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 39

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 39

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Then there were the Kutner Colony one section removed from Tem- perance and a corner crossed by the mill ditch from Fancher Creek, the water of which ran the grist mill in town and passed on in ditch along Fresno Street for irrigation of the plains to the west of town; the Muscatel just below the third Standard line southwest of Herndon of three sections embracing the plat town of Sycamore and avenues named for big men of finance-Gould, Vanderbilt, Astor and Huntington: the Norris colonies of C. H. and L. E. D. Norris and J. C. Kimble, who had also one named for him adjoining Del Rio Rey Fig and Raisin Company in T. 15; the Nye- Marden near Fowler of Mrs. E. M. Nye and W. H. Marden ; the numerous Perrin colonies of Dr. E. B. Perrin, head and front and controlling owner of the irrigation system before it passed into English hands with Lord Fitz- Williams as the titled money holder and one of whose land holdings com- panies trust deeded in the spring of 1917 for one million dollars covering a loan floated to meet a bond issue of an older corporation that had fallen

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due ; Reedley of S. L. Reed around the town; the Richland Tract adjoining the Caledonia and A. S. Butler vineyards and the tract with the sale of which the name of M. Theo. Kearney is first associated; Riverside at Reed- ley ; the Salinger Tract, a large body of land northeast of town comprising Belmont Addition and which contributed to the eastern expansion of the city into acreage land; the Sierra Park Colony and Vineyard of C. K. Kirby, the distiller, west of Fowler, besides many others.

Nor should be overlooked the J. T. Goodman, Frank Locan of 800 acres, the William Forsyth and R. B. Woodworth Las Palmas vineyards in the three sections of Nevada Colony; the G. H. Malter, M. Denicke, Dr. W. J. Baker's Talequah, the A. B. Butler, Fresno, Margherita and H. Granz vine- yards in Easterby Rancho and in the Fancher Creek Nursery neighborhood the equally prominent W. N. Oothout, Dr. Eshelman's Minnewawa, the Minneola in T. 14, the T. F. Eisen vineyards and the F. Roeding sections.

The sorry fact must be recorded that the early small farmers and their successors for years after were extravagant in the use of water for irrigation. The problem that they have left as an heritage is how to reclaim within reasonable cost and with assurance of successful reclama- tion land that was once fertile but now is barren because surcharged with alkali. The government has demonstrated that theoretically it can be done by sub-drainage and leaching. The state university on the Kearney estate has drain-tiled a section of land with reported reestablished fertility, butt time must more fully determine the practical success of the leaching process. The soakings that the large dry areas received with first and long continued application of water for many seasons resulted in such a saturation of the bone-dry subsoil that for miles about in the irrigated districts the water level arose from fifty to fifteen and twenty feet from the surface. In Fresno city at Mariposa and H Streets, the level in gauged wells there arose from seventy to twenty and twenty-five feet.

Beneficial experience has taught that after a primary thorough satura- tion, a little water judiciously applied suffices. Too much injures trees and vines and forces the alkali to the top. Too many noting the marvelous effect of irrigation on new and raw land with the cheapness of water in Fresno- cheaper than elsewhere in the state-imagined that they could not abuse such a good thing and irrigated to excess without a thorough plowing and cultivating that should succeed every water application. Of late years, orange, citrus and alfalfa growers have turned to pumping from wells by electric power for irrigation in localities not served, or where the supply is not dependable for various causes. A flowing artesian well will irrigate twenty or thirty acres of alfalfa or orchard land and in cases even more.

The more experienced farmers use water sparingly now-verily a case of locking the stable door after the horse has been stolen. Once upon a time orange orchards were drenched six or seven times in a season; now three or four are considered sufficient. Vineyards were watered several times; now the best vineyardists irrigate once during the winter and at the most another slight application in May. Grain land where irrigated is watered before ploughing. The result of over-irrigation has been to alkali sterilize large areas of the first colonized lands about Fresno that were once things of beauty and joy and show places to take the visitor to, but now are night- mares around which wide detours are made.

