Fabulous Farmer: The Story of Walter Knott and His Berry Farm

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Text originally published in 1956 under the same title.

© Papamoa Press 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

FABULOUS FARMER:

THE STORY OF WALTER KNOTT AND HIS BERRY FARM

BY

ROGER HOLMES

AND

PAUL BAILEY

Illustrations from the sketches of PAUL von KLIEBEN

and

CLARENCE ELLSWORTH

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

ACKNOWLEDGMENT 4

FULL PAGE SKETCHES 5

PAY DIRT 6

ROSAMOND OF TEXAS 12

THE GOOD EARTH 23

THE FARMER TAKES A WIFE 28

SAND AND SURVIVAL 35

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE 41

THE SHARECROPPER 45

MIRACLE OF THE BOYSENBERRY 49

GROWING PAINS 57

GHOST TOWN 64

A RAILROAD COMES TO GHOST TOWN 73

THE FARMER’S WIFE 81

WHAT SHALL THE HARVEST BE? 86

CALICO 89

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 96

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors are indebted to the Knott family for many hours of patient and willing help in assembling the facts and checking the material essential to this book. To Marie Nelson, who was unfailing in her help, and to Clyde Finley, Wallace Frazier, and all the other associates of Mr. Knott who so graciously gave of their time and knowledge, we tender our deep gratitude.

FULL PAGE SKETCHES

Walter Knott

Cordelia (Hornaday) Knott

Rosamond’s Star House, San Bernardino

Reverend Elgin Knott

Walter Knott as a Child

Cordelia Hornaday at Age 18

Cordelia and Walter, Shortly

After Marriage Walter Knott, Age Twenty-five

The Knott Children

Path to Lake

The Lake and the Island

General Merchandise Store on Market Street

Main Street, Ghost Town

Goldie’s Joint, Ghost Town

Windmill and Livery Stable, Ghost Town

Silver Dollar Saloon, Ghost Town

Flowering Trees on the Village Green

PAY DIRT

AMERICA is a land of farms. Across its broad agricultural belt are wheat farms, hay farms, dairy farms, hog farms, mushroom farms, frog farms, stud farms, and an endless variety of crops and things lending nomenclature to the particular acres from which they sprout or lend forage. But in California—a land long noted for such queer and imaginative variety of farms as alligator, ostrich, snake, lion, fish and baby farms—stands the world’s richest prize in agriculture. Never in all history, unless the crop be pure uranium, has there ever been a richer farm, acre for acre, than the quarter-section presided over by a quiet, white-haired, modest man by the name of Walter Knott. How Walter parlayed ten acres of berries into a land of golden wonders is one of the success stories of this decade.

More than twenty million people have walked the acres of Knott’s Berry Farm. A thousand travel agencies and sightseeing desks book it into the California travel itinerary of a million tourists a year. Its chicken dinners and bucolic atmosphere are known throughout the breadth of the earth. Eighteen thousand people a day eat its food, stare at its strange and unbelievable sights, ride wheels around the berry patches and marvel at its out of the past wonders—with little thought of how it came to be, and the amazing background story which will someday grow faster than its berries into the legend of free American enterprise.

In 1920 Walter Knott, 31 years of age, rented ten acres of level land in Orange County, California, and with a few hard-saved dollars, planted it to berries. With him were his wife, Cordelia, and three youngsters, weary from the buffetings of a desert homestead, his labors as a common hired hand and the herculean efforts of a share-crop vegetable venture in Central California. They could have remained plain berry farmers, like ten thousand other California patch-growers, were it not for a shrewdly analytical quirk in the thinking of Walter Knott.

Add water, and the deep soil and salubrious climate of Southern California produces in tropical abundance. Berries were no exception. The marketing of this abundance became Walter’s everlasting problem—as it is to every man who must wrest a living from the earth. For, when the crop comes in, the prices drop, and wholesale buyers whittle away most of the farmer’s increment in that hour. Knott’s first step forward was to circumvent this problem by peddling his crop from a roadside stand—to the automobiles which daily rolled past his tiny farm.

For seven years the family struggled in this pattern—a pattern not unfamiliar to thousands of other roadside marketing patches. But in 1927 Walter had managed to purchase the ten acres, and Cordelia was baking the berries into pies and selling light lunches to passers-by.

