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History of the California First Theatre

The building in which the first paid public dramatic entertainment in California was staged is located in Old Monterey. John Alfred (Jack) Swan, a sailor of Scottish descent, arrived in Monterey in 1843 as a crew member on the Soledad, a Mexican brig engaged in the coast trade between Mexico and Alta California. Upon arriving in Monterey, Swan likes the small city and decides to stay. A lack of immediate employment forces him to sea again, this time as a cook on the Mexican schooner California, captained by John B.R. Cooper, another American destined to historical importance in Monterey. After a pair of successful trade voyages between Monterey and the Mexican port of Mazatlan, Swan's culinary skills lose their luster with Captain Cooper and he loses his post. Whether he was fired or jumped ship is unknown, but he arrives in Monterey at the end of 1844, once again with no work. This time, enterprising Swan decides to make a name for himself as a baker and manages to set up a small shop. The American influx to California has begun in earnest by this time and Swan's Yankee patrons soon make Swan's pies a favored concoction. By 1846, with money acquired from the business, he purchases some land on the old Calle Estrada, now the southwest corner of Pacific and Scott Streets. In the summer of the following year he begins construction on an adobe structure, a small house already having been built, with the idea of turning it into a boarding house for itinerant sailors such as he was just a few years prior.

In March 1847 the first of three American transport ships arrives in San Francisco, carrying detachments of the First New York Volunteer Regiment, under the command of Colonel Jonathan Drake Stevenson. By April 1848, Companies D, E, F, G, and I were assigned to Monterey, where the soldiers remained for some months until they were either transferred to other coast cities or mustered out of the service. A number of New Yorkers from Companies D and I, used to the myriad of entertainment choices afforded their leave time in the large cities of the East Coast, devised their own entertainments in Monterey to help relieve the monotony of camp life. The war with Mexico by this time virtually over, a few of the sailors knew their muster was soon to come and, concluding that their entertainments might fetch them money and a possible living after the government's paychecks stopped, approached Swan with the idea of leasing part of his adobe as a theatre. Swan, ever mindful of new and enterprising ways to make money, was favorable to the idea.

Pressed into service quickly, the building was fitted with whatever could be used to make the building suitable for dramatic performance: scraps of lumber, shipping crates, and barrels for the stage and seats, blankets for the curtains. As money came in from admissions, better materials were used, scenery and costumes of higher quality. With no programs or handbills in existence, it is not definitely known what play was the first play performed in Swan's theatre. According to Bancroft, one of the plays given in the Spring of 1848 was Putnam, or, the Lion Son of '76, which was quite profitable. In fact, the theatre was by all accounts a remarkable success, having taken in $500 in admissions on the first night's performance alone. Melodramas popular at the time were the prevailing works performed in the theatre, complete with a small orchestra adept at accenting every heroine's anguished wail and every villain's mustache twitch.

By 1849, Gold Rush fever was sweeping California, and Monterey was not immune to the loss of population to the gold mines of the Sierras. Performers from Los Angeles came north to attempt to fill the gap, but by the end of 1849, the lure of gold and riches had taken its number of men to the mountains, including Swan, and the company disbanded.

Over the ensuing years, Swan leased his building to a number of business people and it served a variety of functions: whaling station, drug dispensary and store, and eventually a tea room and shop. Swan traveled both in and out of Monterey over the next 35 years, retiring by 1885 to the old adobe, having won and lost a number of fortunes in different ventures. In 1896 Jack Swan died with no heirs, and the old adobe and house began to deteriorate, sitting abandoned until 1906.

1906 brings the crumbling adobe some good fortune when a group of local Monterey citizens, assisted with funds from W.R. Hearst's California Historic Landmarks League, purchase the building and deed it to the State. By 1920 the adobe and house undergo a complete restoration and open to the public as a museum. In 1937, the State leased the buildings to Denny-Watrous Management, a performing arts organization dedicated to reviving the performance of melodrama in the old First Theatre. A company, Troupers of the Gold Coast, comprised of mostly local residents, revive the performances of late 19th-century melodrama followed by an Olio, an audience sing-along. These performances continued without interruption through a couple of management changes until the buildings closed again for further restoration in 1999.

Chronology

History of the Plumas-Eureka Mines and Johnsville, California

(The history of Johnsville and the surrounding area of Plumas County, California, is inseparable from the history of gold mining operations in the area in the mid to late 19th century. This narrative, adapted from histories compiled by George Ross, Plumas-Eureka State Park docent, lays out the general chain of events surrounding the discovery of gold on Eureka Peak (Gold Mountain as it was formerly known), the establishment of the Plumas-Eureka and Jamison Mines, and the founding of the town of Johnsville and other communities organized around the mining operations.)