Land has risen so in value that these sterilized spots must in time be reclaimed, even though there are other large tracts in the county awaiting the husbandman. The colonization enterprise supply in tract sales is far from exhausted as the recorded plat filings and real estate column adver- tisements in the newspapers will show. But it is colonization on altogether different lines. The day of pioneering is no more. The worth of the soil has long been demonstrated. The present day colonizations are purely commer- cial affairs for seller as well as buyer. The man without money or securities

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need not apply. Where once ten's of dollars were paid for an acre, now it is in the hundreds, depending upon conditions or how many. Looking back though, it must be conceded that the country progressed more rapidly than did the city, and sorry indeed the city without the sustaining basis of a back country as in Fresno.

CHAPTER XLVI

NEWER TOWN LOCATIONS REPRESENT LATER AND MODERN DEVELOP- MENT PERIOD. THEIR ORIGIN BRIEFLY REVIEWED. FRESNO IN 1879 STILL "A COW COUNTY VILLAGE." BURIALS IN TOWN CEASED ONLY IN 1875. Two TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROADS SERVE COUNTY. A REMARKABLE MOUNTAIN RAILROAD INTO THE SIERRAS. AUTOMOBILE HAS SOLVED PROBLEM OF INTER- URBAN COMMUNICATION.

The newer towns of the county today are "the product of the new blood, the newer order of things in the county," representing a later modern development period. In a write up published on New Year's day in 1879, Fresno is "damned with faint praise" and given distinction as "the largest place in the county," and as "one of the most flourishing villages" in the valley with "about 2,000 inhabitants including Chinese."

The Expositor feigned to know of "many elegant residences surrounded by beautiful gardens within the limits of the town." It also recorded that "unlike other California towns the Chinese quarter is not located in the white portion of the town but is located to itself on the west side of the railroad track and fully one-fourth of a mile from the town proper." Much was made in the write up of the $10,000 "elegant" two-story, seven-room school house that was being erected on "a rising piece of ground north from the court- house." That old building turned to face another street and moved to an- other site on the same school block is still in use. For the period of 1876-78 Fresno was credited by another authority with a population of "about 700 inhabitants" and boasting "of courthouse of elegant design erected at a cost of $60,000"-not the present structure.

The fact is that at this time Fresno was "a cow county village." It had not yet awakened to its possible future, and while there were things to commend many more were there to damn. It was yet in the village forma- tive period with a world of experiences to undergo before striding out on the quick march of advancement. It was still in the shanty period. The bungalow had not been dreamed of. The two-story brick building, plain to ugliness, was an architectural eighth wonder; the sky scraper unthought of. The graded, chuck-hole street, deep in dust in summer a muddy quagmire after every shower, was a step in advance but the paved or oil surfaced roadway was not to be realized until years later. If you arrived by train at night, you were piloted with lantern across the rubbish and dumppile fac- ing the depot where now Commercial Park is laid out; and were you a resident you would be met with lantern also to pick your way across lots homeward. It was only about January 20, four years before in 1875, that burials had ceased in the first "old cemetery in the north part of town" and the bodies "some nine in number" were being exhumed for removal to the second burial ground "lying south of Chinatown" off Elm Avenue. That old city cemetery was at what is today M and Stanislaus Streets, less than six blocks east and three north from the railroad depot, then the business center of Fresno. When the cemetery was located there, so far out on the prairie, little was it thought that the town would in a few years have spread to there. Yet again at county seat removal time, the gift of a courthouse

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site, only one block northeast of the present location was declined and exchange made because too far out of town. So much for the faith that some then entertained as to the future of Fresno.

There have been town locations in the county that not passing beyond the initial stage of founding were overcome by arrested development. There is not lacking in the record projected and platted towns that never had material existence as :

Butler partly on the Easterby and Henrietta ranchos on land of W. N. Oothout, A. B. Butler and W. D. Parkhurst and bisected by the projected Stockton and Tulare Railroad.

Covell (Easton postoffice) in Washington Colony with four blocks re- served for townhall, school and two plazas on four central surrounded blocks.

Clifton on Washington Avenue one mile east of Prairie school house and on fifteen acres.

Riverview on the north bank of the San Joaquin at the railroad bridge crossing and as the rival of Herndon on the south bank.

Shelbyville in T. 14 S., R. 16 E, a notable swindle.

