LeBaron: What would a railroad have done for Lake County?
Somewhere, in a long-ago history class, a professor illustrated a point about the progression of civilization by pointing out that the Irish were about 100 years behind the English and most European countries economically because, he said, the Romans had never conquered Ireland. An important step in the advance of history had been skipped.
I thought about that bit of academic wisdom in recent weeks when several people, commenting on the devastation caused by the Lake County fires, said things like “Poor old Lake County, just can’t catch a break.”
Sorrowful observations like that are based on statistics, to be sure. Lake is the sixth from the bottom of California’s 58 counties in per-capita income, the median being less than $40,000 on most statistical charts. The average cost of a home is about $225,000, so we understand our fellow workers who make the long commute down the mountain.
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LAKE BECAME a county in 1861, 11 years after Sonoma County was organized. It was carved out of the corners of Napa, Mendocino and Colusa counties. It already had a rugged history. The first two white settlers in the area - one named Kelsey - brutalized the Pomo Indians and were killed in retaliation. Friends and relatives formed a kind of posse, known as the Napa Raiders, and went on an Indian-killing rampage. They were arrested and brought to trial in a case, which had the distinction, in 1850, of being Case No. 1 on the docket of the new California State Supreme Court. Nonetheless, justice was avoided. The high court sent the case back to the Sonoma Justice Court, where the defendants were allowed to make bail and left the state.
In Sonoma County, truth be told, most of us don’t pay a lot of attention to Lake County. Too much of the “everyday” news that we read is not positive - crime, car crashes, gnat infestations and mercury in Clear Lake.
We visit the hot springs. Some own weekend homes. We drive over the mountain for a fair-weather shortcut to the Sacramento Valley and I-5. Some of us know that Clear Lake is the largest freshwater lake entirely in California, since we share Tahoe with Nevada. Others simply know it as the best damn bass fishing lake in the state.
It’s obvious that mountain beauty, starry nights and an astonishing array of hot springs offer a potential that has never been truly realized.
Maybe it isn’t because Lake County “can’t catch a break.” It may be that it couldn’t catch a train.
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LAKE COUNTY is like the Ireland of that old lesson. It has missed a major step in the historical progression. Not Romans, of course, but a railroad.
Lake County, you see, is the only county in California that was never served by a railroad.
It never had those 40 or 50 years of “modern” transportation around the turn of the 20th century that hauled crops to market, brought tourists to see what wonders there were, raised real estate prices and pulled in investors. Such things were expected, but never happened.
Consider, if you will, this excerpt from a directory of Napa, Lake, Sonoma and Mendocino Counties published in 1874:
“Lake County is, even now, thinly populated. There are several reasons for this. First, because the advantage of its climate and the richness of its soil are not generally known abroad; second, the means of communication between it and adjoining counties is by mountain roads and axle.
“It is proposed to extend the Napa Valley Railroad from Calistoga to Lake County. … The day is near at hand when the shrill whistle of the locomotive will be heard on the shores of Clear Lake. Then a great future will dawn for Lake County; … her towns will become beautiful cities and her mines bring forth the hidden treasures of the earth.”
That never happened. Routes were proposed from every direction. Stock was offered. Documents were signed. By 1911, one of Lakeport’s leading citizens, Judge T.B. Bond, would tell historian Aurelius Carpenter that he had, in his time, “subscribed a million dollars for railroads and was never called upon to pay one cent.”
These were what were known as “paper railroads,” each with a prospectus, a map of the route and great plans. Lake County was a destination for 22 paper railroads. None was ever built. The closest was a railroad from Yolo County, which got no farther than Rumsey, at the edge of the Sacramento Valley, before it was abandoned.
There were routes chosen from Ukiah, from Potter Valley, from Hopland, from Napa by way of not only Calistoga but Pope Valley, an electric line from the Russian River following the Pieta Creek canyon.
The last was the most promising: The Highland Pacific Line offered a route from Santa Rosa through Alexander Valley to Preston, then up the mountain and down to Lakeport. That failed plan was the last gasp.
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