Articles by Richard Crawford
In the matter of requiring prisoners in the county jail to perform labor, a resolution . . . to compel prisoners to work on the roads and streets was adopted. In the matter of the getting balls and chains for chain gang . . . the Sheriff was authorized to secure six balls with the necessary chains, for a chain gang. —San Diego Union, January 18, 1883.
The story of the chain gangs in 19th century San Diego: Read: Back on the Chain Gang
D. C. Collier had his new automobile on the streets yesterday for the first time and the vehicle, when it was not speeding up and down the street, was the center of an admiring throng. . . He has the distinction of being the first San Diegan to own an automobile. –San Diego Union, Feb. 13, 1900
San Diegans marveled at the sight of Charlie Collier’s automobile in 1900. His three-wheeled “French designed” vehicle could speed up to 25 miles per hour and go 50 miles on three quarts of gasoline. For most San Diegans, it was the first automobile they had ever seen.
Read the story of how San Diego Discovers the Automobile.
After surmounting difficulties and suffering anxieties that would have disheartened any but a live Yankee, we are enabled to present the first number of the Herald to the public. –John Judson Ames, editor, San Diego Herald.
San Diego’s first newspaper, the Herald, appeared on May 29, 1851, only twelve days after the first issue of the Los Angeles Star, the earliest newspaper in Southern California. The editor and publisher of the Herald was thirty-year-old John Judson Ames, a towering, six-foot six-inch “live Yankee” from Calais, Maine.
Read the story of John Judson Ames and the San Diego Herald.
Major General Leonard Wood, chief of staff of the United States army, gave the command . . . The first automobile in the desperate San Diego-Phoenix race shot forward with a bound. –San Diego Union, Oct. 27, 1912.
In the fall of 1912, San Diego challenged Los Angeles to a road race across the desert to Arizona. The story of The Great Race.
Gambling ships were quite the vogue in the 1930s. Anchored three miles off the San Diego coast, ships like the Reno or Monte Carlo frustrated law enforcement but delighted the sporting crowd. Click below for a story I wrote many years ago about the ill-fated Monte Carlo, the wreck of which can usually be seen each winter at low tide in front of the Hotel del Coronado. This was originally published in Stranger Than Fiction: Vignettes of San Diego History (San Diego Historical Society, 1995).
Kelp–best known as “the flyblown brown seaweed that fouls beaches and tangles the legs of ocean swimmers” is actually one of San Diego’s great natural products. In the early 1900s, the processing of ocean kelp by the Hercules Powder Company in a huge plant in Chula Vista employed hundreds of people and helped win a war. The story of Hercules Powder.
To look at it now, solidly in place, you would never know its disturbed history. The broken course of the Sutherland project is one of those fantastic things that could only happen here. –Shelley Higgins, former City Attorney, in This Fantastic City.
The story of the ill-starred Sutherland Dam, known in its day as a A Dam Fiasco.
We arrived at San Diego very tired at ½ past 7. Did not know where to go or what to do. It was dark. A serious time. At length, Walter, Keane, and self were taken in at the Dragoon Quarters and the rest got a tent. Our supper was coffee and crumbs of biscuit. –H.M.T. Powell, December 3, 1849
The diary of a tired traveler from Illinois provides a rare, colorful account of early San Diego. Of an estimated 80,000 gold-seekers who found their way to California in 1849, relatively few stopped in San Diego. Fewer still left recorded narratives of their time here. The journal of H.M.T. Powell, published in 1931 as The Santa Fe Trail to California, 1849-1852, is considered by historians to be one of the most important accounts of the Gold Rush era.
An eyewitness view of Old Town San Diego in 1849: H.M.T. Powell and San Diego
San Diego is now the automobile racing capital of America. For the brief space of one week the Southern California exposition city is to revel in all the glory of the speed game. Next Saturday America’s foremost drivers are to risk their lives . . . in one of the most unique motor races ever staged on the Pacific Coast. –Los Angeles Times, Jan. 3, 1915
The story of the 1915 Exposition Road Race.