The History of Hiram in Hughson
The History of Hughson, California: The People, the Places, the Traditions of a Small Town
On June 4, 2024, Melinda Garrett, the Great-granddaughter of Hiram Hughson, presented with her cousin, Palmer Hatch Hughson, on the history of Hiram and Luella Hughson, after whom the City of Hughson is named. The following history is taken from their presentation that day.
Hiram Hughson grandson of a Revolutionary War veteran (George Hughson III, d. 1836), and the son to Nicholas M. Hughson (b. 1801), a farmer, schoolteacher and county treasurer in New York. Nicholas married Charlotte Duncan from Edinburgh, Scotland. Together they had ten children. Hiram was the fifth. He was born in 1830 in New York, Middleburg, Schoharie County. At 12, his family moved to Chenango County, New York when he was 12 where he attended public schools and finished at the Norwich Academy. At 16, Hiram moved to Elmira, New York, where he worked as a clerk at R.E. Covell Land Company, a dry goods general store, for four years, then at a general merchandise dry goods store in Norwich, New York, with his brother.
One of his brothers’ grandsons, William “Billy” L. Hughson, opened the first Ford dealership in San Francisco in 1903.
Luella Rosalie Avery was the daughter of farmer Demas Avery (b. 1822) and Mary Maria Reed (1826-1914), a descendant of Mayflower pilgrims. Together, they had seven children, three of whom were born in Lee County, Iowa. Luella was born in 1850. She came with her parents and brother, Norman Mortimer, to California by covered wagon. The six-month journey brought them to Stockton, California. In 1856, they moved to Columbia, Tuolumne County, where Demas mined for gold. Luella’s two sisters, Ida Mae (b. 1857) and Emma (b. 1860) were both born in Columbia.
In 1857, Hiram Hughson left New York for California on the “Star of the West” steamer, crossing the isthmus of Panama and taking the steamer “John L. Stephens” the rest of the way. He arrived in San Francisco, California, after five months and worked in Marysville as a clerk at a dry goods store called Kirby and Burns.” As Hiram worked in the store, he saw many men come fin from the mines with gold. He decided to go and dig his wealth out of the ground.”
Hiram began digging outside Grass Valley and Downieville in the mountains of Forest City and Monte Cristo. He bought an interest in the Keystone Mine, which was worked by a tunnel running 1000 ft back into the mountains. The mine was a failure.
Hiram left San Francisco for the Fraser River mines in British Columbia. The mines failed again.
He returned to San Fransisco.
In 1859, Hiram worked for George Walton on his ranch for six months before being hired by John Cambel to deliver beef cattle to the mines of Monte Cristo. Now successful, he went into the cattle business himself.
At his brother's urging, he returned to New York to take over the dry goods store. The money could not compare to his earnings in California, so in 1860, he sailed back to California, settled in Stockton and rented farmland. He put in a crop, plowed 120 acres with a single plow, and sowed it half wheat and half barley. When it matured, he harvested, hauled and stacked it. Hiram paid 10 cents a bushel for Tom Marshall to thresh it using a horsepower machine. For his workers, Hiram provided room and board. The wheat was sold to Sperry’s Mill, now Sperry’s Flour Mill, in Stockton.
In the winter of 1861-2, Hiram bought 100 head of cattle from Henry Post, paying him with money, a wagon horse and outfit. The Great Flood of 1861 wiped out all but one dozen cattle.
He rented farmland again, grew and harvested barley, and sold mining supplies to mountain settlements. His wagon train traveled to Sonora and Columbia, among other mining towns.
At this time, Luella was a schoolteacher in her teens at the Old Red Brick Schoolhouse in Columbia. “One time when Hiram’s wagon train passed through Columbia, he caught the eye of 15-year-old Luella Rosalie Avery,” Garrett said. “It was love at first sight.”
When the railroad came through, Hiram abandoned the teaming business. He rented 1,500 acres of land from Al Wood, working it until he bought his first ranch in 1863 five miles southeast of Stockton on Hogan and Sonora Roads, purchased from and within the “Rancho Del Campo de las Franeeses” 48,747 acres from a, 1844 Mexican Land Grant. Today, it is known as French Camp.
Demas and Mary Maria moved their family to Stockton in 1864. There, Hiram and Luella were married on November 21, 1867.
Hiram farmed his first ranch, where six of their eleven children were born. The family lived there for fourteen years until 1876. Beginning with the birth of their first child, Bell, in 1866, the couple welcomed a new child each year for eleven years.
In a farming accident in 1871, Hiram lost his left arm “from a spring of his mowing machine,” Garrett said. “He was thrown against the scythe. An unfortunate happening, just like what happened to Hiram’s grandfather, George Hughson III, who lost his arm in the Revolutionary War. It was recorded that Hiram Hughson said in later years after he had made his million and was rated one of the most successful ranchers in the valley ‘that he never had been able to make a success of anything until he lost his arm, when he commenced to use his head a little, instead of his strength altogether.’”
The next year, he purchased an additional 500 acres for $5000, just $10 per acre, farmed it, made improvements and sold it for $25,000. Four years later, he sold his first ranch.
The advent of the combine harvester in 1880 was a boon for Hiram, who used his mule teams to pull it. At times, he owned as many as 60 mules to pull the combine, which cut, threshed, and stacked the wheat as it went over the field, covering 40 acres per day. Mule teams hauled the grain to the town of Keyes, where it was shipped by train.
