Photo showing San Dieguito Municipal Water Authority officials at construction site of Lake Hodges Dam in December 1918.

One hundred years ago to the month, the January 1, 1924 issue of The San Diego Union  ran an article headlined: “New Irrigation Districts Formed in County.” The article, by Winfield Barkley, then Manager for County Development at the Southern Trust and Commerce Bank, began by noting that “At the beginning of 1923,” local dam and reservoir projects like the Sweetwater, Lake Hodges and Escondido systems, along with private pumping plants, had brought “close to 25,000 acres under irrigation within the county.”

In the ensuing year, according to the article, continued growth in the existing reservoirs plus the addition of new irrigation districts such as Vista would soon increase the amount of irrigated land in San Diego County to “upwards of 75,000 acres of agricultural land—three times the present acreage.”

In a sidebar to the same article, Barkley predicted that when the water resources of the county were fully developed, there would be “sufficient domestic water available to support a population of upwards of 1,000,000 people—eight times the present population.”

The county’s population in 1924, extrapolating from 1920 US Census figures, would have been around 125,000. We’re up to a county population of roughly 3.3 million as of the 2020 Census. You could say we’ve met that 1924 prediction and then some, albeit with the help of irrigation projects connecting with the Colorado River and northern California. And access to a steady water supply certainly made a big difference!

One of my favorite topics to write and speak about is: “What’s In A Name? A Lot of History,” exploring the history behind San Diego County placenames. On December 28, 2023, my wife and I made a visit to Cardiff, also known as Cardiff-by-the-Sea. That name triggered a research project.

Two of my most reliable sources on the topic of place names, Leland Fetzer’s book San Diego County Place Names A to Z, and the late Erwin G. Gudde’s California Place Names: The Origin and Entymology of Current Geographical Names, agree that the coastal community was named for the town of Cardiff, Wales and that the source of the name was one J. Frank Cullen. Some slightly more detailed sources I found, such as the website of Cardiff 101 Main Street, a non-profit community service organization, along with some real estate websites, describe Cullen as a former paperhanger from Massachusetts who came west around 1909, bought up some coastal land in an area then known as San Elijo (after a nearby lagoon) and began selling lots. Those sources along with Fetzer state that the original source for the name Cardiff was Cullen’s wife Esther, who was said to be a native of Wales. Esther was also said to have influenced her husband to give the town street names derived from the British Isles, such as Birmingham, Oxford, Chesterfield and Manchester.

I use the phrase “said to be” regarding Esther Cullen’s nationality because subsequent research into this couple indicated that Esther was born and raised in the USA and had never been anywhere near Wales or any other part of the United Kingdom, nor had her husband.

I found lots of ads and news items from mid-1910s San Diego newspapers about “the new beach town of Cardiff-by-the-Sea” and other J. Frank Cullen developments. But none of those ads or articles mentioned anything about the origins of the town’s name. When Esther Cullen died in 1943, her obituary gave her birthplace as Belfast, Maine. Your History Seeker research team did some more digging and found this same couple in three different United States Censuses (1910, 1920 and 1930). In each census Esther’s birthplace was given as Maine, and J. Frank’s as Massachusetts.

We also found this excerpt from the marriage register of Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1898 recording the marriage of J. Frank Cullen and Esther Young. The column on the farthest right gives the birthplace for each, Amesbury, Massachusetts for the groom and Belfast, Maine for the bride: 

But wait. Our research also led us to looking at maps of the states of Maine and Massachusetts, specifically the areas Esther and J. Frank came from. We noticed some names that sounded similar to the names of towns in the UK. We also found that there was a small town in Maine called Wales! But while we found some evidence that people from Wales in the UK had settled in Wales, Maine, a look at old maps there showed no street names similar to the names of UK places.

We also checked the names of neighbors around the Cullens in the US census for anyone from the UK or with UK roots, and found none. We did see some evidence that the Young family, including Esther prior to her marriage, had moved around to different communities. In fact, we found Esther’s younger brother, Ernest, was born in Lewiston, Maine. Lewiston is virtually next door to the town of Wales, Maine.  Could that be the Wales that Esther might have been referring to in conversations with people in San Diego decades later?

At this point that’s the closest we can offer to a theory on the origin of the name of Cardiff-by-the-Sea.

I learned recently of the death, on November 12, of David Kreitzer at the age of 94. I first learned about Dave through his volunteer work in the local history and environmental communities in San Diego County. In 1984, as a volunteer member of the Rancho Bernardo Historical Society, I conducted an oral history interview with Dave. He was one of Rancho Bernardo’s earliest residents, moving there in 1965, when the area was just beginning its transformation from cattle ranch to planned community.

“The place was gorgeous,” he said in another interview years later for one of my research projects, speaking of his then-new Greens East neighborhood. “We had cattle grazing behind us. One night I went out in the backyard and caught the eyes of some coyotes in the beam of my flashlight.”

He’d come west with his wife and young children after his job in the textbook division of publishing house Harcourt Brace (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) was transferred from Minneapolis to San Diego. He enjoyed working in publishing, the field he would remain in until his retirement in 1991. But his original college degree was in botany, and his new community rekindled a love of open space and a concern for its preservation, motivations Kreitzer would act on as a volunteer for the rest of his life.

