Gold, Apples, and a Name Chosen for Looks
Near Julian, California
Julian sits in the Cuyamaca Mountains of San Diego County, about an hour's drive from the coast, at nearly four thousand feet above sea level. The town is famous today for apple pie, which feels modest until you learn the other half of the story. Julian was born in a gold rush.
In December of eighteen sixty nine, a man named Fred Coleman spotted gold flakes in a creek west of where Julian now stands. Coleman had been born into slavery, and after the Civil War he made his way to Southern California. His discovery set off a stampede.
Within weeks, hundreds of prospectors were streaming into the Cuyamaca Mountains. Claim after claim was staked. The Stonewall Mine and others opened in quick succession.
The settlement that formed was named Julian, not for any great figure of history but for a personal preference. Drury Bailey, a Georgian who had served in the Confederate cavalry, arrived here after the war with his family and the Julian cousins. Bailey reportedly named the town for his cousin Mike Julian because Mike was, by Bailey's own accounting, better looking than anyone else in the family.
Julian attracted a population that surprised observers. Of the fifty five African Americans counted in all of San Diego County in the eighteen eighty census, thirty three lived in and around this small mountain town, making Julian the largest Black community in the entire county. Among them were entrepreneurs who would shape Julian's character for decades.
The gold lasted about two decades. By the eighteen eighties most mines were played out and the population crashed from boomtown to barely a hundred people. What saved Julian was the cool mountain air and a widower who planted apple trees.
James Madison came to Julian from New Orleans and began cultivating orchards in the early eighteen seventies. Farmers discovered that Julian's elevation, with its warm days and cold nights, produced apples of remarkable quality. By the eighteen nineties, growers were calling this the greatest apple belt in the world, and the claim held up in competition.
Julian apples won blue ribbons at three consecutive World's Fairs: Chicago in eighteen ninety three, Saint Louis in nineteen oh four, and San Francisco in nineteen fifteen. The town that followed a gold rush became an apple kingdom, and the pies that came from that kingdom have been drawing visitors up the mountain ever since.
