From Coulterville to Junction. May 19, 1900 Mariposa Gazette contributed by William Disbro

      Leaving Coulterville by way of Stockton street takes you on to the
LaGrange road by way of Pinon Blanco. From Coulterville to this point
there are numerous small farms and ranches and quite a display of Mother
Lode. At Pinon Blanco the much discussed new road to Sonora turns to the
right  and accompanies the notorious lode out of the county and down
Maxwell's creek and they disappear together  in the distance. Our
journey led us down the La Grange road. Considerable of the distance
after leaving Pinon Blanco is up hill and that you are leaving the
mountains seems a hallucination until the top is reached and then it is
a rough reality. This is the roughest road on earth and eggs that would
hatch after crossing this hill would be frizzly chickens.
        At the foot of the hill is the house of Frank HERBECK, Sr., Mr.
HERBECK has lived here a life time. Then the farms of Peter and James
WOLLESON are next. They are fine mountain farms. These gentlemen have
lived here since 1852. This community is known as the Granite Springs
district. It was here that the writer graduated from school in 1877. For
seven consecutive summers we attended school in this district and as we
muse over those past boyhood days they remind us of a stone dropped into
the bosom of a tranquil lake that ripples o'er the mind and widens as we
dream until we feel the bud that stirred the dust in the bosom of our
pants. The old school house has been removed but every well remembered
land mark yet remain. 'Tis thirty years since first we started to this
school and yet how vivid are the memories of that April morning. Our
teach- was Miss Kate J. FAHEY, now the wife of Wm. FAHEY of the
Cosmopolitan hotel in San Francisco. Mrs. FAHEY is a very bright woman
and a favorite teacher of ours. Three of those teachers have passed fro
this life to another. Many of our schoolmates too have crossed the
silent river, but the memories of their happy laugh, the joyous days we
passed at Granite Springs school will ever remain the brightest flower
of memory and tangles in our heart strings the hopes that beyond this
vale of tears their troubles have found and end, and that their door of
death was but the entrance to eternal joy. Our road from here for a
quite a distance is the same we walked so often back and forth to school
over a cycle ago; how one's thoughts are stirred by such scenes that
live as fresh in memory as if 'twas yesterday we played our childish
games with no thought of the morrow except the joys 'twould bring. Life
is like a rose, at first a little bud that opens leaf by leaf until it
blossoms into fullest bloom, and then it grows triumphant, then leaves
so silent fall that we scarcely miss them for a time, then a gust of
wind dismantles all its beauty and another flower is gone.
        We rode over the new road on Piney Creek. This is a great
improvement over the old road by Van Riper's bridge, doing away with a
dangerous bridge and a very steep and rough grade. It will have to be
widened in a few places and then it will be a pleasure to ride over it.
Supervisor Lindsey has certainly accomplished a great deal with the
means he had.
         We passed the home of John Fleming. Mr. FLEMING was out
gathering wild flowers we suppose, as we did not see him nor his bride.
>From here the hills become less ridgid and occasionally you can trot
along and turn your head at the same time. As a rule it takes a good
civil engineer to guide a team over the eccentricities of a Mariposa
trail, misnamed roads. We reached the Junction about noon. S. B. HAYWARD
and family lives at this place. Here the road forks, one going to
LaGrange and the other to SNELLING, by way of Porter's Fields. Mr.
FIELDS is on the line of Merced and Mariposa counties and the country
roads run a zig-zag course through his farm. He would like to straiten
them some way but they seem too tolerable hard to bend.

return to the Mariposa Tour site

cdf
November 23, 2002