M. Theo Kearney may have been Fresno’s raisin king, but he wasn’t the first to pioneer the product in the county. Today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots, we explore the pioneers who built the raisin industry.
Historians tell us Harvey Akers planted the first vineyard in the San Joaquin Valley near Centerville in 1852, with cuttings taken from vines at Mission San Gabriel. But things didn’t really get moving as an industry until 1873. That’s when Francis and Gustav Eisen, two immigrants from Sweden, planted a 25 acre vineyard along Fancher Creek east of Fresno, intent on making wine.
Francis Eisen actually got in the raisin business by accident. In 1877, a brutal heatwave left many of his Muscat grapes dried on the vine before harvest. He wound up packing them and selling them in San Francisco, labeling them as imports from Peru. It marked the beginning of Fresno’s raisin industry.
Soon others joined in, many in the small farms in the Central California Colony of William S Chapman and Bernhard Marks, and promoted by Kearney. Among the earliest raisin farmers there were the four women who owned the Hedgerow Vineyard, located on 25 acres along Elm Avenue. Led by retired schoolteachers Minnie Austin and Lucy Hatch, they were among the first to pack and ship a raisin crop from Fresno selling them in boxes under the Austin brand. Other pioneers of the era read like a directory of Fresno streets and landmarks: Butler, Barton, T. C. White, and Frank H. Ball, and just to name a few.