Plumas County as a region had been virtually bypassed by the hoards of people flooding into California at the news of the gold discovery at Sutter's Mill in 1849. Since the major gold discoveries were on the western flank of the Sierra Nevada, the closest many 49ers got to the region was more than fifty miles away, along the trail forged by Peter Lassen a couple of years prior that wound across Nevada through the Feather River Canyon on its way to Oregon, with forks in a pair of places reaching south to the gold mining regions in the foothills. Lassen's trail traversed the area of today's Plumas County most significantly at Big Meadow, an area now covered by the waters of Lake Almanor. It was at Big Meadow that weary wagon trains would stop to rest and feed their animals in preparation for the final push to the coast.

History has it that a man who got lost discovered gold in the Plumas County region. A '49er of questionable intelligence and integrity named Stoddard had gone hunting one day and promptly lost his way. His wagon train not willing to wait, he and a companion were left to fend for themselves. In their wanderings, they chanced upon a lake and discovered gold in the sands, theirs for the taking. With winter approaching, however, the men had more pressing needs and decided that the riches of their "Gold Lake" would have to wait until the spring.

Stoddard spent the winter of 1849-50 visiting the gold camps of Nevada City, Grass Valley, and Downieville, all the while telling magnificent stories of his "Gold Lake" just waiting to be rediscovered. "The Gold Lake Excitement," as it came to be known, was not altogether convincing to many, but by the spring of 1850 Stoddard had a hand-picked party of 25 miners ready to accompany him back up to the high country along old Maidu Indian trails in search of the lost lake of gold.

Over a month of searching got them nowhere, and many of the party lost faith in their leader Stoddard. By June they issued an ultimatum that Stoddard took as a threat and he stole out of camp one night, this time not getting lost as he made his way out of the region. The rest of the party, deciding to head back homeward, stopped to pan for gold in the streams along the way. They were not disappointed. Although they did not discover the famous Gold Lake of Stoddard's tales, they did discover a number of placer streams and many of the party were richly rewarded for their efforts. Too ill equipped to last the winter in the high country, they journeyed to the Central Valley to stay the winter and plan a return to the region with the spring thaw.

The spring of 1851 saw the original group return, along with a group of nine additional miners following. Not finding much panning room along the streams, the nine decided to cross the crest of the mountains. Setting up camp in the shadow of a mountain, along a creek on the east side of the crest, two members of the nine set off to inspect the surrounding terrain. What they found was nothing less than miraculous. The two men, Meriwether and Peck, had stumbled across an exposed ledge of rose quartz about 20 feet wide that slanted uphill about 400 feet. The ledge was full of gold.

The fortunate nine sent word of the discovery along the trails to men still panning the creeks, and within days, by June 5, 1851, the Eureka Company was formed with 36 men. A flood of people followed and the rush to Eureka Peak had begun. The creek was named Jamison Creek and more surveying and prospecting begun. 76 men came together to form the Washington and '76 Mine Company, laying claim to another outcropping not far from the Eureka. A half-mile south, 40 more began the Rough and Ready Mine. To the north, another 80 men started the Mammoth Mine. Within a month of the Eureka discovery, Eureka Peak was being blasted and tunneled in a series of claims along its surface.

The progress was not easy. Of the four mines established that June of 1851, two put far too much capital into infrastructure and the failure to gather enough gold-bearing ore the first year left them insolvent. The '76 Mine had invested heavily in an expensive stamp mill near Jamison Creek and a wooden chute over 1500 feet long to bring the ore down the mountain. They also developed a small town, the City of '76. When the following spring's ore produced only $200 in gold the mine folded, the company disbanded, and assets were sold for cash, with only a handful of men willing to stay and work the claim. The Rough and Ready also lived up to its name, investing in its own mill and suffering through a series of starts and stops. While the claim was worked until 1854 with meager success, the company eventually disbanded, leaving its claims unworked for many years.

The men of both the Mammoth and Eureka Mines persisted, however, and their persistence eventually brought its rewards. Not invested in the overhead of the other two companies, relying on rudimentary tools and learning from the experiences of miners from other regions, the companies both built arrastras, mule-driven grinding facilities that were a less expensive means to pulverize and pull the gold from the ore, a slower but wiser process. The arrastras were used until the blasted ores produced enough revenue to merit the building of stamp mills, although use of the arrastras did not cease entirely.

The formation of the mining companies introduced the need for a host of support. The town of Jamison City, just below present day Johnsville, started along Jamison Creek and soon gathered a reputation for wild living and easy women. Activities related to mining soon sprang up all along Jamison Creek, with claims along the stream supplementing the claims further up the mountain. Prospecting took place all over the region, with gold strikes along the Yuba River, the three branches of the Feather River, tributary streams and other rock outcrops. With the flood of miners came additional people laying land claims, and soon farming was in place to provide the area with foodstuffs that would otherwise require transport from distant communities such as Marysville via mule train. The building of mills, flumes, outbuildings, and homes helped a logging industry take hold that still persists today. Over the next decade, as the industries took hold the population grew from a fledgling 200 people to over 5000.

