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Julian City and Cuyamaca Country: A History and Guide to the Past and Present
This work covers San Diego County's only gold rush town, from its beginning in 1869 to the contemporary scene. It also tells the history of the neighboring Cuyamaca Mountain area from prehistoric Indians through the Mexican and early American periods to modern times. Gold was no sooner discovered and mines going when in 1870, the owners of the neighboring Cuyamaca Mexican land grant filed to have the miners removed from their land holdings claiming the mines were actually part of their grant land. This book covers the work that Judge Benjamin Hayes did to save the miners from being swindled off their land. It tells about town fathers, former Georgia farmers Mike Julian and Drew Bailey and their Civil War records. Also the creation and details of construction of San Diego's answer to the Roman Aqueduct, the Cuyamaca Flume. Itcarried water 36 miles, from the mountains to La Mesa and San Diego from 1889 until 1919. The story is also told about those mountain men's fight to wrest the San Diego County seat from the city, and more.
252 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1992
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June 22, 2023
Reading this after having grown up in Julian was absolutely fascinating. It gave me many more insights and meaning of the social forces that have shaped the town today and how they have come to influence my own identity as someone from Julian.
LeMenager presents this history as a chronological progression from the time when the Kumeyaay lived in Cuyamaca before European occupation to Julian's founding in 1870, and also covers the town's important economic transition from gold mining to agriculture. I also found it interesting that you can just perceive distant hints of the beginning of the subsequent transition from the agrarian economy to the now hegemonic tourism based economy which conditions much of local life today. In addition to this, while there have been other very significant developments in the area since the writing of this book (e.g. the 2003 Cedar Fire), the history he covers still reflects most of the area's heritage.
My main critique of the book is that there are some points in LeMenager's recounting where the record becomes hazy and he makes some interpretations of events that I don't fully agree with. The primary example of this is that fact that he doesn't seem to consider that the frequently cited 1870 census data very likely underrepresents the population of the area significantly due to the extreme remoteness of it during that period and the fact that the prospectors and miners of the time would have been widely scattered throughout the mountains and not concentrated in the main encampment which was the focus of the census taker. Nonetheless I'm still grateful that LeManager has provided an easy to read, concise, and accessible account of the history of my home town and its surroundings.
LeMenager presents this history as a chronological progression from the time when the Kumeyaay lived in Cuyamaca before European occupation to Julian's founding in 1870, and also covers the town's important economic transition from gold mining to agriculture. I also found it interesting that you can just perceive distant hints of the beginning of the subsequent transition from the agrarian economy to the now hegemonic tourism based economy which conditions much of local life today. In addition to this, while there have been other very significant developments in the area since the writing of this book (e.g. the 2003 Cedar Fire), the history he covers still reflects most of the area's heritage.
My main critique of the book is that there are some points in LeMenager's recounting where the record becomes hazy and he makes some interpretations of events that I don't fully agree with. The primary example of this is that fact that he doesn't seem to consider that the frequently cited 1870 census data very likely underrepresents the population of the area significantly due to the extreme remoteness of it during that period and the fact that the prospectors and miners of the time would have been widely scattered throughout the mountains and not concentrated in the main encampment which was the focus of the census taker. Nonetheless I'm still grateful that LeManager has provided an easy to read, concise, and accessible account of the history of my home town and its surroundings.
Displaying 1 of 1 review