Imagine it is well over a century ago and you are trying to build a railroad across the great United States of America. What would you need? Turns out, one of the biggest challenges you would face was not the steel track itself, it was finding the timber for all those millions of ties that lay beneath the parallel rails. And when you consider that each tie was 8 x 8 inches square and eight feet long and numbered about three thousand per mile over hundreds and hundreds of miles at a stretch, the demand for wood became truly colossal.
That is exactly the dilemma that faced Mr. Walter E. Hodges of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1906, who looked at an area north and east of Del Mar in San Diego County and suffered a moment of inspiration. It would be the perfect spot, he reasoned, for the Santa Fe to create its own forest. Thus, more than three million blue gum eucalyptus trees were planted and grew quite magnificently as the railroad anticipated an abundant and renewable supply of railroad ties in perpetuity.
It was an agricultural experiment of astonishing size …and it did not work. Oh, the trees grew just fine and can still be seen in the area today. It is just that they could not hold a railroad spike. They split and warped and alas, were not up to the job. Faced with such poor results, the Santa Fe was looking to cut its losses when developer Ed Fletcher came along with an idea. The land itself still had great value and was situated in such an attractive location, he imagined there could be a wonderful community built of orchards and homes and country estates, where “gentleman farmers” could be among their own kind amidst the winding roads and yes, eucalyptus trees, and even though the railroad timber thing was not a success, the Santa Fe would end up making money anyway. And so it was, that an absolutely beautiful place we all know very well today was born, and how in 1921 and forever thereafter, it came to be called Rancho Santa Fe.
And as for Walter Hodges? Well, all that new development in Rancho Santa Fe and downstream would need water of course, and so on behalf of the Santa Fe Land Improvement Company, he laid the groundwork for a water project that would later come to be known as Lake Hodges.
Interesting isn’t it, how things “tie” together, when you know the story About San Diego?
