Camp Meeker Beat by Tom Austin - May 2018
It is early May as you read this, and there is plenty of time for you to mark your calendars for the
If you’ve been to one of these before, you know all this and wouldn’t miss it come heck or high water. It’s well worth the price of admission just for all the items above, without even remembering that your donation goes a long way toward funding our Volunteer Fire Department, and let me tell you we get our money’s worth. Living way out here in the forest has its many advantages, but as such we are a little more vulnerable to some things than city folk. Out here, the first responders are more critical than ever (as we all learned last fall), and they are our friends and neighbors in the VFD. It might even be a good idea to chat up a firefighter…about fire safety, of course. There is plenty we could all learn about defensible space, especially as we live in a forest.
Now I would like to continue a thread I began last fall, in the October 2017 issue. In that issue, I shared a vignette from the biography of Melvin Cyrus “Boss” Meeker, in which he related the courtship of his wife Flavia in somewhat turgid prose (He gently put his arm around her waist, and offered that he possessed a great fortune). I was going to go on from there and tell the tale of how enterprising young Melvin, whose family was possessed of no great advantages, pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, parlaying a meager bundle of cash from his carpentry earnings into a lumber empire so great that he gave the Bohemian Club their start by selling them a few acres.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. That’s all true. But in researching the above, something struck me as odd. If you remember the 90’s, it was one of those things that “make you go ‘hmmmm.’”. What I found was this.
Melvin Meeker was born in 1841 in Essex County, New Jersey. He began work as an errand boy in a gristmill in Milltown, NJ when he was just eleven. By fourteen he was the foreman. At sixteen, he began service as an apprentice carpenter in Millburn. There he learned sawing, molding, ornamental trimming, and the trade of a sash, door, and blind maker. Then, in 1861, he came to California…Okay, hold the phone right there. Twenty-year-old Mel Meeker, picks up and moves to California in 1861.
What ELSE happened in 1861? Oh, a little dustup we like to call the Civil War. Or the War Between the States. Or, the War of Northern Aggression, if you’re from the south. Or “the late unpleasantness” if you’re from the DEEP south. In April 1861, Fort Sumter was fired upon, and in response, able-bodied young men from all over the country rushed to join ranks with their countrymen and fight the good fight.
So…why didn’t Melvin? Twenty years of age, in the prime of his youth. Why did he choose exactly then to skedaddle off to California? According to the Official Record, he came to California “as an escort to his sister, whose intended husband was already settled here.” Doesn’t that strike you as just a tad convenient? Young men his age were flocking to recruitment centers, but he had to escort his sister to California? And stay there? Hmmm.
Was that unusual? Over 88,000 soldiers in the Union Army were from New Jersey. Well, heck. As we know, the founder of Occidental, Dutch Bill Howard, was neither Dutch nor named Bill. He was in fact a Danish able seaman named Christopher Folkmann, until he jumped ship in San Francisco Bay one day in 1849. If Occidental can be founded by a ship jumper, I guess Camp Meeker can be founded by a draft dodger.
