History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches 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, Volume I, Part 14

Author: Vandor, Paul E., 1858-
Publication date: 1919
Publisher: Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company
Number of Pages: 1362

USA > California > Fresno County > History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches 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, Volume I > Part 14

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Early historic paragraphers from Faymonville down have credited Alex- ander Ball with erecting the first sawmill in 1854 on Pine Ridge. The first man was James Hulse. He located below Corlew's Meadows, and according to the story staked the mill as a wager in a poker game at a ball and lost. Then it came into the possession of Ball, who lost it by fire, hastening on his bankruptcy in 1857, one of the very earliest if not the first in the county. The original toll grade was cut by two trappers and hunters, the Woods brothers, under a charter of 1866, starting from the upper end at a place which later became known as the Widow Waite's. Their grade was about 150 feet higher than the later improved one, that first trail being yet discernible in places.

J. W. Humphreys and Moses Mock established in 1866 a mill which became in 1870 the property of M. J. Donahoo, who also bought from Glass and others the toll road to the mills that had passed into their hands. Dona- hoo improved the grade, and in 1878 sold it to the county for $5,000, where- upon it became a free road, though still continuing a beast killer. Donahoo erected a planing mill in 1876 at Tollhouse, which became a busy mountain settlement, a halting station on the stage line, and before the flume a shipping point for the Pine Ridge lumber cut, already a county resource. The sites of these many early mills may be located today on the edges of the deep ravines that have been filled with the heaped up great accumulations of rotting saw-dust.

The timber belt that in the course of years has been pretty well denuded was an extensive one, over twenty-five miles wide and sixty long, embracing over 1,500 square miles, estimated at 8,000 feet an acre to contain over 9,600,- 000,000 feet of lumber, considered a low average, and placing the value at ten dollars per thousand the aggregate would be $96,000,000, considered not fifty percent. of the real value. The Pine Ridge district was in its day a perfect web of sawmills and camps, with Ockenden as the center of the mills and timbering operations. It was the most important mountain settlement, contributing to the wants of thousands engaged in the industry, which was an important one of the county, coming next to mining and agriculture. It has been said that there have been as many as eighty-four mill sites, according to the tell-tale saw dust dump piles during the years when the lumbering operations were at their height.

Equally as extensive lumber operations were prosecuted in the Kings River region, not even sparing Big Trees, with Sanger later as the flume receiving point and the mill headquarters of the Kings River Lumber Com- pany, and at a still later date of the eastern capitalized Hume-Bennett Lum- ber Company which revived activities in that quarter. It undertook a great piece of work in moving mill and plant at Millwood across a range to a more promising location on Ten Mile Creek which was dammed to form a lake by an original piece of concrete construction work, the conception of

COURT HOUSE 1866 AT MILLERTON, COSTING $19,000-ABANDONED SEPTEMBER, 1874

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Civil Engineer J. S. Eastwood. There the mill and mountain settlement of Hume has been established on the never completed state and county fostered scenic road through General Grant National Park via the Sand Creek road from Reedley and Dunlap. The dam was completed late in November, 1908, at an approximate cost of $35,000, creating an eighty-seven-acre lake with a maximum depth of fifty feet and draining an area of twenty-five square miles. It is 677 feet long on the crest and fifty-one high at its highest point, ground for it having been broken on June 26, 1908, and 2,207 cubic yards of con- crete, besides eight miles of old steel cable entering into the construction.

CHAPTER XVII

HISTORICAL COURTHOUSE A WORRY FOR TEN YEARS. IT IS ABAN- DONED IN THE END TO THE OWLS AND BATS AFTER SEVEN YEARS UPON REMOVAL OF THE COUNTY SEAT. FINANCIAL DIFFICUL- TIES LONG STOOD IN THE WAY OF ITS REALIZATION. IT WAS A MODEL FOR HONEST CONSTRUCTION, AND THE BOAST AND PRIDE OF THE PEOPLE. COURTROOM BECOMES THE TOWN ASSEMBLY HALL. BUILDING RECALLS TRAGIC MYSTERY IN FRESNO'S OFFICIAL ANNALS AND THE FIRST DEFALCATION.

