Sarah Lim: A historic peek at the communities of Merced County

“Thriving Los Banos,” “Atwater, the Home of Merced Sweets,” “Le Grand, the Garden Spot” and “Planada, the City Beautiful” were just a few of the catchy phrases describing Merced communities at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

While the Merced County exhibits for this world’s fair marketed products from the San Joaquin Valley to the Sierra Nevada foothills, its promotional booklets provided vivid accounts of these cities and towns with descriptions of idyllic country living that offered immense opportunity and prosperity.

A hundred years later, you now have a chance to visit these portraits from the PPIE era in the “Promoting Merced: A County of Many Resources” exhibit at the Courthouse Museum. Here, at a glance, are some of the communities in 1915 and how they prospered as a result of convenient transportation, plentiful irrigated land and well-established social and educational institutions.

Merced’s growth and prosperity in that era is best illustrated in numbers. With a population of around 5,000, Merced was not only a political center of the county, but also the busiest transportation hub in the San Joaquin Valley. It was served by three railroads with a daily arrival and departure of 30 passenger and 14 freight trains. Merced had four newspapers and eight churches to meet the intellectual and spiritual needs of its residents and spent a total of $382,000 from 1907 to 1915 on the beautification and improvement of city streets and sidewalks.

Founded by cattle king and land baron Henry Miller, who brought the railroad to the West Side in 1890, Los Banos was the second-largest city in the county in 1915 with about 1,500 residents. Since the town served as the headquarters of the Miller and Lux enterprise, its growth was intertwined with the success of the corporation whose irrigation system accelerated the settlement of the West Side. The town benefited from the generosity of Miller, who often donated land for public use, provided loans on a simple personal guarantee and hosted an annual May Day picnic for the townspeople.

Like Los Banos, the prosperity of Dos Palos was also under the auspices of Miller and Lux as its land was irrigated by the same water system and its shipping point was served by the same railroad. The business district of town featured tree-lined streets and attractive brick buildings. Many of these were constructed after the 1911 fire, which destroyed approximately two city blocks. Among the many business establishments in the district, it was said that not a single saloon was found in town in 1915 because of the strong and active temperance movement.

Gustine was a town also started by Miller because of the railroad. Historically, there has been a misperception on the naming of the town, which was thought to immortalize Miller’s beloved daughter, Sarah Alice “Gussie,” who died tragically in an accident at the age of 8. It turns out the town was named in honor of Miller’s mother, Christine. In 1915, Gustine, with an estimated population of 400 and a bustling dairy industry, was facing the challenge of incorporation as a municipality when its residents demanded street lights, paved streets, city water, sewers, and law and order.

In 1915, if Gustine was the dairy center of Merced County, Atwater was the fruit center. The very first cannery in the county, Atwater Cannery, was built in 1905 by the Atwater fruit growers, who soon started canning peaches. Other products canned by the cannery in 1915 included tomatoes, grapes and sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes bestowed Atwater the title “The Home of Merced’s Sweets” as thousands of carloads of sweet potatoes were shipped from Atwater annually.

Similarly, Livingston’s fertile river soil was perfect for the “sweets,” and its leading cash crop was also sweet potatoes. According to a Merced Evening Sun reporter who visited a sweet potato farm in Livingston in March 1915, one hill of sweet potatoes weighed 27 1/2 pounds. This extraordinary production was nurtured not only by the disintegrated granite sandy loam from the Merced River, but also by the comprehensive irrigation system of the Crocker-Huffman Land and Water Co.

It was the sandy soil of Mariposa Creek that made Le Grand the “Garden Spot” of Merced County, with its leading agricultural products being grain and almonds. Le Grand was started by the Santa Fe Railroad, instead of the Southern Pacific Railroad, in 1896. However, the history of this area went as far back as the Gold Rush days, when John C. Frémont had a house built to secure his floating “Mariposa Grant,” and when pioneer settler James Cunningham started the Cunningham Ranch before Merced County was even organized.

In comparison to Le Grand, Planada is a much newer town by the Santa Fe tracks. Started in 1911 by J. Harvey McCarthy, the president of the Planada Development Co., Planada was going to be an example of beautiful architectural refinement with wide avenues radiating from the town center. Although Planada’s development was arrested by 1915 because of its financial troubles, what was already built – the Hotel Ciquantan, Bank of Planada and Broadway with electrolier street lights – had made Planada one of the showplaces of Merced County.

To learn more about the PPIE and to see historical images of our county’s cities and towns, come visit the museum’s “Promoting Merced” exhibit. Museum hours are 1 to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, and admission is free.

This story was originally published June 19, 2015 at 1:52 PM with the headline "Sarah Lim: A historic peek at the communities of Merced County."