Dear Family, Friends, and Diary,
I started early, before sunrise, because I had unknown places to cover before I was expected at a family birthday celebration over in Los Gatos. The plan was to head Southwest for a breakfast start.
The hour-long drive through vineyards, orchards, and vegetable fields was marked by light drizzle, traffic, and a fair number of huge American flags. This is MAGA country out here, at least at the prosperous farm management and owners' level. Oh well, the current Democratic presidential candidate has emphasized that it is EVERYONE's flag.
My initial goal was the Harris Ranch Resort, for my breakfast and for Carla's first feeding of the day. The 98 Tesla Superchargers at Harris Ranch, at one time the largest Tesla station in the world, showed 88 empty connections for me to choose from, and there were a dozen and a half chargers from other brands, in case a giant caravan arrived just before me. No range anxiety today.
While Harris Ranch started in the mid 1930s, the "resort" part came in the 1970s with a Highway 33 burger stand. Since then, with the building of Interstate 5, the burger stand has grown to be one of the largest travel stops between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area.
I wanted to have steak and eggs, but the $50, 14 oz., rib-eye was beyond my budget and appetite.
The chicken-fried steak was plenty - and plenty good.
Harris is a vertically integrated operation, from growing feed, grazing, feed lot operation,
and wholesale cutting, packaging, and shipment.
(In-N-Out Burgers is one of their best-known customers.)
A few miles west of Harris Ranch, I stopped at California Historical Landmark #344, marking the spot where notorious land pirate Joaquin Marietta was reportedly killed on July 25, 1853, by a posse formed to bring the raider to justice. There are conflicting stories about whether he was a common bandit or a Mexican Robin Hood. In any event, he earned a plaque by the side of a small West Valley road.
A few miles north on Highway 33, there is an example of modern business, and perhaps of future of West Valley farming. This ribbon of a roadside picture shows one of several solar farms in the area. Open it up and zoom in to see just how massive the installation is.
Each of the 800,000 Tranquility Field solar panels faces east in the morning, up in the afternoon, and west to gather the last of the sun's rays at sunset. The 205 MW (rated) power facility is supported by a 288 MW-hr Battery Energy Storage System (BESS). There are newspaper-reported plans for 100 times this amount of solar/battery power - in Fresno County alone. Maybe rainbows really will lead to pots of gold - solar gold. (Projections of electric generation are notoriously uncertain, but still ...)
North of Tranquility and its promise of future wealth, is Mendota. The town was founded as a storage and switching station for the Southern Pacific in 1891 and grew slowly for the next 50 years, before incorporation in 1942. Today, it is agriculture that provides jobs, most of them apparently paying poorly, and, despite the town's lofty claim to be the "Cantaloupe Center of the World", signs of poverty abound. A 2019 USA Today headline tagged Mendota as "The Worst City in America".
My pictures were limited to one church and a single boarded-up, historic-looking, building across from the railroad tracks. Anything else would not be worth showing - "poverty porn" is not my thing.
Several miles north I came to Firebaugh, a bit more prosperous, or at least not so grim as it's southern neighbor. The town center and neighborhoods were still pretty hard scrabble, but there was a riverside park, marking a bit of history. Firebaugh was founded in about 1849 as the ferry crossing that continued the road from the coast, through Pacheco Pass, and over to the Sierra gold fields. A decade later, the town was a stop on the Butterfield Overland Mail Company, a stage line that connected St Louis with California.
A few park pictures: a ferry memorial and river crossing with part of the rail road bridge that put the ferry and the stage express out of business; an old wood jail building and a flower for contrast; the small rodeo grounds, with poster.
I had missed the July rodeo. Note that this poster is ONLY in Spanish.
Maybe not a bilingual community?
My last small-village was Dos Palos, the home town of our friend Priscilla Del Bosque. Named for two tall poplar trees in the Mexican Land Grant days, Dos Palos was expanded in 1891 when rancher Henry Miller brought in 40 farm families from Iowa and Nebraska, most likely German-speakers as was he. Those settlers reportedly struggled and many failed, but a Portuguese farming and sheep ranching community eventually succeeded.
