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My Facebook friend Jason Blanco posted this photo and leave it to my historian friends Shirley Gibson and Michael Shannon, all of us are now pretty sure that this is Halcyon Road, somewhere between the mobile home park and the Halcyon store today. 

Jason’s photo is from about 1908.

Those cypress trees are nearly all dead now, and ghastly-looking, but more than 100 years ago, they were dense. Halcyon Road was like a funnel, bounded by thick and dense green cypress, until you hit the County Highway, today’s Highway 1, to Oceano.

Shirley and Michael pinpointed the man who planted the cypress. He was Thomas Hodges, a Civil War veteran (45th Missouri Volunteer Infantry), who planted them as a windbreak to protect his fruit trees. He made a guest appearance in my Civil War book.

Arroyo Grande has always been famous for its row crops. You can read about them in old newspapers as far away as Kansas and South Carolina. Our pumpkins were astonishing.

But tree crops were important too—some of you may remember dense walnut groves that surrounded AGHS, until they were decimated by the husk fly larvae.

Arroyo Grande High School at the bottom of the photo with the vast walnut orchards beyond.

But even on the “farmette” (3 acres) where I grew up, on Huasna Road, there were fruit trees that preceded our house, built in 1956. So I grew up with:

–Plums

–Apricots

–Peaches

–Apples

–Oranges

–Lemons

–Avocados. 

The house where I grew up, Lopez Drive and Huasna Road. Two walnut trees remain at left, in the lower pasture. The big fella out front is a loquat tree. The Queen Anne’s Lace in the foreground was always there. Arroyo Grande Creek is just beyond the left edge of this photo.

We had nine avocado trees. They were nowhere near the best. The best avocados were grown by barber “Buzz” Langenbeck, whose barbershop is today’s Heritage Salon on Branch Street. Sadly, I did not appreciate avocados until the day I discovered guacamole, probably when I was in my twenties.

And you can find, if you look for them, at least two more generations of Hodges at AGUHS, playing sports, starring in school plays, elected to class office, graduating–the venues varied–at the movie theater in Pismo or the one in Arroyo Grande, today’s Posies in the Village.

Like any other living thing, cypress trees get old, turn brittle, and die. I don’t think that my hometown’s ties to history, even to the Civil War, ever die.

Adapted from The Heritage Press, South County Historical Society