NORTHERN CALIFORNIA – This week in history features the creation of an employment program that strove to relieve the country of a great depression and an earth-shattering disaster that threatened to forever change an American city.
April 17, 1933
Like the rest of the nation, Lake County was hit hard during the Great Depression.
Those who lived through that time and related their experiences afterwards remember lean years, with the threat of losing a farm to the bank always present.
In such a rural area with virtually no industry to speak of beyond agriculture and a dwindling number of mines, the loss of even a few jobs was felt keenly in Lake County in the 1930s.
One of the saving graces during this time was the multitude of government support that helped to prop up the local economy.
On this day in 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt opened the first Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, camps in the nation in Luray, Virginia.
A program that targeted young men under the age of 25, the CCC employed them in construction jobs across the nation as the program quickly spread outwards from Virginia.
The construction of highways and the maintenance on preexisting roads provided a steady source of income for those lucky enough to land such a job. Each month the young men would receive a paycheck of $35, of which at least $25 had to be sent back home to their families.
Those young men lucky enough to land a CCC job in Lake County helped infuse the local economy with much needed money.
The CCC had a camp stationed at the Mendocino National Forest outside of Upper Lake and employed locals in such projects as road construction.
The stone-lined stretch of Highway 20 south of Lucerne along Clear Lake still stands as testament to these CCC crews and the work they performed.
A CCC job wasn’t always the difference between going hungry one month and having enough to eat, sometimes it was simply a way of making a little extra cash for a young man.
This, at least, is how Lamar Enderlin remembered his experience working at the CCC camp in Willits in the mid-1930s.
In a 1980 interview with the Lake County Historical Society, Mr. Enderlin fondly remembered that the $1 a day wage that the CCC paid “was a lot of money” – money that he used to pay off bills in Lake County so he could start fresh in San Francisco.
By 1939, Lake County’s economy was being annually infused with $50,000 to $75,000 of federal money through another federal program, the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, which each year employed about 65 locals (Source: Lake County Bee, August 3, 1939. Lake County Bee, August 10, 1939).
One of the more long-lasting legacies of the WPA in Lake County was the construction of the county’s first museum building, which was funded in part by the administration.
All of these federal programs greatly assisted the country, bringing to rural areas jobs that otherwise would not have existed in the starved economy.
In Lake County, we still have a stone-lined highway as a stark reminder of those tough times, and of the perseverance of our forebears.
April 18, 1906
The hub of business, trade and culture in California and home to some 400,000 people, by 1906 San Francisco was the ninth-largest city in the U.S. and the jewel of the West Coast.
The city itself was a microcosm of the larger social makeup of the new-century America.
Home to businessmen like Mark Hopkins and Leland Sanford – two of the “Big Four” industrial barons who had amassed fortunes during the previous decades – and newly immigrated families from Europe (one in three residents of the city were foreign-born), citizens of San Francisco ran the gamut of extraordinarily wealthy to utterly impoverished.
The urban fabric of the city reflected this disparity, with blocks of stately hotels and office buildings cheek by jowl with wood tenements and shanties.
It was a city of longshoremen and lawyers; prostitutes and politicians; Marxists and merchants; poets, artists, drunkards, dimwits and dandies. In short: the epitome of urban America at the turn of the century.
Over the previous decades the city had sprouted stone and cement edifices like the Call Building, San Francisco’s first skyscraper. The city was on the rise and nothing looked like it could stop its ascendancy.
The earthquake announced itself with a shockwave at 5:13 a.m. that was felt from Coos, Oregon in the north to Los Angeles in the South and Nevada in the east – an area of about 375,000 square miles.
San Francisco’s rise had stopped abruptly.
The quake rent buildings from their foundations and collapsed walls into streets. By 6:30 a.m. troops stationed at the nearby Presidio were ordered into the city.
The initial reaction of those residents unharmed was relief at being spared. At 8:14 a.m. a major aftershock finished what the initial quake started, toppling those buildings just barely standing.
Although the damage was severe, it would pale in comparison to the fire that raged shortly thereafter.
The first fire started almost immediately, the second quickly followed suit sometime after 10:30 a.m. – later called the “Ham and Egg” fire because it was believed to have started from an untended breakfast left on a stove.
Sometime in the mid-morning, the Winchester hotel caught fire. At 11:00 a.m., weakened by the furious onslaught of flames, the hotel collapsed in a heap of broken brick and flaming beams. Somewhere deep within the rubble lay the singed guest registry.
The fires raged for days. At the end of the disaster, over half of the population of the city found themselves homeless.
The financial cost of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and subsequent fire were unprecedented, the human cost somewhere around 3,000 dead.
Visiting San Francisco today, you would never know of the sheer destruction that was visited upon the city.
It took years but the scar left by the fire healed, buildings rebuilt, people repopulated. If nothing else, humans are persistent.
Antone Pierucci is the former curator of the Lake County Museum and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.