By the 1870s, ownership of all of the mines had undergone changes as miners discovered they were not necessarily the best managers and wealthy interests from San Francisco and other financial centers moved in. With new ownership came better management and efficiency, and soon the mines were producing thousands of dollars a month in gold. John Parrott, a wealthy San Francisco banker, had been the first of the major owners to buy up and consolidate mining operations, his Eureka Mine competing with the Mammoth as to who had the richer tunnels. Eventually he was bought out by the Sierra Buttes Mining Company, a London-based outfit, which then proceeded to buy the Mammoth Mine and other claims along Eureka Peak. At the time of the sale, the Eureka Mine employed about 70 men for eight months out of the year and Jamison City was still lively.

When the Eureka Mine's stamp mill at Eureka Lake collapsed in 1872, the Sierra Buttes Mining Company built a new and much-improved mill near the mouth of the Upper Mammoth Tunnel further up the mountain. This resulted in the enlargement of the tunnel and development of an entirely new town, Eureka Mills, on level with the tunnel workings. Not long after the new mill went into operation Eureka Mills became a substantial community, with a boarding house for 200 miners, a school, a church, two stores, a hotel with a saloon, two additional saloons, a livery stable, a blacksmith, company offices for the mine, and several homes.

Later in 1873, the mines were put under the charge of William Johns, a brilliant manager of mining operations, who, through a series of moves and processes made the mines much more efficient, and a string of 25 successful and profitable years began. With an influx of capital to build the mill and a pair of other improvements, the mines gave up a prodigious amount of gold. Even old tunnels that were thought to have been played out were discovered to have more "paying ledges." In less than a decade, the London investors had their original investments returned and shares of the company increased in value, making them very wealthy indeed.

Life in Eureka Mills was very different from that of its sister town further down the mountain. More families lived there year round, as the mine continued work through the winter to extend the tunnels, lay track from the tunnels to the mills for mule-drawn ore cars, and maintain a sawmill. By 1873 there were over 300 men on the Plumas-Eureka payroll, nearly a hundred of them Chinese. Their community was patriotic and religious, more of a family town than the wild Jamison City. With prosperity and the stream of gold came improvements in their way of life. The Central Pacific Railroad crossed the Sierra Nevada at Truckee in 1869, making Eureka Mills closer by days to a major source of supplies. A wagon road was opened from Jamison City to Eureka Mills, and in 1874 the telegraph line reached the town via Downieville and Sierra City.

William Johns planned and built a second stamp mill, the Mohawk, a 40-stamp mill completed in 1878. As with the Eureka Mill, an adjacent town was organized. Johns laid out a town site in 1876 and a Jamison City man named John Banks claimed land and built the first building, a hotel, in the town that was first called Johnstown. Two conflicting stories circulate to this day as to the original naming of the community of Johnsville, whether it was named for John Banks or William Johns. No definitive evidence survives. Johnsville didn't grow much until work on the mill was begun in earnest, but by 1878 Johnsville was a community. As the stamp mill began its work and gold ore was crushed by the ton, Johnsville grew and flourished. In 1882, Johnsville was a thriving town with two hotels and stables, three general stores, two meat markets and a number of saloons.

The mines on Eureka Peak were successful for a number of years, but by 1887 much of the gold had been taken. Dividends, for so long up in the 15% range, for the next couple of years dropped to a meager 2-3%. The shareholders, knowing that profits were not much longer in coming, decided to withdraw their investments in the Sierra Buttes mines and put the properties up for sale. Other owners, lessees, tributors, and miners in several combines continued to work the Plumas-Eureka until the turn of the century, but mining was essentially over by 1897. Persistent hopefuls into the 1940s produced a trickle of gold. When all was finished, Eureka Peak had given up some 18 million dollars in gold and another 2 to 3 million came from Jamison Creek placer mining. Today there are some 62 miles of tunnels in the mountain, many of which are still intact but off-limits.

With the decline in the mines, so went the towns. Jamison City and Eureka Mills did not survive, and Johnsville nearly went the way of the gold dust. The hardy families who loved the town, were born and raised there, persisted as long as they could. Johnsville shrank to a town of 15 people by the Depression years, but in the 1970s, new blood infused the town with life. A group of local homeowners was formed to help preserve many of the original structures that had fallen into disrepair and today Johnsville is a community of some 100 people, completely contained within Plumas-Eureka State Park.

