Fresno is a town of many neighborhoods, from Sunnyside to the Tower District. But few have as interesting a history as one on the city’s northern edge, near today’s River Park shopping center. Today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots – the origins of Pinedale.
The year was 1921, World War I was over and the Roaring 20s were just getting started. And here in Central California, the new Sugar Pine Lumber Company had big plans to cut virgin timber in the Madera County mountains near Bass Lake. They built a company logging town at the lake, called Central Camp. They also built a railroad to bring the lumber from Central Camp down to the valley – the Minarets and Western Railway.
But they also needed to build a sawmill somewhere in the Fresno area. It sparked a civic competition, with different communities vying to land the mill site and town, and with it hundreds of jobs. Fresno developer J.C. Forker and the Fresno Chamber of Commerce led a drive to raise $200,000 to purchase almost 600 acres north of Herndon and west of Blackstone for the mill and town. Soon a town site was laid out and construction began on both the sawmill and homes for workers. They dubbed the new town Pinedale, and the mill opened in 1923. Soon the plant was turning out 100 million board feet of lumber a year. The town had a school, a church, a library and a hotel.
But the boom didn’t last long. By 1931 during the depths of the Great Depression, the company went bankrupt. But that’s not the end of the story… which we’ll pick up on another episode.
