Accounts of San Diego becoming a Navy town usually begin with the creation of Naval Base San Diego in 1922. With its fine natural harbor, San Diego and its residents were welcoming navies going back to the Spanish. U.S. Navy ships were already a big attraction in the late 1800s, as evidenced by reports in local newspapers in February 1896.

In an article headlined, “Excursion to San Diego,” The Escondido Times-Advocate of Friday, February 7, 1896, reported “The U.S. warships, Philadelphia, Albatross and Monterey, will be in San Diego on Saturday, February 8th, on which date the Southern California Railway will sell tickets at one fare for the round trip, with return limit of February 18th.”

Here’s an 1893 Currier and Ives print of the USS Philadelphia, courtesy of the Library of Congress:

The Philadelphia, The Times-Advocate noted, “is one of the largest war vessels ever in San Diego Harbor, and it is expected will attract a large number of visitors. There will be a grand naval and military parade at 2:30 p.m. and a grand military ball at Coronado on the evening of the 8th.”

The San Diego Sun, in its issue also dated Friday, the 7th, perhaps because it was a little closer to the action, reported that all the ships had apparently arrived in the early hours of Friday morning, the Monterey arriving “at Point Loma this morning at 4. After daylight she was brought into the harbor. When off beacon No. 6, the Monterey fired a salute in recognition of the flagship Philadelphia, and a few moments later both the Philadelphia and Albatross fired a reply of seven guns.” The volley from the ships, the Sun noted, “brought a great many people to the water front and the wharves were crowded even before the monitor [referring to the Monterey] had anchored.”

A separate article in the Sun on the planned parade and ball, regarding the number of out-of-town visitors expected,  reported that “the Southern California  people say they expect from 600 to 800, from what they hear,” and that “over 400 tickets have already been issued” for the ball at the Hotel del Coronado.

It’s been a long time, too long, since my last blog post. I was reminded of that this morning on a visit to Old Poway Park. My wife and I went to the park to attend a folk music festival and then visit the farmer’s market. We ran into an old acquaintance, Joe. He asked me, “How’s the writing going?” and reminded me that he’d bought and read several of my previous local history books and was a reader of my blog.

Joe is a farmer with a stand at the Poway market. He reminded me about how striking it was that beets were a big product in the town of Bernardo in the early 1900s. I had covered that in my book Once Upon A Town: Bernardo, Merton and Stowe.

One passage in the book reads:

” ‘Sugar Beets Prove Success at Bernardo,’ was the headline of an article in the San Diego Union on New Year’s Day, 1915. Twelve [railroad] carloads averaging about fifty tons to the car were shipped by U.S. Weaver,” read the article, which also listed a hay crop of 6,000 tons, 10.000 sacks of grain, and two to five carloads of honey coming from the community….”

Thank you, Farmer Joe, for your terrific memory. Thank you also for your work growing food for your family and for your community. I pledge to work with renewed energy in harvesting historical knowledge as you work to harvest your crops.

Today is Indigenous Heritage Day, a day for remembering the indigenous civilization living here in San Diego County thousands of years before Europeans arrived. The following two links offer further info into the movement by which the descendants of our county’s original residents have reasserted their historical legacy and assumed agency over their history and their future.

The first is a link to the resolution adopted by San Diego State University in 2019, acknowledging the legacy of the university’s site as Kumeyaay land:

And this is the link to the website of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center at California State University San Marcos. If you go to the site and then click on “Land Acknowledgement”, you’ll see an explanation of the agreement acknowledging the Cal State site’s legacy as “the traditional territory of the Luiseño/Payómkawichum people.”

https://www.csusm.edu/cicsc/index.html

As part of a recent research trip for new history talk subjects, the San Diego History Seeker team visited Mount Hope Cemetery. Founded in 1871, Mount Hope is the only active city-owned and operated cemetery in the county. As such it is the burial place for numerous well-known figures in San Diego history, including Alonzo Horton and Elisha Babcock. It’s also the final resting place for many local citizens, whose lives contain stories connecting personal as well as national history.

There is a section in Mount Hope devoted to the members of the GAR. That stands for Grand Army of the Republic, which was the organization of the veterans of the Union forces in the U.S. Civil War. Founded in 1866, the GAR grew to include thousands of local posts across the nation. It existed until 1956, dissolving shortly after the death of its last member.

Among the hundreds of grave markers in Mount Hope’s GAR section is that of Isaac Barrett, shown below:

It’s a small, modest stone and like many it took a little effort to clear off from overgrown shrubbery. But it revealed that Isaac had fought as a member of an army unit in Minnesota. And his birth year of 1847 indicated he had to have been very young when he enlisted. Further checking revealed that he was mustered into Company E of the First Minnesota Heavy Artillery in 1865, which would have made him around 16 or 17 years old. He survived the war and returned to his then-home state of Minnesota. There he married Louisa Lacocq in 1871 and started a family.

Isaac would live in Minnesota until 1910, when, in his early 60s, he would join the ranks of west coast transplants and move to San Diego County, settling in National City, where he would live out his life until his death at the age of 75 in 1921. We can assume that he had a reasonably good life here, albeit a relatively quiet one. A brief notice in the San Diego Union in the April 20, 1912 edition mentions him as a principal in the sale of a “good lemon grove.”

Isaac also never forgot his Civil War service. A May 25,1916 San Diego Union article describing upcoming memorial services by local GAR officers included this: “Comrade Isaac Barrett will decorate the 40 veterans graves in the National City cemetery.”

Isaac’s life also built and preserved he and Louisa’s own personal union. In his obituary in September, 1921, the Union , noting that he’d been a decades-long member of the local GAR post, “active in his work up to six months ago, when he was suddenly taken ill,” also noted that “More than 50 members of the post attended the golden wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. Barrett last New Year’s Day.”

Sources for this post included historic San Diego newspapers and the website Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/ .

You can catch Isaac’s story along with other lesser-known stories of county people, parks and places in my talk, “Hidden Gems of San Diego County,” this Thursday, August 14 at 10 a.m. at the Oasis Lifelong Learning Center at La Mesa. Here’s a link you can use to register for the class:

https://san-diego.oasiseverywhere.org/product/hidden-gems-in-san-diego-county-history-2/

The photo above, captioned “View in Poway Valley,” is from the book, Picturesque San Diego. Published in 1887, the book offers images and stories about a far less populated, more rural San Diego County than the one we’re familiar with today. Join me as I present some of these images and stories at the Oasis Lifelong Learning Center in La Mesa on Thursday, May 8. Click on the link below to learn more and sign up.