Travel, Leisure & Fun for South Valley Adults
Travel, Leisure & Fun for South Valley Adults
Sorted by date Results 51 - 54 of 54
Long before the golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah in 1869, the people of Tulare County had their eyes on railroad transportation. Compared to buggies, iron horses offered easy travel, and compared to wagons, trains made hauling crops to market much quicker and more efficient. Trains meant travel convenience and economic prosperity to communities. The first serious effort in Tulare County to get railroad transportation seems to have been in 1861. A meeting of prominen...
The settlers of Mussel Slough had worked hard to make their farmland some of the best in Tulare County. They dug miles of irrigation ditches and built homes, barns and roads, turning arid ground into productive farmland. By any measure they should have been rewarded for their hard work, but one day in May, 1880 reward turned to pain as farmers died in a deadly shootout on ground they loved. How did this productive agricultural land become a killing field? In the 1870s the...
In 1852, nearly 25,000 square miles of land on the south end of Mariposa County was carved off creating Tulare County. The new county's boundaries stretched from the Los Angeles County line on the south, to the Mariposa line on the north. Its western edge was the coast range and on the east, the county line extended to what we now know as the Nevada state line. But the huge new county, about the size of West Virginia, was not destined to remain so for long. In 1856, the northe...
In 1850, when California became the 31st state in the union, it was isolated and far from the population centers to the east. Mail service was slow, and the steamships delivering precious cargo weren't always reliable. California was important to the country, so Washington was anxious to solve the problem. The federal government contracted with John Butterfield, the well-known entrepreneur and transportation pioneer, to operate what became the longest stagecoach mail line in...