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 31

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 31

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The danger of the direct competition with the south is to be avoided. Instead of the short staple upland type of cotton of the southern belt, it is of distinct advantage to the southwestern farmers to plant Egyptian cotton.

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

It is adapted to the conditions of the irrigated valleys of Arizona and Cali- fornia. With cotton as with every other crop, a failure to take account of differences in varieties may lead to costly failures. The Egyptian differs from the upland variety as a taller and more slender plant with narrower leaf-lobes and smaller bolls. This last feature has led southerners to believe that the yield must be small, whereas the Egyptian often yields very well, a 500-pound bale or more per acre having been obtained on many farms in the Salt River Valley of Arizona.

Thirty thousand acres of the Egyptian grown in the valley in 1917 gave a return to the farmers estimated at $5,000,000. Estimates from it and other valleys indicate that nearly 100,000 acres would be planted in 1918 in Arizona. The Arizona varieties have been grown not only in the Yuma, Palo Verde and Imperial Valleys of Southern California, but have been found well adapted to the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley around Bakersfield and Fresno, and in 1917 grew and ripened satisfac- torily at several points in the two great interior valleys. The season may have been unusually favorable for cotton ripening in the Sacramento Valley.

The scarcity of extra-staple cotton may be appreciated from the fact that seventy to eighty cents a pound was paid for superior grades of the Arizona grown Egyptian for which twenty-five cents was considered a good price.

There were other considerations in this connection, but if the needs of American manufacturers for cotton of the Egyptian type are to be met by a home production the call would be for the planting of several hundred thousands of acres. Experts' figures are that California's central valleys can produce more cotton to the acre than any other region in the world. The California yield is 400 pounds per acre with 315 as the next highest in Virginia for thirteen cotton growing states, and with Texas 157 pounds.

State university experiments at the Kearney Estate are that California is able because of the climate and the soil conditions and when one kind of cotton is grown to produce the finest grade outside of Egypt. An influence working detrimentally in all areas is the diversity of varieties produced. Cotton cross-pollinates readily and when varieties are grown in the same community crossing is brought about by wind and insects, causing deteriora- tion in quantity and quality of yield of each. This has been demonstrated by conditions in the Imperial Valley, where many varieties are grown so close together that at this time no superior variety possesses superior quality or yield.

Agitation of the subject in Fresno has resulted in the formation here of the California Egyptian Cotton Growers' Association after an unequivocal declaration in favor of using every effort to confine planting in the central part of the state to the Egyptian long staple variety and to urge the potential cotton growers of two valleys to do their own ginning on a cooperative plan. Quite generally through the San Joaquin the counties passed at the associa- tion's instance ordinance similar to the one enacted on Washington's Birth- day, 1918, in Fresno as the first prohibiting the planting of any save Egyp- tian cotton. Several cotton planting enterprises have been incorporated. One of them known as the Fresno Liberty Cotton Company will cultivate 1,000 acres of Miller & Lux land near Oxalis on the west side of the county on both sides of the railroad.

One of the very first results of the passage of the Fresno ordinance limiting character of the planting was an action at law in the federal court by an Imperial Valley grower attacking the ordinance after a shipment of short staple cotton staple seed had been seized at Firebaugh for condemna- tion.

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

FIG CULTIVATION BOOMING

As the result of a fig institute held in January, 1918, and taking a lesson out of the book of experience of the raisin, peach and other fruit growers, the California Fig Growers' Association has been formed in Fresno with Henry Markarian, a pioneer fig grower as the first president of this latest of cooperative organizations.

Its objects will be to act as a cooperative marketing agency and as such set at each season a standard minimum price for the different varieties of figs to all growers, to plant a Capri fig orchard in a thermal belt of the San Joaquin as suggested by Mr. Markarian to be maintained by the associa- tion for early caprification and as a dependable supply source at minimum cost and eventually to make a better or standard uniform pack of figs, fol- lowing on the lines that the raisin and peach men are pursuing in their market- ing of their products. A first step in February was to advance for 1918 the prices about forty dollars a ton for all varieties on future sales. A fig exhibit will be made and the suggestion has been favorably received to promote a California Fig Day similar to the Fresno Raisin Day for the mutual benefit of growers and consumers.

