And a U.S. Civil War vet in Alameda told the story of when he saw President Lincoln in-person.
It seemed like early spring in Berkeley last week, with warm, dry, weather in the high 70s and plum trees in bloom. So it seems appropriate to give some excerpts from the Berkeley Daily Gazette “Spring Gardening Page” published a century ago on Feb. 12, 1922.
“Well kept flowering shrubs” are important to the appearance of gardens, one article advised. “There is nothing more fascinating and inspiring than to step out into the garden on a nice spring morning and see a beautiful flowering peach, hawthorn, quince or almond tree in full bloom,” another article commented. “ ’If it is flowers you want, plant dahlias’, says Carl Salbach, a local grower and originator of many prize-winning dahlias.
“Dahlias planted in spring will give you continuous blooms from July to December. The dahlias are the people’s flower, and the time is not far distant when every garden will contain a bed of these wonderful flowers. The bay cities and Oakland in particular are destined to be the dahlia centers of the world.”
I was particularly charmed to see an advertisement for a nursery not far from my current Berkeley home, where “a complete assortment of shrubs and plants for summer flowering” could be purchased in 1922. That particular nursery is long-gone, but at least one large tree and a huge red flowering quince currently in bloom appear to remain on its former grounds.
Student aid: A drive to raise $10,000 in funds on the UC Berkeley campus “to aid students of other lands in pursuing their work, and in some cases to live during the hard economic stress of the present” was organized on Feb. 13, 1922.
UC President David Prescott Barrows said that “among the more than 200,000 students of Europe a considerable proportion are in situations bitter in the extreme due to the violence of revolutions and political struggles coming as the aftermath of the Great War … . In these countries, such as Poland, economic conditions are deplorable and the struggle for national existence so acute that the future enlightenment of Europe is dependent upon foreign assistance.”
Real estate: The Gazette reported Feb. 18, 1922, that about $250,000 had been spent by the Roy O. Long Co. to purchase the “Bailey Estate interests … some 400 pieces of land scattered throughout the city (consisting of) residential, business and factory sites.” Long said real estate was blooming in Berkeley.
Lincoln remembered: A century ago there were still many people alive who had met or seen Abraham Lincoln in-person. The Feb. 13, 1922, Gazette carried an interview with C.C. Reed, of Alameda, who “was an artilleryman in the First Ohio contingent and saw Lincoln while his division was being inspected by the president.”
“I think he was the homeliest man I ever looked at — not only his face, but his clothes”, Reed said. “His stovepipe hat did look like a stovepipe, and I think he must have packed his coat into a suitcase while it was wet, there were so many wrinkles in it. He was a long man, and he wore a long coat. He rode a small horse that day, and the coattails nearly covered the animal.”
Reed continued that, “Probably no great figure in history had Lincoln’s intense humor, combined with a keen and racy wit. It always seemed to me that it was a great support to him and acted as a reserve fund,” praising the president for “his natural honesty of character, his desire to make his meaning clear literally, to demonstrate what he believed to be the truth with mathematical precision.”
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.