In 1934 she and the children were serving chicken dinners with their berry pies, and Walter had introduced the boysenberry to California and to the world.

Seating room in the rickety little roadside restaurant had to be expanded to twenty seats, then to forty seats, and by 1940 to 300. By then the ten acres had grown to a quarter-section under the labors and productive skills of Walter Knott. He was the owner of his little agricultural empire.

People were coming to Knott’s Berry Farm in an unabating stream, caught by the piquant flavor of Cordelia’s berry pies and savory chicken dinners. Buyers of berries and root stock, cognizant of the magnificent boysenberry now marketed by Knott, purchased all the output he could spare above the wants of his own establishment.

In 1940 we started Ghost Town, is Cordelia’s matter-of-fact statement of this happening which caused Knott’s Berry Farm to outcircus even Old MacDonald’s Farm. The thing started with a cyclorama, a giant-size painting, circular in shape, and depicting the early wagon migration of the Knott forbears into the then wild and savage west. With soft and changing lights, it had a soporific and dream-conjuring effect upon its viewers. Visitors to Knott’s liked it immensely.

Encouraged by such enthusiastic acceptance of his nostalgic urge to recreate the atmosphere of his pioneer ancestors, Walter now began the project which would set his name down as the most imaginative farmer extant. His hobby and his obsession became the recreation of a complete frontier town—replete with everything from saloons (berry juice) to livery stables. Restaurant profits were plowed back into this ambitious venture until, through the years as the slow, deliberate, painstaking work took its shape, Ghost Town at Knott’s became a more real and impressive town to millions than any of the actual prototypes which dot the American landscape in decaying remembrance to the American dream.

By the time Ghost Town’s railroad line was established and San Francisco’s abandoned cable cars were lurching along the Knott trackage, the farm itself had added to its berry crop a perennial crop of wide-eyed tourists which spread itself over two hundred acres and required seven huge dining rooms to feed.

MacDonald’s Farm was never like this. Prophets of doom were many, predicting the collapse of this strange mushrooming venture. But the oft-predicted collapse never came—though there were times enough when Walter Knott himself wondered as to its future. Knott’s Berry Farm continued on—more amazingly successful year by year—simply because it met and satisfied a then unrecognized inner hunger gnawing at America. Consciously, or unconsciously, Knott, himself an humble American, had followed the whim and hunger of his own soul. He had looked backward to the historical premise of his own ancestors, recreated the dream, and by so doing had struck a chord vibrantly receptive to the heart and soul of every imaginative American.

But there is much more to Knott’s Berry Farm than chicken dinners, berry pies and wild west atmosphere. People like the Farm—and return to it again and again—because the same humble and democratic family not only is there to greet them, but the fabric of their unaffected personalities is spread across the face of its acres of wonders. Parking is free; no admission charge; enjoy Ghost Town and its atmosphere as though you were driving into Bodie or Virginia City. The Knott family is still as approachable as the day they homesteaded near Calico. Knott’s is now a big enterprise, though no one ever gets the feeling that this is so. Accident or intent, Knott’s Berry Farm, from its waitresses to its owners, radiates the homey, open-handed hospitality and friendliness which was once a recognized and essential part of our American tradition.

The visitor sees and instantly senses that here indeed is the American dream come true. From sharecropper to entrepreneur; from berry stand to acres of restaurants; from two-room adobe to city within a city; here is the song of the freeman; here the American success story. From rags to riches—including the one ingredient Americans demand to make the dream vicariously palatable and acceptable—that the protagonist in the drama remain the simple, homespun champion of the little man from beginning to end. When all these ingredients are present, Americans love it. Oddly, at Knott’s all these ingredients are present. Walter Knott still lives in the same house and on the same ground of his achievement. He is a pugnacious champion of the little man. He is still approachable. He still believes passionately that success can be achieved under the competitive free enterprise of the American system by anyone with imagination and the willingness to work long hours to gain it. He still is of the earnest opinion that the American way is good, and that those who persevere under it can find the measure of success their heart’s desire. And who can say that these things are not so? There is the Knott