Smyrna on the Kearney Fruit Vale Estate alongside of the chateau grounds, besides others.

Among Fresno's newer towns may be mentioned :

Clovis northeast of Fresno was once a grain growing country. Today it is a producer of more Malaga grapes than the original district of Spain. It is a bustling little town, the creation of the lumber company with operat- ing mills at Shaver in the Sierras as its flume shipping terminal with mills on the plains. Its payroll alone is $450,000 a year. Town has a population of 1,500 and is the gateway to a rich section of mountain territory. It is a naturally favored, modernized little town with a future exceeded by none as the logical trading post of a 125,000-acre region for the most part in the thermal footbelt and awaiting development. Two colonizing companies will in time bring nearly 8,000 acres under fig cultivation, one of these selling land at $400 an acre.

In 1880 Fowler was marked by two shanties and the railroad siding. Fruitful harvests made it a large warehousing and grain shipping point. Fruit and raisins followed and in 1890 shipments included 688 carloads of grain, 153 of raisins and fifteen of green and dried fruit. Three irrigation ditches supply it with water. During the last ten years town and country have made prosperous strides. It is one of the favored spots in close rela- tion with the county seat since the automobile has annihilated time and distance. With a town population of 1,200, the tributary district claims 5,000. To tell of all its varied resources would smack of advertising litera- ture.

Sixteen miles from Fresno to the west is Kerman, central point in a 26,000-acre colonization tract. It has had rapid and substantial growth, is residentially a grouping of bungalows and as with all the new settlements in the county is liberally provided with school facilities in modernized buildings with district high school affiliations. An agricultural center and a railroad freight transfer point, Kerman has been laid out and built up on progressive lines as to public utilities. Dairying is an industrial specialty.

Laton on the Santa Fe is the natural result of the development of the Laguna de Tache and Summit Lake lands, as a trading center at the junc- tion of the transcontinental road and the Laton & Western branch. Laton is a village of some 600 people, in oak tree shaded and parklike surroundings and in a fertile territory noted for dairying, alfalfa and hog raising. It is picturesquely situated and though not more than ten years old is advancing despite a destructive fire in its eighth year. Lanare is the terminus at the other end of the branch road.

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Malaga is a triangularly platted hamlet central to Malaga Colony, just east of Central California Colony, and established by G. G. Briggs pioneer raisin grower of the state. The tract was of ten sections in twenty-acre farms and vineyards. It is in a fertile section and thickly built up with attractive and prosperous rural homes.

Oleander village, seven miles southeast of Fresno and three from Fow- ler, is essentially an intensive farming community with 2,500 acres of raisin vineyards and an equal acreage in orchard, alfalfa and grain tributary, and with several raisin and fruit packing houses. The work in these estab- lishments in season is not performed by transient labor but by the villagers, the men, women and young people. Rural life in the Fresno settlements with all their comforts and social surroundings borders on the ideal.

A great wheat field marked in June, 1888, the townsite of Reedley named for the late T. L. Reed. It is on the two railroads almost in the southeast corner of the county, twenty-five miles east of the county seat and about sixty from the Coast Range on the south bank of the Kings. Contributory to the town are 160 sections of land. It is in the Alta Irrigation District. Wheat and raisins are the two important exports. The region is one of fertility, a part of the citrus belt, and one of great promise. The first sale of town lots was on April 25, 1889, with the foundation of the town laid after the 1888 wheat crop was off and Mr. Reed giving the railroad company a half interest in 360 acres to plat and locate the townsite. On the f salesday $16,000 was realized. Reedley is contiguous to the Mount Camp- bell orange country, a sight of which is an inspiration.

