A Walk Down Memory Lane (4): Wine tasting at the Inglenook Winery in 1978

My first and only visit to the beautiful Inglenook Winery in Napa Valley - now owned an operated by Francis Coppola - took place in 1978. The winery had been founded 99 years earlier by the legendary Finnish Sea Captain Gustave Ferdinand Niebaum (originally Nybom), who already in the late 19th century managed to create world class wines, winning gold medals at the Paris World Fair in 1889.

At the time of my visit the brand and the winery was owned by Heublein Inc. which unfortunately was to start selling cheaper wines produced elsewhere under the name Inglenook. Fortunately Francis Coppola was in 2011 able to acquire the brand and the winery, which again produces some of the best (organic) wines in Napa Valley.

A giant floating gold dredge in California in the early 1920s

An early 1920s "monster" gold dredge in California.

This is an early 1920s photograph of a large floating gold dredge in California (unfortonately I have no information about where in California). Monstrous machines like this one scooped up millions of tons of gravels - and a lot of gold - in the early 20th century. Several of these giants still exist in state-sponsored heritage areas.

Today technological advances have again made dredging popular. Small dredges allow a single person to access and process gravel banks that were inaccessible to the giant dredges of the early 1900s. 

Oranges in San Bernardino

Orange trees in San Bernardino in the early 1920s.

The first orange trees were brought to the San Bernardino valley in California in 1857. In the early 1920s there were already a few more of them .....

The National Orange Show website has this information about the history of oranges in the valley:

According to Ingersoll’s Century Annals of San Bernardino County, Anson Van Leuven brought the first orange trees, six in number, to San Bernardino Valley from San Gabriel Valley in 1857. In 1869, Lewis F. Cram was given the opportunity to buy 500 trees, but opted to purchase only enough rootstock to plant 1 ¾ acres. By 1887, he showed a net profit of $1,757 on this meager planting, over $1,100 net per acre–a good fortune in those days. In 1873, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent California’s two original orange trees to Eliza Tibbets. The tree’s seemingly endless oranges won awards at major expositions for their superior quality and taste. Ms. Tibbets soon had a booming business selling buds from her celebrated stock. By 1910, one year before the National Orange Show began, at least 100,000 acres in California were planted with the progeny of her trees and California navel orange sales had reached $200 million.

The economic importance of the oranges has been considerable for the area:

 For example, the 7,511 orange trees in 1872 had grown to 1,347,911 by 1900; the 15,000 boxes of oranges shipped in 1881 stood at 1,562,108 boxes by 1902-03; and the cash value of the orange crop had grown from $2,450 in 1860 to $1,634,783 in 1900. This introduction provided the setting and circumstances for the genesis of the National Orange Show, which has taken place every year since its inception in 1911, with the exception of four years during World War II.

Redwood logging in California in the early 20th century

In its 22 January 1905 issue, the Swedish weekly Hvar 8 Dag published an article on redwood logging in Humboldt County, California. The correspondent was somewhat ambivalent about what he saw in the redwood forests close to Eureka:

"Still there are vast forests left, but they are beginning to look severely damaged. Wherever the white man arrives, everything will soon be plundered. Now there are in many areas only half burned tree-stumps left, like graves in an enormous graveyard. It feels sad that the plundering to such a great degree has been done by Scandinavians. Most of the axes and saws are namely handled by Swedes and Finns."

"But the there is also a bright side. Yes, before the white man arrived, the trees were untouched, and you felt like entering a cathedral, pillars beside pillars, with organ music at the tops. The Indians were roaming, and the bears were padding without fear. But it was also wilderness everywhere. Now the land is cultivated, and the grain is standing high in the fields, and big herds of cattle are grazing. Thousands have got new homes; small towns have been built; railways have been been constructed; and then the primeval forest has again began to grow around the stumps."

"Pillars beside pillars - One felt like entering a cathedral".

"A beautiful specimen".

"The stumps are big enough to be used as a dance floor"

"How the trees are felled . This one was 23 feet in diameter."

"In cases of emergency you can use trunks as a stable."

A loading station.

A train carrying the  felled trees. 

"Planks 80 inches wide, without a crack, can be sawed."

PS

The Swedish correspondent was right about the redwood trees beginning to grow again:

Humboldt County is a densely forested, mountainous, and rural county situated along the Pacific coast in Northern California'srugged Coast (Mountain) Ranges. With nearly 1,500,000 acres (6,100 km²) of combined public and private forest in production, Humboldt County accounts for twenty percent of the total forest production for all of California.^[4] The county contains over forty percent of all remaining old growth Coast Redwood forests,^[5] the vast majority of which is protected or strictly conserved within dozens of national, state, and local forests and parks, totaling approximately 680,000 acres (over 1,000 square miles).^[6]

Read more about Humboldt County here