Julian’s Ghosts Inhabit Book by Local Author

For such a lively guy, Charles LeMenager has a lot of dead friends.

Like Mike Julian. Mike nearly struck out as a Confederate soldier--the enemy captured him twice--but he was so handsome he later got a town named after him.

Or W.L. Detrick, who brought fame to Julian when he won the first-place apple award at the 1904 World’s Fair. “Apple Growers Achieve Success in Magnificent Exhibit,” headlines screamed.

Or “Slim Jim,” a gambler with a lot of jewelry and no last name. People suspected that Slim robbed the Wells Fargo stagecoach as it rumbled out of Julian one winter night in 1875.

But Slim was slick. Nobody ever proved a thing.

Ghosts swirl around LeMenager like a cloud of backcountry dust.

So far, he’s written and published three books about the region’s pioneers, Indians, bandits, gold miners, mule skinners, apples, turkeys and school marms: “Off the Main Road” in 1983; “Ramona & Roundabout” in 1990, and “Julian City and Cuyamaca Country,” which appeared in stores this summer.

Old Julianites say LeMenager’s latest book is the most complete, most objective history ever compiled on the famous apple town.

“I think he did an excellent job of research,” said Ray Redding, a 50-year Julian resident and past Julian Historical Society president. “It has a good deal on the Cuyamaca area that is not generally known to people.”

According to the book, Julian sprang up as a crusty mining camp in 1869 after a man spied a gold nugget in a stream while watering his horse.

A year later, the population stood at 574, including 93 gold miners, nine saloon-keepers and one dentist. Homes (counting tents and bedrolls) numbered 306. At about this time, several former Confederate soldiers arrive from Georgia and become the town founders.

Tension mounts two chapters later when crooked landowners try to alter their property boundaries to include the Julian mines. They fail.

The gold rush fizzles in Chapter 6, but Julian’s ideal apple-growing climate keeps the town alive through the end of the book.

The last chapter features photos of modern-day Julian, documenting the annual fiddle and banjo contest, Smokey the Bear’s 1990 speech at the town hall, and pervasive apple-pie eating.

Residents say “Julian City” also corrects a few falsehoods in the Historical Society’s 64-page shiny gold booklet--the town’s leading history resource before LeMenager’s book.

“It was full of a lot of interesting things,” LeMenager said. “But also a lot of BS.”

Although he isn’t a trained writer or historian, the retired Ramonan started cataloguing backcountry history almost 20 years ago, squirreling away historical tidbits from newspapers in a special desk drawer.

“I always had it in the back of my mind that someday I’d write history,” said LeMenager, 66, a retired land-use consultant who worked three years as the state director of housing and community development.

Finally, he started a book, spurred to action when the San Diego Union misidentified a 1930s barn near his house as a mid-1800s stagecoach stop.

The resulting book, “Off the Main Road,” tells the story of the San Vicente Valley, just east of Ramona, where LeMenager lives in an upscale housing development with its own golf course and monthly newspaper.

Although LeMenager master-planned the development, now home to about 7,000 people, his book chronicles the valley’s virgin years, long before the whine of golf carts and the scrape of patio furniture broke the silence.

Next came LeMenager’s Ramona book. It traces highlights like the town’s rise and fall as Turkey Capital of the World and its struggle to claim the name “Ramona” as its own.

The book explains that a budding town in Los Angeles County also wanted to call itself Ramona. Present-day Ramona lost the battle and was forced to keep its original name--”Nuevo”--until the rival Ramona lost its post office in 1895.

LeMenager’s first two books won Institute of History awards, honors the San Diego Historical Society grants to any useful book on San Diego history, said Rick Crawford, the society’s archivist.

“They are good books and they’re well-used by the patrons in the library,” said Crawford, also editor of the quarterly Journal of San Diego History. “If you want to research Ramona or Julian, there’s just not a lot of information out there.”

Although many towns have historical booklets, history buffs say well-researched histories are rarely published because they aren’t money-makers.

There’s a particular dearth in San Diego County’s “hinterlands,” said Don Shannon, a history instructor at Grossmont College.

“In some ways, genealogy is the only thing more personal than local history,” Shannon said. “And if nobody writes it down, it’s lost.”

LeMenager says he has the money to publish the books--a cost of about $10,000 per edition--and to wait for the proceeds to trickle in.

“I do it for a semi-hobby and as a community service,” said LeMenager, former Ramona water board member and former mayor of Santa Rosa. “Some people restore old cars. I do this.”

LeMenager said he sold copies of his books at cost to the Julian and Ramona historical societies, which distribute them and keep the profits.

He keeps the profits from books sold outside the communities.

Together, the first two books sold about 5,500 copies. The Julian book hit the racks at the onset of the town’s fall tourist season and promises to outpace the others. It sold 1,000 copies in its first two months.

But even if the sales stall out, LeMenager says he’ll still feel good.

“I think it’s important to preserve the culture,” he said. “In the end, we find out there’s really nothing new. Like Harry Truman said, the only thing that’s new is the history we don’t know.”