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The Town Under the Lake Laurel Bar, California, 1850–1955 by Alice Pimentel My name is Alice Pimentel. I am eighty-two years old and I live in Modesto, California, where I kept the books at a fruit cannery for thirty-three years. My grandson set up this computer for me and showed me how to make the letters big, which is why they are big. He said people would want to read about my town. I said I doubted it, but he is usually right about these things. I was born in 1917 in a little town called Laurel Bar, on a river in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. It started in 1850 as a gold camp on a gravel bar in the river, and by the time I came along the gold was long gone and it was a ranching and orchard town of about four hundred people, with one main street, one church, one school and everybody's business known to everybody else. In the 1950s the government built a dam on the river below us. In 1955 the water came up behind it, and Laurel Bar is now at the bottom of a lake. People fish over it in the summer. I have been out on that lake in a boat, and I can tell you about where my father's garage is under the water, give or take a hundred feet. I want to say one thing at the beginning so you will not misunderstand me. I am not angry about the dam. The valley below us needed that water for the farms, and for the towns, and to keep the floods down, and there were a great many more people in the valley than there were in Laurel Bar. I worked in a cannery my whole life, and every peach and tomato I ever counted grew on water from some dam. It was a fair price and they paid it. It was just that the price was our town. So this is not a complaint. It is a walk. Come with me down Main Street the way it was when I was a girl, from the bridge at the bottom of town to the church at the top. The Bridge You came into Laurel Bar over an iron bridge, painted green, built in 1898. It rattled when a car went over it and sang when the wind blew, and every child in town was told never to climb it and every child in town did. Below the bridge the river made a long pool against a big granite rock, and that was the swimming hole. We swam there from the last day of school until the first, boys at one end and girls at the other, until about 1930 when nobody bothered anymore. You could jump off the top of the big rock if you were brave. I did it once, when I was twelve, and I did not do it twice. Avila's Livery, later Avila's Garage The first building on the left, past the bridge, was my father's. Manuel Avila came from the island of Pico in the Azores in 1905, when he was nineteen, with one suitcase and an uncle in California. He worked on a cattle ranch for seven years, saved every cent, and in 1912 he bought the livery stable in Laurel Bar. He rented out horses and wagons, boarded people's teams, and shod horses with the blacksmith next door. By the time I was a girl the automobiles were coming, and my father was a practical man. In 1925 he sold the last of the horses, poured a concrete floor over the stable, dug a grease pit, put up a gasoline pump out front, and painted AVILA'S GARAGE over the big door. He taught himself to fix a Model T from a book, with my mother reading it to him because his English reading was slow. I learned to change a tire before I learned to make bread. My mother was not pleased about that. Llewellyn's General Store and Post Office Across the street was the store, which had been the store since the Gold Rush, and the Llewellyns had run it for three generations. They came from Cornwall, in England, like a lot of the old mining families. You could buy flour, nails, overalls, coffee, shotgun shells, penny candy and a wedding dress if you gave them a month. The post office was a window in the back with brass boxes, and Mrs. Llewellyn was the postmistress and knew who was getting letters from whom, and was the soul of discretion about it, more or less. The Laurel Bar Hotel Two stories, with a balcony across the front, built in 1856 when there were still miners with gold in their pockets. By my time it was a boarding house run by Mrs. Rosa, a widow, for the schoolteacher, the road crew and whatever salesmen came through. On Saturday nights in summer they pushed back the tables in the dining room and somebody played the piano and there was dancing. I met my husband, Bob Pimentel, at one of those dances in 1936. He had come up from Modesto with his cousins. We were married two years later and I moved down to the valley, and that was the beginning of my leaving, though I didn't know it yet. Mercer's Next to the hotel was Mercer's Saloon, which became Mercer's Soft Drinks in 1920 when Prohibition came, and became Mercer's Saloon again in 1933 when it went. Nobody in town was fooled in between, including the sheriff. We children were not allowed to go in, but we were allowed to stand at the door, and old Mr. Mercer would come out and give us each a root beer. The Holy Ghost Hall About a third of the families in Laurel Bar were Portuguese, most of us from the Azores, and the Portuguese families built their own hall in 1910, a big plain wooden building with a kitchen at the back. It was used for everything, weddings and dances and meetings, but it was built for the festa. The Holy Ghost festa is a custom from the Azores, and the Portuguese brought it with them wherever they went in California. It goes back to a queen of Portugal, long ago, who was known for feeding the poor. Every summer, in June, we had ours. There was a parade down Main Street with a band, and the festa queen and her maids in long capes, with the silver crown carried on a pillow, up to the church for Mass and the crowning. Then everybody went