There was a time when farm livestock outnumbered human beings in San Diego County, a time when much of the county looked like the photo below of Poway Valley from 1887:

Join me on April 1 at Ranch Bernardo Oasis as I present stories and slides from my research into our county’s agricultural history and the role agriculture still plays in our lives today.

To sign up for the class, you can go online to https://san-diego.oasisnet.org/san-diego-oasis-at-rancho-bernardo/, click on “Classes” and find “Class # 2289, San Diego County’s Agricultural History.” Or you can call 858-240-2880 and tell them you want to sign up for that class number and name. See you then!

In March in San Diego County, 151 years ago, it was rodeo time, as exemplified by the notice below from the San Diego Union of March 21, 1873:

Back then, this wasn’t a public entertainment event. It was all business, part of the cattle business, to be exact. As Charles Nordhoff, a prominent journalist of the day, wrote in, California: A Book for Travellers and Settlers, which was published that same year, “Every spring, in the cattle country, rodeos are held. Rodeo comes from rodeár, the Spanish verb to gather or surround. A rodeo is, in fact, a collection of cattle or horses, made to enable the different owners to pick out their cows, count them, and, if they wish, drive them off to their own pastures.”

Nordhoff added that, “Sometimes, 20.000 head of cattle are gathered on a plain, and the work of ‘parting out,’ as it is called, and branding, lasts for several days. A carefully defined set of laws regulates this work, and law officers, called ‘Judges of the Plains,’ attend to settle disputes as to ownership, and regulate the procedure. These officers appoint the times and places of rodeos, and attend at each.”

Excerpt from ad in San Diego Evening Tribune, October 10, 1934.

She was a psychic. And long before psychic hotlines, clairvoyants and mediums of various kinds were in demand, including in San Diego. How much in demand? The archives of the San Diego City Clerk’s Office include a copy of a “clairvoyance and palmistry license” issued in June 1910 to one individual, and the archive blog notes that there are “multiple similar licenses” on file.

“Madam Zelma, Truthful in her predictions, Reliable in her advice,” was the heading  of a classified ad that appeared on page 23 of The San Diego Union on Sunday, November 5, 1911, informing readers that “the noted clairvoyant and medium, who acquired such a wonderful reputation for her remarkable predictions and her sensational demonstrations which startled and amazed hundreds for the past two seasons at Coronado Tent City, is now located permanently in San Diego.”

In one ad, shown below, from the Union in January of 1912 on a lecture she gave at the U.S. Grant Hotel,  Zelma used a last name of Dentt. Your History Seeker team used that to find some background information on her and her husband Frank Dent (proper spelling) including their move from San Francisco to San Diego in the fall of 1910:

Judging by her media coverage, Zelma maintained her psychic business in San Diego from the 1910s until 1934, with ads that appeared pretty much weekly in San Diego papers during those years. The ads disappear after 1934. Interestingly, our attempts to find other info about Zelma and/or Frank in San Diego during that period, from census data to city directories to voter lists to obituaries, have come up blank. An early census we did find for the Dents, from 1910 in San Francisco, just before they moved to San Diego, gives Zelma’s age as 25. That would make her 49 years old when she ceased running pychic ads in 1934. So what became of her? Any psychics out there with any clues?

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.