Unforgettable: Long Ago San Diego
San Diego may be unique in American history as the only city that changed locations. In 1871, the county seat moved three-and-a-half miles south, from Old to New Town. The change, literally, tore the city …
The Butterfield Stage line between Warner’s Ranch and Oak Grove was a narrow trail, dusty in summer, soggy in winter, rutted the year round. On its weekly treks, the stage always stopped at Deadman’s Hole, …
When he recalled his early years in San Diego, Herbert Hensley loved to tell about the time Jimmie Dillar saw the devil. In June 1890, as he explored the treeless mesa where Balboa Park stands …
In the great romantic legend of early San Diego, Josefa Carrillo falls in love with Henry Delano Fitch, a Massachusetts seaman. But Governor José Maria Echeandia forbids their marriage. So late one night, the star-crossed …
“What nameless tortures and miseries Americans suffer in foreign climes from despots,” complained the mountain man James Ohio Pattie. “They hate the victims of their oppression, as judging their hearts by their own.” One of …
“You are a devil!” the Mexican governor of California shouted at his American prisoner, a shaggy-haired fur trapper named James Ohio Pattie. Then, with the eye of “an enraged beast” and the “growl of a …
“The disk is a whale,” Howard Blakeslee, science editor at Associated Press, wrote to George Ellery Hale in 1934. “Every detail is on a scale so much larger than anything heretofore attempted.” “And if the …
Jack Belyea’s truck company became world famous for hauling gargantuan objects. In 1930, he and his brothers transported a 110-foot, 115-ton kiln 26 miles, then lowered it down a 20-percent grade with winches. They moved …
Rattler ManJoseph Beresford, son of a British Lord, fell in love with the gardener’s daughter. His father, whose lineage went back to James I, gave him an ultimatum: marry beneath your rank and lose your …
In 1904, young Elise Roberts and her family summered on Palomar Mountain. They left their Long Beach home in a roofed wagon, half packed with clothes and bedding, the other half filled with hay for …
One of the greatest casualties of the First World War was information. A devastating H1N1 influenza virus broke out early in 1918. Even though it originated, some now speculate, in Haskell County, Kansas, the virus …
She’d send, she proclaimed, “a message from above.” On Thursday, January 27, 1921, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson stood in the cockpit of a Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny.” Wearing a leather coat and cap, tinted goggles across …
Kid Smith was disgusted. For three rounds, the iron-jawed middleweight took the fight to Jimmy Meyers, but their bout ended in a draw. After a monster right almost cracked his ribs, Meyers steered clear, and …
A SPECULATION. John W. Collins had nothing left. One of San Diego’s most beloved citizens and president of California National Bank, Collins lost his wife and two children in a boating accident in 1890. Eighteen …
THE FALL. On September 1, 1890, while he was in San Francisco on business, John W. Collins’s wife Fannie, daughter Mary, son Johnny, and three others drowned in a boating accident off Point Loma. “Nothing …
THE RISE. In 1880, San Diego County had 4961 official residents. By early 1887, an estimated 30,000 newcomers had arrived, with thousands more on the way. Immigrants, health-seekers, and speculators came to buy property for …