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Collection: Directories and Documents > Pamphlets
Report on the Agriculture Experiment Stations of the University of California (PH 4-16)(1890) (211 pages)
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Page: of 211
SOUTHERN COAST RANGE STATION. 89
THE SOUTHERN COAST RANGE STATION.
Location: Two miles north-northeast from Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo County.
The Coast Range Region at Large.—The Coast Range region forms a belt
varying in width from forty to sixty miles, lying between the Great Valley
of California and the seacoast. It is traversed by numerous more or less
disconnected ranges, mostly trending parallel to, or at a small angle with,
the coast line. From Mendocino County, inclusive, southward to the northern end of the San Bernardino Range, few points or crests exceed the height
of four thousand feet, and most of the higher ranges remain between three
thousand and three thousand five hundred feet. Many of these are very
rugged and barren, and largely treeless; of the lower ranges, from two
thousand to two thousand five hundred feet, many are rounded in outline,
largely forest-clad, deeply covered with soil, and in the moister portion of the
region susceptible of cultivation to the summits. The higher portions are
thus far occupied as grazing grounds only, the bulk of the cultivated lands
lying in the valleys or on the lower slopes and hill lands.
In conformity to the mountain ranges, the larger valleys also mostly
trend more or less parallel to the coast; while those of smaller streams,
descending from the outer slope of the Coast Ranges to the sea, generally
open more nearly at right angles, thus giving free access to the coast
winds. The latter condition determines very great differences in local and
even regional climates; and as the California coast extends through nine
and a half degrees of latitude (coextensive with the Atlantic Coast from
Boston to Savannah, Georgia), with a rainfall ranging from eighty inches
down to ten, it may readily be imagined that no one culture station can
even epeeaeely represent the Coast Range region as a whole. The
Central Station at Berkeley, although geographically nearly central, north
and south, really has an exceptional climate, dominated by the cool currents and summer fogs that enter through the Golden Gate, and thus
represents only the immediate seaward slope of the central portion of the
coast for a few miles inland. It thus becomes necessary to make a choice
of such portion of the extensive region as seems to stand most In need of
an experiment station for its immediate future, thus benefiting the largest
number of agriculturists.
It has been thought that these conditions would be best fulfilled by the
establishment of a culture sub-station at some point in the largest valley
of the southern Coast Range—that of the Salinas River—representing a
very large area of agricultural land, just being opened by the extension of
the Southern Pacific Railroad, and but little tried as to its productive
capabilities. As the needful offers of land and money for station buildings
Were made from the upper Salinas Valley, two personal visits to that
region were made for the purpose of exploration and final location. The
following description of the region, for the special benefit of which the
a Southern Coast Range Station” was established, is based partly upon
these visits, partly upon data obtained in connection with the census of
1880, and heretofore published in the reports of that work. (See Vol. 6,
monograph on “The Physical and Agricultural Features of California.”)