El Prado, California

This place used to be called El Prado. It was a railroad junction, connecting the San Joaquin & Eastern shortline and the Clovis Branch of the Southern Pacific Railroad. I imagine some interesting characters once passed through here: local farmers; miners and loggers going to and from the mountains; absconding bandits, pursuing lawmen; tourists from the East.

The San Joaquin & Eastern ran from El Prado up into the Sierra Nevada foothills to a settlement called Big Creek, near Huntington Lake. It was called "the crookedest railroad in the world" -- though I don't know if that was because of its many sharp, hilly curves or its business practices. The Depression forced the line's closure and abandonment in 1933.

The Clovis Branch ran south into Clovis and thus to the Southern Pacific mainline at Fresno. It was constructed in the 1890s by the old San Joaquin Valley Railroad -- a local business trying to break the Southern Pacific's stranglehold on California freight transportation. The effort failed and the branch was eventually bought by the Southern Pacific, which ran trains over it until 1971. A new San Joaquin Valley Railroad took over operation sometime after that, but it too abandoned the branch in the early 1990s. Today there is little or no trace of either railroad in this area, though in Clovis proper, a bicycle trail has replaced the old roadbed.

The old mailboxes in the photo are not likely to last much longer. The future of El Prado is the country club marked by the trees in the background and the suburban housing subdivisions that will soon cover the surrounding fields.