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 33

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 33

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It was in December, 1895, before a pound of raisins had been seeded in Fresno, that Pettit and Spromer became acquainted with Forsyth in New York. As the result three contracts were entered into, the Forsyth Seeded Raisin Company was subsequently incorporated in Fresno and of the original stock 167 shares were issued to Pettit, reduced in time by change in capitali- zation and by reason of other causes to 152 in April, 1899. They were then sold for nonpayment of an assessment of six dollars per share and Pettit was at the end of his resources, bereft of whatever corporate interest he ever had, and with a change of management left without employment from which he had been unceremoniously dismissed under the new regime under A. Gartenlaub. Claiming that he had been literally "frozen out" of his in- terest, Pettit sued for the par value of the 152 shares at $100 each and non- assessable according to one of the three contracts entered into.

These stipulated that for money advanced and to be advanced Pettit and Spromer were to devote three years to build and improve seeding ma- chines for which application for a patent was later made. Hough dropped out of the combination early and Spromer later, Pettit coming out in the summer of 1896 to Fresno to install machines and superintend their opera- tion. He and Spromer were to receive one-third of the 1,000 shares of the incorporation, the shares to be non-assessable and Forsyth by one of the contracts agreeing to protect Pettit in this regard. The third agreement was for Pettit's employment at $1,200 a year. It is needless to follow up all the ramifications of the case, because it is sufficient that the verdict of the jury was in favor of Pettit after a presentation of all his claims and the judg- ment as reduced was in the end paid after all patience and the delays of the law had been exhausted.

Forsyth claimed that the business was not remunerative at the outset, that he expended from $8,000 to $10,000 in experimenting with pre-seeding processes, that Pettit's undoing was due to his own lack of business foresight, that he hypothecated his shares and thus lost them and that in his pioneering raisin seeding he (Forsyth) financially embarrassed himself and that he met with heavy losses as when packing house and machines were consumed in a great fire that swept almost every raisin and fruit packing house on Raisin Row on the line of the railroad reservation.

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Forsyth died in May 1910 and his estate was valued at much less than he was rated popularly in his life time. He had been conspicuous in the raisin and business world as the pioneer commercial seeder, as the owner of a vineyard which with age however had retrograded and having in large part been uprooted was replanted to citrus fruit, and as the owner one time of the Forsyth building, the first constructed in the city of the modernized large office structures, originally tenanted as apartment rooms. Pettit sur- vived him and in his closing years did not suffer so acutely the pressing pinch of poverty. With his experiences of the past, he embraced Socialistic prin- ciples and at one time was actually a candidate of that faction for a municipal office. The judgment money that came to him in the end-and he readily accepted the reduced award on the theory that half a loaf is better than none-was after settlement with his lawyers improvidently invested in lots and in the erection of a house far in excess of his temporal needs and require- ments. The story was circulated and generally accepted that in consideration of his aid and evidence in support of the patent litigation in the infringement cases, A. Gartenlaub financed Pettit in the suit against Forsyth and thus made it possible to continue the long fight. In the patent cases, the testimony of Pettit was of the first importance and he gave it in several depositions.

So ended this chapter in the story of the raisin industry litigation.

PRE-SEEDING PROCESS NOT PATENTABLE

From Forsyth the Pettit patent passed into the ownership of the U. S. Consolidated Seeded Raisin Company. The industry had become a great and valuable one. Ownership of patent gave a virtual monopoly. Many were the infringements on the basic idea of the operating mechanism to evade payment of royalty on every pound of raisins seeded. Litigation was fruitful as between corporate interests in the federal courts with the Consolidated as the complainant controlled by Gartenlaub, the leading spirit in the com- bination and the owner of a governing interest. In Gartenlaub centered for a time the commercial manipulation of the raisin industry. It was in June 1910 that U. S. Circuit Judge Wellborn rendered decision in the suit against the Selma Fruit Company, tried nearly three years before, toppling in a heap half of the claims for the exclusive right to seed raisins. His ruling was that the process of preparing raisins for seeding under the patent secured by Forsyth some 15 years before is not patentable because it lacked novelty, having been used in the treatment of other fruits long before it was applied to the raisin.

