History of Kern 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, Part 10

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1682

USA > California > Kern County > History of Kern 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 > Part 10

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

And the Santa Barbara Press was boosting for a railroad to Bakers- field just as cheerily as it is now (in 1911)-and with the same result.

The railroad is finished about to the Merced river, and farmers are still driving their turkeys from valley points to San Francisco for holiday market.

December 16, 1871-J. S. Brittain lands here to found a Democratic paper-the Southern Californian.

A petition is in circulation to move the county seat from Havilah to Bakersfield.

B. Brundage and E. H. Dumble move here from Havilah.

December, 1871-Surveyor Yates of the San Joaquin Valley Canal Com- pany decides to wait until the weather is settled before continuing his plans for a great canal to start at Antioch, run south along the Coast range mesa to the head of the San Joaquin valley, circle the base of the San Emidio hills, turn north at Tejon, follow the Sierra Nevada mesa to the head of the Sacra- mento valley, and return on the west side of that valley to a point opposite Antioch. The purpose of the canal is to gather all the waters of all the streams of the interior into one great irrigation system that will water every foot of land in the two great valleys. (It is too bad the plan was never carried out !)

January, 1872-Freight by teams from Los Angeles to Bakersfield costs 4 cents per pound.

April, 1872-The legislature defeats a bill to repeal the fence law, and a meeting is called in the town hall to discuss means of protection from wild cattle. The fight over the fence law is between the farmers and the stock- men. The latter want a law which will practically compel the farmers to fence their lands or suffer damage from stock that may trespass upon them, while the farmers want the burden of herding the cattle or paying damages placed on the stockmen.

The same month-Surveyors are laying out the town of Fresno on the line of the new railroad.

May 22, 1872-The Hotel Association is selling stock, and plans to build a first class hotel.

June, 1872-Mechanics are leaving their work in town and flocking to the placer gravels along Kern river about nine miles above Bakersfield.

August, 1872-Drs. Baker of Visalia and Howard of San Francisco are here to look at new coal mines and petroleum deposits at the base of the Coast range west of Bakersfield. The San Francisco Gas Company is plan- ning to make gas of crude oil.

The great register of the county for 1872 contains 785 names, divided among the several precincts as follows: Bakersfield, 245; Linn's valley, 140; Tehachapi, 90; Havilah, 85; Kernville, 60; South Fork, 40; Sageland, 35; Bear Valley, 30; Tejon, 25; Walker's Basin, 15; Long Tom, 10.

November, 1872-A. Cross arrives with three teams from Owen river with 335 bars of lead bullion, or 30,000 pounds. The bullion was hauled to the foot of the lake by steamers from the furnaces on the other side. It took ten days to make the trip by team from the lake to Bakersfield.

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

November, 1872-Colonel Baker makes the first successful attempt to burn a kiln of brick.

Sunday, November 24, 1872-At 1 p. m. Colonel Baker dies of typhoid pneumonia. His funeral is held from the town hall the following Tuesday, and the entire population of the town attends. The Masons conduct the service, and A. R. Jackson delivers the oration. The body was buried in Union cemetery, the ground for which was selected by Colonel Baker about a year before.

CHAPTER VIII Bakersfield Becomes the County Metropolis

In the process of gathering the data for this history the author asked one of the men who have been intimately associated with its larger affairs during the last forty years to name over the chief events in the history of Bakersfield. He answered:

"The history of Bakersfield is a story of hope deferred, of promises unfulfilled. First we prayed for a railroad. We got it, but it did not unlock the door of our possibilities as we expected it would. Then we prayed for colonization. Everything was made ready to answer that prayer, when the contest over the water rights interfered and nothing could be done toward cutting up the land until that was settled. It took years to settle it. When it was out of the way and the colonization scheme was undertaken, just at the start, when everybody's hope was stimulated, the town burned up. We rebuilt on hope, and the colonization scheme went forward. Most of the colonists who came were not farmers, or if they knew how to farm in the east or in England they did not know how to farm here. The water was managed badly ; some of the ground was waterlogged, the ditches broke, things dried out on the high ground and flooded out on the low ground. Just as the orchards and vineyards came into bearing the panic of 1893-4 broke. There was no local market, and fruit shipped east would hardly pay the freight; sometimes it did not pay the freight and they sent back a bill to the shipper. The seasons about that time were dry, but we could have managed that. The greatest handicap was transportation charges. Then we prayed for a competing railroad. The Valley road (the Santa Fe) was built, but it did not compete. There never was a thing happened in this county that really gave it any chance, that offered any opportunity to go ahead and do things until they began to develop the oil fields."

