Just as in the nation at large, California’s farming sector in the last three decades of the nineteenth century moved increasingly from subsistence to commercial tilling. What distinguished the state’s agricultural output in this era was the preeminence attained with respect to the cultivation of wheat, citrus and deciduous fruits, raisins, nuts, viticulture (grape growing), and sugar beets.
Nature, technology, and the built environment coalesced to foster California’s wheat production, which, according to the 1870 census, surpassed gold as the state’s most valuable commodity. In the ensuing decade wheat farming overtook ranching as the dominant form of California agriculture. The Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys were home to the sufficient rainfall, fertile soil, and heavy machinery that produced a wheat bonanza in the late 1800s. California’s lead in inventing and utilizing steam-powered tractors and combines assuredly benefited the state’s wheat growers. The building of rail lines connecting the Central Valley to San Francisco’s waterfront enabled farmers to get their crops from distant fields onto waiting ships that would transport the grain to markets across the Pacific and elsewhere.
Though not representative of most growers, a few “wheat barons” and finance-shipping moguls conducted business on a vast scale. Hugh Glenn, for example, owned 66,000 acres of Sacramento Valley farmland on which he employed a thousand workers. Investing $300,000 in machinery, Glenn produced a million bushels of wheat a year by 1880. Isaac Friedlander facilitated the credit arrangements and sale of bulk grain cargoes by working with burlap sack companies, banks, warehouses, and shippers, ensuring that harvested wheat would reach the intended overseas markets.
While the bonanza lasted, both the quality and quantity of the state’s wheat were impressive. Grower John Bidwell’s wheat won the gold medal at the 1878 Paris International Exposition, meaning that his grain was judged the finest in the world. In 1889 California, with some 3 million acres of wheat fields, was the nation’s second-largest producer of the staple crop. Such intensive and extensive cultivation, however, exhausted the soil. Simultaneously, competition arose from growers in the Mississippi Valley, Argentina, Russia, and Australia - many of whom imported techniques and machinery developed in California. Prices dropped and wheat cultivation gave way to a citrus fruit bonanza.
Spanish missionaries had introduced citrus orchards into Alta California to combat scurvy among crewmen aboard vessels plying coastal waters. Citrus crops included oranges, lemons, grapefruit, tangerines, and limes. Like so many other commodities connecting California to the Pacific world, the Far East - especially China - had been home to oranges and lemons. These fruits had been part of a much larger and ongoing Pacific exchange between Asia and the Americas dating back to the beginnings of the Manila galleon trade in the latter 1500s (see Chapter 2). While the yield from orange trees reduced the incidence of seagoing scurvy, the missions’ Valencia variety did not meet the taste test for many. Still, gold rush miners opted for scurvy prevention over flavor. They thereby ensured a market for the seedy and often tart Valencias harvested from the orchards of growers like William Wolfskill, Los Angeles’ mid-nineteenth-century pioneer citrus planter. In the late 1800s California planters imported eucalyptus trees from Australia, another article in the ongoing Pacific exchange, to serve as windbreaks for the proliferating orange groves in the Southland.
More than any other citrus crop, oranges captured statewide acreage and national markets. Sometimes referred to as “fruit of golden hue” by advertisers, the orange emerged as California’s signature crop. America’s nineteenth-century Orange Empire, says scholar Douglas Sackman, was centered in the Los Angeles Basin. Within this 50-mile north-south swath, orange production increased dramatically from about 1870 to the early twentieth century and beyond. In 1870 only 30,000 orange trees were growing in the state, mainly in this region. Twenty years later that figure had jumped to 1.1 million trees. In 1893 more than 70 million California oranges were sold nationwide, bringing in receipts totaling $32
Figure 7.1 A Pomona-like goddess holding California oranges looks toward a ship in port. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Million. By the early 1900s, southern California grew two-thirds of America’s oranges and at least 90 percent of its lemons.
A number of factors made this remarkable growth possible. The introduction of sweet, seedless navel oranges, facilitated by the replanting of cuttings from Bahia, Brazil, in Riverside, California, in 1873, resulted in a year-round harvesting cycle. Valencias ripened in summer, and Brazilian (renamed Washington) navels did so in winter. Refrigerated railroad cars, in use by the 1880s, reduced spoilage of these perishable cargoes en route to national and global markets. The creation of the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange in 1905, later rebranded as “Sunkist,” removed middlemen from the business and provided growers with cost-sharing technologies, packing, advertising, and marketing operations. Similar agricul-
Tural cooperatives were formed by producers of seasonal fruits (peaches, apricots, and plums), nuts, raisins, poultry, and dairy products. Criticized as communistic by independent contractors who recoiled at the idea of nonprofit cooperatives, the fruit exchange was replicated by growers across the Pacific in Australia and elsewhere.
