Her Story Is History : Escondido’s Humble Beginnings Traced From Devil’s Corner

Frances Beven Ryan is a walking, talking encyclopedia of Escondido’s first 100 years and she’s geared up for the 1988 Centennial.

She has lived in Escondido for 86 years and has filled in the rest by recording the memories of her aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents who first came here in the 1860s.

To Ryan, “it’s not his tory, it’s my story” that she has told and retold, written and lived.

Long before the hamlet of Escondido was incorporated on Oct. 9, 1888, Ryan’s ancestors were setting up rural housekeeping in the inland valley known then as Rincon del Diablo--Devil’s Corner. Then the Wolfskill brothers bought the land from the Alvarado heirs of the Spanish land grant and turned the 12,000-plus acres into a sheep ranch called Wolfskill Plains.

Got New Name in 1883

Fortunately for future Escondidans, a group of San Joaquin grape growers pooled their assets and formed the Escondido Company to buy the valley in 1883, or Escondido might well be known as Devil’s Corner or Wolfskill Plains to this day.

Even more fortuitously, the grape growers’ first vineyard--100 acres of Muscat vines--succumbed to the floods of 1884, and the Escondido Company put the land up for sale just when a group of early-day investors was looking for a site to start a town and cash in on the land boom.

R. A. Thomas, Ryan’s uncle, was one of those early-day real estate agents.

A huge “ESCONDIDO LAND” sign was painted on the side of the Escondido Land & Town Co. offices at 5th Avenue and E Street in downtown San Diego. March 29, 1886, was set for the first booster excursion to Escondido, which promoters translated from Spanish as “hidden valley.”

Ryan’s description of the prospective buyers’ first sight of the valley, gleaned from one of her ancestors, explains why, within three years, Escondido became an instant city of 541 inhabitants:

“As the sun was sinking behind the high western mountain . . . the early-day caravan got its first glimpse of the Escondido valley. It was springtime and, as the booster man said, ‘The hidden valley was green as an emerald set in purplish amethyst hills.’ Wild lilacs showered the hillsides with blossoms. Stately Spanish daggers stood as sentinels on guard. Purple sage perfumed the ocean breeze. Bees buzzed gathering honey until the last sun rays dimmed.

“A babbling creek meandered lazily in the grassy meadows. Twittering birds nested in the willows. Fruit trees were in bloom and grape vineyards budding. Sheep bleated; cows hurried through a field of buttercups toward a lone settler’s shack. It was milking time. . . .”

Ryan has saved a piece of that Escondido of old, a 17-acre preserve deeded to the University of California with the proviso that she can live there, in a clapboard cottage built by her family 68 years ago, surrounded by stately Spanish daggers and rare Engelmann oaks, twittering birds and sunny patches of buttercups.

But the remainder of the valley now is carpeted in subdivisions and neon-trimmed shopping centers where hayfields and vineyards once were.

Capturing History

She can’t bring back the glory years of boom and bounty, the Grape Day festivals and Decoration Day parades, but she can continue to instruct newcomers and youngsters about that perfect time.

Her books about the early days in Escondido are becoming local best sellers during this centennial year. Her articles on the city’s milestones, printed in the weekly Escondido News-Reporter, are required reading in many an Escondido classroom.

Hardly a day goes by that she isn’t lecturing to some civic group, speaking to a Braille Club, presenting an early-day exhibit to the library, setting a centennial committee straight about just what did happen on the Fourth of July, 1888, or just having a nostalgic chat about the “good old days” down at the Joslyn Senior Center.

She is also an unpaid consultant to those who restore some of the town’s venerable structures to their original condition. Most of the old landmarks, she said, “have burned down or been fritzed up.”

“Fritzed” is one of Ryan’s favorite verbs. In her opinion, if the early leaders had “fritzed”--or fouled up--the town’s development, Escondido wouldn’t be a bustling city of 87,000-plus and attracting new settlers every day.

A young couple who purchased one of the original “show houses” (model homes) built by the EL&T; Co. in 1887 came to Ryan recently for advice on how to restore the two-story structure. They got some blunt Ryan advice.

“I told them that, first, they would have to tear out all the indoor plumbing and build an outhouse, and second, they would have to take out all the electrical wiring,” Ryan related with a wry smile. “They said they didn’t want to go back that far.”

