With the introduction of the automobile in the early 1900s, Americans were on the move unlike ever before and Southern California with its Mediterranean climate proved to be a desired destination. Southern California grew rapidly, bringing new jobs, industries and technology to a mostly agricultural landscape, with oranges as the anchor crop. Two major events in Southern California sped up this growth: The completion of the Owens Valley Aqueduct in 1913 brought much needed water to the agricultural landscape and growing population. Southern California also saw an increase in oil production, to satisfy the new demand for gasoline and asphalt. Although Southern California grew rapidly, the land surrounding major cities consisted mainly of agricultural lands and cattle ranches. Farmers and ranchers were vital to the survival of the residents of Southern California. A very young self-taught Walter Knott happened to be one of those farmers. Walter Knott, a child of California pioneers, born December 11, 1889 in San Bernardino, California, and his beloved wife Cordelia (Hornaday) Knott, born January 23, 1890 in Bushton, Coles County, Illinois, truly achieved the American dream, digging and cooking their way out of poverty to not only riches, but their own place in American history. Utilizing the pioneering spirit, mixed with their holistic American values and faith in God, Walter and Cordelia transformed a berry farm into a famous chicken dinner restaurant with an educational and historically significant theme park attached, focused on American, Western, and California history and using realism and replication.
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| Walter and Cordelia Knott Jay Jennings, “Knott's Berry Farm: The Early Years,” Facebook, Accessed May 10, 2018. https://www.facebook.com/pg/knottsearlyyears/photos/?ref=page_internal. |
Rev. Elgin Charles Knott, Walter’s father passed away on March 31, 1896 when Walter was only six years old, so his mother Margaret (Dougherty) Knott moved the family from San Bernardino to Pomona, California.1 With his father gone Walter decided he had to step up and be the man of the house, so he raised vegetables in the back lot of their home to supplement his mother’s income. Walter gained permission from city officials to start planting on vacant lots nearby. His vacant lot farming and newspaper route for the Pomona Progress gave Walter self-confidence, a strong work ethic, and a sense of responsibility, to the extent that when he finished his sophomore year at Pomona High School, he felt that was all the schooling he needed. Walter gained experience outside Pomona, picking cantaloupes in Imperial Valley and renting land where he planted peas. Walter would clear five hundred dollars when other area farmers were going broke, because he grew good quality peas that produced longer than the other more experienced farmers. Walter’s secret was in irrigation, his ability to bargain with wholesalers, and using the local Indian Reservation as a resource for pickers, whom he had to pay each day in coins. This is where the love to plant, harvest, and stay close to the soil formed the beginnings of an entrepreneurial enterprise that was the foundation that became Walter Knott the berry man.2
Walter bought a lot and built a house in Pomona just before he married his high school sweet heart Cordelia L. Hornaday on June 3, 1911.3 After a couple of years of living the domestic life, Walter longed to get back to the soil and own his own farm. In 1914 he talked Cordelia into homesteading a hundred and sixty acres of land through the Homesteading Act, ran by the United States Land Office. The property was located in the Mojave Desert in an area called Newberry which today is close to Highway 18, twenty-five miles east of Barstow.4
Walter moved out to the desert ahead of Cordelia to prepare the one room adobe home left by the last owner who failed to remain on the property for the required three years. It took Walter a week to reach the site by wagon, shadowing his ancestor’s footsteps who came west from Texas in 1868. Although Cordelia agreed to follow her husband out to the desert, once she saw the small adobe and vast emptiness she cried.5 The Knotts sold their home in Pomona to pay for Walter’s new farming adventure, bringing only home furnishings, a buckboard, two horses, a cow, some chickens, feed, and farm implements.6 For a money crop Walter decided to plant grapes near the house, while hoping to turn it into forty acres over time and then plant other crops once the grapes were established. He chose grapes because the soil and climate were suitable and grape vines sent roots down to find their own water source, but found he had to water each plant by hand until the vines took root. The grapevines had just come into leaf and showed promise of producing, when a strong storm pulled all the plants out of the ground and piled them into heaps.7
Wells ended up being the biggest blow to the Knott family farming adventure. The 300 foot well that Walter had paid a San Bernardino well driller to sink, had clogged with sand due to improper installation by the drilling firm, but the Knotts needed water to survive. Walter’s only option was to dig a thirty foot well by hand and install a windmill and casing. It only gave them enough water for the house, which had to be brought in by hand. Walter rented equipment to de-sand the well, but within hours the pipe was clogged again. The clogging remained an issue, but the word “quit” was not in Walter’s vocabulary.8 If they could stick it out for the full three years they would own a hundred and sixty acres.
