Growth in the Mother Lode : Mariposa Clings to ‘Cow Town’ Image Despite Population Pressures

In the Mother Lode town of Mariposa, public debate tends to focus on the basics.

Is an acre enough land to keep a cow or a hog, or should the minimum be 2 1/2 acres? Given that gunslinging bandits and public hangings are a part of the past, hasn’t the time come to make it illegal to fire a gun inside town limits?

By population and by attitude, California doesn’t get much more rural than Mariposa County. In 1991, there is no traffic light, no movie theater, no McDonald’s, and no more than eight full-time lawyers. Less than half of the 520 miles of roads are paved, and county officials still use the two-story courthouse, which opened in 1854 and is the oldest operating seat of county government west of the Rockies.

But even here, the pulls and tugs of the seemingly limitless growth in the nation’s most populous state are felt. Mariposa County’s population of 14,302, hardly a blip when compared to California’s 30 million people, grew by only 3,194 from 1980 to 1990. But that was a 29% jump, and the changes have only begun:

* A million people a year drive through downtown Mariposa, past shops, saloons, and warehouses that date to the Civil War, en route to Yosemite National Park. Caltrans is building downtown’s first left-turn lanes on the main street, California 140. By 2010, traffic will increase by 50% on 140, and will double on the other road into town, California 49, Caltrans says.

* Seeing green in Yosemite’s draw, and in National Park Service efforts to reduce traffic jams and commercialization within the park, developers have spent millions building new hotels and refurbishing what had been ramshackle motels outside the park.

* Two of the three sites proposed for a University of California campus in the Central Valley are within commuting distance of Mariposa. The campus eventually would support 105,000 students, staff and others whose jobs would depend on the university.

* As people in California’s big cities retire and cash in on their equity, many head for the foothills, where housing prices are low, air is clear and crime is occasional. The 1990 census shows that people ages 18 through 29 numbered 1,833 in Mariposa County, a drop of 19% from 1980. The number of people 65 and older was 2,508, an increase of 46%.

Whether they are old-timers, big city refugees, or entrepreneurs who figure to profit from any growth, almost everyone here has seen the enemy, and it is the unbounded population growth all around Mariposa.

This may be a cow county. But the locals who are running it are taking the bull called raging growth by the horns and trying to harness it.

“Because we’re a county in California, we know we’re going to grow,” said George P. Radanovich, 36, a lifelong resident and chairman of the Board of Supervisors. “But we’re prepared. That’s the main thing--be prepared.”

Radanovich found that no amount of preparation can stop all conflicts, especially when “big-city ideas” make their way to the foothills. When the county health department suggested banning smoking in public places, townsfolk became enraged. Even nonsmokers protested some bureaucrat trying to say whether someone could light up or not.

“Too many people are moving in, and they want to do what they did in L.A.,” said Helen Kwalwasser, a nonsmoker sipping ice water at the Sugar Pine Restaurant, while friends lingered over ice tea, coffee and cigarettes.

The smoking ban has been tabled for now. But changes, obvious and subtle, go on. Capt. James Allen remembers when the Sheriff’s Department could go three weeks without a call for help. Now, though there hasn’t been a rape or robbery all year, 17 calls come each day. Of course, for perspective’s sake, Los Angeles police got 591 calls for assistance in an average hour last year.

With the newcomers, local historian Scott Pinkerton says, that take-care-of-our-own attitude, the sense of community that enabled his tiny county to build a hospital, a high school gymnasium, a library and a museum, is becoming a thing of the past.

“Now that we’re getting more people from the outside, I feel there are people who don’t have that feeling,” said Pinkerton, 67, who moved here in 1946. “What they’re doing here, I don’t know.”

In an attempt to preserve the old atmosphere, the school board is asking teachers to develop a curriculum to teach local students about Mariposa. County supervisors are asking that Congress declare a 9-mile stretch of the Merced River to be “wild and scenic.” They also backed Caltrans’ decision to designate California 140 from Mariposa to Yosemite a scenic highway, thus restricting some development.

“We want to keep the rural areas rural,” Supervisor Art Baggett said. “That’s why people live here. That’s why tourists visit here. I tend to see Mariposa as one of the last frontiers of unspoiled California. I like to think we’re ahead of the curve. We haven’t been sprawled on yet.”

A task force set up to study growth has as its chairman a transplanted Southern Californian, Jan Mennig, a former Culver City police chief. He retired to Mariposa in 1987, bought a vineyard and built his dream house.

Sitting in an expansive family room that overlooks a wooded hillside and park, Mennig said he got involved in the planning process “for our own protection” to make sure that there is “controlled growth.”

