What does Mark Twain have to do with suburban Bakersfield? Well, more than you might think. The story of the a particular sort of character: the remittance man, and Bakersfield's Rosedale Colony, today on KVPR's Central Valley Roots.
Twain describes remittance men in his 1897 travelogue Following the Equator. They were a product of England’s inheritance laws that left second-born sons of the aristocracy floating adrift, often running afoul of the social standards of the Victorian era. While their older brothers carried on family affairs and the veneer of respectability, these younger sons got into trouble and brought their families embarrassment.
The solution? Send them off across the ocean, for good, to preserve the family’s reputation. In return, they received a small monthly stipend – a remittance, a condition of their exile. Some sailed the oceans, others made it all the way to Bakersfield, and specifically the Rosedale Colony.
It was a land development scheme launched in 1890 by the Kern County Land Company, patterned after successful colony farms of Fresno County. In fact, one of the founders of Fresno's Central California Colony, Bernhard Marks, was involved as an agent for the Rosedale Colony.
Located on 12,000 acres northwest of Bakersfield, the vision was for the colony was a swath of small farms of 20 acres in size. And they were promoted heavily, especially in England and Scotland. Eventually some 250 British investors, some of them remittance men, eventually settled there and put down roots as Kern County farmers.
But they didn’t see success. Unlike the Fresno colonies, Rosedale didn’t have solid surface water rights, and Rosedale Colony failed within a few years, though we have Rosedale Highway, and the cross of palm trees near 7th Standard Road and Rudd Avenue.