Understand that this is the speech of an optimist, not a pessimist. Through nearly all this period (this era of hopes deferred and promises unfulfilled) Bakersfield was counted by travellers and travelling salesmen as one of the "best towns" in the state. It was always full of life and interest, always there was something doing. Only to the men of intimate knowledge of the county's possibilities and of abounding faith in the county's future has the history of the past forty years been one of hopes deferred and promises unfulfilled.

Nevertheless, throughout these forty years the attitude of this optimist who speaks like a pessimist has been a typical one. Literally hundreds of people, looking about at the immense body of fertile land that fills the heart of the county, the great river that flows down from the mountains at

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

exactly the most convenient spot for irrigating it, the warm, even climate and the tremendous treasures of oil and other mineral wealth that the hills and mountains contain, have been amazed, irritated and angered because circumstances have prevented Bakersfield from becoming the largest city in the interior of the state, as it justly deserves to be.

Understand, also, that it is only in the retrospect that the Bakersfield optimist has seen that the history of the town was a story of promises unful- filled. For only brief periods during all these forty years has the town been lingering elsewhere than on the threshold of a great new boom. It was on the threshold of one of its booms when its founder, Colonel Baker, died. The fertility of the Kern delta was fully established, capitalists in the person of Livermore & Chester were promising great things, plans for getting the remaining portions of the public domain into private hands with the least possible effort and the speediest dispatch were going forward without a hitch worth mentioning, the example of Colonel Baker inspired the belief that so soon as these public lands were patented they would be offered for sale at modest prices, and the Southern Pacific railroad was headed down the valley with the long desired transportation facilities. Bakersfield was convinced of her future greatness, and was preparing to take her first steps forward by incorporating as a city and by wresting the county seat from Havilah.

Bakersfield Gets the County Seat

The contest for the removal of the county seat from Havilah to Bakers- field, preliminary skirmishes of which had been taking place occasionally for years before, assumed final, serious form in January, 1873, when, in response to a petition signed by upward of one-third of the registered voters of the county, the supervisors called an election for February 15th to determine the question.

F. W. Craig, who was one of the supervisors at the time and who fought hard for the retention of the county seat at Havilah, says that the Havilah partisans did not hope to keep the county seat permanently, but they objected to its going to Bakersfield because they considered the place unsuited on account of its low and swampy character. They believed that with the building of the railroad a new and more permanent town would be founded somewhere on higher ground than Bakersfield, and their fight was to keep the county offices at Havilah until the expected new town could develop and assert its claim to the seat of government.

The sincerity of the men who made the fight against Bakersfield on the ground of healthfulness is shown by subsequent action on the part of some of them, although a very few years sufficed to prove that their fears were ungrounded. Dr. L. Brown, the county physician in the days of Havilah's supremacy, declined to follow the court house to Bakersfield but gave up his practice and moved to a farm in Walker's basin where he would at least have the advantage of the mountain air. By the irony of fate the good doctor died a short time thereafter, while his widow, who some years later became the wife of General Freeman, came to Bakersfield, where she still lives in the best of health and possessed of an energy and activity that would do credit to a woman of half her years. Mr. Craig, who afterward was county clerk, came down to the valley perforce, but he took up his residence in Sumner (now East Bakersfield), and still maintains that there is more ozone in the air east of Union avenue than west of it.

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

Bakersfield people contented themselves with pointing to the mortality tables and making fun of the contention of Havilah that Bakersfield was not a "fit place for a gentleman to live," but to the complaint that it would cost the county a large sum of money to erect the necessary new buildings which a change in the county seat would entail, they presented a more material answer. Morris Jacoby gave a bond, with F. A. Tracy and Solomon Jewett as sureties, that he would build a brick jail and lease it to the county for five years free of cost if the election resulted in moving the county seat. Julius Chester signed a lease to the county at $1 per year for a one-story brick building to be used to house the county offices. On the same terms John Howlett and Julius Chester, as trustees, leased to the county the town hall for a court room. The lease was for five years.