Money began to run out and Walter had to get a wage paying job. He began with making adobe bricks for two dollars a day and repairing homes in the area for newcomers to the desert. This work was not daily or consistent and made it difficult to feed his family. So, in 1915 he went to the Calico Silver Mine that just reopened because the price of silver had gone up due to the beginning of World War I. Knott was hired as a carpenter foreman for two dollars and sixty-five cents a day. This also ended up being short lived as well, because Walter realized that the promoters of Calico were preparing a false front in order to sell stock, and actually no mining was going to be done. This kind of shady enterprise was against Walters Christian values, morals, and ethics, but he also missed his wife and children, so he quit.9
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| Calico, Ca - Silver Town 1931 |
Walter had a personal tie to Calico as well; his beloved uncle John C. King, once sheriff of San Bernardino County, had discovered one of the mines in Calico called The Silver King. It produced ten thousand dollars in sliver.10 In the evenings Walter would walk the streets of Calico and climb up to his uncle’s old mine while admiring and exploring the old ruins around him. He wasn’t sure what buildings were used for which purpose but he knew the former saloons because of the piles of bottles that adorned the rear of the buildings. He looked for a church and could not figure out among the ruins which one it could be if there was one at all, but a cemetery did exist, overgrown with weeds, on a hill just outside of town.11 Calico and its ruins had to be one of his inspirations when it came to creating his own Ghost Town twenty-five years later. After Calico, Walter finally starting making good money, one hundred twenty dollars a month for himself and his team while working on county roads in the desert.12
The Knotts survived severe poverty, desert storms, and clogged wells in the Mojave Desert for three years and finally had one hundred and sixty acres to show for it. It remained in the family for decades after, but with three kids and another one on the way they had to do something different. Walter, when asked about his desert years, said, “Those desert years were some of the best years of our life. They taught us much we would need to know in the future. The hardships we endured made us tough. After what we went through there, nothing could faze us.”13 The hardships the Knotts suffered through the desert year formed a solid foundation for the heartwarming, hardworking, kind, giving but firm souls they became.
The opportunity to leave the desert arose in 1917, with a move to Shandon in San Luis Obispo County, California, where he got into the sharecropping business growing vegetables for a 47,000-acre cattle ranch. With Cordelia in tears once again, the Knotts loaded up their three children in the wagon and with three hundred dollars in their pocket, headed to a new adventure off what is now Hwy 41. During their time in the desert the automobile age had begun in Southern California, so the horses who were old and over worked had never seen nor walked on pavement found it difficult to travel any length of distance each day. The other problem was having to share the road with new automobile traffic.
The rancher told Walter, “Pick out any spot you want, I don’t know anything about farming but I understand that you do. So find yourself as many acres as you need and we can talk it over. Better choose a place off to one side though, or my stock will trample down everything you plant.”14 Walter did just that by picking seven and a half acres near the San Juan River, close to the ranch house and close to town so he could market the surplus of vegetables. The seven and a half acres he chose was full of tall and sturdy weeds, and he proclaimed, “If weeds grew as luxuriantly as this, certainly vegetables would also.”15 The deal he made with the rancher for the use of seven and one-half acres was that he would supply the vegetables for the manager, hands, and personal use, and he could sell the surplus. After the deal was made, it was time to get to work, so Walter rented a house for eight dollars a month and got to work.
Before Walter could plant anything, he needed water and had to remove the weeds. With a series of springs running through the acreage, Walter diverted them all into one irrigation ditch that supplied plenty of water to irrigate the acreage. The weeds were mostly bull nettles and he removed all seven and a half acres of them with a hoe and by hand. He did not have a tractor or heavy tools. Walter was smart though; after clearing a section he would plant seeds and get something growing as he continued clearing weeds.16 The rancher saw how hard Walter worked his land and gave Walter odd job ranch work until the crops started coming in.
