The town of Clovis bears his first name. But just who was the famed “Wheat King” Clovis Cole? His story today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots.
Cole was born in Indiana 1856, and came to California in 1873 with his father Stephen H. Cole, who himself would become a future mayor of Fresno. The family homesteaded a farm near Herndon and McCall east of present-day Clovis. The young Cole began his career as a teamster hauling logs in the Sierra. In 1880 he purchased 480 acres near today’s Old Town Clovis. Within four years, Cole’s empire reportedly reached 40,000 acres.
In 1891, Marcus Pollasky’s San Joaquin Valley Railroad founded a new town and named Clovis in his honor. At his peak, Cole grew wheat on 25,000 acres in Clovis area, and 25,000 acres in Madera. This was “dry farming” with no irrigation. Seeds would be sown in the fall, the crop would grow during the rainy season, and would be harvested in the summer. Unlike others who laid claim to the title of “The Wheat King," Clovis Cole wasn’t an absentee farmer. He was his own foreman, riding on horseback to his fields, supervising his crews in both planting and harvest.
In 1899, the San Francisco Examiner called his Clovis operation the "largest wheat field in the world." But by 1900, things turned. That year, the Fresno Morning Republican newspaper reported that the Fresno Sheriff ordered Cole to hand over his gold watch to pay off his creditors.
According to Cole, two years of crop failures around the turn of the century took their toll on his finances, he “got in with the wrong people.” Cole defaulted on the mortgage on his farmland. Cole retired in 1904 and moved to Fresno, living in house on "U" Street. It was later moved to Kerckhoff Avenue, where it still stands today. Cole was a lifelong Democrat, and a staunch supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt. Cole died in 1939.