Biography

Adherble Thomas Dale Button (1832-1904), a native of Covenant, Erie County, Pennsylvania, was among the earliest settlers of the Hernandez Valley, San Benito County, California. In the late 1850s, Button left Pennsylvania for California, leaving behind his wife Lucelia, who joined him at a later date. He ended up initially in Placer County, possibly working as a foreman for a mining company until the mid-1860s. While in the gold country he and his wife produced four sons, Ira, Ival, Carroll and Grant. In the mid to late 1860s he moved his family to San Mateo County where he lived and worked in San Mateo and Redwood City. His son J. Edward was born in San Mateo and a daughter, May, followed a few years later. While living in Redwood City, Button worked for the Corte Madera Water Company, a firm that supplied water to the Atherton area. Assorted documents show that he came to San Benito County sometime in the 1870s. He either homesteaded or bought land in the Hernandez Valley. He worked as superintendent of the re-opened Picacho Quicksilver Mine in the 1870s and 1880s and became an established and respected figure in the county, serving on the board of the local school district and as postmaster of the local Post Office. Button was twice elected Justice of the Peace in 1875 and 1877. He was instrumental in naming Erie Township, San Benito County, after his Pennsylvania birthplace. A long time member of the International Order of Oddfellows, Button died in 1904 at the age of 72 and is buried in the old Oddfellows cemetery in Hollister, along with most of his family.

About the Collection and the Stevenson House State Historic Monument

The Stevenson House Collection consists of primary and secondary source materials, artifacts, and memorabilia connected with the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson and the Stevenson House/French Hotel in Monterey, California. In the Stevenson House, a former rooming house, Robert Louis Stevenson lived for four months, September to December 1879. During his time living in the rooming house he worked on The Amateur Emigrant and waited for his future wife Fanny's divorce to be finalized.

It was in Monterey that Stevenson penned the "Old Pacific Capital." Some say that his setting for the tale Treasure Island came from his walks along the Monterey Peninsula. Today, the Stevenson House has been restored as a period home with several rooms devoted to 'Stevensoniana'.

This two-story adobe has sheltered families, government officials, artists, writers and fishermen, beginning in the Mexican era. First owned by Don Rafael Gonzalez, and reportedly built in the 1830s, the two-story adobe originally comprised the sala and one large room upstairs. A Swiss businessman, Girardin, purchased it and added on the Houston Street section. Over the years it served many business purposes, and for a time was known as The French Hotel. Stevenson lived in the building during this period.

In 1937 the historic adobe was purchased by the late Edith C. van Antwerp and Mrs. C. Tobin Clark to save it from destruction. They in turn presented it to the State of California as a memorial, and it is now a unit of Monterey State Historic Park.

Biography

Robert Lewis (later: Louis) Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. His father Thomas belonged to a family of engineers who had built many of the deep-sea lighthouses around the rocky coast of Scotland. His mother, Margaret Isabella Balfour, came from a family of lawyers and church ministers. In 1857 the family moved to 17 Heriot Row, a solid respectable house in Edinburgh's New Town.

At the age of seventeen he enrolled at Edinburgh University to study engineering, with the aim - his father hoped - of following him in the family firm. However, he abandoned this course of studies and made the compromise of studying law. He 'passed advocate' in 1875 but did not practice since by now he knew he wanted to be a writer. In the university's summer vacations he went to France to be in the company of other young artists, both writers and painters. His first published work was an essay called "Roads", and his first published volumes were works of travel writing.

EARLY PUBLISHED WORKS:

His first published volume, An Inland Voyage (1878), is an account of the journey he made by canoe from Antwerp to northern France, in which prominence is given to the author and his thoughts. A companion work, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), gives us more of his thoughts on life and human society and continues in consolidating the image of the debonair narrator also found in his essays and letters (classed among his best works).

MEETING WITH FANNY, JOURNEY TO CALIFORNIA, MARRIAGE:

His meeting with his future wife, Fanny, was to change the rest of his life. They met immediately after his 'inland voyage', in September 1876 at Grez, a riverside village south-east of Paris; he was twenty-five, and she was thirty-six, an independent American 'new woman', separated from her husband and with two children. Two years later she decided to obtain a divorce and Stevenson set out for California. His own experiences continue to be the subject of his next large-scale work The Amateur Emigrant (written 1879-80, published 1894), an account of this journey to California, which Noble (1985: 14) considers his finest work. In this work of perceptive reportage and open-minded and humane observation the voice is less buoyant and does not avoid observation of hardship and suffering. The light-hearted paradoxes and confidential address to the reader of the essays written a few years before (1876-77) and then published as Virginibus Puerisque (1881) continue in the creation of his original debonair authorial persona.

Concluding this first period of writing based closely on his own direct experiences is The Silverado Squatters (1883), an account of his three week honeymoon at an abandoned silver mine in California.