As late as May, 1888, a spreading wheat field covered the ground where today the bustling little foothill town of Sanger is as the result of a location on a division line of the Southern Pacific. It is fourteen miles east of Fresno and was founded as the industrial terminus and mill-town of the Kings River Lumber Company with its fifty-four miles of flume to float down from Millwood, high up in the Sierras, the lumber cut in Converse Basin, around Millwood and the nearby timber forests, operations which with the changes of time and ownership successions are being conducted by the Sanger Lumber Company in the new mountain sawmill town of Hume on Ten-Mile Creek to which the base of operations was moved across a moun- tain ridge from Millwood in the upper Kings River region. Ground was broken for the $35,000 concrete dam to create an eighty-seven-acre lake of impounded water from the creek on June 26, 1908, and work completed late in November. The dam project was worked out by Civil Engineer J. S. Eastwood on original lines as a unique piece of engineering and construction work. The dam has the appearance of a long bridge of arches and buttresses set on edge, with the rounded arches withstanding the immense pressure of water in the lake behind them, but receiving it equally distributed at all points. The dam is the first of its kind in the world. The town was laid out on sanitary lines and seventeen and one-half miles were added to the flume, joining the old one at Mill Flat Creek. The first lot sale in Sanger was held in June, 1888, and the result of the location was the depopulation of pioneer Centerville. Sanger is on the edge of the thermal belt and in a rich fruit and raisin country. Centerville was only three miles away southeast. East of Sanger is the foothill orange belt, west and south the famous "red lands" so adapted to raisin grapes. Sanger is a wide awake town of cosy and pretty homes, and an estimated population of 2,500 in 1914, has steadily grown and advanced and has a magnificent future.

Selma on the line of the Southern Pacific, about fifteen miles southeast of Fresno and five miles from Kingsburg, once on "a sandy desert," was located on his soldier's land warrant in 1878 by Jacob E. Whitson, a veteran of the Civil War, former county treasurer and founder of the town. As late as 1879 the country about was utilized by the herdsman for the wild grasses as stockfeed. Whitson's location was 160 acres and he laid out the town in

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1882. It was for a money consideration paid by him, aided by E. H. Tucker, M. Snyder and G. B. Otis, whom he gave equal interests in town lots, that the railroad was induced to build a small switch to the town, which in 1882 had a population of less than 250 but of 1,000 five years later. The neighboring land was brought under irrigation by the main branch of the Centerville and Kingsburg Ditch Company and vineyards, orchards and alfalfa were the plantings. The soil is sandy and specially suited for the peach which is the leading specialty. The town draws its support from the cultivated area surrounding it and its growth has been despite discouraging reverses, especially in destructive fires. The community is a prosperous one, overshadowed commercially as it always will be by reason of its proximity to Fresno. It is preeminently an ideal town of attractive homes, churches, schools, fraternities and of high moral tone, having early in its career no less than ten organized churches. Selma is typical of the best developed phase of semi-rural life in the San Joaquin Valley with a population 3,500.

Mendota is a divisional point on the Southern Pacific. Friant, or Pol- lasky as once known, is on the San Joaquin as the branch terminus serving the Millerton region and the northeastern mountain country of Fresno and Madera. A fine, arched, concrete bridge spans the river at this point, and another below Herndon, Skagg's bridge, at an old time ford crossing. Oak- hurst on the Santa Fe is the center of the Kings River Thermal Tract and Wahtoke at the terminus of the Reedley branch is in the orange belt.

A region west of Fresno on the Southern Pacific line, south from Ker- man, was opened to development about five years ago and given over to alfalfa, fruit and grapes. Located on the line are Raisin City, a community of Dunkards, nine miles west from the county seat, and five miles south of Caru- thers, both central to 50,000 acres susceptible of development.

Parlier is in a rich strip of territory, northwest of Reedley and is a grape center on the Santa Fe. Del Rey, north of it, is a raisin shipping point with three packing houses.

Evidences of the new blood are to be seen also in the many changes in the Pine Ridge mountain region, once monopolized by the saw mills. Apple and fruit orchards and berry and vegetable patches now mark the meadows and plateaus ; there's Ockenden, popular mountain resort; Shaver, the lumber inill village with its Sulphur Meadow as a favorite summer camping ground, and beyond it on lake the headquarters of the Shaver Lake Fishing Club, unique organization of trout anglers. On the other side of the Kings divide there is, starting out from Reedley, the county built Sand Creek mountain road with hardly a perceptible grade to Sequoia Lake, trout fishing, camp ground and the popular General Grant National Park resort, the road continuing to Hume and joining the state projected exten- sion to open up eventually the Kings River Canyon as accessible playgrounds in a scenic region that when better known will rival the Yosemite. In its mountains Fresno County has a valuable scenic asset that has too long been neglected.

