The above item is from the Poway Progress newspaper’s May 4, 1894 issue. Its report on the hay and grain crop in Merle (now part of Leucadia) offers a glimpse of local agriculture during that period. A few years earlier, in December of 1888, the San Diego Union reported that “barley, oats and wheat are growing with great rapidity in Merle,” and that “grass and grain are over fifteen inches high” and reaching twenty inches in some places, insuring “plenty of feed for stock.”

One finds similar reports about communities all over San Diego County in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when the livestock population literally outnumbered the people, and barley and grain hadn’t yet given way to citrus and avocados.

You can find out more by attending my Oasis class, More Livestock Than People: San Diego’s Agricultural Heritage, in April at the Grossmont Learning Center.

If you’d like to sign up or just find out more, go to the Oasis website, https://www.oasisnet.org/San-Diego-CA , click on “Take A Class,” and type in 416.

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