"When in 1874, the county seat was removed to Fresno, the entire town of Millerton was abandoned, and the splendid courthouse which had cost the county many thousand dollars, was left there standing by itself, a refuge for owls and bats, and the drunken orgies of the 'noble redman,' a dumb, silent, and yet an eloquent witness of the folly and short-sightedness of those who formerly directed the affairs of the county."

These are the parting words of Historian Faymonville in 1879.

The decision to vote on the county seat removal was the death-knell of Ira McCray's future activities in Millerton, as witnesseth the following pub- lication on a certain February day in 1874 :

SHERIFF'S SALE-On Saturday, Sheriff Ashman sold the following property situate in the town of Millerton at public auction to satisfy an execution against it. Jesse Morrow was the purchaser and the property sold for the following figures: Oak hotel building and lot and livery stable $250, blacksmith shop $50, Joe Royal storehouse, $15, "Negro Jane" house and lot $13. The election ordered by the board of supervisors for the purpose of removing the county seat does not add to the value of property in Millerton.

James McCardle became proprietor of the Oak Hotel.

Can Sheriff Ashman have had hopes that the end of Millerton might be averted? If so, he was challenging manifest destiny. On March 11, 1874, appeared the following announcement of an actual improvement in the expir- ing village.

IMPROVEMENTS-Just think of it-a new building is being erected in Millerton : a dwelling house, too, and just now of all times, when the county seat is about to be removed. But such is the fact, nevertheless. Those two indefatigable knights of the saw, hammer and chisel-they haven't got any plane for we inquired-Joseph Lamper Smith and Henry Roemer are hard at work on a dwelling for J. Scott Ashman.

Until that historical courthouse and jail of 1867 was completed, to be abandoned with removal of the county seat after only seven years of occu- pancy, the housing of the officers and courts was a perennial subject of worry for the supervisors. They were scattered in as many as four different build- ings at a time under one year leases, because from the time of the earliest discussion of the subject in June, 1859, the hope was ever entertained of a county-owned official home. But the finances never would permit. The tax rate with the early sparse population and scarcity of assessable property was

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not sufficient to perceptibly augment the created building-fund nest-egg. Besides builders were not inclined to bid for a contract with pay forthcoming in the scrip or bonds of a fledgling county, which had not yet attained a settled basis but was in the throes of development. While the community had, with the years, been educated up to an acceptance of the public necessity of a courthouse, another educational campaign was necessary to endorse a legis- lative appeal for a bond issue. Even after all these preliminaries were suc- cessfully overcome, the resolution to build was carried in the board by only a bare majority and over the formal protest of S. S. Hyde, one of the three members.

In those days under the '49 constitution, liberal a document as it was asserted to be, the legislature was entrusted with more regulative and super- visory powers over local government than it has today under the shot riddled constitution of 1879, which enlarged upon the home legislative body's govern- ing powers in local matters. All these things are to be borne in mind to account for the years of wearisome delay before the county could luxuriate in its own courthouse. It may be soberly questioned even, whether in 1856, the territory with its scant population, its lack of known resources, save in the placers, the life of which no one could foretell, and with its future a serious problem, was prepared to assume every responsibility of independ- ent county government. One local historian has epitomized the situation in the words that "Fresno had undertaken in county organization to satisfy a champagne appetite on a small beer income."

In June, 1859, in response to a call to buy a suitable county building, McCray offered his Oak Hotel building for $8,000, and Henry Burroughs his much older wooden hotel structure and also to repair again the jail-the one with the voodoo on it, that he was paid $6,000 for. The upshot was a decision to secure plans for a courthouse building, and there the matter rested until November, 1862, when the subject was revived and a set was accepted in April, 1863. Meanwhile, in February, a site was bought from L. G. Hughes and Stephen Gaster, in the store and stable ground of Hughes, for $600, occupied by Gaster and J. B. Royal, and William Rousseau's adjoining lot, for $150.

No response forthcoming to the advertisement in the Mariposa Free Press from builders, another call for bids was inserted in June in the San Francisco Weekly Bulletin, and Weekly Sonora Union-Democrat and still no response, and with like experience a third call made in August, in the California Weekly Republican of Sacramento. One year elapsed, and then it was resolved to fence in the site.

In February, 1866, the Mariposa Free Press and Visalia Times were tried as advertising mediums and as a result Charles S. Peck of Mariposa offered plans, which later were accepted. In May proposals to build were invited and an issue of $20,000 bonds at ten percent. was authorized to meet the obligation. The bidding contractors were :

Charles P. Converse, $17,008.25; Peck & Hillenhagen, $18,500; George Chittenden, $20,000.