The decision was regarded as a victory by the independent packers, a dozen or more, who were not under control of the High Five combine and resisted paying tribute to it in royalties. With the advance of the seeding industry, the Consolidated, popularly known as the Seeded Trust, had gained control of the Pettit seeding patent, but various other seeders had been in- vented claiming not to be infringements. Rather than meet the issues on a test of every alleged infringement, another tack was tried and a first test was on the processing patent-the Forsyth process as it was known-said process being employed on whatever seeding machine used. If the Con- solidated could maintain the validity of the process patent, it could effectually control seeding of raisins and maintain its monopoly. This process was an alternating heating and chilling of the raisins to separate the meat from the seeds so as to effect the mechanical elimination of the latter without the bruising or tearing of the berry skin. For years in the original Forsyth plant, this process was guarded from curious eyes, and only trusted employes were permitted to gain knowledge of the secret.

PETTIT SEEDER PATENT UPHELD

Four months after the process decision or in October 1910, the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a case of the Consolidated against the Kings

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County Raisin and Fruit Company made its ruling on the merits of the con- troversy upholding the Pettit patent and decided that being a pioneer inven- tion the letters patent are entitled to a liberal construction. In this case it was contended that there was theoretically in existence a preceding sceding process known as the Crosby patent, but the court held that even so it did not detract from the Pettit patent. The decision was a big victory for the trust as emancipation from it would be only in the invention of a non-infring- ing fruit seeding machine as covered by Letters Patent No. 619,693 issued February 14, 1899, for the Pettit creation. The Crosby patent was No. 56,721 for an improved raisin seeder and issued July 31, 1866. The differences in the two devices are described in the decision which then recited :

"The Crosby invention undoubtedly anticipated and described the whole theory of the Pettit patent, but it does not appear ever to have been put to use and there is no evidence that any machine was ever constructed under it. It is one thing to invent the theory of a machine. It is quite another thing to invent a successfully operating machine. A third of a century passed be- tween the date of that patent and the date of the Pettit patent, and in that time the evidence is conclusive that raisin seeding was done by hand and that seeding by machinery was an unknown art. The Pettit machine was the first to go into very extensive and successful use. . .. It would seem that it (the Crosby) was one of those unsuccessful and abandoned machines which are held to have no place in the art to which they relate."

It is needless to enter into other considered particulars, so sweeping was the decision on this one point.

FIRST RAISIN ASSOCIATION LIQUIDATION

Not often is it that a considerable percentage of a particular industrial population of a county is haled into court as in September 1905 when the suit was brought by the California Raisin Growers' Association against Andrew L. Abbott and 2,800 other defendants for an accounting of the proceeds from the sales of the 1903 raisin crop in liquidation of the affairs of the combine. The suit was in the courts until September 1911 when the last 600 overpaid appellants abandoned further fight and final judgments were entered up to close the case. Never has there been a case in the Fresno courts with so many individuals involved as defendants. Not all the judgments were realized upon on execution, but speaking generally as the result of the long litigation and receivership about sixty per cent. was realized on the face value of the claims by the 1903 season raisin contract signers.

The suit was not alone for an accounting for the individual but also for a distribution of the assets and a refund of excess payments made to particu- lar signers and for payment to those underpaid. Judge G. E. Church of the Superior court tried the case and ordered judgment in April 1908 on the accounting taken by Walter S. Johnson as referee. Some had received no returns or only partial returns on the 1903 crop sales and others had to refund excess advance on the three cents selling price before the market broke that year to accelerate the association's lingering death. The gross deliveries by signed growers were for that year 95,014,195 pounds; net 92,435,066, the sales amounting to $3,926,220.22, though the total money judgments involved exceeded that sum. The association directors at the dissolution of the pool were: Robert Boot, A. L. Sayre, A. V. Taylor, D. D. Allison and T. C. White.

