USA > California > Napa County > History of Napa and Lake Counties, California : comprising their geography, geology, topography, climatography, springs and timber, together with a full and particular record of the Mexican Grants, also separate histories of all the townships and biographical sketches > Part 46
USA > California > Lake County > History of Napa and Lake Counties, California : comprising their geography, geology, topography, climatography, springs and timber, together with a full and particular record of the Mexican Grants, also separate histories of all the townships and biographical sketches > Part 46
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bring them in. He could give us items of interest of the pioneer days that would half fill our book, were he disposed to do so. Mr. Beach moved from San Francisco to St. Helena in May, 1872, having purchased a resi- dence on Main street, but a hundred feet from the post-office. His store adjoins his residence. He intends, the coming year, moving his house back, fronting it on Oak avenue, and erecting a building for business purposes on Main Street. This will be the result of a plan laid by him when he first made his purchase; and all his efforts-his tree planting, etc .- on the Oak avenue end of his property, have been with this result in view. It is said by his friends that he is rather self-confident; that the law of his being is to conclude whatever he undertakes; that let him engage in any task, no matter how difficult or how small its worth, he cannot quit it till he has mastered its whole secret, finished it, and made the result of it his own.
The following letter of reminiscences was read from George H. Beach, of Napa, one of the original founders of the First Congregational Church, though never connecting himself with its covenant :
" STOCKTON, July 15, 1874 .- Rev. A. L. Stone and others : Your note of the 25th ult., extending to me an invitation to be present at your twenty-fifth Anniversary, was duly received, but business engagements will prevent my being present. Allow me to state a few incidents of the pioneer days, perhaps worth treasuring: On leaving New York on the 1st of February, 1849, in the steamer " Falcon," there being on board two ladies, Mrs. John W. Geary and Mrs. Bezar Simmons, sister of Mr. Frederick Bil- lings, I organized a choir composed of those ladies and two or three gentle- men. Judge Geary officiated on the Sabbath, reading the Episcopal Service on the steamer. Rev. Albert Williams, who arrived by the steamer " Cres- cent City " at Chagres about the same time, officiated while we were at Panama, about three weeks. Our choir held together all the time. We came up from Panama on the steamer " Oregon," and came to an anchorage off Saucelito on Sunday, April 1st. The same evening we steamed over to San Francisco, a number of the passengers landing that evening, and the rest next day. We found it mostly a canvas town, but there were some adobe and wooden buildings. The white canvas tents from the previous steamer of the 1st of March were dotted here and there; and when the tents from our steamer were set up next day, to accommodate about four hundred pas- sengers, it had the appearance of an army having arrived and encamped in the town. There were but very few women there, and, to use the expres- sion of an old schoolmate whom I met for the first time in many years, ' The very ground on which a refined lady trod in San Francisco was alinost worshiped.' You may judge that all were anxious to get a sight of the new- comers by our steamer. On the second or third day on shore, while standing
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with Mr. Charles L. Ross, then a merchant, near his door, we noticed a gen- eral rush from the various buildings on the opposite side of the street. We ran out also, and found this exodus had taken place all along the line from both sides of the street. I asked the cause of the alarm from the first man I met, supposing a fire had broken out somewhere. 'Alarm !' said he; 'I guess you've just arrived.' 'Yes, that's so,' said I. 'Well, those two ladies with that gentleman just turning the corner above caused all this excite- ment. It's a very rare thing, sir, to see a white woman on the streets here.' Fifty men or more were then running in the direction the ladies had taken, that they might get another sight at them. The party so curiously observed were John W. Geary, his wife, and Mrs. Simmons. We learned that the Rev. T. Dwight Hunt was holding Divine service in the little 20x30-foot school- house on the public plaza. Having made Mr. Hunt's acquaintance, Mrs. Simmons and the gentlemen of the choir agreed to go in and aid him on the following Sabbath. On that day, the 8th of April, we took our seats as a choir, with our three or four note-books, which we had the thoughtfulness to put in our trunks, and two of which I have at this day. Soon after the singing commenced, the little room being filled, a living girdle began to form around the building, until, when the service had closed, the people-men in all sorts of attire, pants in boots and over boots, with red, blue, white and checkered shirts-had thickened around us to a depth perhaps of twenty to thirty feet. On emerging from the building, I asked if that was a common occurrence, and was told that it was not, but an entirely new feature; that as soon as the lady's voice had been heard on the outside the news spread like wildfire, and its effect was not lost until it completely broke up, for the time being, the gambling circles around the tables in the famous Parker House, then situated on the east side of the Plaza, where the Hall of Records is now. Even Robert Parker himself, the proprietor, followed the retreating crowd to the school-house. This living mass had been drawn there to get a sight of the newly-arrived lady and to hear the sweet tones of her voice. When told that she was the center of attraction, Mrs. Simmons laughed heartily, and said she would stick to the little school-house as long as her presence proved an auxiliary to Mr. Hunt's labors. But it was not so to be. She was suddenly attacked by typhoid fever, and lived but two weeks, leaving a husband, brother and many fellow passengers to mourn her loss. Here, in justice to every '49er, I will add that never since, in the history of California, has a lady been more safe from the possibility of hearing an offensive word than in those days of chaos-of red shirts and miners' boots. The least insult to a lady then would have brought down a thunder- storm on the perpetrator's head. The roughest seemed to vie with the most refined in striving to do her homage. When I look back through the quar- ter-century to that little school-house, that sentry-box, that dim speck in
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the horizon, and contrast it with the now effulgent light, shining to all the world, it seems but a dream."
