This is the Arroyo Grande Creek alongside the house where I grew up. The creek makes for rich alluvial soil, so many years before my family moved here, two Civil War veterans farmed within a mile of this spot. Both were Ohioans and both had been neighbors twenty years before they came to California in the 1880s.

But that day was July 1, 1863, when their regiments took up their positions on Barlow’s Knoll.

Fouch became a fierce defender of the high school where I would someday be a student and teach history. It was not at first popular with Arroyo Grande taxpayers, but Fouch, a formidable man, saw to it that the high school would not only survive but get its first schoolhouse in 1906.

Sylvanus Ullom’s son—later high school graduating classes are populated by plenty of Ulloms–became a house painter who, in 1918, won the contract to paint the 1888 two-room schoolhouse, yellow in this photograph, where my education began.

Their descendants still live in Arroyo Grande today.