the course of the county's growth materially, may be said in another sense to have affected it profoundly. This was the river steamer transportation, and the sense in which it affected the county's history was what may be called a negative sense. It affected the course the county's growth should take because it was such a failure as transportation. We have seen how Steele in the late sixties, when the new grain-raisers had begun to pour into the country south of the Merced and into the West Side country, indulged in a good deal of erroneous prophecy about the continued growth of Snelling, and
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especially about the assured future and permanence and growth of Dover. The essential reason why his prophecy was erroneous was that the San Joaquin and the Merced ran too low for navigation, by about midsummer, particularly as it was not until about this low water stage that the grain began to be ready for shipment. It is said that steamers, some of the small free-lance freighters, a few times came up the Merced as far as Cox's Ferry, and we have assurance that the pictures of steamers in the pictures of the Stevinson and Turner ranches in the old 1881 history are founded on fact. On the San Joaquin the head of navigation seems to have been Sycamore Point, only a short distance below where the Central Pacific crosses the stream. The San Joaquin is still officially considered by the United States Government as a navigable stream, and the bridges are turn bridges below that point. Oldtimers in Merced tell of seeing the smoke of steamers from the county seat as they puffed up against the current. They frequently took cargoes of wool from Firebaugh and points lower down. It is interesting to speculate how different the history of Merced County and the whole San Joaquin Valley would have been if river navigation with heavy cargoes had been possible the year around. The two lines of railroad first built across the county from north to south may be regarded as admissions that river naviga- tion had been tried and found wanting. If the river had been navig- able, it would have proved a bond of union instead of a barrier be- tween the West and the East Sides, the railroads would not probably have been built where they were, the towns would not have been built where they were- and other "ifs" could be added indefinitely; but enough of them have been suggested.
THE OLD SCHOOL BUILDING AT SNELLING
1
CHAPTER XIX
EDUCATION
The records that are left about the early schools in the county are pretty fragmentary. In February, 1856, the minutes of the board of supervisors show that William Nelson presented a petition that the county be divided into school districts. The board granted the petition and made the division easily enough. The county had already been divided into Judicial Townships One and Two, the former north and the latter south of a line drawn half-way between Bear Creek and Mariposa Creek from the Mariposa line to the San Joaquin, "and thence in a straight line to the Coast Range." Upon Mr. Nelson's petition the board now established three school districts by drawing one additional line. It ran from Scott's Ranch north to the Stanislaus boundary and south to the line between Townships One and Two. Township One was thus divided into two school districts and Town- ship Two constituted a third. Over this little educational kingdom Mr. Nelson was forthwith appointed the first superintendent of common schools. The names and dates of the successive superinten- dents are given in the chapter on County Officers. These three first school districts were numbered instead of being named.
The early schools struggled along under very difficult circum- stances. Seven years after the appointment of William Nelson as the first county superintendent, a report of R. Byron Huey, then superintendent, shows total funds for maintaining the schools of the entire county of less than would now pay the annual salary of one teacher. We quote parts of his report, which was dated January 10, 1863:
"It is certainly very desirable that our schools should be liberally sustained. . . . Merced County reports 267 children, which at ninety cents each, would entitle her to $240.30. This distributed among the four districts, would be, Jefferson District, 134 children at ninety cents each, $120.60; Pioneer, fifty-six, at ninety cents each, $50.40; Jackson, forty-two, at ninety cents each, $37.80; and Merced Falls, thirty-five, at ninety cents each, $31.50. Total, $240.30. There has been reported to the County Superintendent for school purposes up to December 8, 1862, the sum of $813.67, derived from the revenues of the county set apart for that purpose. This gives to Jefferson School District the sum of $414.51; Pioneer, $162.73; Jackson, $128.95 ; Merced Falls, $107.46. These figures will be slightly in-
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creased from a small amount yet to be apportioned. In the aggregate the county fund will probably reach $1000."
The next month we find Huey making an appeal to the people for better support for the schools, in the form of a call for a meeting. The meeting was held June 4, 1863. It convened at the court house at 10 a. m., and since court was in session, adjourned to the school- house at Snelling. This, by the way, was the Jackson District. Mer- ced Falls explains itself, Pioneer was over on Mariposa Creek where part of the old district still bears the same name, and Jefferson, we find towards the end of the sixties, embraced the country between the lower Merced and the San Joaquin from the range line between Ranges 10 and 11 westward (substantially). At this later date there had come to be three districts on the West Side; but here in 1863, judging from the large portion of the total number of children which Jefferson District had, it presumably embraced that portion of the West Side in Township One, and probably more territory further up the Merced.
Returning to the meeting at Snelling on June 4, 1863, it organized itself into the first County Teachers' Institute. R. B. Huey was presi- dent and C. S. Hatch was secretary (pro tem., at least), and among others present were J. M. Fowler, J. W. Longworth, and G. P. Lake.
In 1865 the four school districts showed census children as fol- lows; Jackson, 52; Pioneer, 81; Jefferson, 214; Merced Falls, 41; total, 388. Since 1863, Jackson had gained 10, Pioneer, 25 ; Jefferson, 80; and Merced Falls, 6, a total gain of 121, or between 45 and 46 per cent, assuming that the basis of age was the same in both cases. E. T. Dixon reported the 1865 figures in a statement published in the 1881 history, and he says in this statement that the salary first paid the superintendent of schools was $200 a year, without stating when this began, however.
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