The letter in the "Star " concerning Mr. Beach's connections with the steamboats, alluded to above, is as follows :
" THE SECOND STEAMBOAT. SAN FRANCISCO, July 26, 1880 .- Editor St. Helena " Star," St. Helena : Dear Sir-Friends at intervals send me your spicy little paper, in the last issue of which I read an account of the first steamboat which plied on the waters of California. And now I will tell you of the second, especially as it relates to an especial friend of mine who is a resident of your town. The news of the great gold excitement reached the East in the fall of 1848. In the spring of 1849, there being a pretty little steamer named 'Lawrence,' measuring about seventy-five tons, plying on the Merrimac River, Massuchusetts, it was purchased by a company numbering sixty-four. They had her taken to pieces ; each piece of wood and every bolt was numbered. They chartered the ship 'Mayflower,' of Boston, in which was shipped all the parts of the little steamer 'Lawrence,' boilers and everything. They shipped their provisions, advertised for and obtained a goodly number of passengers, and sailed for San Francisco, which port they reached in September. After three or four days' investigation, anchor was raised, sail set, and with a fair wind went up to what was then called New York of the Pacific, a town laid out on Suisuin Bay by Colonel Jonathan Stephenson. Here the material, provisions, etc., were all landed, and the steamer set up. About the 15th of December she was ready for a trial trip. She was run up to Stockton. On returning she encountered a heavy blow and came near foundering. Discontent immediately took possession of a majority of the company, most of them desiring to give up this enterprise and try their luck in the mines. Captain Oliver Allen and Captain Merri- hue, old acquaintances of Mr. George H. Beach in the East, immediately took the steamer's small boat, reinforcing themselves with two or three others of the company, paddled and sailed to San Francisco, where on arrival they immediately called on Mr. Beach at his store on Sacramento street and stated all the facts to him, informing him that they were empowered to make sale of the steamer for $30,000. Mr. Beach, after an evening's reflection, informed them that he would send sufficient freight by sail- ing vessel to the steamer which would warrant her making a trip to Marysville, and if everything pleased him as regards to the good working order of the steamer, he would likely purchase her. The proposition was accepted. The next day Mr. Beach sent the sloop 'Alfred' off with fifty tons of freight, more or less. This being transferred at New York of the Pacific, the little steamer pushed out for Sacramento, Mr. Beach, himself, on board. The little 'Lawrence ' had some narrow escapes before she reached Marys- ville, much alarming many of the company. Mr. Beach inade money by the
27
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charter, as he took on board at Sacramento a hundred passengers at twenty- five dollars each, to be landed at Marysville. On the way down, and before reaching Sacramento, Mr. Beach had completed the purchase at $27,000 or $27,500. As soon as he had the papers perfected, he raised the guard of the steamer and added twenty-five feet in length to the bow, making her faster, safe against the rapid currents, and enabling her to carry twenty-five tons more freight. Mr. Beach retained Captain Crosby as her master, and as many others as he desired to remain by her. I was given the posi- tion of clerk at a salary of $250 per month. We made our first trip to Marysville from Sacramento, about the 25th day of December, 1849. The business was a great success for so small a craft. Mr. Beach disposed of three-eighths of her while she was being added to, he retaining the control- ing interest. He must have made $50,000 out of her earnings before heavy competition made it his interest to sell. But while this pretty little steamer was coining money for him, the conflagration of San Francisco had leveled his building and stock of goods twice, perhaps amounting to $75,000, and in those days no insurance to be obtained. H. T. HUTCHINSON.