Contest Over Election

First unofficial returns of the election gave a majority of twelve for Bakersfield, but when the vote was canvassed on February 24th, Super- visors Craig and John M. Brite, father of the present supervisor, voted to reject the returns of Hudson, Bear valley and Walker's basin precincts on account of irregularities on the part of the election officials. Solomon Jewett, the third supervisor, recently elected, voted to count the returns from the three precincts but was outweighed, and Havilah was declared to be the choice of the voters for the county seat by a vote of 328 to 318.

An application for a writ of mandamus compelling the supervisors to count the returns of the rejected precincts was thrown out of court by Judge Colby on a demurrer filed by Supervisors Craig and Brite. An appeal was then taken to the district court.

Meantime there was another county election, and John Narboe suc- ceeded Brite as supervisor from the third district, and Andrew H. Denker was appointed to fill the unexpired term of Supervisor Craig, who had been elected county clerk. This changed the attitude of the majority of the board on the county seat removal, Supervisors Jewett and Narboe favoring Bakers- field while Denker, who was a merchant and hotel owner of Havilah, stood for his own town. Jewett was chairman of the board.

The case was entitled People of the State of California on the relation of A. R. Jackson, plaintiffs, against the Board of Supervisors of Kern County, defendants, and was heard before Judge Alec Deeming at Tulare. B. Brun- dage appeared as counsel for the plaintiff, and A. J. Atwell represented the board of supervisors as the defendant. An answer filed by Attorney A. C. Lawrence and verified by Supervisor Denker, was stricken out by the court on affidavit of Supervisors Jewett and Narboe that he did not represent the board. The case being submitted on the pleadings, Judge Deeming issued a peremptory writ of mandate requiring the supervisors to canvass the vote of the Hudson-Rosemyer and Bear Valley precincts. The returns as finally canvassed on January 26, 1874, gave Bakersfield a majority of twenty-two votes, and stood, according to precincts, as follows :

Havilah-Havilah, 97; Bakersfield, nothing. South Fork-Havilah, 33; Bakersfield, 1.

Hudson-Rosemyer-Havilah, nothing ; Bakersfield, 14.

Kern Island-Havilah, 5; Bakersfield, 265. Long Tom-Havilah, nothing; Bakersfield, 10.

Tehachapi-Havilah, 40; Bakersfield, 18. Bear Valley-Havilah, 4; Bakersfield, 22.

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

Sageland-Havilah, 22; Bakersfield, 1.

Linn's Valley-Havilah, 38; Bakersfield, 23.

Kernville-Havilah, 72; Bakersfield, nothing. Claraville-Haviland, 21; Bakersfield, nothing.

Totals-Havilah, 332; Bakersfield, 354.

No election was held in Alpine precinct, and for some reason the vote of Walker's Basin was never included in the official count.

For a short time the seat of government was transferred to the town hall in Bakersfield, located on the present site of the Beale Memorial library. But preparations at once were made for more permanent quarters. An act of the legislature was secured authorizing the board of supervisors to bond the county for $25,000 for a court house and jail. In lieu of the offers of free rent for the county offices, George B. Chester tendered and the board accepted on September 1, 1874, a deed to the block of land just south of Truxtun avenue and west of Chester avenue. In those days the intersection of these avenues was considered the civic center of Bakersfield, and all streets were numbered with reference to that point. Seventeenth street was known as First street North, Eighteenth street was Second street North, and Nineteenth street was Third street North. I street was First street West, etc.

New Public Buildings

On October 5th, a contract was let to A. W. Burrell of the California Bridge and Building Company for the new court house at a price of $29,999, the work to be completed within a year. T. W. Goodale, who had suc- ceeded Denker as supervisor, voted against the awarding of the contract for the reason that the price was in excess of the bond issue. The new court house which comprised the south wing of the building now in use, was ac- cepted April 3, 1876, on the favorable report of a committee of inspectors composed of J. A. Riley, N. R. Wilkinson, E. H. Dumble and P. A. Stine. The court house was furnished for $3802. In the fall a contract was let to William McFarland to build a county hospital for $1400. For a time a branch hospital was maintained at Havilah, and later a branch was estab- lished at Hot Springs. In November, 1874, a branch jail was built at Kern- ville for $200, and in 1875 the old county jail at Havilah was presented to Caliente and moved to that place.

