Sarah Lim: Looking back at when all roads ran to Planada

It was no accident that William Jennings Bryan made a whistle stop in Planada when he barnstormed California for Woodrow Wilson’s presidential campaign in 1912.

Planada, the City Beautiful, was probably the most famous town in Merced County at that time. Planada was known for its rich farmland, a garden spot with its planned community. The founder of this young and famous city, J. Harvey McCarthy, was a close friend of Bryan. Thus, making a quick stop at Planada was perhaps a personal favor for his longtime friend and political supporter.

Who was J. Harvey McCarthy? How did he have so much political capital to pull Bryan to a small rural town in the heartland of California?

A San Diego native, McCarthy was a real estate developer in Los Angeles who was politically active in the state Democratic Party and who professionally saw the potential in Planada. He was going to make Planada a model city and farming community of the West by designing a carefully planned garden community for both newcomers and old settlers. But the truth was that McCarthy was a dreamer and the Planada project was just one of his get-rich-quick schemes.

The town now known as Planada was first called Geneva when the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railway established a station there in 1896 and then was named Whitton when the Santa Fe Railway took over the ownership in 1900. Planada (“the plain” in Spanish) was chosen as the name of the new town after Guy M. Rush of Los Angeles won the naming contest in 1910. McCarthy then organized the Planada Development Co. with himself as the president and incorporated the town of Planada on Jan. 11, 1911.

McCarthy decided to invest in this isolated farming community because he believed in location, location, location; that is, all roads led to Planada. Planada was surrounded with the richest agricultural land and situated in the heart of the state, which earned it the title of the “cream of California.”

As a central stopping point for the Santa Fe Railway, Planada was just 9 miles east of Merced, the county seat, as well as a prosperous tourist and commercial center. To the northeast of Planada were the rich mining towns nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Serving as a junction of the Merced to Mariposa road (the original portion of Highway 140 that was defined in 1909), Planada was an automobile stop on the way to Yosemite Valley and its Mariposa Big Trees.

Just a few miles south of Planada, it was said oil fields were discovered. Although there was no substantial evidence for this claim other than the incorporation of Oil Canon Oil Co. in Dos Palos in April 1910, the so-called oil boom in the Valley must be one of the things that attracted McCarthy’s investment in Planada.

Because of its location as a transportation hub and potential as a business center, McCarthy proclaimed that Planada was a “city of destiny” and viewed building Planada as building his own monument. He said “I intend Planada, the ‘City Beautiful,’ shall stand as an enduring testimony of my ideas and my ability as a city builder.”

To carry out his ideas, he enlisted help from well-known landscape architect Wilbur David Cook of Los Angeles, who at the time was working on the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in Balboa Park, San Diego. Cook followed McCarthy’s vision of a clean, orderly and attractive town by unconventionally making the railroad station the focal point of traffic and the entrance to the town. Hence, three beautifully landscaped main streets would radiate from the station plaza. The town would possess many unique features such as a temperance business district, gardenlike residential quarters and pedestrian-friendly streets with electroliers.

McCarthy was a tireless promoter of the Planada project. Traveling between Los Angeles and Planada, he often brought hundreds of investors and spent very large sums of money in developing the infrastructure of the town. By 1912, boom town Planada had a bank, hotel, school, library, church, newspaper, water system and chamber of commerce, plus several concrete store buildings with a variety of businesses. During its one-year anniversary, an estimated 10,000 visitors attended the two-day celebration in June, although the town had a population of several hundreds.

With all this fanfare and spending, the return on the investment fell far too short.

McCarthy needed more capital for his project because the construction and furnishing of the Hotel Ciquatan alone cost $50,000. He reorganized the Planada Development Co. into the Planada Development Corp., in which the Los Angeles Investment Co. now owned all of Planada’s holdings.

Because of politics within the Los Angeles Investment Co., McCarthy was forced to resign as president of the newly formed Planada Development Corp. He then tried to unload all his Planada shares and got into an ugly battle with the investment company’s board, headed by Charles A. Elder.

As McCarthy gave up building Planada, many of its settlers, such as M.M. Reiman and W.B. Pugh, picked up the pieces and held the community together. Today, Planada is a community that is working hard to develop the full potential of this valley town where different roads of our county cross.

For more history about Planada and Merced County, please visit the Courthouse Museum. Now on display is a traveling exhibit, “Gold Fever! The Untold Stories of the California Gold Rush.”

This story was originally published April 1, 2016 at 12:22 PM with the headline "Sarah Lim: Looking back at when all roads ran to Planada."