It is not many years ago that merchants in California and in the East as well were of the decided opinion that this state would never produce a fig equal to the imported. The prejudice has been overcome. Figs have been grown in California for over 100 years. The padres brought them in the variety that has been named the Mission Black. In later years the California White Adriatic was introduced and fifteen years ago the Cali- myrna fig-the name a contraction of California-Smyrna-from Europe through the efforts of George C. Roeding. From a very small beginning, with the figs in many cases allowed to go to waste, trees neglected and principally used for shade, the industry began to be a factor seventeen years ago when small and indifferent packs were shipped.

During the year 1917 the estimate of W. F. Toomey, mayor of Fresno and one of the chief fig shippers in the county, is that between 6,500 and 7,000 tons of the three varieties were shipped from this county. The major part of these was White Adriatic. The frost the year before had greatly reduced the crop. That the industry will be an important one is not only evidenced by the fact of thousands of trees being planted but that packing firms are going into the manufacture of byproducts as fig coffee, fig pulp or paste used in the making of cake and fig cereal. The 1916 figures present a fair basis for a comparison between the production of the county and the state, the production in other sections not showing a great increase while Fresno's output has increased from 1,500 to 3,000 tons :

Variety.

State.

Fresno.

White Adriatic

5,000 tons

3,800 tons

Smyrna

600

400

Black Mission

300

100

California produces some 16,000,000 pounds of figs, mostly Adriatics. Be- fore the European war, there was an importation of 20,000.000 pounds an- nually mainly of the Smyrna variety. During the next ten years there will be gradually produced from California fig orchards planted and being planted an additional 20,000,000 pounds. The optimistic look to see in the next twenty years a production in California and largely in the vicinity of Fresno of 100,000,000 pounds and each year better figs and better packed, for it is argued if the 100,000,000 Americans are going to eat American figs there must be American methods of growing and of packing and in this connection the word American means Californian in so far as the fig is concerned.

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

Of the figs grown in Fresno, "The Garden of the Sun"-as it has been denominated in the latest slogan officially adopted by the county chamber of commerce-there are four varieties that have demonstrated their particu- lar value and merit. The Black Mission is the oldest and most frequently found under cultivation. It is a heavy producer, particularly desirable for bakers' use and a good short distance shipper when green. Next comes the Adriatic, also a heavy producer, of fine appearance and suited to many uses. The Smyrna is the recognized fig for drying and unsurpassed for packing qualities. The Kadota is a luscious and golden-yellow-hued fruit whose strongest recommendation is as a green shipper to most distant continental markets in refrigerator cars as are grapes and other fruit, arriving in eastern markets in such fine condition that for two seasons it has commanded prices ranging from fifteen to fifty cents a pound, meaning from $300 to $1,000 a ton. It is a favorite for cooking purposes and the fact that no caprification is required to produce a crop is an important point. When caprified, it is of size equal to the Smyrna, takes on an added appearance for shipping and is materially improved. The smaller variety of the fig which is about thirty percent. of the crop is in demand by canners and for glacé fruit and it lends itself to the other uses that the fruit is put to.

The J. C. Forkner Fig Gardens are one of the wonders in the process of the development of the fig in Fresno County-a great fig orchard of 5,000 acres not to be held by a corporation but subdivided for homes and in prepa- ration for them an adjunct nursery that has 200,000 cuttings growing and flourishing. The buyer of the land is permitted to plant whichever variety he chooses. By far the greater majority of the figs planted and to be planted are the Calimyrna, with 500 acres in the spring of 1919 to the Kadota. The territory under development is a 10,000-acre tract near the San Joaquin River, north of the city. It is land that has been slighted and neglected be- cause it is of the so-called "hog wallow" conformation and lacking as long claimed depth of soil because the hard pan is so close to the surface, neces- sitating the use of dynamite in penetrating that hard pan to the soil under- neath.

