The Hemmi lynching was an anomaly in the history of Arroyo Grande. The time between the drought years and the First World War would be marked by progress and by a happy confluence of remarkable families who replaced the ranchero generation of Branch, Price and Dana. Agriculture would provide them with a living and they would build a town of brickwork and ornate wooden facades two miles west of Branch’s ranch house.

He had donated the land along the Arroyo Grande Creek for the town, his gift to posterity; but he was a realist, as well. As drought decimated his cattle, Branch began to sell small pieces of the Santa Manuela to hopeful farmers.

So a new generation settled Arroyo Grande:  Easterners like Branch, some from England–which accounts for the road cheerily named “Tally Ho” by the immigrant Vachells, sometime polo players–or Moravia or, like Joseph Jatta, from Canada. For those who acquired a piece of Branch’s Santa Manuela, the bargain was simple: So long as they occupied the land, cleared the monte and planted both crops and family roots, Branch offered them easy mortgages.

The townsite he donated, the one whose main street bears his name, began to emerge in the 1880s and would incorporate just before the Great War. A smithy, little shops, and soon the PCRR and its attendant warehouses and platforms were built; the little track ran along the foot of Crown Hill, which dominated the eastern end of the town of Arroyo Grande, on its way north to San Luis Obispo.

Two inevitable and competing institutions would also be built—churches and saloons. Civilization was still incomplete: A town constable was shot to death when he tried to disarm a man at a local saloon early in the new century. Local historian Jean Hubbard has written a superb history of the Arroyo Grande Methodist Church: in 1892, when Pastor Ogborn’s sermon was interrupted by a befuddled drunk who wandered into the church; the pastor stopped, grabbed the trespasser by the collar, dragged him outside, and after the noise of “a brief scuffle,” nonchalantly re-entered and finished that Sunday’s lesson.

My childhood church was St. Barnabas Episcopal, where the Sunday nine o’clock featured a regular whose attendance was interrupted only by her death in 1983. She was Miss Ruth Paulding, a longtime teacher at the high school and a link to the earliest days of the town—she was born in 1892 in a large home partly hidden by an oak that pre-dates the Declaration of Independence, by vegetable gardens, and sometimes by sunflowers, on Crown Hill, and she only had to walk across the street to her work.

When I knew her, her wheelchair was always parked alongside the front pew. I can’t remember whether she was first or last, but the priest would leave the sanctuary to administer communion to her; it was a small but meaningful homage. I do remember the pleasure of getting a little smile from her if our eyes met while I returned to my pew from the altar rail. She was so fragile, so elegant, and so admired that a smile from Miss Ruth was as good as, or even better than, a blessing from a priest. She was ‘a gallant lady,’ the title of the little biography she wrote about her mother, Clara.

I did not know my own ties to Clara until later, but from what I knew about Ruth’s mother, I was an admirer.  She returned to college with Ruth, who’d been promised an extra $100 a year, if she took additional coursework, when the Second World War began to revive the economy. The pair decided to take summer courses at Clara’s alma mater, Mills College. Ruth took classes for the extra money; Clara, over eighty years old, took hers for pleasure, a course in “History of the United States to 1865” because, she said, she remembered the rest.

One of Clara’s assignments during more than thirty years in the classroom was at the school I attended, Branch Elementary. There is a photo of her in front of the school. Behind Clara and her bicycle in 1898 are the same steps I would climb on my first day of formal education sixty years later.

Arroyo Grande’s population, at the time of the photograph, was approaching 1,000. Beyond the town, to the east in the Upper Valley, and to the west, bounded by the sand dunes at the edge of the Pacific, in the Lower Valley, there were patchworks of farms worked by ambitious pragmatists:  Arroyo Grande men and their teams of heavily-muscled draft horses, their necks arched in effort, turned some of the richest soil in the world to prepare it for planting. They might have been plowing for sowing pumpkins or carrots, onions or beans, or one of the most important products in the many cycles of agriculture the Valley has seen: flowers, cultivated for their seeds.

What must have delighted Clara Paulding on her two-mile bicycle commute to her sixty students every morning would have been the sight of brilliant fields of flowers and, planted in others, she would have smelled the delicate fragrance of sweet peas.

It’s not hard to imagine her, given her personality, waving cheerily to the men working those fields, their faces hidden by broad-brimmed straw hats, or to imagine them waving back, wide smiles creasing their upturned faces. ecause even as field workers they had never had this much hope, and even in the Upper Valley, hemmed in closely by the oak-studded Santa Lucia foothills, they had never had this much room.

Clara’s spirit was expansive. She may look severe in her photograph, but she adored, without disguising it, young people, and the youngest the most, a feeling they reciprocated.  Her wave on school mornings would have touched these men, younger sons from a very crowded place, and not particularly welcome in this new place.

The men in the fields whom she greeted were from Japan, and some of them from a prefecture known as Hiroshima-ken.