Below is a photo taken in 1887 for the book, Picturesque San Diego, showing Lindo Lake in the then-new community of Lakeside:
Below is a photo taken earlier this year by your History Seeker team, on a visit to the still-existing and still beautiful body of water, now part of Lindo Lake County Park:
Worth a visit, friends, to sample San Diego County’s historical and natural heritage.
Access to a steady water supply made all the difference in making San Diego County livable. Vincent Nicholas Rossi, the San Diego History Seeker, will show how it happened in his new Oasis class, “How Water Changed San Diego.” Join him Friday, August 23rd at 1 p.m. at Oasis Grossmont Lifelong Learning Center or on Tuesday, August 27th at 10 a.m. at Oasis’ Rancho Bernardo campus. Click on the link below to sign up:
https://san-diego.oasiseverywhere.org/?_presentershortname=Rossi,%20Vincent
Ed Fletcher was a major mover and shaker in San Diego city and county history, remembered today by Fletcher Hills and Fletcher Parkway. The photo below shows Fletcher standing in front of the open spillway at the Lake Hodges Dam during a release of water from the dam’s reservoir in the early 1920s, shortly after the dam’s completion:
Fletcher was then the president of the San Dieguito Mutual Water Company, which built the dam. That company was one of a number of ventures which he led during his life to promote water development in San Diego County, efforts which played a big role in making San Diego County livable.
The photo is part of an archive of Fletcher’s private papers now held in the UCSD Library. The majority of those papers have been digitized, and so are available for public viewing. It’s a great source for history seekers. See the link below to check it out.
On a recent Sunday morning, in need of some time away from work and home, my wife and I decided to talk a short walk on a nearby trail. Just a short drive from our neighborhood is the Mule Hill Historic Trail, adjacent to the Sikes Adobe Historic Farmstead. The trail and the farmstead are part of the San Dieguito River Park, which was created in 1989 to preserve a chunk of the San Dieguito River watershed, from Volcan Mountain near Julian to Del Mar on the coast, as undeveloped greenspace.
The Mule Hill Historic Trail offered us some great examples of history, both natural and human.
Here’s an example of the natural part:
The bolders and flowering vegetation offer a glimpse of what all of San Diego County looked like for thousands of years.
And within a mile or so on the same trail is the scene of some significant human history:
The stone wall and historical markers look out on Mule Hill, site of the climactic final stage of the Battle of San Pasqual in 1846, during the Mexican-American War. The US victory in that war in 1848 would transform California from a Mexican province to an American state.
A lot of history in a short hike. Check it out!
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