An imaginative writer has declared that it required 6,000 years to bring about a full realization of the fig gardens of Smyrna and at most there are 20,000 acres monopolizing a world's trade. Here on the outskirts of Fresno City beginning has been made on a great orchard of 5,000 acres, one-fourth the size and promising of a greater production than that of the old world. Below the protecting hard pan surface was revealed a stratum of from five to fifteen feet of soil and analysis has proven it to be ideal for the fig. The way to this subsoil has to be dynamited and the land of hog wallow knolls levelled during the first year. During the first year in this planting work $12,000 worth of dynamite was used. For the second $3,000 worth is being used monthly. In this plan to plant 5,000 acres, 1,500 have been put in ; for 1918 ground is in preparation for 2,000 and for 1919 1,500 with all the prepar- atory work and the growing of the serving nursery.

A beginning was made with 10,000 acres of land. Four thousand of these were sold before conceiving the plan of the 5,000-acre fig garden. The original idea was to handle the tract as millions of other acres in the state have been previously subdivided and sold. The fig garden came as a later inspiration. No nursery would of its own initiative plant 200,000 or even 100,000 fig cuttings because forsooth no nursery in the history of the state had ever sold 200,000 or 100,000 in a year. No nursery could undertake this risk. This suggested the adjunct nursery in a frostless, foothill section, every fig cutting from the 160 acres of Henry Markarian, the pioneer fig grower, was bought and 500,000 planted and today the day is awaited when 200,000 fig trees will be planted. It is the most marvelous fig nursery stock the world has seen. The time is coming when the 5,000 acres will be fig

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

producers and continue to be after many a man, woman and child in the community will long have been forgotten with the passing of the years for the fig like the olive is of long life. It will be the day when California through Fresno will be controlling the world's production and market of the fig.

CURRANT AND SHIPPING GRAPES

Another predicted industry is that of the currant grape and a great one if taken up on commercial lines by the vineyardists of the San Joaquin Valley. George C. Husman, pomologist in charge of viticultural investiga- tion for the United States Department of Agriculture, states as the result of trials and tests at the government's experimental station at Fresno Vine- yards Company's property with more than 500 varieties of grapes that it is no longer an experiment but that the growing of currants as a com- mercial factor should be vigorously pursued by the growers of the state and notably in the raisin belt and established as a variety of California's world controlling raisin industry. From Greece, the Zante currant so-called of commerce has been yearly imported in quantity of 45,000,000 pounds but now as the result of the war the currant country has become devastated or neglected and it is the opportunity for the vineyardists to plant currant grape vines.

There is the important fact that the currant grape may be harvested, cured and stored for consumption before the harvest of the raisin crop com- mences. This solves the labor problem as vineyardists may give employ- ment for months before the Thompson's, Muscats and other varieties are placed on the trays for sun curing. Testing out the annual incision of the currant vine to promote the successful setting of the fruit of this variety, experiments have led up to the quadrupling of the crop on particular vines. The currant vine will bear within three years and in production will surpass the Muscat and equal the Thompson and the Sultana.

Attention has also been paid to the development of a real choice produc- tive variety of table, shipping and storage grapes. Investigation shows de- cidedly that the higher quality of grapes of better shipping, storage and sell- ing qualities than those grown for that purpose has been developed and there is no hesitancy in the declaration that among these varieties are such as the Ohanez which stands in a class by itself so far as late storage and keeping qualities are concerned. This is the variety that for so many years has been so extensively cultivated and imported from the Malaga districts of Spain, at least 1,600,000 barrels of these grapes packed in cork dust coming into this country.

The California Wine Association has given the Agricultural Department a fifty-year lease, with annual renewal, on the experimental property so that experiments may be undertaken by the government without fear of molestation before the work is complete.

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

CHAPTER XXXIX

M. THEO. KEARNEY, THE MAN OF MYSTERY IN PRIVATE LIFE, THE AUTOCRAT IN PUBLIC. HE LIVED IN SOLITARY GRANDEUR IN A CHATEAU WITHOUT COMPANION OR FRIEND. AS A PERSONAGE HE WAS POPULARLY MISUNDERSTOOD. YET NO OTHER RICH MAN OF THE COUNTY HAS MADE A GREATER PUBLIC BENEFAC- TION. DIED UNATTENDED ON THE HIGH SEAS. CHAMPIONED THE FORMATION OF THE FIRST RAISIN GROWERS' ASSOCIATION. SAND LOT KEARNEY SET UP CLAIM OF HEIRSHIP ON A FIRST COUSIN RELATIONSHIP.