All of Walter’s experience in his youth and in the desert finally paid off. His crops produced, and produced big, so big the retail markets did not know what to do with them. One shop owner stated, “I have never seen cabbages like that before! I had to cut them up and sell parts of them. Send me some more . . .”17 Not only cabbage, but corn, bell peppers, tomatoes, beans and other vegetables, started making Walter some well deserved money.
With Walter working the farm, Cordelia become bored since she did not have to haul water in from a well, there was no longer desert sand to clean up, and life had become a little easier. Sugar was hard to come by because of World War I and food allotments, but Cordelia managed to procure a small amount. With the sugar Cordelia experimentad in making gourmet homemade candy. She took those candies to a local store in Shandon in hopes to sell them there, which the storeowner agreed to do, and they were a hit. Since she created a successful candy business, she now qualified for extra allotments of sugar. Cordelia made so much extra money selling candy she took her earnings and the Knotts purchased their first automobile, a secondhand 1917 Ford Model T.18 Cordelia’s success in the candy business gave her the self-confidence and courage to later produce the Knott’s Berry Farm jellies, jams, preserves, syrups, baked goods, and most importantly her world-famous chicken dinner.
After three years in Shandon the Knotts became home sick for Southern California. Their kids were growing, and Walter realized he could never be able to expand his farm or own the land he worked on so hard. Walter still chased the dream of owning his own farm someday, and that someday arrived in 1920 when his cousin Jim Preston, who lived in Buena Park raising berries, ask him to come to Buena Park and go into business with him. Walter said yes to Preston, and unknowingly cementing his legacy in Buena Park. The Knotts took their two thousand five-hundred-dollar profit from the farm and candy, packed up the family for the last time, and headed to Buena Park. When they arrived, Walter and Preston leased twenty acres for one thousand dollars a year, from William H. Coughran, who agreed with a hand shake to a five-year lease. With the farm land secure, the family found a house to rent for eight dollars a month with no plumbing, just a few blocks from the farm.19 Walter once again put almost all he saved into equipment and root stock for the new farm, but he also planted a garden of vegetables to live off of while he waited for his first harvest of berries. Sadly, once again tragedy stuck the Knott family when a rare freeze hit Southern California that winter and the Knotts barely survived, but survive they did.20
Jay Jennings, “Knott's Berry Farm: The Early Years,” Facebook, Accessed May 10, 2018. https://www.facebook.com/pg/knottsearlyyears/photos/?ref=page_internal.
Footnotes:
1 Barbara LeClaire, “Rev. Elgin Charles Knott,” Find A Grave Memorial no. 45630110, Dec 12 2009, Find a Grave https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/45630110
2 Willie Mae Caldwell, The Genealogy of the Knott Family 1617-1989: Founders of Knott’s Farm, Buena Park California, (La Habra, CA: Willie Mae Caldwell, 1989), 179.
3 Ibid.
4 Norman E. Nygaard, Walter Knott Twentieth Century Pioneer: The Story of the Man Behind Knott’s Berry Farm Internationally-known Tourist Attraction, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1985), 49.
5 Huell Howser, “California Gold: Knott’s Berry Farm,” You Tube Video, 15:31, July 2 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY5nXl6VpS4&t=28s
6 Helen Kooiman, Walter Knott: Keeper of the Flame, (Fullerton, Ca: Plycon Press, 1973), 32.
7 Nygaard, Walter Knott Twentieth Century Pioneer, 54.
8 Ibid.
9 Nygaard, Walter Knott Twentieth Century Pioneer, 55. Calico originally established in 1880 when silver sold at $1.31 an ounce, pulling almost one hundred thousand dollars of silver from the mine, but in 1896 with a population of thirty-five hundred people, the price of silver sank to sixty-three cents making it no longer profitable to work.
10 Kooiman, Walter Knott: Keeper of the Flame, 38.
11 Ibid, 57.
12 Nygaard, Walter Knott Twentieth Century Pioneer, 60.
13 Ibid, 31.
14 Ibid, 62.
15 Ibid.
16 Kooiman, Walter Knott: Keeper of the Flame, 48.
17 Ibid, 50.
18 Nygaard, Walter Knott Twentieth Century Pioneer, 66.
19 Ibid, 68.
20 Ibid.
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