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In 1877, the Southern Pacific Railway laid lines from Goshen to Coalinga. The passageway crossed a Chinese sheepherder's camp, and thus began a city now nearing a population of 60,000. Today, Hanford is brimming with citizens working to maintain the genuine look and historical feel of the little town that was born well over a century ago.
The town of King City came into existence in 1886, when the railroad arrived north of San Lorenzo Creek in the Salinas Valley of Central California. Named after Charles H. King, owner of this portion of the San Lorenzo Land Grant, King City has grown into a hub for the magnificent agricultural fields that surround it and support its economy. US Highway 101 and the Salinas River are unique features of the town, and Mesa Del Rey Airport was instrumental in the training of pilots during World War II. Author John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden is set near King City.
It was in 1888, four short years after he first came to Fresno County to farm wheat, that Thomas Law Reed made a deal with the Southern Pacific Railroad. In exchange for a half-interest in 360 acres of Reed's farmland, the railroad would build a depot along its east side branch and help develop a townsite. The town was Reedley. See what happened when settlers arrived. Watch as homes are built, as businesses are started, and as schools and churches are founded. Witness farmers cultivate the region's rich soil, and with irrigation, grow a bounty of crops that they will ship near and far. View a place of dusty streets and simple wooden buildings transformed into a modern 20th-century community. Meet the people of Reedley as they work, learn, worship, and celebrate. This book is Reedley's family photo album.
Kings County is slowly becoming modern, as California's urban areas continue to expand into rural and formerly agricultural land. Still the open skies here look down upon copious amounts of historical significance. From the dwellings of the early Yokut people, ferries across the Kings River, the arrival of the railroad, and the subsequent Mussell Slough tragedy to the expansion of Highway 198, modernist buildings in Hanford, and the military presence at Lemoore, Kings County boasts compelling stories and a diverse group of people and places. In this engaging retrospective, readers will enjoy fantastic images of a Kings County that some say no longer exists.
The Sierra Nevada of Fresno County is rich in natural resources. Logging operations of the 19th century built dams and millponds, such as Hume Lake, sawmills, railroads, and two of the longest flumes in the world. In the 20th century, the Southern California Edison Company began the massive Big Creek Hydroelectric Project. It resulted in the creation of several lakes, including Shaver and Huntington, and a series of powerhouses for hydroelectric power. These lakes provided new venues for fishing and boating. Included here are epic stories told with historical postcards of logging, electricity, and leisure in the Central Sierra Nevada within Fresno County.
From fairy tales to photography, nowhere is the complexity of human-animal relationships more apparent than in the creative arts. Art illuminates the nature and significance of animals in modern, Western thought, capturing the complicated union that has long existed between the animal kingdom and us. In Beauty and the Beast, authors Arluke and Bogdan explore this relationship through the unique lens of photo postĀcards. This visual medium offers an enormous and relatively untapped archive to compelling document their subject.
Fresno was founded in 1872 in the middle of the vast, fertile San Joaquin Valley and quickly became the financial and social center of California. From the infinite amount of agricultural products to lumber, oil, water, and electrical power, the city thrived upon the multitude of natural resources that were abundantly available in the area. As the county seat, it was the political and cultural center of central California. Shown in this volume are postcards of the city in its heyday.
Santa Margarita de Cortona was founded in 1775 as part of the original Spanish mission system. Its asistencia, in fact, has been considered a lost mission. Santa Margarita Ranch was later founded from a Mexican land grant. In 1889, the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad, with its terminus in Santa Margarita, created a boomtown with dance halls, blacksmiths, hotels, pool halls, saloons, and a jail. And with the popularity of auto travel half a century later, Santa Margarita was once again revitalized with garages, gas stations, motor inns, restaurants, and bars. It fell into a deep sleep, however, as Highway 101 bypassed the town in the mid-1950s. Landlocked by the 17,000-plus-acre Santa Margarita Ranch, the town has remained frozen in time until recently.
For more than 100 years, Avila Beach has represented the best of what California's Central Coast has to offer. Inhabitants of Avila have, since before its inception as a town, borne witness to the many changing faces and cultures representing the California landscape. Its earliest inhabitants were the Chumash Indians, who populated the Central Coast until the arrival of the Spanish missions. Later, the San Miguelito Rancho land grant was awarded to Don Miguel Avila, for whom the town itself was named. Avila eventually became a thoroughfare for the fishing industry. Other industries prospered as well, notably due to the ingenuity of early pioneer John Harford, who was instrumental in the development of numerous piers at Avila and at Port San Luis. The access to the sea allowed the region to benefit from the steamer ships that serviced California's coast.
Kings County, sprawling across the San Joaquin Valley south of the Kings River and encompassing the bulk of the historic Tulare Lake bed, is an agricultural wonder with ranches, dairy farms, vineyards, and multiple other field and orchard crops. Created in 1893 from Tulare County and expanded in 1909 from elements of Fresno County, Kings County has grown in the last century from a forgotten corner of California into a major agricultural-economic force.