Little of the wealth enjoyed by the genteel growers living on Pasadena’s “millionaire’s row,” later called Orange Grove Avenue, fell into the pockets of the fruit pickers. Generally, orchard workers were ethnically non-white males and came from throughout the Pacific Basin - China, Japan, Mexico, and the Philippines. They stood atop tall ladders, often harvesting oranges in sizzling temperatures and receiving a small wage calculated on the quantity of fruit a man picked. At most, pickers made a few dollars a day. From the 1870s to the 1890s, the Chinese predominated in the fields largely because orchard owners learned that rough treatment of oranges caused spoilage. The Chinese were thought to be the most skillful fruit handlers, and growers saw them as particularly suited by nature to withstand the harsh conditions and low pay. According to one planter, “the short-legged, short-backed Asiatic performs all of the stoop-over-work, the squat work. He stands any temperature.” In the packing houses, where the washed and labeled fruit was wrapped in paper and placed in wooden crates for shipment, women performed the labor. Because they were paid by the box, or piece-rate, their hands flew practically without interruption. A 1914 report prepared by UC Berkeley economics Professor Carlton Parker, on conditions in the packing houses, noted: “By closing time the girls are pale and worn looking, almost wilting before one’s eyes as the days drag along, leaning forward on their boxes for an occasional rest.”
Prune plums, a deciduous fruit, were grown in abundance by Pacific-crossing Chinese and then Japanese workers in the Santa Clara Valley beginning in the late 1800s. In 1891 the valley’s output reached 22 million pounds. By the early decades of the twentieth century, Santa Clara County produced half of the world’s supply of prunes. With the opening of the Panama Canal in 1915, millions of cases of canned prunes and other California fruits were shipped across the Pacific and through the new waterway to markets along the Atlantic seaboard and elsewhere overseas.
California viticulture, like other agricultural enterprises, can be traced to the Franciscan padres. Their unremarkable sacramental libation was greatly surpassed in quality when a French commercial winemaker, Luis Vignes, closed his distillery business in Hawai’i and immigrated to California in 1831, settling in Los Angeles. A master vintner, he brought vine cuttings from France that he replanted on his southern California property. Twenty years later Hungarian immigrant Agoston Haraszthy grew Zinfandel grapes at his Sonoma vineyard. Within a decade French vintners Etienne Thee and Charles Lefranc were plying their trade in Los Gatos, and Charles Krug was operating a Napa Valley winery. Meanwhile, in what came to be known as Anaheim, a group of Germans established a wine-producing colony sustained by their planting of 400,000 grapevines. In later decades vineyards proliferated from Sonoma County in the north to Cucamonga in the south. By 1870 California ranked first among America’s wine-producing states, responsible for more than half of the nation’s output.
While not as stately as a wheat stalk, or as picturesque as a golden orange, or as sensuous as a wine grape, the lowly sugar beet nevertheless played an important role in late nineteenth-century California agriculture. Moreover, beet sugar magnates Claus Spreckels and the
Oxnard brothers (Robert and Henry) became influential businessmen in the state and the western region. After having liquidated his extensive Hawaiian cane sugar holdings, German-born Spreckels immigrated to California in 1888, underscoring the close relationship between Hawai’i and the Golden State. In San Francisco he entered the recently established beet sugar business. Sometimes called the “Sugar Emperor,” he dominated the market for the sweet substance west of the Missouri River before partnering with the Oxnard brothers in the 1890s. Spreckels’s Watsonville factory in Santa Cruz County was the largest of its kind in the United States before 1900, by which time California led the nation in the profitable beet sugar enterprise.
Despite Spreckels’s and the Oxnards’ dominance of the western sugar market, the Hawaiian-based maritime shipping firm of Castle & Cooke sent cargoes of island-grown cane sugar to their California and Hawaiian Sugar Refining Company factory in Crockett, California. The C and H brand, as it is familiarly known, has been a staple on grocers’ shelves in California and beyond since the company’s founding in 1905. Both the shipping firm and the sugar-refining company illustrate California’s business ties to the Pacific Basin.
World History