In 1884, Hiram began to build his family farmhouse on his 5000-acre ranch. The two-story, white Victorian farmhouse still stands at 3423 Tully Rd just outside Hughson’s city limits. To build it, Mary Hudelson Stetson, related to Hiram by marriage, helped build it. The Stetsons lived in the house from 1884 to 1886 before Hiram and his family moved into it, hauling their possessions from Stockton by wagon in 1886, where they would remain for 15 years. The Hiram Hughson house would then pass to the Raitts from 1902 to 1908 before T.B. Michaels bought it. It would remain in the Michaels family for approximately 100 years.
“The house was a mansion in those times. 3,700 square feet, six bedrooms, 5 ½ bathrooms, large rooms, numerous built-ins, lots of closet storage, solid redwood frame with lath and plaster walls. Luella ordered two large gold leaf orate wall stand-up mirrors from New York that traveled to California via ship, then train to mule-driven wagons to the Hughson Ranch House,” Garett said. Those mirrors remain in place today.
Once a year, Hiram bought a train box car full of supplies for his family, including cloth, flour, sugar, coffee, etc. His granddaughter, Evelyn, recalled visiting the Hughson Ranch House. “Hiram would meet her at the Train Depot with a horse-drawn carriage. She said, ‘it was such a fun time out in the country, and Grandpa always gave me a silvery dollar.’”
In 1888, Hiram and Luella’s eleventh and last child, Lester Roy Hughson, was born.
In 1890, the ranch increased to 7,000 acres, all south of the Tuolumne River. Hiram drove his 10-mule team to one of the properties and back each day, plowing and harvesting seven acres a day.
In 1899, Hiram donated one-acre plot of land at Tully and Whitmore roads for the construction of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1908, the church relocated to Locust and Second Street.
In the early 1900s, the San Joaquin Railroad purchased land from Hiram for their tracks. Hiram gave 100 feet wide right of way through his acreage plus a plot of land for the train depot to be built. The train depot and station became known as the “Hughson Stop.”
Hiram would say, “Water was the mother of growth in the San Joaquin Valley, and the father was the railroad.” Garrett said. “Hiram helped lay out his namesake town of ‘Hughson’ with wide streets so that a huge wagon pulled by four horses hitched could make a u-turn when necessary.”
The Hughson township was founded in 1907. It was incorporated in 1972. Hughson placed his land in the hands of the Hughson Town Company under the direction of Charles Flack and C.W. Minniear. John Tully, who owned as section of land south of Hughson, opened his land for settlement. Both land transfers allowed the town of Hughson to be born.
The rail remained an important part of the town fo Hughson, bringing people in and shipping food in and out. The rail brought mail multiple times a day, and took passengers from Hughson to Modesto and back. The Hughson Train Station was torn down in the 1950s.
The children of Hiram and Luella continued to spread out. Hiram ranched, bought, and sold grain with his son George Washington Hughson, who acted as a private banker lending to individuals and business firms. He died in 1911 at 72 years old.
In 1913, Luella bought a 50 x 110-foot lot at the northeast corner of Tenth and J Streets in Modesto for $10,000, and she planned to build an elegant hotel, which she would name “The Hughson Hotel.” It was the largest hotel in Modesto and the “finest in the San Joaquin Valley.”
It opened in 1914. It is a six-story building with a basement and garden on the roof and a 36-foot redwood flag pole from which the American flag flew every day. The flagpole and flag now stand at Modesto Pioneer Cemetery as a monument.
The lower level had a dining room and grill. The mezzanine floor overlooked “the gracious lobby with ladies’ parlor, writing room, hairdressing and manicure parlor.” There were 110 rooms with 40 private baths. The entire Hotel Hughson provided steam heat, and all rooms had hot and cold water. The hotel had an elevator, and half of the top floor was devoted to an immense ballroom. There was a swimming pool in the basement.
Luella occupied two rooms in the hotel until 1926.
Luella was honored as “Queen of Modesto” during the Modesto Centennial Celebration. In 1950, she was quoted in the Modesto Bee answering the question, “How to live much longer than a human’s normal lifespan?”
She answered, “Possibly the way things were in my day…no washing machines, no electric lights, no automobiles, no vacuum cleaners, no ‘sitters’ for children…naturally made one healthy, if not rugged.”
On October 25, 1951, Luella died at age of 102.
Hiram and Luella are buried in the Modesto Pioneer Cemetery.
The Hotel Hughson was torn down in 1998. In its place stands Tenth Street Place, home of the new City Hall and County Building.
In 1907, the Gilette Hotel was moved from Ceres to Hughson by Charles Flact and Charles Minniear. The two-story structure was cut in half for the five-mile move along Whitmore Road. The first half was moved by two 65 horsepower island engines and 60 two head of mules over three weeks. That was too troublesome and unnecessary. The second half was moved by mules alone and took half a week.
An additional floor was built under the hotel after it arrived on the northwest corner of Hughson Avenue and Third Street. In 1908, the $25,000 three-story Hughson Hotel was open. “It housed drummers traveling through the area and provided lodging for teachers, salesmen, etc. Every room had an outside window view, with the coast range on one side, snow-capped sierras on another, and the endless sweep of the beautiful San Joaquin Valley in front and back.
In its first decade, the town showed outdoor movies projected onto the wall of the hotel. James V. Date, Hughson’s first fire commissioner and manager of the Hughson Hotel and nextdoor livery stable, sponsored the movies to promote local shopping. He built an annex to the left, connecting it to the hotel. The annex housed a barber shop, real estate office, pool hall, and soda and snack concessions.
After 117 years, the Hughson Hotel is still standing. It is now the Odd Fellows Hall at 6943 Hughson Avenue.
Originally published in the Hughson Chronicle & Denair Dispatch on June 18, 2024. The Hughson Chronicle & Denair Dispatch is part of MidValley Publications - committed to the power of the positive press. Reprinted with Permission.