To Converse was awarded the contract under a $34,000 bond. His offer was raised $1,600 in August on account of authorized changes. Construction began in the winter of 1866 and ended in the summer of 1867, the brick was burned on the ground, and the granite and rock quarried near by. On settle- ment Converse claimed $7,599 additional, $2,000 by reason of depreciation of county bonds and interest payments on loans by reason of non acceptance of presented warrants because of the treasurer's defalcation. This $2,000 claim was disallowed, but in all he was allowed $5,728.25 above his contract price.

It must in all fairness be admitted that the building was most sub- stantially constructed, the jail portion in the rear basement with its great granite slabs and heavy iron doors being second to none then in the state

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for fortresslike stability. Converse really took a pride in giving the county a durable and solid structure, the two dungeon walls being of granite blocks some weighing a ton or more. The building will serve, standing to this day, as a mute object lesson to present-day contractors of shoddy and ginger breaded public work. It made no pretense to architectural beauty. It was plain and simple and planned for use and not empty show. It could be made tenantable at no great expense in the refitting of the woodwork.

It is remarkable that after the years of agitation for a courthouse and a total expenditure of more than $24,336 so little in the end should have been thought of the enterprise as to overlook a celebration to mark its completion, or even in the beginning in the laying of the cornerstone. Vandals have burrowed through and under the front brickwalls for the cornerstone box of coins and relics, but in vain, for none was ever deposited. The old courthouse was the boast and pride of the Millertonian. Long after the desertion of the village, it was carried as a tangible asset on the books of the county, though it had legally passed into the possession of Charles A. Hart, who became the owner of the land by reason of a government home- stead location.

The makeshift outside courtrooms had been the place for general public assemblies and traveling shows, such as in those days at great intervals lost their way into this far away neck of the woods, principally sleight of hand performers, lecturers on phrenology and stranded negro minstrels working their hazardous route homeward and during whose stay the hotel landlords kept watchful eye on stage departure days. The tribunal chamber in the Converse courthouse also became the townhall, but under the restric- tions of August, 1867, forbidding traveling shows or exhibitions of leger- demain, and making exceptions as to musical concerts, vocal or instrumental, lectures on the arts and sciences and political and religious exercises. Balls and receptions were given and fraternal societies held forth there, the Odd Fellows' lodge on Monday and the Independent Order of Good Templars on Saturday evenings at the early hour of seven, besides the religious services at eleven in the morning on the fourth Sabbath of the month, conducted by Rev. J. H. Neal, who, on the other Sundays, preached in rotation at the Mississippi, Scottsburg and Dry Creek schools.

The erection of the courthouse recalls the first tragic story and mystery connected with the official annals of the county in the defalcation and dis- appearance of Gaster, the treasurer, well to do and a highly respected citizen -in fact there were defalcations in the treasurership by successive elected incumbents. Sixteen days had elapsed on August 28, 1866, that Gaster had, according to the formal official record, "without apparent cause absented himself and failed and neglected to discharge the duties of his office," where- fore it was resolved to open the office and force the safe. Investigation showed that $6,603.06 was missing, and County Judge E. C. Winchell de- clared the office vacant. Thomas J. Allen was later appointed to the vacancy, but failing to qualify, George Grierson was named.

In the safe were found five packages containing county scrip, notes, and a buckskin sack with $1,800 and memoranda of ownership, besides fifteen loose twenty-dollar pieces in several compartments. A. M. Darwin estab- lished his ownership to this money and it was legally surrendered to him. The Gaster estate later offered to compromise the shortage for $2,000, but it was declined and little was recovered by suit. Gaster's defalcation has never been satisfactorily accounted for. At the time he and Converse were close friends-in fact Gaster financed him in enterprises and possibly in the courthouse construction.

Gaster's disappearance on August 11, 1866, left Mrs. Emma C. Gaster to face the world, handicapped with the care of four children. About two and one-half years later she married Converse, who in February, 1868, had been divorced. His end was also a tragic one.