The appeal from Church's decision was passed upon in August 1911. The main controversy on the appeal was whether or not the association was a trust and monopoly in restraint of trade, the contracts made with it void therefore, and that having made unlawful payments in advances for deliveries it could not maintain suit to recover them as it had originated the contract. The association contended that at suit bringing for the dissolution it was no longer in active operation and the action was to determine property rights in a fund on hand, independent of how acquired, and that in the acquiring

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of it as mutually agreed upon no wrong was committed against the general public or in restraint of trade. The decision was to find nothing in the record or in the evidence that the association was engaged in a conspiracy in restraint of trade to arbitrarily fix prices or to exclude raisins from packing houses not signed up to it.

The appellants who numbered some 600 who had received excess advances, abandoned further proceedings after the decision of August 1911, sustaining the lower court and delivered by Justice Melvin, concurred in by Justices Henshaw and Lorigan. The point on which the decision turned was the special defense that the association was conceived as a monopoly in restraint of trade and therefore that its contracts were not enforcible. But in this regard the decision was that the most that can be claimed with reference to the guilty knowledge of the raisin growers that the association was trying to form a monopoly was a published statement, which was admitted, that it was determined to secure eighty-five per cent. of the year's production. "But granting that those who delivered raisins knew of this design," said the de- cision, "that fact alone would not prevent them from recovering the full value of their merchandise, or from participating in the distribution."

In the existing share owned capitalized association, the pitfalls of the past have been avoided, and success has followed the broader and better or- ganized plan of a cooperative enterprise to create a demand and market for the raisin, to undertake the packing of the product in leased, purchased or erected establishments, and to act for the grower as a general sales agent to the best advantage and profit.

CHAPTER XLI

FEW OF THE RICH HAVE OUT OF THEIR BOUNTY GIVEN TO THE PEOPLE. FREDERICK ROEDING, M. THEO. KEARNEY AND WILLIAM J. DICKEY HAVE MADE THE MOST NOTABLE BENEFICENCES. THE SECOND NAMED OF THESE WILLED TO THE STATE A PRINCELY ESTATE FOR AN AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. DR. LEWIS LEACH IS REMEMBERED AS A PROMINENT AND NOTE- WORTHY PERSONAGE IN THE HISTORY OF THE COUNTY AS WELL AS OF THE CITY. FRANK H. BALL MADE LARGE BEQUESTS TO PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS.

The history of the county and of the City of Fresno is a subject so vast in scope and covers such a stretch of time that it is hopeless in a work of the present character to elaborate on all entitled to notice, either because of picturesque or successful careers, or achievements and positions in public or private life.

There were not lacking those that rounded successful careers ; there were others that flashed like meteors, made lurid showing and pretense and ended in sputter; and too many were there that never arose above the common- place, even with all the opportunities that surrounded them in a new country. None deserved more at the hands of Fortune than the earliest pioneers ; none were more shabbily rewarded in the end. The experience is not singular to Fresno.

Looking back, it has been often commented upon how few of the rich have out of their plenty made public bequest or gift for educational, artistic, benevolent or religious purpose. The earliest recorded exception is Dr. Lewis Leach to erect in unfrequented and almost forgotten spot a costly monument to mark the grave of his picturesque business associate. But he did this in life. Later in 1910. Fulton G. Berry made in his will bequest for a monument to recall "The Father of Irrigation."

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The man in the county who made the greatest public benefaction was one of whom it must be said he was in life also the one the least esteemed by that public and whose unheralded coming has been recalled as of a young man stepping off a belated train at night, dressed in flapping linen duster, grip in hand and rich in nothing save self-assurance. It was in 1906 that M. Theo. Kearney, leaving no kin or kith, gave his princely estate to the State of California through the University of California for an agricultural experimental farm. That university has not even acknowledged the munifi- cent gift or honored him by giving the metallic box containing his ashes a place of sepulture marked by memorial stone or tablet. He was a strange character, misunderstood in life, his memory unhonored after death save through his magnificent gift.