SHORT STORIES:

Stevenson's first published fictional narrative was "A Lodging for the Night" (1877), a short story originally published in a magazine, like other early narrative works, such as "The Sire De Maletroit's Door" (1877), "Providence and the Guitar" (1878), and "The Pavilion on the Links" (1880, considered by Conan Doyle in 1890 as 'the high-water mark of [Stevenson's] genius' and 'the first short story in the world,' qu. Menikoff 1990: 342). These four tales were collected in a volume entitled New Arabian Nights in 1882, preceded by the seven linked stories originally called "Latter-Day Arabian Nights" when published in a magazine in 1878. This collection is seen as the starting point for the history of the English short story by Barry Menikoff (1987: 126). The Arabian stories were described by critics of the time as 'fantastic stories of adventure,' 'grotesque romances' 'in which the analytic mind loses itself' (Maixner 1981: 117, 120), and are seen by Chesterton (1927: 169) as 'unequalled' and 'the most unique of his works'. They have an affinity with The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in their setting in the labyrinthine modern city, and the subject matter of crimes and guilty secrets involving respectable members of society. Stevenson continued to write short stories all his life, and notable titles include: "Thrawn Janet" (1881), "The Merry Men" (1882), "The Treasure of Franchard" (1883), "Markheim" (1885), which, being a narrative of the Double, has certain affinities with Jekyll and Hyde, "Olalla" (1885), which like Jekyll and Hyde originated in a dream and also deals with the possibility of degeneration. The above short narratives were all collected in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables in 1887.

"Olalla" was written in a period of just over two years (1885-7) when Stevenson and Fanny were living in the cottage Skerryvore in Bournemouth. Despite problems of health and finances, this was a period of meetings with Henry James, W.E. Henley and other literary figures, and when he wrote the long short-story (published as a single volume), his 'breakthrough book', The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Another collection Island Nights' Entertainments, tales with a South Sea setting, was published in 1893, including "The Bottle Imp" (1891), "The Beach of Falesa" (1892, a long short story of the same length as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), and "The Isle of Voices" (1893).

TREASURE ISLAND AND "CHILDREN'S LITERATURE":

Another fortuitous turning-point in Stevenson's life had occurred when on holiday in Scotland in the summer of 1881. The cold rainy weather forced the family to amuse themselves indoors, and one day Stevenson and his twelve-year-old stepson, Lloyd (Fanny's son by her first marriage), drew, colored and annotated the map of an imaginary "Treasure Island". The map stimulated Stevenson's imagination and, 'On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire' he began to write a story based on it as an entertainment for the rest of the family. Treasure Island (published in book form in 1883) marks the beginning of his popularity and his career as a profitable writer; it was his first volume-length fictional narrative, and the first of his writings 'for children' (or rather, the first of writings manipulating the genres associated with children). Later works that fit into this category are A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), The Black Arrow (1883), Kidnapped (1886) and its continuation Catriona (1893). The four narrative works mentioned in this paragraph, though they all have youthful protagonists and were all first published in magazines for young people, are also clearly intended for adult readers. The last three, based on careful documentary research, are fictions exploring history and culture; and the last two are interesting studies of Scottish culture.

NOVELS AND ROMANCES:

Prince Otto (1885), his second full-length narrative, is defined by Andrew Lang as 'a philosophical-humouristical-psychological fantasy' (qu. Maixner 1981: 181). The action is provocatively set in the imaginary state of Grunewald, an unusual choice for Stevenson, and it was to historical Scotland (which had already provided the setting for Kidnapped and Catriona ) that he turned for his next full-length 'adult' story, The Master of Ballantrae (1889). This is a Doubles narrative in which the brothers James and Henry have similarities with Jekyll and Hyde, not only in their initials, but also because of the mixed personality of the 'good' character, the constant return of the persecuting Double, and the simultaneous death of the two antagonists. Both Calvino and Brecht consider it to be the best of his works, and it is highly praised by writers as diverse as Henry James, Walter Benjamin and Andre Gide. The novel that he was working on when he died, Weir of Hermiston (published incomplete and posthumously in 1896), is also set in Scotland in the not-too-distant past and is often praised as Stevenson's masterpiece. The centre of the story is the difficult relationship of an authoritarian father and a son who has to assert his own identity (a theme present in many of Stevenson's works - and clearly a way he used of exploring and coming to terms with his difficult relationship with his own father).

IN THE SOUTH SEAS :

This very Scottish romance was written when Stevenson was far away on the other side of the world. His decision to sail around the Pacific in 1888, living on various islands for short periods, then setting off again (all the time collecting material for an anthropological and historical work on the South Seas which was never fully completed), was another turning point in his life. In 1889 he and his extended family arrived at the port of Apia in the Samoan islands and they decided to build a house and settle. This choice brought him health, distance from the distractions of literary circles, and went towards the creation of his mature literary persona: the traveller, the exile, very aware of the harsh sides of life but also celebrating the joy in his own skill as a weaver of words and teller of tales. It also acted as a new stimulus to his imagination. He wrote about the Pacific islands in several of his later works: Island Nights' Entertainments already referred to; In the South Seas (published 1896), essays that would have gone towards the large work on the area that he planned; and two other narratives with a South Sea setting: The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb-Tide (1894). The former is a mystery adventure set in various places over the globe but centred in the South Seas (indeed at Midway Island, Latitude 0' deg;) with some dark tones, especially in the fruitless search for treasure and the massacre of a ship's crew (for quite understandable reasons!). The Ebb-Tide (like "The Beach of Falesa") gives a realistic picture of the degenerate European traders and riffraff who inhabited the ports of the Pacific islands. These South Sea narratives mark a definite move towards a more harsh and grim realism (Stevenson himself (qu. Maixner 1981: 452) acknowledges affinities of The Ebb-Tide with the work of Zola).