Of the three farm towns of my day so far, Dos Palos was the smallest and seemed to be closer to television's Mayberry model than either Mendota or Firebaugh. Clean. Cute little downtown. Decent coffee saloon.
Between tiny Dos Palos and much larger Los Banos, I wanted to visit a semi-famous house: The Randall Faucett House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the middle of the last century. Unfortunately, it was hidden at the end of a long and very-private driveway. We need to keep an eye out for an open house. Priscilla?
Last on my towns for visiting was Los Banos, a town we have passed through dozens of times as we travel from Fresno to the Bay Area. Those travels are always on the Pacheco highway, a couple miles of nondescript strip malls and car shops. Downtown Los Banos is different, with a real small town feeling: clean buildings, occupied ones, and a moderate amount of commercial traffic.
In the center of town is Henry Miller Plaza, with a life-size bronze of him astride his horse, herding a cow and a hog. As one of the richest ranchers in America at the turn of the last century, I do wonder how much time he had for herding stock of this kind.
The next tourist spot was the Milliken Museum, a small building housing the local historical society's collection. Docent Sally gave me the full 15-minute tour and, I have to say, it was worthwhile. She focused on two pioneers: Francisco Perez Pacheco and Henry Miller.
Pacheco's Rancho_Ausaymas_y_San_Felipe was series of a Mexican Land Grants from the mid 80s, including what is now Pacheco Pass, along with land at either end. (Gilroy on the west, Santa Nella on the east.) Francisco even had a summer house in Monterey, now used as the Pacheco Club. (Family connection: one of Marianne's dad's first jobs in America was working at this men's club.)
The ranch buildings on the eastern end of the pass served family and travelers for over a hundred years, before they were taken over by the state and flooded by the waters of the San Louis reservoir. Efforts were made to move an original adobe building, only to fail when the road being used collapsed and tipped the ancient structure into a deep gully. History preservation is a difficult business.
German-born Henry Miller migrated to San Francisco in the late 1850s and successfully set up shop as a butcher. With that success, he teamed with a German-speaking competitor, Charles Lux. Miller-Lux became perhaps the first completely vertically integrated meat supplier in California, if not the country. Like Harris Beef today, Miller-Lux did it all: grow the feed; graze and fatten cattle and hogs; butcher, transport, and deliver meat. Miller-Lux also went on to found or develop Los Banos, Gustine, parts of Firebaugh and other Joaquin Valley communities. The businesses made Miller so much money that, when his estate was settled in the late 1910s, it was valued at over $40,000,000 ($1.2 billion in 2023 dollars)
Miller's ornately-tooled saddle did indeed seem to have been used - at least a bit.
Charles Lux on the right.
The Milliken Museum held far more than just Miller and Pacheco artifacts, but I was tiring and had one more job to do: Eat. For a historical visit, I had to choose between the Mexican restaurant in the old Canal Farm Inn, where Henry Miller had originally headquarted his businesses and the Wool Growers (French) Basque restaurant. I chose Basque.
The San Joaquin Valley has a number of Basque restaurants, many of them from the old days, with hotels attached. Sheep workers would live here between field jobs or trips home to the Basque mountains of France and Spain.
The workers would also catch up on eating and socializing, after long solitary work periods with little more than rice and mutton.
Traditionally, a Basque meal has at least a dozen dishes, served in three or four courses, on long community tables. So it was at Wool Growers.
- Course 1: soup, beans, bread and butter
- Course 2: salad and stew
- Course 3: tri-tip (roast beef) and french fries
- Course 4: cheese and ice cream.
I suppose the water and wine need to be considered the last of the dozen dishes.
Exceptional food? In quantity and variety, sure. In quality, maybe not so much, but that wasn't the original point. And in my case, I was looking for history and tradition.
Properly fed, I hit the road west, through Pacheco Pass, pausing once to feed Carla electrons, but that was it. On the hour-plus drive to Los Gatos, I considered if my West San Joaquin Valley exploration had been worthwhile. All things considered, yes. I visited a dozen new places, saw historic landmarks and varied countryside, learned about societies I was unfamiliar with, ate too much, and did no harm to Carla or myself.
Some day we will do the lower half of Highway 33, the part from Harris Ranch to Ventura.
Stay tuned,
John and Marianne