Coarse gold created Coarsegold
Long before the town of Madera was on the map, gold — heavy, coarse gold — was discovered in abundance along a gulch in what is now Eastern Madera County. With miners probing for placers on every creek and stream of the southern Mother Lode, it is no surprise that this entire area, approximately 35 […]
Hensley Lake named for sheriff of Fresno County
The Sheriff’s granddaughter sat composed and alert while I probed her memory for pieces of Madera County’s past. She told me of her days in Pershing School and then Lincoln School. She took me down the halls of Madera High School from which she graduated in 1932. Then she turned the other way to go […]
Glimpses of Madera in 1912
Madge Cook was born in Madera in 1904. Eighty-five years later, she made a presentation before the Madera County Historical Society in which she gave the highlights of her memories of early Madera. Here, she remembered our town as it was in 1912. “The Sugar Pine Lumber Company (was) located in Madera… east of town. […]
The mysterious town of Borden
When the folks in charge of the High-Speed Rail began first to talk of starting the project at Borden, folks all over the state began to ask, “Where is Borden?” The answer came swiftly; it was a tiny, 19th-century town about four miles south of Madera. Not long after that, some people wanted to know […]
Madera almost never was
Every historian writing of the founding of Madera includes an account of how the town was almost never built. As the story goes, when the California Lumber Company began building its flume from the mountains to the Southern Pacific tracks in the Valley, it had its sights on the little town of Borden for the […]
Sacrifice of the sheriff’s son
Madera County Sheriff William O. Justice wore his badge for 20 years — from 1935 to 1955. During that time, he wrestled with some pretty thorny issues. An influx of striking cotton pickers caused a riot under his watch. Four Madera policemen somehow lost their guns to four crooks, and if that wasn’t enough, a […]
Looters struck Madera’s Chinatown
California’s wildfires are disastrous and heartrending. Lives have been lost and entire communities have been destroyed. Some folks have lost everything, but there is something more. Added to the distress of lost lives and property are reports that looters sometimes find their way into the destruction to help themselves to anything of value that might […]
Fresno slammed Madera schools
When they carved Madera County out of Fresno County, the newspapers of Fresno never failed to take pot shots at its new neighbor to the north. In 1893, the public tone in Fresno turned blatantly sarcastic. “How dare these ingrates even propose leaving the nurturing arms of Fresno!” An excellent example of these journalistic sour […]
Madera’s first physician
The doctor came to Madera in April 1877, when it was just six months old. The young, upstart village then consisted of 25 buildings, most of them dwellings. It could hardly compare with the mining community of Buchanan, from whence C.E. Brown came, but it had promise. That’s why he decided to remain and become […]
Fresno Flats went to the dogs
When S.W. Westfall was elected to the job of sheriff, he knew that the task would not be easy. Madera County had its share of troublemakers, and it took a great deal of patience to ensure domestic tranquility in the face of the criminal element that roamed the countryside. Occasionally, however, it wasn’t the robbers, […]
