Every once in awhile we historians get research requests from real estate agenst. Which helps to prove, I guess, that we have some practical value. Here’s one:

Dear XXXX,

I am honored to be recommended by XXXX Since, as a historian, I am nosy by nature, I glanced at XXXX’s listings and found the home you cited. If that’s not the property, I will now blush.

I can’t ascertain whether 1930 is the right construction date, but the home once belonged to one of Arroyo Grande’s most prominent families, the Briscos.

Charles Brisco and his wife, Etta, moved to Arroyo Grande in 1902; they had three children. One of them, Leo (1892-1987), was a whirlwind. He owned one of the early garages in town, which would’ve stood about where the IOOF Hall parking lot is today.

Leo married the granddaughter of Huasna rancher and Union Civil War veteran Adam Bair–nearly sixty veterans like him are buried in our cemetery, where I give Civil War tours–

 who fought in the deadliest year of the war, Grant vs. Lee, in 1864-65.  If I start to feel sorry for myself, all I need to do is glance at the regimental flag of Bair’s 60th Ohio as it looked at the end of the war.

When the Norwegian lumber freighter Elg ran aground off Oceano in 1938, the captain had to jettison the cargo to get his ship afloat again. Pretty much the whole South County ran to the beach to get free lumber–one young man drowned and another, future World War II fighter pilot Elwyn Righetti, nearly did. And that’s how Leo Brisco got into the lumber and construction business.  It’s said that many of the homes and businesses along Brisco Road are constructed from Elg lumber.  Leo also bought the building, in the 1940s, that now houses Cafe Andreini; it’s sometimes referred to as the Brisco Hotel.

Leo was blind in one eye and wore a shaded eyeglass lens, so that’s him at Brisco Lumber today.

He was also one of the founders, along with my Dad, Albert Maguire, Walter Filer and others, of Mid-State Bank, today’s Mechanics’ Bank.
On Etta Brisco’s death in 1939, the home was inherited by her daughter-in-law, Marietta (1908-2001), who married a business partner of Leo’s, Frank Bosch (1902-1987). Here’s an advertisement from 1941 (I included the cow because I kind of liked the ad:

Sadly–if irrelevantly–Mary Agueda’s daughter was murdered in 1926, which has provided the Arroyo Grande area with its most poignant ghost story:

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2021/10/01/little-alice/

Frank Bosch stayed in the service station/auto repair business and kept it in his brother-in-law’s name:

Mrs. Bosch was the head of the local Red Cross and spent countless hours in volunteer work and in teaching first aid classes, most notably during World War II.

Sometime in the 1950s, the home was acquired by Mrs. J.H. (Gertrude) Thurlwell. She moved away from Arroyo Grande in the mid 1950s but returned to the home to live out the final three months of her life in 1959.

Tragically, she lost a son, Vernon (upper left in this photo from the 1917-18 Arroyo Grande Union High School yearbook) who had been accepted to Stanford but was trying to enlist in the Army. The 1918 flu claimed him instead. (And, parenthetically, that hit Arroyo Grande hard, too, as the story in the link below describes):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1libbJd0azm2ZpdUJoBti7G_DUjHFJlv5/view?usp=sharing

Incidentally, a tool that just might bring up several conversation pieces between agents and their clients is this, an interactive history map of Branch Street. Enjoy, and feel free to share, courtesy of the South County Historical Society.

www.historicbranchstreetarroyogrande.com

I hope that some of this is helpful, and the Society and I wish you great success! We, in turn–as we battle our way back from over two years of Covid–welcome the support of the real estate community!

My best,
Jim Gregory, President

Like most of you, I’ve been veering between rage and despair over Ukraine.

I’m even resorting to movie fantasies to comfort myself–like when Diana rescues the village from the Germans in Wonder Woman–another writer saw that scene evocative of what was then happening in Syria, with the assistance of the Russians– or, far more violent, envisioning the First Air Cav of Apocalypse Now’s Robert Duvall delivering a spectacular napalm strike on the Russian columns as they head east toward the Donbas.