Back in the 1880s, Escondido was lacking a lot of things we take for granted today, Ryan admitted.

In the Beginning ...

Grand Avenue was a grand main street 100 feet wide, but unpaved. There was a fine brick bank building, but no city hall for the town’s first board of trustees. They met on the second floor of the bank.

There were the 100-room Escondido Hotel, on a rise at the eastern end of Grand, where Palomar Medical Center now towers; a livery stable; blacksmith shop; meat market; general store; newspaper; a combination furniture store-mortuary, and several churches along Grand in those formative years

But there were no saloons. Escondido was dry from its very beginnings, even though the valley was filled with verdant vineyards. Every deed to land sold in the valley contained a clause forbidding the making or vending of intoxicating liquors.

Ryan has recorded tales of haying crews that were persuaded to work on the Fourth of July by the bribe of a barrel of beer at quitting time.

And she tells of a “tipsy” Escondido youth who stumbled and fell into a box of live rattlesnakes, which had been gathered for sale to a traveling carnival show. The youth was not bitten and he took that as a sign that he should join the carnival as a snake charmer. He did, and died of a snakebite a few years later.

Ryan doesn’t know where the farmhands got their barrel of beer or the tipsy youth got his liquor, but she knows it wasn’t in Escondido. Those God-fearing, church-going Escondido folk didn’t allow a saloon in their community until the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.

Hard to Reach

Perhaps the biggest lack in the days of the land boom was a means to get to the valley.

The EL&T; Co. started a San Diego-Escondido stage run, but the trip was a long one, taking a day each way. J. N. Turrentine, who later became owner-publisher of the Escondido Times-Advocate, arrived by stage in 1887 and likened the 35-mile journey from San Diego to the road of life: “It’s long, dusty, bumpy, crooked, rocky,” he said.

So the early-day developers paid through the nose to persuade the California Central Railroad to run a branch line from Oceanside to the foot of Grand Avenue, and they offered a sizable cash bonus--some say it was $50,000--if the project was completed by July 4, 1888.

By July 1, the track had been laid to within yards of the Escondido station, but no bridge had been built over the Escondido River. A wily construction foreman solved the problem and earned the bonus by laying temporary trackage across the bone-dry river bed.

The train came in on time. The bridge was built later.

Less successful was the land company’s attempt to deliver the train’s passengers to the Escondido Hotel in style.

Streetcar tracks were laid the length of Grand, but the fancy horsecar didn’t arrive in time for the Independence Day celebration. Instead, the guests were delivered from train to hotel by a quickly built “contraption” which was nothing more than a wagon on iron wheels, with boards nailed across for seats.

When the horsecar finally arrived, it was sent back to its Eastern manufacturer and the tracks along Grand were torn up. Many of the ties became hitching posts along the main thoroughfare.

The actual Escondido incorporation ceremonies on Oct. 9, 1888, were an anticlimax to the land boom happenings of the previous years. A bigger party was the bond-burning celebration in 1905, which took the burden of debt for a massive dam and water reservoir off the shoulders of valley landowners, Ryan said.

Those were years of excitement, thrills and catastrophe. Those days are what Frances Beven Ryan has preserved for today’s Escondidans.

“It was a day or so after I retired that Carleton Appleby (another former Times-Advocate publisher) called me,” she said. That was back in 1959, the end of Ryan’s 30 years as a schoolteacher. “He certainly didn’t wait very long.

“He said to me that it was time that I got busy and wrote down the early history of this valley. He said that we were ‘locked in the present’ because so little was known about the past. He said that I was the one to do it because I’d been here the longest.”

So she did. Ryan and her late husband, Lewis, an artist, researched and sketched and interviewed and wrote and produced a series of books on the valley’s history that put Escondido--past and present--on the map.

For Ryan, it was a labor of love.

She knows the valley and its landmarks like the lines in her palm. There’s Stanley Peak, named for her great-grandfather; Dixon Lake, after an uncle, and Reidy Canyon, named after Maurice Reidy, the first of her clan to arrive in the valley.

Ask her what she’d like to see happen in the valley in the next 100 years, and Ryan shakes her head and brusquely turns away the query as “a stupid question.”

But, without saying a word, she looks out across the valley and the questioner knows that Frances Beven Ryan would like the world to make an abrupt U-turn and march right back into the glorious past.