Sunday, December 28, 2014

 Photo postcard of Main St., Visalia.  Taken in 1921 or 1922.      The building at the left foreground is the Palace Hotel  (on the NE corner of Main and Court St.).      The 5-story building down the street is the Johnson Hotel (Built in 1917,  at the NE corner of Main and Church St.).    
Noticeably missing in this image is the 5-story Bank of America building which was built in 1923.
Togni-Branch Stationary store is here on the first floor of the Palace Hotel structure.   Togni's first opened in 1921 and remained in business until 2007;  I think the building that they eventually moved to is also in this image.


 Dillonwood sawmill,  1904.    Photograph by  A.R. Moore.    The Dillonwood grove is located about 33 miles east of Visalia (6 miles north of Balch Park).   Logging started on the lower fringes of  this area around 1865 and continued on-and-off  until about 1990.   In 2001 the grove became part of the Sequoia National Park.   Over the years,  many old-growth redwoods were cut down here.
Note the small stand of large sequoias at top-center.   The road to the left of these redwoods, that curves down towards the center of the photo,  is actually a logging skid path.   A  'steam donkey' engine was used to drag cut trees along the logging skid to the sawmill.   There's a water flume running from the sawmill that was used to transport cut lumber down the steep mountainside.   The flume is in the lower half of this image, running to the photo's lower left-hand corner.

Photo postcard showing the Giant Forest post office, in Sequoia National Park.   Circa 1920.