ON THE RAILROAD LINES

A few years ago when there was agitation for interurban railroads, the map of the county was described as looking "like a gridiron of rail- roads." The description was fantastic rather than real. A great ado was made over several projected enterprises, but after all the smoke and noise the net result was only two small electric lines, one running out east of Fresno, never completed to Clovis as the planned terminus, camouflaged as an interurban road, operated at a loss and in court in foreclosure litigation based on its quarter of a million bonded indebtedness, and the other a city line extension to new farming settlements west of Fresno. Talk alone will not build interior and seaboard connecting railways, however urgent the 16

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need for them. The promoter faces the fact of the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe in control of the situation, working in harmony to maintain the monopoly and blocking competition by open hostility or extinguishing it by absorption, when not actually promoting a "feeder" branch under guise of an independent enterprise of private capital. The interurban prob- lem has been solved in part by the automobile.

Two transcontinental roads serve the county. Many villages and settle- ments have of late years sprung up on the branch lines as the result of the colonization and sale of tracts for orchards, vineyards and alfalfa. With the consequent development of the county, there are many central points that could be catalogued, but with a sameness in detail and altogether lack- ing the picturesque features of the early settlements. As the inspirations of speculative colonization and industrial enterprises, they are too numerous for detailed mention. The Southern Pacific main line passes across the county on a direct line at its narrowest from Herndon on the San Joaquin to Kingsburg on the Kings, and south of the county seat through Calwa Junc- tion, Malaga, Fowler and Selma. Another line enters the county from the northwest through Firebaugh, Mendota, Ingle, the site of Jameson, Ker- man to Fresno, and from Fresno south and to the east of main line through Sanger and to Reedley on the Kings. Jameson is named for the late Jeffer- son G. James of San Francisco, pioneer cattle man and one time owner of the big Jeff James ranch in the West Side slough country.

West of Fresno the main line is paralleled by a branch starting from Kerman running south through Dubois, Raisin City, Caruthers to Lillis named for S. C. Lillis, who died January 22, 1917, at Oakland, Cal. Lillis was a picturesque relic of the pioneer land baron of early California, owned at one time one quarter of the great Laguna de Tache cattle ranch of the Spanish days, occupied the headquarters Grant House as his home, and could claim possession of 140.000 acres of land. His name is associated with the Laguna lands and lawsuits with the government, serving a term of imprisonment for the offense of fencing in public lands.

Still further west of Kerman, branching at Ingle and running south is a line through Tranquillity, Graham, Caldwell, Helm and other slough set- tlements to Riverdale on the Laguna, the Hanford and Summit Lake Rail- road. This line is in the rich slough country formed by the back water from the San Joaquin and the overflow from the Kings. A great reclama- tion work is in progress there. The 72,000-acre James ranch has been opened to colonization and is being developed by its syndicate successor, the Graham Farm Lands Company incorporated for $3,000,000 to handle the 113- square-mile farm project. Jameson and Tranquillity Colony and town have been relegated to the past. The Laguna de Tache is a British capitalized enterprise, the same that controls the irrigation system. Its colonization was begun a decade ago and thousands of settlers have been brought on the land. To the original ranch grant have been added the Summit Lake lands rounding out a tract of 40,000 acres. Laton is the seat, with Lillis one mile and a half west, Kingsburg at the eastern end of tract, Lemoore in Kings County near the western, and the railroad to Coalinga a little to the south, flanking it the full length. This slough branch joins an east and west road touching the Southern Pacific main line south of the county, running west again into the county, passing through Rossi, Huron and Stanley to Coalinga and beyond to Alcalde on Warthan Creek, a stock ship- ping point for the Coast Range foothills. A northeast Southern Pacific branch from Fresno passes through Clovis with Friant on the San Joaquin as the terminus in the Millerton country. This is the Pollasky road, so-called.

Above and west of development arrested Herndon, the Santa Fe enters the county from the north and heads direct for Fresno, passing through the city on Q Street, four blocks behind the courthouse. It branches with one fork southeast, later joining the main line further down but passing

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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 39

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