Like many people here, he most fears that his town will become like Oakhurst, a town of about 13,000 people in Madera County 30 miles away. Growth “went wild” there in the 1980s, he said. “I shudder when I look at a place like Oakhurst.”

In Oakhurst, Doug Macaulay, president of the local Chamber of Commerce and a refugee from Thousand Oaks, predicted that the bursting-at-the-seams growth in his adopted hometown will go on “up and down the Sierra foothills.” As counties in the Central Valley take bolder steps to protect cropland from development, Macaulay said, population will push into places like Mariposa.

“The valley is too important agriculturally,” Macaulay said. “It is the breadbasket of the world. There is only so much land you’re going to build on down there.”

For now, development pressure persists in the valley downslope from Mariposa. A potential site of the 10th University of California campus is in neighboring Merced County, on rolling pastureland above Lake Yosemite a few miles from the Mariposa County settlement of Hornitos.

Hornitos bustled in the 1850s with more people than live in the entire county now. There were bordellos, gambling halls and opium dens. The Ghirardelli family of chocolate fame ran a store, a few walls of which remain. The town was a hangout of the bandit Joaquin Murieta, whose system of secret tunnels aided his escape from lawmen.

From the looks of it now, however, Hornitos is a town with one foot in the grave. Not much is left but an old stone jailhouse, a seldom-used Catholic church, a graveyard and 50 or 60 people. Even the name, which means “little ovens,” refers to the tombs favored by the locals in the 1800s that look like ovens.

“It’s going to grow, and it’s going to grow before I die,” said Manuela Ortiz, proprietor of the Plaza Bar, which she has owned for 43 years. When she arrived, there were five operating gold mines in the area and hundreds of workers. The only other enterprise is a cafe, which is closed and said to be for sale.

“They’re saying it’d be a boom town, but I don’t see it,” said Bob Stephenson, who moved to Hornitos four years ago from Las Vegas to prospect. Now, he is rebuilding his house in the hope of selling and moving out. “Mariposa doesn’t want growth,” he said. “They want to be their own little clique.”

The county has tried to be picky about new development. A gold-mining company dropped plans to reopen an old mine last year after county officials balked. The favored industries are tourist attractions, such as premium wineries. Supervisor Radanovich is among the new vintners.

Officials see the most certain source of economic growth in tourists drawn by Yosemite. Despite the recession, in August Yosemite set a new monthly record for number of visitors--609,830, or 50,000 more than in any previous month.

Donald Fox, a Park Service planner at Yosemite, said that within three years the Park Service will move its maintenance and warehouse complex from Yosemite Valley to the Mariposa County town of El Portal. Park employees will follow.

The park also wants to get tourists to leave their cars outside Yosemite, perhaps in large parking structures, and to take mass transit in. Once that happens, “gateway” towns like Mariposa would be expected to help bus people to the park. Mariposa has begun working on a bus system.

Developers are betting that Yosemite tourism will grow, despite efforts to limit congestion. Marriott opened a 242-room hotel with rooms costing as much as $250 a night in Fish Camp, at the south end of the park, last year.

A family of developers led by Jerry Fischer moved into Mariposa 12 years ago and now controls 460 motel rooms in the Mariposa area. One of the family’s projects, Cedar Lodge, was a small run-down motel 5 miles west of Yosemite on the Merced River. Now it has more than 200 rooms.

“We like to buy little old broken-down hotels and make them shiny and new,” said Barry Brouillette, Fischer’s manager and a local innkeeper himself.

Brouillette, a member of the growth task force and the local school board, stopped in Mariposa 20 years ago on his way to Yosemite from Carson and happened upon a “For Sale” sign on 63 acres. Now, he has an inn and art gallery on the site, owns two other motels, and leases a fourth. “Over the long haul, you can’t miss” when you’re at the doorstep of Yosemite, he says.

“Yosemite is one of the most grand landscapes in the world,” Brouillette said. “They’re going to come from all over to see it.”

As they come, the day may arrive when Mariposa will get a traffic light or two. The Board of Supervisors is poised to ban firing guns inside town limits. But there will still be a rural feel. The board decreed that an acre of land is enough to keep a cow in town.

County health officer Chuck Mosher, however, has decided to push anti-smoking education rather than a smoking ban.

If a prohibition were put to a vote, given the new arrivals in Mariposa, the results would be close, Mosher said. Forces opposed to smoking “might even win.” But as much as he dislikes cigarettes, he knows that old-time attitudes run deep. Any ballot measure to ban smoking “would rip the town apart, and I don’t think that’s healthy, either.”