Bakersfield's First Incorporation

Meantime Bakersfield had launched on its first experiment as an in- corporated town. Pursuant to a petition of the citizens, the county super- visors at their May meeting, 1873, declared the town incorporated and called an election of officers for May 24th. J. B. Tungate, E. H. Dumble and A. R. Jackson were appointed election officers. The town limits included all of section 30, 29-28; the east half of the southwest quarter and the east half of the northeast quarter of section 25, 29-27. The following were chosen for the first officers of the new municipality :

Trustees-W. S. Adams, president ; L. S. Rogers, M. Jacoby, J. B. Tun- gate and R. W. Withington.

Recorder-A. R. Jackson. Treasurer-J. Weill. Assessor-William McFarland.

Marshal-Joseph Short.

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

Adams was a liveryman, Jacoby and Weill were merchants, Rogers was a physician, and Withington and Tungate were saloon keepers.

The new board fixed a license of $20 per year on saloons and general merchandise establishments: $10 per year on breweries, and lesser sums on other businesses. They made it a petit larceny offense to use water from an irrigating ditch without permission; required that all canals must be bridged to the full width of the streets; forbade bathing in the ditches, and fixed a limit of three cubic feet on the amount of litter that might be piled in either of the two chief business streets of the city.

The First Hope Deferred

Meantime, also, the long cherished hope of a railroad into Kern county had been realized at last. On July 21, 1873, the track had been completed to a point four miles south of the north county line, and there work was stopped, as the people of Bakersfield complained, "out in an open plain, thirty miles from wood or water, thirty miles from the nearest farm house, thirty miles from the nearest point where the transportation company could hope to get a single passenger or a single pound of freight." There was a wail of protest from residents of Bakersfield and Kern Island, who could not understand why the road had not been completed at least to the north bank of the river. Whether the railroad builders had run out of funds or were actuated by motives of purposeless, inscrutable malice were questions of common debate during the eight months or more that the grading and track-laying gangs were idle. The latter hypothesis, however, seems to have been the more popular. About this time the Courier refers editorially to the alleged fact that from its very beginning the railroad was the object of popular distrust. This aversion or hostility went even so far, the paper declared, that settlers were buying little railroad land, although it was offered at attractive prices and was generally of good quality and desirably located.

Delano Is Founded

But while the railroad halted and the people of Bakersfield fumed, the new town of Delano was founded and became a flourishing business center on a small but active scale. Merchandise that formerly was delivered to the Kern delta and all the mountain districts via Visalia. Walker's pass or Tejon cañon now came to Delano and was hauled thence by freight teams. All outgoing freight was delivered there, even to the great loads of bullion from the Cerro Gordo mines. The sheep shearing camps that had been scattered over the country from White river to Poso creek moved up toward Delano to shorten the haul by wagon. The stage from Los Angeles made that place its northern terminal, dry wheat farmers on the mesas between the railroad and the Sierras increased in number, and broke trails to the rail- road, and generally Delano became a very lively and prosperous place.

The Story of Eph Johnson's Ox Team

Just how new and strange a thing a railroad was in the San Joaquin valley then is illustrated by the story of Eph Johnson, one of the best known of the teamsters who broke the trails from the mountains to the new ship- ping point. On one of his first trips to Delano Johnson got his first near view of a freight engine. He looked the thing over, and did not think much of it. Loyalty to the old methods of transportation and instinctive antag- onism toward this new machine that threatened to put the teams and team-

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

sters out of business got him into an argument with the trainmen, and finally Johnson bet his eight good oxen against the locomotive that he could drag the iron horse backward on the rails that had been laid with so much expense for it to run upon. Johnson stipulated that he should be allowed to tighten the chains before the engine was started, and he cracked his long bull whip and shouted to Baldy, the leader. Baldy stiffened his neck to the yoke, and all the eight great animals got their hoofs against the ties and sank their bellies low toward the soft, new roadbed in a perfect exhibition of bovine team-work. Then the engineer opened the throttle and jerked the finest eight-ox team in Kern county into a tangled mass of chains and cattle. The trainmen had no more use for Johnson's oxen than Johnson . would have had for the engine, and so the bet was never paid, but it cost the teamster the value of at least one yoke of cattle before the thirst of the other teamsters, the railroad crews and all the population of Delano was assuaged.