"P. S .- Captain Oliver Allen, who was the originator of the whale gun, and one of the projectors in this enterprise, was a neighbor of Mr. Beach's in Norwich, Connecticut, and now has one of the largest dairy ranches in California, and is located a little south of Tomales, Marin County, and has made a number of valuable inventions since that of the whale gun.
H. T. H."
"Since receiving the above we have submitted it to Mr. Beach for his approval. Mr. Beach says the letter is a very correct report, and does not underrate his profits in the steamer or losses by fires; and adds that the third steamer which went into the Sacramento and Yuba River waters was of his purchase-the steamer 'Phoenix.' Then the fourth, the ' Martha Jane,' also purchased by the Lawrence Steamer Com- pany. The last two were too small for profit-were purchased simply to prevent competition. The 'Phoenix' was afterwards sold to an association called the Linda Company, as a dredging boat-dredging for gold in the Yuba River-and the 'Martha Jane' to parties living on the San Joaquin River, near Stockton, for a tow-boat. Judge E. D. Wheeler, now of San Francisco, then a mere lad, was employed as a fireman on the first little steamer, 'Pioneer,' the little steamer preceding those purchased by Mr. Beach. Captain Cornelius Storms, now living in San Francisco, is con- versant with all these facts, as well as Judge Wheeler. Storms was one of the company to bring out the steamer 'Linda,' which, with the splendid steamer 'Governor Dana,' knocked the little steamers off the line."
CRANE, GEORGE BELDEN. Whose portrait, at seventy-three years of age, will be found in the body of our work, first saw the light in the
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State of New York, sixty miles north of the city of that name, and eighteen miles east of the Hudson River, in what was then, 1806, Dutchess County, now Putnam. His father was Belden, and grandfathers Zebulon Crane and David Paddock. To follow him in his delineations of the educational facilities, business conveniences, and industries of the people generally, so near the commercial emporium of the nation, we obtain a graphic account of the manners and customs of the people who were familiar, practically, with the hardships of the War of Independence, and their immediate de- scendants. These, when contrasted with the present state of things in those relations, give us in a condensed view a clear idea of our wonderful growth during the six central decades of our country's history from 1820 to 1880. And to follow him in his wanderings after leaving the Empire State at the age of twenty-six, till he became a permanent resident of our El Do- rado, we become familiar with the spirit and instincts which justifies the oft-quoted declaration of Bishop Berkeley : "Westward the Star of Empire takes its way." But preparatory to this, and to show our boys what perse- vering energy can do in achieving a good practical education, with but little of the advantages they now enjoy, we will listen briefly to his recollections of the character of his first "going to school," sixty miles from New York City. The school-house was a mere shanty ; a fire-place in one side, a door in another, a broad plank framed into the other two sides, sloping down towards the center of the room for a writing table, and the central part filled with seats without backs, from eight to twelve feet long, made of slabs brought from his father's saw mill on the west branch of the Croton, the water of which river now supplies the great city of New York. On these seats the little boys and girls would sit, study, go to sleep, fall off, and get whipped for falling, while the larger ones would sit at the writing table, keeping the " master " busy much of the time "mending" their goose-quill pens. He remembers having heard it urged by parents who felt they could not afford their children the use of tallow candles (and no other were known) to study "o' nights," that Martin Van Buren, born and educated not far away, and who had become a great lawyer, used to get "light- wood" to see by in night study. Like about all the boys in the Eastern and Middle States in those early days, he would work on the farm in the summer, after getting old enough to work, till he was fit to enter what is now called a high school; and the winter after his sixteenth birthday, a certificate of competency from the school inspectors placed him in the proud position of a teacher. The ruling wages for common school teachers at that day was $10 to $12 a month and board. Four years later we find him in. the Medical Department of the State University in the city of New York ; then soon a licentiate, practicing medicine and surgery in the central por- tion of that State; then, in 1832, a graduate of that college; then wending
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his way westward, traveling from Albany to Schenectady on the first pas- senger railroad in that State, or in the United States ; then on board a canal boat drawn by horses, at the rate of fifty miles in twenty-four hours, to Buf- falo, at which place he was told that a new town called Chicago, had just started near Lake Michigan, which "might become something of a place," and that he had better go there and grow up with it. He left the steamer at Cleveland, Ohio, however, thinking this Chicago, a name and place of which he never heard before, was too far beyond the limits of civilization. From Cleveland, in 1832, he rode on a boat on the Erie and Ohio Canal, to Chil- licothe, which canal was finished only to that place, forty miles north of the Ohio; thence by stage to Portsmouth, the southern terminus of the canal, near the mouth of the Great Scioto River, near where had been, some thirty years before, the Little Scioto Salt Works, about which a