Noon:  "Arroyo Grande's Wild West” 

by Jim Gregory, President, South County Historical Society

 

Tombstone and Dodge City are more famous, but Arroyo Grande has a Wild West to rival theirs. In 1848, town founder Francis Branch and his friend John Price discovered the victims of California’s first mass murder. Branch’s son-in-law, county schools superintendent David Newsom, for whom Newsom Canyon is named, discovered on an 1850s ride south to Santa Barbara that skeletal remains appeared then about as often as Andersen’s Pea Soup billboards do today. Lopez Canyon was rife with property disputes: in 1886, bitterness between two families resulted in murder and a double lynching at the foot of Crown Hill. A decade later, a body found in a vacant lot near The Palace, a San Luis Obispo house of ill repute, was tied to a Lopez Canyon feud, as well. Arroyo Grande’s first school, on Nevada Street, had to be moved when a gunfight broke out at the nearby Ryan Hotel stables, and a town constable, Henry Lewellyn, was shot dead in the doorway of the Capitol Saloon on Branch Street in 1904. Move over, Tombstone.

 

1 p.m.:   Cowboy Poetry 

by Bob Perrault and Friends

Join Local Cowboy Poet Bob Perrault and his friends for an hour of Cowboy
Poetry at 1: Pm in the I.O O. F Hall, on September 24 th as a part of the Harvest
Festival. Bob will provide stories and tales from a lifetime of living close to his
horse and experiencing western life. Some folks may recall Bob for his former
“day Job” as the City Manager for Grover Beach, but Bob was raised close by
Ventura County he spent his formative years chasing critters on the ranches and
farms. Since that time, he has stayed true to his western roots.

 

2pm:  History Videos:

Video Entitled: How did Arroyo Grande wind up with nearly sixty Civil War veterans? The connection between these settlers and the Pacific Coast Railroad.

Video Entitled: What three waves of immigration marked the Arroyo Grande Valley in the early 20th century? The local impact of the Depression and New Deal.

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2 p.m.:The Pacific Coast Railway:

Why a Railroad to the Coast including the Arroyo Grande Valley

by Andrew Merriam, Board Member of the San Luis Obispo Railroad Museum

 

The timing of this year’s Harvest Festival is just three months prior to the 150th anniversary of the incorporation of San Luis Obispo’s first railroad. A railroad that stopped in Arroyo Grande at the old Loomis warehouse.  What was to become the narrow-gauge Pacific Coast Railway was incorporated in 1872 by John Harford to transport the agricultural products out and bring manufactured goods in to the then isolated San Luis Obispo and northern Santa Barbara Counties. Passengers and freight were boarded on ships at Avila to connect to the California coast from Seattle to San Diego.  Andrew Merriam, a local resident of SLO for 65 years and a board member of the San Luis Obispo Railroad Museum, will offer the history of this very interesting and very local railroad which connected our area to the rest of California prior to highways, street paving and motorized vehicles

 

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3 p.m.:    "World War II Arroyo Grande"
by Jim Gregory, President, South County Historical Society 

The war’s impact on our town, population 1,090 in the 1940 census,

was immediate. Two Arroyo Grande sailors were killed on battleship

Arizona on December 7. What followed were nearly four years of

deprivation and commitment at home—and even greater commitment

from those in uniform: The grocer’s son who brought his crippled B-17 home from a mission over Berlin; the fireman who fought in Easy Company, the “Band of Brothers;” the woman Marine who became, for a day, the president’s chauffeur; the fighting prowess of Filipino-Americans, whose first regiment was formed at Camp San Luis Obispo; the tragic frequency of air crashes from training flights out of bases in Santa Maria; perhaps the war’s central tragedy, the enforcement of Executive Order 9066, which ironically served to reveal the dignity—and loyalty-- of Japanese-Americans and the heroism of their sons who volunteered to fight.