News Notes of 1873-75

A few more news notes of the time will fill out the detail in this picture of the county in 1873-75 :

June 22, 1873-At Tehachapi Brite & Bennington are building a steam saw inill with a capacity of 10,000 feet in twelve hours.

Tehachapi merchants are asking 100 per cent profit on grain sold to Owens river teamsters.

John Narboe & Co. are gathering salt from the salt lake near Tehachapi.

Green & Henderson clean up $1.438 in their hydraulic mine near Tehachapi.

The Kern & Inyo Forwarding Company advertises for fifty mule teams to haul between the end of the railroad and Owens lake, and guarantees a full load both ways.

Stage fare from Delano to Bakersfield (thirty-two miles) is $7; from Bakersfield to Los Angeles, $25; from San Francisco to Los Angeles, $25. The "long and short haul" problem is a cause of complaint.

August 2, 1873-Escalet's new hotel at the corner of Chester avenue and Third street (now Nineteenth) is completed.

August 23d-The affairs of the California Cotton Growers' Association and Livermore & Chester have been assigned to J. H. Redington.

August 23, 1873-Tiburcio Vasquez is reported overtaken in Rock cañon east of Los Angeles.

September 12, 1873-Montgomery and Burkhalter of Tulare are building a schooner-rigged boat fifty feet in length and of seventy tons burden for Atwell & Goldstein, who have an immense hog ranch on an island in Tulare lake.

November 22, 1873-J. C. Crocker and Miller & Lux are fencing a great tract of land between Buena Vista and Goose lakes with redwood posts and lumber shipped from Oregon. They will plant alfalfa.

Many stage robberies are reported from Visalia.

December 6, 1873-The Stine Irrigating Canal Company levies an assess- ment of $25 per share.

Farmers' Irrigating Canal Company is supplying water to a new dis- trict between Panama and Kern lake, which is fast settling up. A school is to be opened there in February, with Mrs. S. A. Burnap as teacher.

January 17, 1874-W. B. Carr, the "world renowned Billy Carr, political

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

Napoleon of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company," is here looking over the country. He owns some land in Kern county and is anxious to get more. He has plans for the complete and thorough irrigation of the valley.

A bill is introduced in the legislature to form a new county out of a strip of territory cut from the north end of Kern and the south end of Tulare counties, Porterville to be the county seat and the name of the new county to be Monache. (The bill, of course, did not pass.)

March 7, 1874-Julius Chester, E. Tibbet, P. Tibbet and R. Trewin are raising funds to build a Methodist Episcopal church. The building is to be open for the use of all evangelical denominations.

The Pioneer canal is finished for a distance of eight miles.

W. G. Souther, who is building the Kern Island canal, is having con- structed at Hollister a big plow with a mould board eleven feet long by nearly three feet deep which will cut a furrow five feet wide and two feet deep. The naked plow will weigh 1800 pounds, and eighty horses or forty yoke of oxen will be required to pull it.

The Kern Valley Bank, incorporated on February 24, 1874, with a capital of $50,000, will open for business in the Wells Fargo office about April 20th. Solomon Jewett is president ; S. J. Lansing, secretary ; F. A. Tracy, P. T. Colby and P. D. Jewett, directors.

April 6, 1874-Work on the extension of the Southern Pacific railroad south from Delano is resumed with 100 men and thirty-five teams.

Local option is the subject of agitation all over the state.

Rev. Thomas Fraser, Presbyterian missionary, preaches in the court house.

Citizens discuss a plan to build a water tank thirty or forty feet high near the flour mill to afford a gravity pressure for fire protection.

The two business streets of the town are sprinkled.

Mexicans are preparing for a bull and bear fight in the southern outskirts of the town.

Local option loses in Tulare township because the returns from a pre- cinct giving an anti-license majority of twenty-seven votes were sealed up in the envelope marked "ballots" and so were not counted in the official canvass. The unofficial count gave a majority of one against the saloons.

August 1, 1874-Trains reach the north side of Kern river.

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History of Kern 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, Part 10

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog] Publication date: 1914 Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company Number of Pages: 1682

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1682