Before this, Frederick Roeding, pioneer landowner who died at the age of eighty-six years in San Francisco in July, 1910, had in his life time made two gift tenders to the city of land making up the present acreage of Roeding Park, one of the most attractive municipal recreation spots in the state. This park reclaimed from a sandy waste is today the pride and boast of Fresno City and was donated to it with no other condition attached than that the city expend in improvement a stated sum annually for a given number of years.

Yet when the original offer was made of the greater acreage, it was regarded as a gift horse and its mouth looked into, while a sapient board of city trustees declined it for the specious reason that the donor was actuated in his offer by a desire to enhance the value of his surrounding holdings one mile outside of the city corporate limits. Several years elapsed before the first offer was renewed and accepted, and people marvel today at the short- sightedness that ever prompted its declination.

George C. Roeding, famous horticulturist, is at this writing (March, 1918) one of the commissioners of the city parks. He is a son of the donor. To mark his entry as a member of the commission and to expedite a more rapid planting of the parks of the city, he made tender to the city that for every dollar it spends for the plant beautifying of the parks controlled by it he would for the year donate in plants an amount equal to the city purchases. The offer was accepted and at the same meeting that the agreement was made the commission gave out plant orders on bids for $700.

William J. Dickey

Noteworthy bequests were contained in the will of W. J. Dickey who died in July 1912 and devised $25,000 for public purposes. His estate was an ample one and yet not comparable with many that preceded and followed it. The sum of $10,000 was willed to the City of Fresno to be used by it in the purchase of apparatus for the children's playgrounds and "of such a character and kind as will be most beneficial and enjoyable for the children using such grounds." The bequest came at a time when the city playground department was a new municipal experiment in Fresno and the city embarrassed for means to equip grounds after having expended the bulk of the voted $75,000 bond issue in acquiring sites. The pioneer Dickey playground on Blackstone avenue stands a monument to the generosity of the man who made his all in Fresno.

Another $10,000 was directed to be by his executors given for such charity or benevolence as to them after consultation with his wife might seem best, it being understood that it be used "in and about the city." The income from this legacy supports a university scholarship for a deserving student. Lastly $5,000 was bequeathed to the Fresno County Humane Society, an institution that once was a potential power for good but whose field of activities has been supplanted by later benevolent organizations.

Its pioneer work was notable in moulding public sentiment, especially in the more humane treatment of dumb animals, and it brought to the fore as its

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agent, William Harvey, who on account of his activities became a local char- acter of note and because of his English birth, manners and pompous de- meanor was popularly known as "Lord Harvey." He is a man who has never been given full credit for a great humanitarian work accomplished in times and under conditions when a rough public sentiment was not always in accord with his reform movement.

The Dickey bequests were the more appreciated because coming at so opportune a time and because absolutely unlooked for. He was an Ohioan born. Fifty-nine years of age at time of death, a most approachable man, genial and unassuming and one whom prosperity had unchanged from the days of Fresno's beginnings, when he came as a dry goods clerk, was so employed by Kutner, Goldstein & Co, and later as the desk clerk at the Morrow House, the caravansary of the day. He dabbled on the side in wool, and also wrote insurance, and was a leader in jeunesse dorée circles in the wretched little village seat of a cow county.

Samuel L. Hogue recalls as if it were only an incident of yesterday how as a federal census enumerator on June 30, 1880, he and Dickey collaborated, figured and figured in the hope of crediting the village with a population of 1,000 but after recalling every known resident and counting babes born and in expectancy, and this was not such a stupendous task, they could not inflate the total to exceed 930 and Dickey in his beautiful Pinafore "big, bold hand" entered the result on a page of the Morrow House register as an unofficial record.

Dickey was a public spirited man, allied with the First National Bank as a stockholder, also as a shareholder in the People's Savings Bank, inter- ested in the first water supplying company, a promoter of the Fresno Street Improvement Company and its enterprise of the day in the brick structure at Fresno and I Streets, and in later years prominent in the Mountain View Cemetery Improvement Association, organized as a popular movement of the citizens in response to an agitation to rescue the city's burial ground from the neglected condition that it had fallen into.

