L. W. Currey, Inc.

(California; Colusa County; Central Valley; Sacramento Valley) Wooster Company, C. M. NEW LAND OPENING IN CALIFORNIA UNDER IRRIGATION (BY ACT OF CONGRESS) ABUNDANCE OF WATER THE RICHEST OF SOIL CONTINUOUS GROWING SEASON [cover title]. [San Francisco: C. M. Wooster Company, 1907.]. 22.7x10 cm (folded), pp. [1-3] 4-24, 22 illustrations from photographs (including one on front panel), 3 maps, self wrappers, stapled. Primarily an agricultural county, Colusa's early agricultural products were largely wheat and barley. Following the subdivision of the large pioneer ranches, smaller farms mainly grew fruit and vegetables. C. M. Wooster was the president of the Sacramento Valley Land Company and the Central Canal & Irrigation Company. This brochure, prepared by Wooster's "Land Department," offers subdivided land, mostly 40-acre lots, in their Packer Ranch and Boggs Ranch subdivisions, land located between the Sacramento River on the east and the Great Central Canal on the west. In 1903 the Central Canal & Irrigation Company took over the stalled canal project, completed it, and installed a pump at its intake. "When the Central Canal and Irrigation Company took over the system in 1903, it extended the river branch to a point three miles south of Princeton, with the result that one of the very finest communities of small farmers in the county gathered there. Incidentally, a great injustice was done these people, for they bought their lands with a water right included, and then, by the decision of the supreme court in 1915, were deprived of the water right. They are now forming a district of their own, and will pump water from the river. The Central Canal itself is sixty feet wide on the bottom, and is made to carry six feet of water. The original contractor was the San Francisco Bridge Company, which had a special excavating machine built to dig the canal. The machine weighed two hundred seventy-five tons and cost fifty thousand dollars. It worked night and day, employing a crew of thirty men during the day and twelve at night, and doing the work of four hundred men. In twenty-two hours it excavated about four thousand cubic yards of earth. On September 26, 1906, the Central Canal and Irrigation Company, having completed the canal to its intake, began to install a pump to put water into it. The capacity decided upon was one hundred cubic feet a second, capable of irrigating twenty thousand acres. The original district contained one hundred fifty-six thousand five hundred acres. For several years the Sacramento Valley Irrigation Company has been in financial straits, and has been selling off its lands. Thus the lands are passing back into the hands of individual owners, where they should be, and the strife and turmoil caused by the old Central Irrigation District are almost at an end" (Charles Davis McCornish, History of Colusa and Glenn Counties, California ... [Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1918], page 102). Not in Rocq (1970). Light wear along folds, small closed tear along the lower edge of the fold of the last leaf, small stains to last three leaves, agent's stamp on rear panel, a good copy. OCLC lists this item, but does not provide a location. (#168943).

Price: $375.00