DEATH:

The authorial persona had changed from the debonair flaneur of the early works, but retained a joy in his craft and a consciousness in the shaping of his own life. He died in December 1894 and even shaped the manner of his burial: as he had wished, he was buried at the top of Mount Vaea above his home on Samoa. Appropriately it was his own short poem, "Requiem" (from an 1887 collection), that was written on his tomb: 'Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie...'

RECEPTION:

Stevenson establishes a personal relationship with the reader, and creates a sense of wonder through his brilliant style and his adoption and manipulation of a variety of genres. Writing when the period of the three-volume novel (dominant from about 1840 to 1880) was coming to an end, he seems to have written everything except a traditional Victorian novel: plays, poems, essays, literary criticism, literary theory, biography, travelogue, reportage, romances, boys' adventure stories, fantasies, fables, and short stories. Like the other writers who were asserting the serious artistic nature of the novel at this time he writes in a careful, almost poetic style - yet he provocatively combines this with an interest in popular genres. His popularity with critics continued to the First World War. He then had the misfortune to be followed by the Modernists who needed to cut themselves off from any constraining tradition; Stevenson was felt to be one of the most constraining of immediately-preceding authors for his sheer ability, and one of the most insidious for his play with popular genres and for his preference for 'romance' over the serious novel. Condemned by Virginia and especially Leonard Woolf (1927; not unconnected, perhaps, with the fact that one of Stevenson's great supporters had been Virginia's father), ignored by F.R.Leavis, he was gradually excluded from the "canon" of regularly taught and written-about works of literature. The nadir comes in 1973 when Frank Kermode and John Hollander published their Oxford Anthology of English Literature . With over two thousand pages at their disposal in which to exemplify and comment on the notable poetry and prose produced in the British Isles from '1800 to the Present', not one page is devoted to Stevenson - in the whole closely-printed two thousand pages, Stevenson is not even mentioned once! Critical interest has been increasing slowly since then, in some countries more than others (cf. Ambrosini 1991), though there have been few single-volume studies when compared with the large numbers of books published every year on his contemporaries James and Conrad. Stevenson, some might say, has been fortunate to escape such attention. Reading this Mozartian and mercurial writer remains for many as for Borges (1979), despite critical neglect, quite simply 'a form of happiness'.

Copyright 1997 Richard Dury. Used by permission from the author.

A Brief History of the California Dairy Industry

Cattle first entered California with the Spanish missionaries in the late 1700’s. Milk and cheese were consumed at the Franciscan Missions from San Diego to the northernmost mission at Sonoma. At times milk may even have been an essential element of the missionaries’ diet. Father Junipero Serra wrote in 1772 that milk was their “chief subsistence” at Mission San Carlos in Carmel, and other records show that as early as 1776 women were making cheese and butter at Mission San Gabriel. But the first cattle in California were of Mexican stock, better suited for meat, hide and tallow than for milk. As these herds grew, a lucrative trade in tallow and hides developed. These goods left California by ship, and the Eastern merchants’ desire for these products in the 1830s contributed to the growth of seaport trading communities at San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Monterey. In the first few decades after the arrival of cattle in California, dairying was incidental to the more lucrative tallow and hide trades. But as the herds grew stronger and larger, dairying became more and more popular.

The first export of dairy products, however, probably happened much farther north than the centers of the tallow and hide trades. The Russians at Fort Ross on the Sonoma coast engaged in farming and dairying and shipped butter, cheese, and locally grown produce to fur-trapping settlements in Alaska between the years of 1812 and 1841. After the Russians left California in 1841, John Sutter of Sacramento acquired most of the materials at the fort, including the small dairy herd, and he operated small dairies on land at Mills Station (modern-day Rancho Cordova, in the Sacramento area) and Yuba City. But until the great influx of fortune seekers in the 1850’s following the discovery of gold in California, dairying in the state was still primarily a domestic activity, and not an economic one.

Many families who braved the overland trek from the eastern United States brought with them cows to provide milk for their children and infants. In the Mother Lode mining communities dairy cattle soon became valuable commodities. In many cases, while husbands were mining, wives managed the family’s livestock and found that they could sell fresh milk and butter at a favorable price. Dairy herds began appearing in the Sierra foothills to satisfy the Easterners’ desire for milk and butter; simple pleasures that they had left behind when they decided to seek their fortunes in the untamed gold fields. As California’s population swelled over succeeding decades, the demand for milk increased proportionally.