few words will show our youth the possibilities within their reach. Four youngsters worked there, relieving each other day and night, keeping up the fires. One of them, "Tom." Ewing, became United States Senator ; another, " Bob" Lucas, Governor of Ohio; another, "Joe" Vance, also became Governor of that State in 1836, and the fourth, his informant, was one of the pioneers in the development of the great iron interests in southern Ohio. They should remember in this connection, President Garfield, at a later date, on the canal tow-path. Here, on the border land, between North and South, he saw cropping out the feud destined thirty years later not only to destroy social harmony, but to convulse our whole political fabric. With the South- ern settlers on the Ohio side, " Yankees " were in bad odor. An old " Tuck- a-ho," as the Southerners were called, without the remotest idea from what State our friend hailed, told him that York Yankees were the meanest kind. He had never before heard the then opprobrious epithet " Yankee " applied to any but New Englanders, save but by English writers. Here (in Scioto County) he followed his profession between four and five years, marrying, meantime, the oldest daughter of Daniel Young, a pioneer from New Hamp- shire to southern Ohio, author, while member of the Senate of the former State, of the first legislative enactment which separated Church and State in New England, and subsequently a leader in the development of the great iron interest in Ohio, president of the Ohio Iron Company. The health of his wife demanding a change of climate, the winter of 1836 found them in North Alabama, where he continued to live, enjoying the professional pat- ronage and social kindness of a superior class of people, till he found his constitution about broken by hard labor in what was then not only a hot, but a highly malarious climate. Seeking restoration to health in a higher lati- tude, we next find him on the right bank of the Mississippi, in Pike County, Missouri, a place and people made at a later day conspicuous by California emigration. However this distinction originated, or whether creditable or
P. H. Palmer
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otherwise, he is quite free to confess or boast that for more than a decade of years he was a citizen of a county from which hail such men as United States Senator Henderson, J. O. Broadhead ; the late Republican candidate for Governor, Patrick Dyer; the present Lieutenent-Governor of that great State, R. A. Campbell; three Congressmen, and one Presidential Elector, whose name was in everybody's mouth during the Hayes-Tilden imbroglio, besides our own John F. Swift, Commissioner to China. And in this con- nection, while averse to referring to his professional credentials before the public, he states en passant, the fact that while a citizen of Pike County, in 1848, he had, unsolicited, the honor of being one of the two or three phy- sicians of that State on whom the medical department of the University of Missouri conferred the Honorary Degree of M. D. Like other old men with progressive instincts, he likes to compare the past with the present, and draw the contrast. Returning to his native State and county, after twenty years absence, he found the labor of weeks compressed into as many days. Rapid railroad transit to the city had superseded the wagon and the old North River sloop, and we soon find him in this far-away region, encouraging the march of improvement by a substitution here of railroad for wagon and steamboat; but with the preparatory steps to this, begins that future of his his- tory with which Californians are more immediately interested. Succeed- ing generations who will live amidst the splendid surroundings which are destined to distinguish our valley and mountain sides, will be curious to know how their ancestors reached the western coast before its waters were stirred by steam and the thousand of miles of mountain spanned by rail- road. While a vast majority of the early immigrants boldly encountered the hardship of crossing the continent with their teams, others crossed the Isthmus, or sailed " direct," as it was called, though in fact an exceedingly circuitous route " round the Horn." In January, 1853, we find the subject of this narrative, with family and effects, on a staunch thirteen-hundred-ton clipper, sailing far toward the coast of Africa ; then, from a south-east, the good ship "tacks" and takes a south-west direction, and in forty days rounds the "stormy cape;" seventy days farther sailing their ears were cheered by the welcome words, " Land, ho !" from the mast-head, the second sight of any portion of old terra in sailing fourteen to sixteen thousand miles. It proved to be Mount St. Helena, our friend little dreaming then that he was destined to assist in pioneering one of the most important industries of the State nearly under its shadows. Turning back, the Farallones were soon in view, and near which the clipper surrendered to a pilot that met and conducted her through the Golden Gate. And here we would gladly indulge in his description of what San Francisco was then, with its surroundings, with the shores of the bay, Oakland, ferry facilities, etc., and contrast with the magnificent proportions to which