His civic involvement began with attending meetings of the Bernardo Home Owners Corporation (BHOC), Rancho Bernardo’s first homeowners association. By the mid-1970s he would be elected vice-president of the BHOC, and by the late 70s had helped to establish the Rancho Bernardo Town Council, which later evolved into the Rancho Bernardo Community Council.

In 1984 Kreitzer was asked to chair San Diegans for Managed Growth, an organization which had sprung up in response to a San Diego City Council-approved plan for a massive development in what is now the 4S Ranch/Black Mountain Ranch area. San Diegans for Managed Growth, which included members of the Sierra Club and the League of Women Voters, waged a campaign which put Proposition A on the ballot, calling for a city-wide vote on any zoning changes in areas considered part of the city’s urban reserve.

Prop A passed with 54 percent of the vote and helped set a new standard for “smart growth” in local development. Dave continued to pursue his vision, helping to develop two ordinances, on the county and city level respectively, to protect steep slopes, wetlands, streams, sensitive habitat lands and flood plains. Those measures passed and remain in effect today.

In the late 1980s, while serving on the County Planning Commission, he also became a member, and one of the leaders, of the San Dieguito River Valley Conservancy. This group effort led to the the creation of the San Dieguito River Park, preserving 55-miles of the San Dieguito River’s watershed from Del Mar ot Julian as permanent open space.

In 2005 the San Dieguito River Park named him Volunteer of the Year. Four years later, in 2009, when the River Park and the San Dieguito River Valley Conservancy were ready to open a graceful new bridge for pedestrians and bicyclists across Lake Hodges, they chose to name it the David Kreitzer Lake Hodges Pedestrian and Bicycle Bridge.

Into his later years, he was still literally a hands-on volunteer. I recall him in 2012 joining some other volunteers in whitewashing the walls of the farmhouse at the Sikes Adobe Historic Farmstead, one of the historic sites preserved within the River Park. For a time in the 2010s, he was volunteering once a week at another site in the river park, the Santa Ysabel General Store.

Thank you Dave, for reminding us, and helping to preserve, some of the nature and history around us.

Below is a part of a record from Appointments of U.S. Postmasters, 1832-1971, covering San Diego County, from the database of the National Archives and Records Administration:

It shows that a post office named Helix was created on February 5th, 1885 with Rufus K. Porter as postmaster.

As was often the case in the county in those days, this post office was on a ranch owned by Mr. Porter, who’d acquired some acreage in 1865 in the area which we today know as Spring Valley.

According to the account most accepted by historical researchers, the name Helix was attributed to Porter himself, inspired by a discovery on the trail leading from his ranch up a certain local mountain. As Porter’s daughter Rufina Porter Crosby stated in a memoir in the 1930s, “In traveling over the mountain one day he picked up some snail shells, and in Latin Helix means snails-thus the name.”

Helix aspersa was at that time the Latin name for the brown garden snail, today called Cornu aspersum. Porter clearly chose to call both his ranch and the mountain Helix.

In 1909 the name of the post office was changed to Spring Valley. The mountain’s name has remained Helix to this day.

In addition to the aforementioned National Archives database, sources for this post included the book San Diego County Place Names A to Z by Leland Fetzer, historic San Diego newspapers, and Featured Creatures, a database cooperatively run by the University of Florida’s Entomology and Nematology Department and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Division of Plant Industry.

Below is a headline and portion of an article from the Escondido Weekly Times-Advocate of February 18, 1918. It tells about the application of a cement coating to “that portion of the new Carroll dam which is now complete.”

There are a number of references to the construction progress of the “Carroll Dam and Reservoir” in local papers during that time period. Even before the dam was officially completed, another name for the lake started popping up in local media. Local history evolves and takes local placenames with it. In this particular case, two local farmers who also happened to be brothers, James and Thomas Carroll, had adjoining farms in an area called Crescent Valley, which had also come to be known as Carroll Canyon. Then along came the San Dieguito Mutual Water Company, with a project to dam up part of the San Dieguito River to create a more consistent water supply for the development of the city of San Diego as well as other adjacent county communities.

Ed Fletcher was one of the leaders of the San Dieguito Project, along with several executives of the Santa Fe Railroad, which owned considerable property in the county which the railroad wanted to see developed. One of those executives was the Santa Fe’s vice-president, a man named W.E. Hodges. At a dinner meeting not long before the dam was completed, Fletcher is said to have asked, “Why not call it Lake Hodges?” Hodges, according to one historical account, “reluctantly agreed.”

While providing a plentiful water supply for San Diego County’s development, Lake Hodges would also submerge a good part of the Crescent Valley, including the farms of the Carroll brothers.

Here’s a photo of Ed Fletcher, on the far right, and W.E. Hodges, on the far left, along their wives and one other San Dieguito official at the dam site in December, 1918:

Sources for this post include the privately published Memoir of Ed Fletcher, the book San Diego County Place Names A To Z, by Leland Fetzer, the archives of the Rancho Bernardo Historical Society, and historic San Diego newspapers.