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CHAPTER XVIII

No CIVIC PROGRESS OR SPIRIT IN MILLERTON. NEVER WAS THERE TOWN PLAT OR INCORPORATION. ITS SITE WAS ON UNSURVEYED GOVERNMENT LAND. ITS ONE VILLAGE STREET A DOUBLE ENDER CUL DE SAC. NEARNESS TO RICH PLACERS CONTROLLED CHOICE OF SITE. TRADITIONAL ESTIMATE OF NEAR BY GOLD YIELD. RURAL CONDITIONS WERE ALMOST PRIMITIVELY IDEAL. STAGE LINES AND SLOW MAIL DELIVERIES. WAR NEWS RUSHED ON BY STAGE COACH AFTER PURCHASE BY CLUB IN VISALIA.

The eighteen years of village life history of Millerton, with the added burden of misfit county-seat honors, are singular for the lack of civic prog- ress, remaining during that period practically at a standstill and positively retrograding. Was a structure dismantled for removal, which was not in- frequent, was one destroyed by fire, or washed away by flood, there was no replacement. It was never predestined to live as a town, and the fact was emphasized at the county seat removal election in March, 1874.

The only noteworthy building spurt was at the founding in the first half of the 1850 decade. The only picture of the ragged village is from a photograph of 1870, by Frank Dusy, after the big flood. It shows a scattered collection of sixteen houses and local landmarks, including Chinatown at the upper end of the village street into which it debouched, the Indian rancheria on the bluff across the river, with the courthouse and Oak hotel looming up as the principal stone structures, and with more vacant than occupied spaces on both sides of the roadway.

There was an Indian rancheria above the fort and another below the village, hence the ferry landing name, "Rancheria Flat."

The hotel was erected by Ira McCray in 1858, at a cost of $15,000, with brick burned and stone quarried right on the ground, and for the day it was a pretentious structure and a comfortable caravansary that the flood razed to one story. McCray never recovered from this misfortune, it was the turning point in his affairs.

Never was there a town plat of Millerton. There never could have been one. It never had town incorporation or officers. The county supervisors were the town governing body, if any assumed the prerogative, and before county organization it was practically without government, because of its remoteness from Mariposa's county seat. The village site was on no man's land, on unsurveyed government land in which no one could have owner- ship, yet buildings were erected, leases entered into, lots sold and bought, the courthouse site included, and no one had more tangible claim than a squat- ter's possessory holding from which he might be turned off at any time, but was not-another evidence of the "loose, devil-me-care" spirit of the times. When the fort was abandoned at the close of 1863, the late Judge Hart bought the government buildings for a song as a home residence, and after the land survey he located a homestead on the surrounding land, including the fort site.

So it was with the village on the river bank. The homestead filed by George McClelland, whose house was central in the village, embraced the site as far as McCray's, the township line cutting across the town riverwards just beyond the opposite courthouse. This homestead right came to the late W. H. Mckenzie by purchase, and so his estate (he was born at the fort as was his half brother, Truman G. Hart) is the owner of the fort, village and courthouse sites, besides the 12,000-acre cattle range on both

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sides of the river, excluding only the eighty-four-acre sulphur springs prop- erty below town and in the river bed in part, which the Collins brothers never would part with.

Judge Hart owned the crowded quarter of the Chinese at the upper extremity of the village, occupied by them for years after the evacuation. He was their trusted legal adviser, and business agent, and regarded by them as a man second to none in power and influence. He was a man of ample physical girth, and this alone gave him distinction, so that on his later day business visits to Fresno his progress through Chinatown was always one long welcome ovation. This Chinatown of Millerton was typical as the most populous part of the village, in little one-story structures, prin- cipally of brick. It was as every other Chinatown distinguished for squalor, crowding of human beings into narrow confines, with all the characteristic bad smells and grime, and sublime indifference to sanitary measures that marks the oriental's quarters. The river water was used for drinking, and Hotel- man Henry, as one of the committee of citizens, presented protest to Hart against his tenants dumping stable manure and house sweepings into the stream to pollute the water. In 1860, the census showed a population of 4,605, of which 4,305 were whites, 300 Chinese including five women, besides 3,294 Indians.