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all these have attained; but an account of his journey to Santa Clara and San José must suffice for the present. Competition in travel and transpor- tation at that early day protected the public against the robberies of soulless monopolies, and if extortionate prices became unendurable a rival line or business would soon regulate and bring them to a healthy standard, even though great sacrifices were made in bringing things to a proper balance. On the 3d of May, 1853, for twenty-five cents he was taken to Alviso by steamer, and on by stage to San José, the seven miles of staging meander- dering in every direction over the unfenced plains, to find the dryest ground after an unusually wet season, and enabled him to see for the first time the ground-squirrels and coyotes about which he had read and heard so much. At San José he lived and prospered for four years, when, his wife conceiv- ing that the prevalent north winds aggravated her cough, he relinquished the charge of the City and County Hospital and a large private practice, and sought a more healthful change in Napa City. Here the luxuriant growth of Mr. Patchet's vineyard attracted his attention, but his reading of French and German authors on vine culture led him to inquire whether a fine wine could be produced by an adobe or any kind of superior grain- producing soil. It was claimed that vineyard ground should be selected more with reference to the quality of wine it would make than the quan- tity ; that a small crop from land unfit for the production of breadstuffs would command more money than a large one grown on rich land. Com- paring the physical geography of this valley with that of some of the most celebrated vineyard regions of Europe, to which we might superadd our confessedly superior climate, he came to the conclusion that if Nature had specially designed any one spot of earth for vineyard purposes, Napa County had that or those spots. He had noticed in the books that vineyard prop- erty in Europe was regarded as the most reliable for securing a competency for the support of families, and on a large scale for the accumulation of wealth, notwithstanding the frequent failure of crops from frosts, excessive rains, oidium, and other diseases, while General Vallejo assured him that his thirty- year-old vineyard in Sonoma had never failed of a crop and never called for manure. All this, to which he added a very natural desire to engage in a vocation at once as remunerative as his profession, and unlike it-freer from unavoidable hardship and exposure, caused him to turn attention seriously to the question of abandoning the one and engaging in the other. It had not, nor did it on subsequent reflection and inquiry, occur to his mind that native wines might not prove acceptable to palates accustomed only to the imported varieties, and, at the best, that it would be a long time before our wines could figure in the commercial world as a staple commodity-but of that hereafter. The business aspect of the case being settled, a consideration of much graver character arose : Will the addition of an abundant supply of
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the fermented juice of the grape to the intoxicating distilled liquors in gen- eral use as a beverage increase the amount of drunkenness ? An affirmative answer to that question once established, he held that no conscientious man could feel at liberty to engage in the business. But an appeal to history, sacred and profane, and a reference to the habits and state of temperance of the human family throughout Christendom, clearly led to the conclusion that a pure wine would not only fail to increase the amount of intoxication among the people, but would prove an auxiliary to the temperance cause. To justify himself in the estimation of his old associates in the temperance movement, and in the minds of the friends of temperance generally, he assigns, among others, the following reasons why he believed, and still be- lieves, that a prohibition of the use of pure wine by the rules of temper- ance societies is not only impolitic, but fatal to the philanthropic object of their organization. He reasons thus : In sacred history we find wine gen- erally associated with the indispensable necessaries of life; its use never forbidden, but its abuse always condemned. This is a precedent in favor of the use of wine from which it is strange that Christians ever appeal. Would temperance reformers allow all to drink it, young and old, as they did in the apostolic age-as they did in the days of Moses, Elias and Eze- kiel, without damage to physical or moral health, so far as we can learn- and employ every agency within their reach to restrict to the artisan and apothecary distilled alcohol, the happy result would soon be apparent. Distilled spirits, when used as a beverage, have been proved by experience to be ten-fold more potent in the formation of intemperate appetites and habits than the undistilled, fermented juice of the grape. This fact, so vitally important to the welfare of our country, did not escape the saga- cious mind of President Jefferson. Encouraging the people of Virginia to engage in vine culture, he wrote: "In all countries where wine is cheap, drunkenness is rare; but in all countries in which wine is so costly as to cause people to satisfy their natural desire for stimulants by the use of dis- tilled spirits, drunkenness is common." That truly great man and genuine philanthropist was not only a careful observer of the habits of men and nations, and the causes which led to their different manners and customs, but he knew that human nature in general demanded something in addi- tion to mere satiety of food. He knew that no people had ever been found on the face of the earth so savage, or so refined and civilized, as not to be in possession of something, aboriginal or imported, that was used as a luxury in the shape of stimulants or narcotics or both. These facts convinced him that it is natural for man, after supplying the necessities of life by food, to desire to multiply his enjoyments, intellectual and animal, and for the time to exalt them. And the history of the so-called temperance reform in our own country abundantly proves, that whatever is really and truly founded in
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