Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913: Containing the Reminiscences of Harris NewmarkNewmark, Harris
History
Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913: Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark
Newmark, Harris
California, Southern; Los Angeles (Calif.)
Pierre Sainsevain, a nephew of Vignes, came in 1839 and for a while
worked for his uncle. Jean Louis Sainsevain, another nephew, arrived
in Los Angeles in 1849 or soon after, and on April 14th, 1855,
purchased for forty-two thousand dollars the vineyard, cellars and
other property of his uncle. This was the same year in which he
returned to France for his son Michel and remarried, leaving another
son, Paul, in school there. Pierre joined his brother; and in 1857
Sainsevain Brothers made the first California champagne, first
shipping their wine to San Francisco. Paul, now a resident of San
Diego, came to Los Angeles in 1861. The name endures in Sainsevain
Street.
The activity of these Frenchmen reminds me that much usually
characteristic of country life was present in what was called the city
of Los Angeles, when I first saw it, as may be gathered from the fact
that, in 1853, there were a hundred or more vineyards hereabouts,
seventy-five or eighty of which were within the city precincts. These
did not include the once famous "mother vineyard" of San Gabriel
Mission, which the _padres_ used to claim had about fifty thousand
vines, but which had fallen into somewhat picturesque decay. Near San
Gabriel, however, in 1855, William M. Stockton had a large vineyard
nursery. William Wolfskill was one of the leading vineyardists, having
set out his first vine, so it was said, in 1838, when he affirmed his
belief that the plant, if well cared for, would flourish a hundred
years! Don José Serrano, from whom Dr. Leonce Hoover bought many of
the grapes he needed, did have vines, it was declared, that were
nearly a century old. When I first passed through San Francisco, _en
route_ to Los Angeles, I saw grapes from this section in the markets
of that city bringing twenty cents a pound; and to such an extent for
a while did San Francisco continue to draw on Los Angeles for grapes,
that Banning shipped thither from San Pedro, in 1857, no less than
twenty-one thousand crates, averaging forty-five pounds each. It was
not long, however, before ranches nearer San Francisco began to
interfere with this monopoly of the South, and, as, a consequence, the
shipment of grapes from Los Angeles fell off. This reminds me that
William Wolfskill sent to San Francisco some of the first Northern
grapes sold there; they were grown in a Napa Valley vineyard that he
owned in the middle of the fifties, and when unloaded on the Long
Wharf, three or four weeks in advance of Los Angeles grapes, brought
at wholesale twenty-five dollars per hundred weight!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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