At the height of his financial prosperity he made a lucky strike when at the crest of the excitement oil was discovered on a parcel of land at Coalinga which he had bought for a trifle at a tax delinquent sale, yielding him an eighth of a million after compromising with the original owners for $25,000 a threatened title litigation on account of doubtful procedure leading up to the delinquency sale by the state.

Dr. Lewis Leach

This publication would fail of an essential purpose as a historical record were it to ignore mention of a few chosen personages, all but one now dead, that were foremost in the development of county or city and whose names were household words. Nestor of them was indisputably Dr. Lewis Leach. When he died March 18, 1897, there passed away one of the first per- manent settlers, who later was a foremost citizen and one of the very few who linked the Fresno of the days of the Indian and the miner with the Fresno of the days when it was exciting public attention as an agricultural wonder, and Fresno the hamlet of the desert and waterless plain with Fresno the growing city centering in encircling vineyards and orchards. His early career was as varied and picturesque as that of his first business associate in California, Major Savage, whose exploits never have been given the credit they deserve because so barren are the early records.

Born in 1823, Dr. Leach had at death outlived the Psalmist's allotted term of life. He died in the harness. He might have retired with a competency 20 years before, yet until the middle of the week before his passing away his office in the Farmers' Bank Building was open to his patients. Whatever his youthful ambitions of a life career, he was the child of circumstances and the fact is that when he went west from Binghamton, N. Y., and located in the

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primitive St. Louis in 1840 at the age of seventeen he had two accomplish- ments. He was a good fiddler and had a natural gift for drawing. He so ex- cited the admiration of the dean of the medical college of the State University at Jefferson City, by a humorous cartoon of him being chased around a tree stump by an enraged steer that he was invited to take up a course of medical lectures. Young Leach accepted, graduated at the 1847-48 term and for two years practiced medicine in St. Louis.

To reach California was his ambition as it was of so many others. The opportunity came with a party bound for Salt Lake City with a stock of merchandise for barter. There he organized a party to continue the journey and eleven men joining him, "Westward Ho!" was the watchword on start in October 1850. Fifty miles west from Salt Lake was met a party of thirteen families that had lost its way. The two companies joined forces and the young doctor was offered the leadership of them. He accepted on condition that his word should be the law. The Southern route was chosen. They were among the first to follow it and therefore travel was attended by more than the usual care and precaution. At the Mojave River the parties divided. The families headed for Los Angeles, the Leach section crossed the desert to Tejon Pass over the mountains toward the Kern River.

Here it met a party of refugees from the Indian massacre at Woodville, near the present site of Visalia. They had escaped with their lives and were in distress. Relief was afforded in a division of food supplies, even then not overabundant. Evident that danger was to be apprehended ahead. The arm- ament consisted only of a rifle and a shotgun and seven pistols. Every un- armed man was provided with dummy wooden gun and such a formidable armed showing was the result that although the party was surrounded by Indians on the march it was not attacked nor molested.

A sight was presented at Woodville at the scene of the massacre. Many were the reminders of the savage brutality of the Indians. A ghastly one was the sixteen unburied corpses, some of them mutilated as was the not infre- quent practice to discourage the advance of the whites. Sepulture was given the dead. A destroyed bridge was another reminder of the raid. A halt was made with night camp on the field of the massacre and next morning cross- ing of the stream with wagon bed raft. Hardships followed, constant vigilance against surprise by the hovering Indians, and food allowances reduced on account of the division with the refugees. Reaching the San Joaquin, they had been twenty-five days without flour, for coffee they had been boiling roasted acorns, of rice they had little left, of salt pork only a limited quantity and of fresh meat only the flesh of a wild bullock shot by one of the party. The animal had head down charged him after wounding. The horns entan- gling in the underbrush the beast was tumbled over and in the fall broke neck.

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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 33

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