Germane to the story of the raisin industry, an important chapter would deal with the life and public career of M. Theo. Kearney, so notable in the business activities of the county. He was a remarkable character and per- sonage. In private life, he was the man of unfathomable mystery. In public life, he was the autocrat, overbearing, uncompromising-a very "bull in a china shop." He died without clearing the mystery of his life that was the subject of so much discussion and conjecture.

After his death, not even the oldest or most trusted employe could with certainty affirm what his age was, nor what his nativity. No man so prom- inently in a public career for a time was so widely known and so little known also. To suggest that he was an Irishman was to give affront. He maintained on the rare occasions when it is recalled that he ever let slip any information concerning his antecedents, that he was Liverpool born and came with parents to Boston at an early age. In style, comportment and grooming, he posed as an Englishman, and by many was taken as one. He lived the life of a crabbed bachelor, without close friend or bosom confidant, in solitary grandeur in the erected wing of an ambitious chateau designed after an historical French feudal castle. He died suddenly from heart trouble on May 26, 1906, at sea in his stateroom on the steamship Caronia, Europe bound, attended as in life by no friend or sympathizer. The remains were cremated upon arrival at Queenstown and in time were received at the Kearney estate, where the metallic box container is the subject of no one's care, solicitude or reverence but is shifted from here to there as a thing which for the space it covers is neither useful nor ornamental.

Kearney was either a man of fair lineage, who had a past great dis- appointment or woe in life to turn him cynical, or he was a parvenu, who having met with financial success in new surroundings would have it thought that he was patrician, wherefore silence as to his past was the safest course to pursue in blocking inquiry, the while living up to the pre- tension. The fact is that nothing certain is known as to his antecedents, or early life. His age, birth, and ancestry were never the subject of communion even with the oldest business associate. His acquaintances-friends he did not court-never went beyond the cold business relationship. Effort has been made to weave a romance into his life's history in that his souring upon the world was in consequence of a disappointment in love. Nobody knows. No woman ever passed the portals under the tiled roof of his cha- teau. He was brusquely coarse in withholding invitation to enter when, chaperoned by male, one visited the well kept flower gardens and spacious grounds of Kearney Park, also known as the Fruit Vale Estate. So deep rooted was this antipathy against the sex that never a female servant was countenanced about Chateau Fresno.

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

There is one remembered exception of a female guest at the Chateau. It was the occasion of a theatrical engagement in Fresno of Lily Langtry, "The Jersey Lily," with whose name that of an heir apparent to the British throne was once on gossip's tongue. She was Kearney's guest at the Chateau at lunch. It may have been the time she became, in Federal court in San Fran- cisco, an American citizeness to take up land near Calistoga. Kearney's equi- pages in the days of horse-drawn or horseless vehicles were always the very latest. He himself drove his four-in-hand to town for her and returned her to her special car, and the town talked about it for days after.

Kearney was ever the well groomed man of fashion. He was a lover of the beautiful, of the esthetic. He had the means to indulge himself. The Chateau Fresno Estate and everything about it is proof of his love for the beautiful, if proof were needed. He loved horses and he was an expert handler of them. This was his only known leaning in the line of sports. His equipages were the English drag, high-trap and the four-in-hand tally-ho, but he was always the solitary driver or rider in the absence of attendant. He was never credited with knowledge of music yet had a collection of libretti of the best known operas. His esthetic spirit was reflected in the wall paper designs of the chateau and in the pictures that hung from the walls, some of these replica of works of art, and in the furniture and furnishings. Lovely woman was the theme of most of the pictures. However lowly his own origin, his surroundings evinced a taste that the most critical could not but approve.