I can be a bloodthirsty little bastard when I’m angry.

Even moreso when I’m helpless.

We seem, among world figures and self-important commentators, to be quibbling over the term “genocide.” The term applies here, to what’s being done to the people of Ukraine. I’ve written about genocide, at some length, in our own history, and some of it involved Arroyo Grande settlers.

–In 1862, when the government, which had already reduced the size of the Woodland Sioux reservation in Minnesota, thus depriving them of game, also withheld the reservation’s meat and grain allotment, a war broke out. It began with some hungry young men stealing a hen’s eggs from a farmer in Meeker County–where my Irish ancestors, no strangers to hunger, later homesteaded–and ended with the largest mass execution in American history, of thirty-eight Sioux fighters, hanged in Mankato. Over three hundred had originally been sentenced to hang until Lincoln intervened. John Rice, who build a home from Los Berros stone on Myrtle Street, was a soldier who witnessed that execution as a member, mounted that day, of F Company, 10th Minnesota Infantry.

The hangings happened the day after Christmas, 1862. The Sioux sang as they climbed the scaffold and stood on the plank that would be collapsed on the signal of a settler whose family had been murdered. Their hands were bound, but the condemned men tried desperately to touch each other in that final moment.

One of the fighters who died that day was named Chaksha. A White woman had intervened on his behalf at one of the perfunctory military tribunals because he had saved the life of the woman and her children as they were about to be killed by Chaksha’s comrades. But a mistake in record-keeping killed Chaksha. The same mistake, thanks to the similarity in names, spared the life of Chaksey-etay, a Sioux condemned of raping and murdering another woman.

When a warder went into the Mankato jail on December 27 calling Chaksha’s name for his release, a voice called out simply, “You hanged him yesterday.”

–In the Treaty of Laramie in 1858, the Powder River Country was promised to the Lakota and Cheyenne until the end of time. Then gold was discovered there. When miners began getting picked off, the Army sent in a punitive expedition that included two Arroyo Grande settlers, James Dowell and Thomas Keown, under the command of a general, Patrick Connor, who promised “to kill every male Indian over the age of twelve.” It didn’t work out that way, especially when, on the first night of the expedition, Dowell and Keown’s commander pitched camp between two villages whose leaders were Red Cloud and Sitting Bull.

“The Sioux fell on them like angry badgers,” one historian wrote. Dowell and Keown survived the expedition, but just barely, and as infantrymen. They’d had to eat their horses.

–Harrison Marion Bussell, First Colorado Cavalry, is buried in our cemetery. It was only a matter of luck that his company was left behind at Fort Lyon when a detachment of cavalry, under Col. John Chivington, fell on a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864. The horse soldiers from the volunteer regiment that accompanied the First mutilated the genitals of the dead to bring home souvenirs–the troopers of the First, regular army soldiers, had to be forcibly restrained from opening fire on the volunteers, who killed, over the course of eight hours, 230 women and children.

The volunteers killed at close range. The First Colorado–Bussell’s comrades–had brought mountain howitzers along for the expedition and when they opened fire on the camp, witnesses noted that the shells detonated harmlessly in mid-air, high above the Native Americans who were going to die anyway. The soldiers of the First had cut the shells’ fuses short.

The leader at Sand Creek, Black Kettle, would escape. Six years later, on the Washita, he was flying an American flag, a gift from President Lincoln, outside his tipi when Custer’s Seventh–the regimental band was playing the Seventh’s theme, “Garryowen,” the merry old Irish drinking song– rode into the village and began killing everyone in sight. Black Kettle was among them.

And then there’s Wounded Knee. This is from a piece I wrote eight years ago.

So don’t call what’s happening in Ukraine–the extermination, both haphazard and deliberate–of a people considered “inferior”–anything other than genocide. Don’t bullshit me. Don’t equivocate.

I know genocide when I see it.