BOUNTIFUL VALLEY

Wonderful California, circa 1916-1920

"At the appointed hour our train was run to the Narrow Gauge depot, where a special train of four cars was boarded for a trip to the Big Tree Grove. We were soon running up the Santa Clara Valley, with its thousands of orchards and vineyards, toward the Santa Cruz Mountains. Dark streaks, about a yard wide, on the ground on either side of the train proved to be prunes drying in the sun on wire frames. There were miles upon miles of them and there seemed to be enough prunes to supply the world. The weather got extremely hot before we were long on the road and there was considerable dust also. Several tunnels, in which the locomotive developed a bad breath, also contributed to make the pilgrims uncomfortable before the Big Tree Station was reached."

"Going up the mountains through the timber and beside a running mountain stream, with a great deal of romantic scenery to be admired, made the trip a good deal more endurable, although we were glad to escape from the cars as soon as we arrived at 10:30 A.M. Proceeding at once into the grove, the services of a guide were enlisted and the tour of the Big Trees commenced. They are known scientifically as the Sequoia Sempervirens and are in massiveness second only to the Sequoias of the Sierras in Yosemite Valley. In the hollow trunk of one of the first trees we stopped at Bill Maneely and nineteen lesser pilgrims concealed themselves. On a previous visit to the grove forty of our party had gotten into the same tree. Maneely did not make up all the difference, as mole could have gotten in, but did not try. In front of the Giant the camera fiends held up the party while they tried to get a picture of them. Some were successful and some were not ... Some of the trees are certainly remarkable for height and girth, being over three hundred feet in height and upwards of sixty feet in circumference."

The pilgrims mentioned above were part of a group of the Knights Templar, a fraternal order affiliated with Freemasonry. This group traveled from Pennsylvania to the 29th Triennial Conclave of the Grand Encampment at San Francisco in 1904.

Source: Pilgrimage of Mary Commandery No. 36, Knights Templar of Pennsylvania to the Twenty-ninth Triennial Conclave of the Grand Encampment U.S. at San Francisco, Cal. by Clifford Paynter Allen, Philadelphia, 1904.