Fluid milk is more perishable than butter or cheese, so initially milk had to be produced within a short wagon ride of its consumers. Larger dairy herds first emerged close to California’s most populated areas to ensure that milk could be supplied to the rapidly growing urban populations. According to the 1860 census, there were 264,000 people in California and 104,000 cows, and the principal dairy regions that year were the San Francisco Bay area and the Sacramento Valley. Because of the great demand for milk in San Francisco, and because of the area’s good rainfall and natural pasturage, the Bay Area became the state’s first major dairy center.

In the late 1850’s dairies in Petaluma began shipping butter and cheese down the coast by ship to the San Francisco Bay area; however, this answered only a fraction of the demand at the time and the majority of dairy products were still being shipped from the East Coast. California’s cheese and butter industries saw dramatic growth in the second half of the century. In 1850 only 705 pounds of butter and 150 pounds of cheese were produced in California, but by 1880 those numbers had increased to 16 million pounds and 3.7 million pounds respectively.

Today milk is produced in every state in the United States, but since 1980 more than half of the total U.S. milk production has come from only five states: California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, and Pennsylvania. In 2000 California produced about twenty percent of the U.S. total, surpassing Wisconsin as the nation’s largest milk producer. Yet the total number of dairy operations in California declined steadily in the second half of the twentieth century and now the state has less than one-seventh the number of dairies as Wisconsin. The average size of California’s dairy herds, on the other hand, is about seven times the national average and almost nine times the Wisconsin average. In 2002 California produced 1.7 billion pounds of cheese, second only to Wisconsin, and it also led the nation in production of butter, nonfat dry milk, cottage cheese, and ice cream.

California’s success in dairying is due in large part to environmental factors. Its temperate climate mitigates the need to house dairy cattle in winter months, and also contributes to the production of high quality alfalfa. California’s geographic isolation, with the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountain ranges as obstacles to the transport of raw milk either east or west, necessitated the rapid development of in-state production and processing capacities. The state’s phenomenal population growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created steady demand for dairy products, which stimulated the development of storage, packaging, and delivery systems. But the rise of California’s dairy industry from humble beginnings to national prominence is also a story of technological innovation, and cooperation and organization by its dairymen.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, just as California’s population exploded and its demand for dairy products increased accordingly, several new technologies emerged to help jumpstart the state’s dairy industry. Mechanical cream separation, pasteurization, a reliable method of butterfat measurement and even the glass milk bottle were all developed between 1877 and 1892. Dairying in California shifted from a domestic activity to a major industry about 1890. Shortly before that time the centrifugal cream separator, a mechanical device for separating cream from raw milk in large batches, made its appearance in California, and the first commercial creamery in the state opened in Ferndale, California in 1899. The emergence of creameries created a division between production and manufacturing/marketing operations. Before 1900, California dairying was primarily an integrated endeavor, and included growing feed for the cows, producing the milk, skimming the cream, churning the butter and making the cheese all in one location—the dairy farm.

As the division of production and processing operations became the norm, other factors began reshaping the dairy industry as well. Dairy herd improvement associations aided the dairy farmer in selectively breeding cows that produced higher and higher volumes of milk, with higher levels of butterfat. Improvements in the treatment and diagnosis of bovine diseases, and improvements in milking machine technology in conjunction with newly improved herds saw production explode in the beginning of the twentieth century. In order to take advantage of increased demand for dairy products and to protect themselves financially, dairy farmers recognized a need to bargain collectively with processors or to do their own processing and distributing collectively. Farmer-owned dairy cooperatives developed in the first decades of the twentieth century to provide members an assured market for their milk and to help them negotiate prices, assemble, haul, manufacture, process, and market milk and dairy products to wholesalers. A dairy cooperative business is owned, operated, and controlled by the dairy farmers who benefit from its services.

Concerned about the marketing of their cream, dairy farmers in Tulare County, California formed the Dairyman’s Cooperative Creamery Association in 1910. The association operated its own creamery to manufacture butter, but left the marketing of their product to a Los Angeles firm. The following year the association merged with the nearby Riverdale Cooperative Creamery and they began marketing their own butter in Los Angeles under the “Challenge Butter” name. Today Challenge Butter is the largest-selling butter in the western United States. The Challenge Cream and Butter Association developed the first lab in California to sample and ensure butter quality, and their mechanical department developed the world’s first industrial metal churn, an innovation which quickly spread worldwide.