Many a storv has been told of his admiration for and attentions to the fair sex. His collection of pictures of actresses was a large and interesting one. Some were autographed, The Jersey Lily's was a prized one. Pictures may have been personally presented. More than likely they were store purchases of stage beauties and celebrities of the day. Thousands of others possessed these same photographic creations of Bradley & Rulofson, of Taber, of Marceau. Coming to Fresno, Kearney had business association credentials that had he the means then to indulge in the luxury could have given him entree into the society of the nouveau riches. At the least they brought him in touch with the jeunesse doree in the mining stock broker and the real es- tate class. A home in San Francisco he never had. After fortune smiled on him, he was a frequent visitor to the city and the guest at the most prominent hostelry there or at Calistoga Springs or at Del Monte on vacations.

He may have had renewed social yearnings in his later days. It was not at all impossible to have made the acquaintanceship of stage celebrities. The possession is readily explainable of the photographs in his day of such stage divinities as Lily Langtry, of Adelaide Neilson most beautiful of Juliets (pic- ture was, in fact, taken after her death out of her book), of Alice Dunning Lingard, stunning English beauty, who, with her sister, Dickie, popularized "The Two Orphans," French melodrama in San Francisco: of Fanny Daven- port and Ada Rehan as Daly's comedy leading ladies, of Clara Morris, emo- tional actress, of Alice Oates, comic opera singer ; of Ida Scott Siddons, loveli- est of dramatic readers, but lacking the genius of her theatrical ancestress, Sarah Siddons, greatest English actress of her day and times; of Bella Bate- man, Ellie Wilton and Belle Chapman of the old California Theater Stock Company ; of Kate Castleton, the bewitching, of the "For Goodness' Sake, Don't Say I Told You" song of the little Quakeress; of Helene Modjeska (Countess Bozenta), Polish and English speaking tragedienne, and of a host of others, whose pictures might have been found on the dresser of the man of fashion.

European travel, no doubt, polished off some of Kearney's western rough edges and at Bad Nauheim and on the transatlantic voyages undoubt- edly he met personages of rank, station and gentle breeding to account for his numbered and labeled photographic collection. He was himself included in some of the pictured groupings. He had one photograph of the German royal family with the ex-kaiser as the central figure. This is not to inti-

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

mate that he hob-nobbed with royalty, even though the ex-kaiser was very liberal with his autographed photos.

He lived a life of solitary grandeur, sitting majestically alone at table, wearing out his heart in this strange sequestered existence, without friend or companion, and playing the grand role of cynic and misanthrope, sur- rounded by the luxuries that wealth commanded, and amassing a valuable estate with not a relative in the world to bequeath it to upon death. There was a tragic solemnity in his singular life. It was given a farcical turn when after his death, Dennis Kearney, he of the San Francisco sandlot agitation days, came forward to claim heirship on a pretended first cousin relationship with no more apparent basis for the assertion than his own self-serving statements. Right here, be it noted that M. Theo. Kearney pro- nounced his name "Karney." and took offense and petulantly corrected who- soever ignorantly addressed him as "Kurney." Dennis Kearney, who passed away at Alameda in April the year after, and before death assigned formally to a married daughter his inheritance claims, asserted under oath that the real name of his kinsman was Michael Timothy Kearney. This heirship claim was effectually disposed of at an early stage on a petition for a partial distribution of the estate. The decision was sustained on the appeal taken by the daughter after her father's death, so that the disposition of the Fruit Vale Estate was as contemplated by the testator.

Cold and impartial history must record that no man in Fresno County was more generally and cordially disliked-hated is perhaps too strong a term-than was M. Theo. Kearney, as he signed his name. This he was cognizant of. It may have been one reason for his reclusive existence. May- be, it was a reason for offering himself sacrificially on the commercial altar as a martyr in the cause of the raisin men. Mayhap, it was a moving cause for his bequest to the people of the state in amelioration of the past, and yet how otherwise could he have disposed of it, in view of his disinheritance of any legal heir, if living? Nobody knows. At any rate, there was no change in the attitude and bearing of the man during life, so that it is a question whether he was actuated in either act by placating motives. At home in Fresno, he was not known socially, never was seen at a social function, or even at a place of public amusement. It is doubtful whether he had the entree to one private home. His acquaintances were limited by choice apparently to business connections. He was a frequent business visitor to San Francisco and known at the principal hotel, but his life there was as sequestered as at the chateau.

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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 31

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