There never was but the one bisecting roadway or street in the village, on either side of which the scant buildings of the day were irregularly located or faced. The roadway traveled today to the fort is not the one of Miller- ton. From Pollasky, winding along the riverbank to merge into the village street, it is a later creation, primarily for the convenience of the ranch. In the olden time, Millerton was entered by two stage lines from the back hills beyond the fort, or from across the river at the ferries and fords. The river- side road was not laid out until nearly twenty years after scattered settle- ment towards the plains had begun. Before the advent of the railroad, with the Central Pacific Railroad opened in May, 1869, Millerton was on one of the seven eastern wagon roads-the longest one, the Tejon route, through the interior valley. It was from Stockton by way of the village and the Kings River, south through the Tehachapi and Tejon passes to Los Angeles and San Bernardino and the military road to Salt Lake City, 1,100 miles. It was a stage station on the Stockton-Visalia route with Kingston on the river as the next halting place. From the Santa Clara Valley, ran another road, entering the valley at Pacheco pass from San Benito, traversing the West Side plains, following the Elkhorn grade used to this day, and striking the main Kings River road. The name was taken from the fact that over the door of the great barn of the stage company there was fastened the head and horns of a huge elk. Elk's head is no more, but the road is there yet to the Kittleman plains in the oil field.

With all the cobbles and gravel in the river bed, the one village street, ending practically in cul de sacs at both ends, never was paved or macadam- ized. In dry seasons it was a dusty path ; in wet, a thick mud pudding. There was no alignment of the houses, more vacant spots in horse and cow corrals, littered up house yards and stable grounds than occupied ground, low one- story adobe, or up and down boarded wooden structures with a few notable exceptions, and cow and footpaths connecting with the main street as side- paths. That main street never had official name. It was variously referred to as Main, Center or Water, the rear of the houses on the river bank crowd- ing upon the latter, even hanging over the water, or being built up on stone bulkheads to bring them on a level with the street in front.

What really possessed the early villagers to locate where they did, and why was so much built on the riverbank, when as much and more could have been located back of the courthouse, on higher and better drained ground, removed from all flood danger? In the flood of Christmas eve 1867, the water rose in the river thirty feet higher than ever before known, covering

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townsite to the very courthouse steps. From that flood visitation, the village never recovered. It was then in the stage of decadence; the flood accelerated the finale. The question regarding the site location cannot be satisfactorily explained. The fort was undoubtedly placed at the highest and most prac- tical military point on the river, one mile above the village. As to the latter, it was probably governed by the fords and ferries for the stages, and the accessibility to the river water for domestic purposes.

There have never been authentic figures estimating the yield of the gold placers at, near and above Millerton. In 1856, the county had a revenue of $1.000 to $1,200 from the four-dollar foreign miner's tax representing from 250 to 300 delving miners. Their average individual daily earnings were ten dollars-collectively $2,500 or $3,000 a day, $75,000 or $90,000 a month, and continuing with fluctuations for some years. There is a well authen- ticated tradition given corroboration by Jesse D. Musick, as an accepted authority on early historical subjects, that by 1852 one million dollars in gold dust had been extracted from twenty acres of the parcel of eighty- four, three-eighths of a mile below the town, where the mineral water gushes out of a cleft granite boulder at the Collins' sulphur spring in the bed of the river, and in which parcel Mr. Musick had an interest. This is said to have been one of the richest placers, and according to the quoted tradition the village site was located where it was because midway between that busy placer and the next richest across the range above the fort, in propinquity to the others on the river, and all within convenient reach of military succor when needed. Is it to be wondered that there were "loose, devil-me-care" times with that much dust in circulation, and the tables at McCray's loaded down with gold in the games of chance that ran uninterruptedly the night through and until early cock-crow?

John C. Hoxie, Fresno pioneer and miner, and a man with such a marvelous and accurate memory that he was often called upon as a court witness to give litigants the benefit of his recollection of early day events and localities, bore personal witness to the richness of the placers of the Southern Mines. He recalled publication years ago of a series of articles in a San Francisco mining journal by B. D. James, popularly called "Brigham," giving estimates from reliable sources such as express companies and the like of the yields of the mining districts. For the period approximately from 1850-55 the estimate for the Southern Mines was given as thirteen millions and several hundred thousands.

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History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches 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, Volume I, Part 14

Author: Vandor, Paul E., 1858- Publication date: 1919 Publisher: Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company Number of Pages: 1362

Author: Vandor, Paul E., 1858-
Publication date: 1919
Publisher: Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company
Number of Pages: 1362