In 1919 California’s dairy industry faced a new threat. In January of that year, the State Legislature began considering two bills which would have had great impact on California’s dairymen and creamery operators. One would have permitted the manufacturers of margarine to color their product in imitation of butter; the other would have permitted the manufacture and distribution of a milk and coconut oil blend to remain unregulated. The dairy industry considered the first an affront to the integrity of their beloved butter and the latter to be a threat to the health of California’s children. That month the California Dairy Council was formed to go before the Legislature as the official representative of the industry. In addition to its legislative efforts, the California Dairy Council pledged to “promote human welfare and efficiency, by cooperative and united effort, in educating the public to appreciate the importance of the dairy cow and the value of dairy products as human food.” Many other such organizations were founded in California in the middle of the twentieth century with similar promotional goals, including the California Milk Advisory Board, the League of California Milk Producers, the California Creamery Operators Association, and the Dairy Institute of California.

One of these organizations, the California Dairy Industry Advisory Board was created by an act of the State Legislature in 1946 to provide substantial and dependable funding for dairy products research at the university level. In 1904 the California Livestock Breeder’s Association introduced a bill before the State Legislature calling for the purchase of at least 250 acres of the best agricultural land in the state to build a “University Farm” that would be operated by the regents of the University of California to advance the science of farming and dairying for the benefit of California. In 1905 an appointed commission selected 786 acres near Davisville (now Davis), California for the site. The following year the University occupied the site. Courses in dairying began in the fall of 1908, with twenty-five students studying butter making. The “University Farm Creamery” offered students the opportunity to see all the operations conducted in a commercial creamery from a practical point of view. The University Farm eventually became the University of California at Davis, one of the nation’s most prestigious universities for studying agriculture, medicine, and engineering. The California Dairy Industry Advisory Board now operates through the Dairy Industry Division of the University.

The rise of California’s dairy industry from humble beginnings to national and even international prominence is a story of technological innovation, legislative efforts, and masterful marketing, but most of all the cooperative spirit and organizational acumen of its dairymen.

Biographical Notes

The collection contains the papers of Herman Grabow (1898-1993), a cow tester, dairyman, radio personality, journalist and lobbyist for the California Grange. Trained as a cow tester at the University of Minnesota, Grabow came to California in 1923, where he found work as a tester in Ventura County. After losing his dairy in the midst of the Great Depression, Grabow came to San Joaquin County where he acquired a spread that was being sold for back taxes. With financial help from Roosevelt's New Deal, Grabow bought alfalfa seed and twenty cows. By the late 1930s he was well-established and had become Director of the local artificial insemination association. Beginning in the 1940’s, Grabow became a farmer’s advocate, working for forty years to advance the cause of the California dairy industry through legislation and promotion as a lobbyist for the California State Grange and as President of the California Dairymen, Inc. Grabow also published a regular column on dairy-related topics in the California Farmer during the 1960s and hosted a weekly radio program, "A Dairyman's Views on the News" on KTRB in Modesto, California from 1955 to 1960. He will be best remembered (among dairymen in particular) for his contributions to the passage of the California Milk Pooling Act (1969), which gave independent dairymen greater protection from milk price fluctuations.

The collection also contains material collected by Neil McPherson (1904-1983). A native of Scotland, McPherson was a dairy farmer, a regional representative for the American Jersey Cattle Club, and Industry Relations Director of the Dairy Council of California. His personal collection of dairy artifacts and documentary material, acquired through many years of visiting California’s historic dairy ranches and researching their histories, was the impetus for the development of the California Dairy Museum and Educational Foundation, where McPherson served as the founding and only curator from 1974 until his death 1983. In 1978, the American Association for State and Local History commended him for his “service and scholarship in the promotion and documentation of California’s dairy history,” and in 1983 The Dairyman magazine bestowed on him the title of California Dairy Industry Historian Laureate, and proclaimed that “Seldom has one man contributed so much to one industry’s rich history.”

Also featured prominently in this collection are materials relating to one of California’s pioneer dairy families, the Steele family. Cousins George (1825-1901) and Rensselaer (1808-1886) Steele immigrated to California’s Sonoma County from the East Coast in 1855, followed by George’s brothers Edgar in 1856 and Isaac in 1857. Initially farmers rather than dairymen, the family soon discovered a lucrative market for cheese and butter in San Francisco. In 1857 George and Isaac took possession of land at Punta del Reyes on the Marin County coast and established a prosperous dairy operation there. The Steeles produced a startling forty-five tons of butter in 1861. That year they added 15,000 acres to their dairy operations with the acquisition of land farther south at Año Nuevo on what was at that time the Santa Cruz County coast. In 1866 Edgar Steele moved from Marin County to San Luis Obispo County where he introduced dairy farming on an additional 45,000 acres, and by 1870 the Steele’s combined net worth was estimated to be about $1.5 million. Legal disputes over land titles eventually forced the sale of some of their acreage, but Isaac maintained the ranch at Año Nuevo until his death in 1903 and Isaac’s grandson William Steele continued operation there until his death in 1956. In 1967 William’s widow, Catherine B. Steele made a gift of the Green Oaks ranch to the County of San Mateo to be used for historical and educational purposes.

Chronology