to the hall for the sopas. Sopas is beef cooked all night in big kettles with spices and a little wine, and you put slices of bread in a bowl with a sprig of fresh mint and ladle the broth and the meat over the top. It was free. That was the whole point. Anybody who came, Portuguese or not, rich or poor, sat down at the long tables and was fed, and people drove up from the valley for it. My mother made the sweet bread. I was a maid to the queen in 1931 and wore a cape my mother sewed from a bedspread. I was festa queen in 1935, and that crown was heavier than it looked. The Schoolhouse Up the street, on the right, was the school, white with a bell tower. It had two rooms, first through fourth in one and fifth through eighth in the other, and about forty of us. My teacher for most of those years was Miss Hannah Partain, who came to Laurel Bar in 1925 at twenty years old, boarded at the hotel, and stayed until the school closed for good in 1954. She taught me long division, the capitals of all the states, and that you never say "ain't" in front of a teacher. I sent her a Christmas card every year until she died. After eighth grade we rode a bus an hour each way to the high school down in the valley. That bus was the first thing that took the young people away, I think, long before the dam. The Church At the top of Main Street was the church, a small white wooden Catholic church with a steeple, built in 1868. A priest came out from a bigger parish every other Sunday, and on the other Sundays we said the rosary together. I was baptized there, made my First Communion there, and was married there in 1938. The church is the one building in Laurel Bar that is still standing. Before the water came, the parish had it lifted off its foundation, put on big timbers and a truck, and moved fifteen miles up the highway to a town on higher ground, where it sits today. It took four days, at about walking speed. Half the town walked alongside it the first morning. The steeple went separately. I have been to Mass in it since, and it is a strange thing to sit in your own church and look out the window at the wrong hills. Cemetery Hill Behind the church a road went up a hill to the cemetery, where Laurel Bar had been burying its people for a hundred years. The cemetery was below where the new waterline would be, so before the lake came, every grave was moved to a new cemetery up on a ridge above the high-water mark. The government paid for it and did it carefully, one grave at a time, with a family member there if one could be found, and the old headstones went along with them. My father had died in 1951, and so in the fall of 1954 I stood on that hill while they moved him. It was a hot, clear day. I did not like it, but I am glad I was there. He is up on the ridge now with my grandparents and half the town, looking down at the lake, and on a good day he can see where his garage was. The Last Fourth of July We knew for years that the dam was coming. The government men first came through in 1950 to look and measure. Then they came back to appraise every house and building and make an offer, and one by one people took the offers and went. By the summer of 1954 the town was half empty and the school had held its last day. That Fourth of July, a Sunday, everybody who had ever lived in Laurel Bar came back for one last picnic, by word of mouth. There must have been six hundred people, more than had ever lived there at one time. We spread blankets in the schoolyard. Mr. Mercer's son Frank opened the saloon one last time and gave every child a root beer, the way his father had. The festa hall kitchen made sopas, which is not the custom for the Fourth, and nobody cared. There were fireworks over the river at dark, and the bridge sang, and everyone stayed very late. Nobody made a speech. It wasn't that kind of a day. The Water After the people were gone, the crews came in and cleared everything, so that nothing would float up into the lake later on. They tore down the buildings and burned what was left, cut down the orchards and the big oaks and the laurels the town was named for, and took the iron bridge apart. I did not go up to watch that. My brother did and told me about it, and that was enough. The gates on the dam closed, and in the winter and spring of 1955 the water rose up the valley. By summer, Laurel Bar was under it. 1977 You may remember the drought of 1976 and 1977, when it hardly rained in California for two years. By the late summer of 1977 the lake had dropped farther than anyone had seen since it filled, and word went around among the old Laurel Bar families that the town was showing. My daughter drove me up on a Sunday in August. We walked down a long slope of dried mud and gray stumps, and there it was. Not the town, of course. The foundations. You could see the line of Main Street, and the stone steps of the school going up to nothing, and the round footing of the bell tower. And at the bottom of the hill, just past where the bridge had been, there was a square of concrete with a long hole in the middle of it, full of silt. My father's grease pit. I stood on the floor he poured in 1925 and I am not ashamed to say I cried. I found one thing to bring home, a blue glass medicine bottle, which could have come from anybody's house, and which sits on my kitchen windowsill. The rains came back that winter, and the lake filled up again, and I have not seen the town since. I don't expect to. That's all right. I know where it is. The Families of Laurel Bar, and Where They Went If your family came from Laurel Bar, or if you have a photograph of the town, please write to me. My grandson checks the mail for me on Sundays. [email protected] You are visitor number Last updated September 17, 1999