Non Operative Roll 85,649,520
Operative Roll 13,980,567
County Grand Total $99,630,087
The 1917-18 county assessment roll shows the following valuations for taxation purposes, not including the segregated school district valuations for one of the numerically largest county school departments in the state, exclusive of the larger populous centers of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Alameda counties.
County Real Estate $56,792,585
(Fresno City, $15,931,470)
Improvements 20,075,245
(Fresno City, $10,933,700)
Improvements Assessed to Others than Owners 123,720
Personal Property 15,923,163
Money and Credits 427,310
Non Operative Roll 93,342,023
Operative Roll 6,044.386
Railroads 8,515,019
Total Assessed Property $107,901,428
Fresno City as the county seat is the largest incorporated municipality. The other eight incorporated towns are; Clovis, Coalinga, Firebaugh, Fowler, Kingsburg, Reedley, Sanger and Selma.
The county's apportionment by the State Board of Equalization of railroad mileage and property for state taxation is as follows:
Railroad Mileage Valuation
Southern Pacific 196.89 $5,394,978
Santa Fe 96.30 2.311.200
Central Pacific 31.46 692.208
Pullman Palace 166.61 116,633
KEYSTONE IN ARCH OF WEALTH
Geographically considered, California is far from being a unit. It presents with its immense sea-coast stretch and its great breadth, traversing interior wide valleys, desert wastes and high mountain ranges, geographical conditions in remarkable variety. When in their variety in turn, the land surface features, climates and productions, the latter ranging from those of the temperate to the subtropical and the arctic zones, are further borne in mind. California may well be classified as an empire itself.
California's great interior San Joaquin Valley, an empire in itself, is the keystone in the arch of the state's wealth. The Mother Lode poured its millions of gold into the world's lap. Its plains were the public range during the cattle raising era of the boundless pasturage ground. It was once one of the world's granaries in the days of the vast grain ranch period. It is a leader today in the products of the intensive and diversified culture of the small, irrigated orchard and vineyard farm. The oil industry confined to the Coast Range is an overshadowing one, and the San Joaquin valley has become the state's oil producing region. Irrigation has transformed Fresno from a desert to an annual producer of over thirty millions.
Its potentialities are boundless almost. It is no dream that in the cultivation of rice and cotton as the latest taken up enterprises of the soil with demonstrated successes in the experimental efforts, California and its great interior valley are preparing to furnish the world with more surprises. Such an eminent authority as George C. Roeding has declared that Fresno must wake up and teach the world that "here in the central portion of the Golden State there is an empire worthy the attention of the man with the dollar." And there is a wonderful past to substantiate him.
The history of Fresno, and for that matter of the great interior valley also, was little influenced by the Spaniards or the Mexicans in so far as leaving imperishable impress upon the region that the gold seekers brought to the world's knowledge. There was no Spanish sub-stratum with the pictured life and customs as at the coastal mission establishments, so suggestive of medievalism and even feudalism, to give the quaint and picturesque setting for the American superstructure to follow and to recall the days before the Gringo came.
Of the Spanish and Mexican rule there is no lasting memorial, save perhaps in the melodious nomenclature of landmarks, and in the foreign words grafted on the English language. The name "Fresno," from the Spanish meaning "ash tree." was applied because of the abundance of the tree in the mountains of the county. It was first given to identify the river tributary to the San Joaquin and once embraced within the county, but now in Madera. It was so applied before Fresno County was organized, and even before the territory now so named had distinctive appellation as a part of Mariposa County. It was so appropriated to name the first big trees discovered by James Burney of Mariposa and John Macauley of Defiance, Ohio, in 1849. They were in Fresno territory that is now part of Madera County. Burney was of North Carolina and the first sheriff of Mariposa, elected after organization in February, 1850. The above named and two others made the find in the latter part of October on the Fresno-San Joaquin divide while pursuing animals that the Indians had stolen. This was at a time when Mariposa embraced, as one of the original twenty-seven counties of the state, nearly the entire San Joaquin Valley, south of the Tuolumne River.
CHAPTER II
As a political entity, Fresno's history runs back to 1856. Prior to that and territorially long before that, it was unpeopled during the period that Bret Harte has so poetically described as "that bland, indolent autumn of Spanish rule, so soon to be followed by the wintry storms of Mexican independence." It was the undisputed domain of the Indian — the Digger as he was called, because he digged the ground for edible roots, bulbs and insect larvae.
It was indefinitely located as the remote and farthermost outpost of "that section of the mining region known as the Southern Mines" after carving out from Mariposa and with it claiming Utah Territory as easternmost boundary. The Mother of Counties embraced almost everything in the easternmost interior between the Coast and Sierra ranges from Tuolumne on the north to San Luis Obispo on the south, with its celebrated central Fremont Grant concerning which alone a book might be written, its four great central gold abounding sections and quartz veins throughout the county, Mariposa as one of the original organized with formation of the state in 1850, was so rich in mining wealth that it was estimated as formed in 1856 that over 500 mills could be supplied with rock paying from sixteen dollars to twenty dollars per ton.
As to Fresno, years elapsed before "the reviving spirit of American conquest," gripped the land. With successive industrial evolutions, the transformation has been short of the marvelous. From the early primitive mining camps in canyons and gulches or along river banks, the transition from an inland cow county has been to a vast agricultural domain, the future seat of fullest activities in that line of a great commonwealth, and the upbuilding of an interior community that every prophecy holds out as destined to become one of the largest, most populous, influential and richest. It is well on its way to reach that goal.
Jonathan Swift, the greatest satirist of his age, philosophizes through one of his characters that "he gave it as his opinion that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of philosophers put together." What then of the pioneers who on the barren nothingness of 1856 laid the basis of what is the wonderful Fresno county of 1919?
The changes that the mutations of time have wrought in the span of sixty-two years are not appreciated until they are brought to a realization by some homely yet startling illustration. The reader may measurably conceive the changes when contemplating the concrete fact that there are less than a dozen known living persons that have risen out of all obscurity in the growth of the county, or who, having removed from California, trace has been lost of them, and who were residents of the territory before and at the period of the county's organization in the year 1856.
ROSTER