"Read an autobiography about a woman (living or dead) who influenced history in your country. Share five things that you learned on The Farmgirl Connection."
For the intermediate level of Her-Story, I read Pioneer Ranch Life in Orange: A Victorian Woman in Southern California, by Mary Teegarden Clark. It is set a few miles south of Los Angeles and covers the time period of 1875-1887, which is just a year before my own historic house was built in the same area.
Here are 5 6! things I found intriguing to share with my fellow Farmgirl sisters:
1. I found it more helpful to think of her and her family as "pioneers" of large-scale absentee agriculture of an orange grove rather than as more of the subsistence farming I had expected from the Laura Ingalls Wilder precedent. The train system had extended far enough that they could grow citrus in quantity and ship it to favorable markets in the Midwest. A lot of the immigration appeal of this area was for a healthier climate, with this family moving for some relief of the husband's chronic condition contracted patrolling a malarial area of the Mississippi during the Civil War. He dies in a typhoid epidemic 7 years in, but Mary continues to ranch for 5 more years before returning to her family in Indiana and managing the estate remotely.
2. Water availability has been and continues to be an issue for this part of California. Two years into their stay, Mary's family organized a cooperative called Santa Ana Valley Irrigation Company. They had an 18% stake which would have set them back about $310K in modern times ($10K then). It appears SAVI was a canal from the Santa Ana River with gates in trenches running to participating farms. Operators opened these gates for an agreed amount period of time to flood the farmer's groves. The company continued to operate until the 1970's. It is interesting to consider how we now sometimes criticize farmers upstream in the Central Valley for irrigating their crops in a similar way. It also explains why California chose sturdy perennials like orchards which could be flood-irrigated and which yielded produce which did no spoil quickly rather than tender annuals which needed ongoing access to irrigation and much faster transportation methods to market.
3. For the first 5 years or so of their stay, farmers were selling their produce directly into markets like San Francisco. However, flooded markets and falling prices inspired the Clarks to differentiate their premium product with branded tissue paper wrappers and ship to Chicago. They had a clever contingency of sending care packages to friends and family in the same market as a counterpoint on the condition of the produce if their distribution intermediaries claimed it had spoiled in transit. During their tenure, fruit harvesting and shipping collectives began to form and fruit began to be purchased on the tree. This simplified distribution for farmers and buffered them from some market pricing exposure, but also made them hosts to the families of the intermediaries responsible for harvest and shipment.
4. She focuses a surprising amount of her account on her excursions. Some of her haunts are places we still go to camp like the Irvine Regional park and Laguna Beach (although now they are not spur of the moment, but require reservations 6 months in advance). I was amused to learn she considered the mission at San Juan Capistrano a day trip; it is still considered a day trip but not because of the speed of stage coaches but because the degree of highway traffic limits vehicles to about the speed of stage coaches. I really wanted to take a train and follow her footsteps to the hotel in Yosemite that had a giant sequoia growing through the parlor but evidently the 1856 Wawona ('big tree') Hotel is closed indefinitely for roof (and more) repair and no longer has the sequoia parlor feature. One regret she mentioned that I have added to the to-do list is that she didn't keep a guest book when she was hosting guests. I loved paging through the entries of one in Salem, OR airbnb to see what other visitors had gotten up to but here, most of the overnighters are carpenter grandparents because our guest rooms are construction zones. Do y'all keep guest books?
5. I'd like to go back and take closer notes on the foods they grew and prepared for home use to figure out what would be "low lift" to cultivate for a lower ecofootprint lifestyle. She mentions at points that ham and mutton were considered luxuries but later includes bacon as a camping provision. She bakes bread, biscuits mentions serving lamb, trout, canned salmon, chicken, eggs, tomatoes, melons, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, peaches, apricots, nectarine, pear, apple, plum, walnuts, bananas, figs, olives, loquat, persimmons, potatoes, peas, coffee, almond cake, doughnuts, pumpkin pie, dried fruit, raisins, butter, and jam. I am preparing venison as for the "food challenge table" at a Native American history festival this Wednesday and took her tip on page 83 to stew it with onions, potatoes, and a dash of chili pepper.
6. (extra credit) It was fascinating to see that even this far back, LA was a multicultural melting pot. There were indigenous Mexican and Chinese laborers, Hispanic original ranchers, Mexican banditos, and even an encounter with gypsies of European extraction. While Mary's views on work ethics and cultural practices of these different groups might not pass the PC test today, I thought it was fascinating that she still felt it constructive for her children to be polyglots, learning English, German (Pennsylvania Dutch heritage), and Spanish with an foray into French when instruction was available.
