With the purchase of the first land, the Rancho San Justo, Flint, Bixby
& Co., were definitely located, and for forty years San Juan Bautista
was their headquarters. After father’s death the firm was dissolved and
the properties separated, the Flints retaining the lands in the north
and the Bixby heirs those in Southern California.
As time went on the flocks increased beyond the capacity of the
original ranch to support them, and since the wool business was
profitable, other land was bought. As a little girl at San Justo I used
to hear my father tell of necessary trips over to the “Worry-Worry”
ranch. In later years I discovered that he was speaking of the
Huero-Huero. Another of the ranches in Central California was the San
Joaquin.
In 1866 the firm bought in Los Angeles county the Ranchos Los Cerritos,
and a little later took a part interest in the adjoining Los Alamitos.
They held a half interest in the western part of the Palos Verdes,
the seventeen thousand acres, which since its sale has figured so
prominently in real estate literature. Flint, Bixby & Co. were also
half owners of the great San Joaquin Ranch in Orange Co. with James
Irvine, to whom they sold their interest in the late seventies. They
owned these great tracts of land when there were so few people in
Southern California, that it was possible to utilize them for grazing
purposes. When settlers came in the lands were sold in comparatively
large parcels to men who had sufficient capital to subdivide and retail
them as small farms or town lots.
Flint, Bixby & Co. were primarily stock raisers, but they branched out
into a number of other lines.
Beginning in 1869 they operated the Coast Line Stage Co., which carried
passengers, Wells Fargo express and mails between San Francisco, Los
Angeles and San Diego, until 1877, when the Southern Pacific completed
a line between the first two cities. The stage time between San
Francisco and Los Angeles was sixty-six hours.
The making of beet sugar interested them and they, with others,
organized and built at Alvarado, Alameda Co., the first successful
sugar factory not only in California but in the United States. The
initial run was in 1870. Flint, Bixby & Co. transferred their interest
to a second factory in Soquel, Santa Cruz Co. This new industry
suffered from drought, insect pests, price cutting by competing cane
sugar interests and the fact that at that time the process of making
sugar from beets had not been developed to the point it now is, and
the product was not popular. In 1880 the Soquel factory was closed.
Father, however, retained a belief in the ultimate practicability of
sugar-making in California, and his last business undertaking was an
attempt to re-establish it on the Cerritos, near Long Beach. It was
in 1896, the year of the free-silver agitation, and he was unable to
finance a sugar factory himself, but he induced the Clark interests to
put one up on adjoining territory at Los Alamitos, thus obtaining a
market for future beet crops.
It is hard now-a-days to visualize conditions in California during
the fifties outside of San Francisco or the mining camps. The vast
stretches of open valley and hill land were practically uninhabited,
and were infested with wild beasts, and sometimes, wilder men. A very
vivid impression of this may be obtained by anyone fortunate enough to
read an account of “A Dangerous Journey From San Francisco to San Luis
Obispo” given by J. Ross Browne in his book called _Crusoe’s Island_.
We spent one of his nights in the old inn at San Juan, where the young
Maine stockmen were so soon to settle.
The venture of bringing the sheep across the plains having proved good
and a wide estate having been acquired the young men turned their
thoughts to home-building, which is in a primary way, state building.
Not content with the women the west at that time afforded, each in his
turn, like Jacob of old, made a pilgrimage back to the land from which
he came in search of a wife of his own people; but, unlike the old
patriarch, it did not take long to find the bride willing to return to
that far-off, glamorous California. Benjamin Flint’s wife was Caroline
Getchell and Dr. Flint’s was Mary Mitchell, both girls from their home
town of Anson. Father married Sarah Hathaway of Bloomfield, now a part
of Skowhegan.
The way of it was this. Soon after his return to Norridgewock, he,
with many others, was a guest at the annual church party at the home
of Mr. Hathaway, the minister of the parish at Bloomfield. He had been
told that he would find “a passel” of pretty girls there, and was
advised that Margaret, the second, was especially beautiful. That was
a fateful party! Out of it came the destiny of all the five daughters,
for four of them married Bixbys and the fifth became foster mother to
three of us children.
It was not the recommended, witty, black-eyed Margaret, however, who
won the love of Llewellyn, but the oldest girl, tall, blue-eyed Sarah,
whose name I bear. She captured his heart, and soon left Maine to go
with him the long way, by Panama, to the distant ranch of San Juan.
What more natural than when, after a time, brother Jotham returned to
his home, he should go over to the neighboring parsonage to bear the
greetings of his sister-in-law, Sarah, to her family? It is told that,
when upon this errand he met at the gate the lovely Margaret, he lost
his heart completely. He never regained it. When he was eighty he told
me emphatically that his wife not only had been the most beautiful
woman in California, but that she still was.
A few months after this meeting Margaret traveled with friends across
the Isthmus, and up the coast to San Francisco, there to be met by
her sister and taken to San Justo to await her marriage day, which
came shortly. She was married in her new home in old San Juan by the
minister, Dr. Edwards, who had recently been a missionary among the
Choctaw Indians. A letter describing the ceremony tells of the usual
preparations, the making of bride’s cake and wedding cake, of putting
the finishing touches on the little house, of the arranging of the
wedding veil and the gathering in the early evening of the group of
friends and relatives, including three little folks that had already
come into the different families.
The home began immediately, and a few days later a call at the house
discovered the bride happy in her house work and doing the first family
washing.
This wedding ceremony was the first that Dr. Edwards had ever performed
for white people, but it is reported to have been so well done that no
one would have guessed inexperience. It is to be hoped that his later
services in this line were as successful as this one. He was still the
minister in San Juan when I was a child and he was wont to entertain me
by repeating the Lord’s prayer in Choctaw.
The same letter which reports the marriage speaks of the new ranch
house that was building and of the hope that it would be ready for
occupancy in about two months, which dates the building for me,--early
in 1863.
Each of the cousins when he married had brought his wife back to the
San Justo, where they occupied in common a comparatively small house,
which in my childhood was used for the hired men. But children were
coming and a larger home was necessary. The men were intimate and
congenial, and dreamed of an enlargement and continuation of their
associated lives; the income was ample so they proceeded to build them
a great house, a communal house, a staunch Maine house, white-painted
and green-shuttered, as solid and true today as sixty years ago,--but,
alas, now idle. This was the house in which I was born.
They planted the garden about it and the orchard, and made below it the
pond where the hills could look to see if their trees were on straight.
In winter time those hills were as green as any of Maine in June, but
in our rainless summer they were soft tan or gold against the cobalt
sky.
To accommodate three families there were three apartments, each
with sitting-room, bedroom and bath, and in addition, for the use
of the whole group, a common parlor, large office, dining room and
kitchen, together with numerous guest rooms in the upper story.
Every convenience of the period was included,--ample closets, modern
plumbing, sufficient fire-places.
The plan for housekeeping in this large establishment was for each
wife in turn to take charge for a month. It was no small undertaking
to provide for the household, with the growing flocks of children and
the frequent addition of visiting sisters, cousins, or aunts. The
women involved, being individuals, had differing capacities and ideas,
and each had the desire for a home managed according to her own idea.
Imagine sitting down to every meal with six parents, twelve children
and half a dozen guests! Inevitably the communal plan could not but
fail to be altogether ideal. For a wonder it held together in a fashion
for fifteen years, but there were many trips to San Francisco to
relieve the strain, or long visits of mothers and children in Maine,
that I guess might not have been so frequent or of so long duration if
there had been individual homes for the cousin-partners. Ultimately the
Ben Flints took up a permanent residence in Oakland and we moved to Los
Angeles, leaving the Dr. Flints on the ranch.