He was a robber baron from the Gilded Age, a titan of industries and agriculture, and spoken of in the same breath as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. His legacy still shapes Kern County to this day. The story of James Ben Ali Haggin, today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots.
Haggin had an interesting background. He was born in Kentucky in 1822, the descendant of noted Turkish-American physician Ibrahim Ben Ali. Haggin practiced law, but came to Sacramento in 1850 to find a fortune in the gold fields. Instead he found an old acquaintance from Kentucky, Lloyd Tevis, and they went into business together.
From law to real estate, Haggin quickly amassed an empire. According to writer Mark Arax, Haggin and Tevis formed San Francisco’s first gas, water and ice companies. They were investors in the famed Anaconda Mine and the Comstock Lode. He was also an influential horse breeder back in his native Kentucky.
But here in Kern County, they had another sort of empire, the Kern County Land Company. Together with William Carr, they gamed the Desert Land Act to acquire some 300,000 acres in Kern County. The empire far outlived Haggin, who died in 1914.
In 1961, the company donated 370 acres in Southwest Bakersfield to the state for a new state university campus, which you know today as CSUB. In 1967 the company was acquired by Tenneco, which later sold the land to developers Castle and Cooke, developers of Seven Oaks and other subdivisions to this day.
