The Arch at Nine and I

Stand at the corner of Ninth and I Streets and look up. The arch spans the road like a Roman gate dropped into the Central Valley, lit by six hundred ninety-six incandescent bulbs when it was first unveiled, carrying four words that almost were not the words chosen at all.

The year was nineteen eleven. The Booster Club of the Modesto Business Men's Association had persuaded the city council to approve an ornamental electric arch over I Street. The arch itself was to welcome motorists along the highway. The slogan was to be decided by contest, limited to four words. The prize was three dollars.

The winning submission read: Nobody's Got Modesto's Goat.

Town officials looked at this, and then looked at it again, and decided that it was perhaps not the civic statement they were seeking. The second-place entry took the prize. Water. Wealth. Contentment. Health.

In nineteen twelve, the arch was officially dedicated.

The motto is still up there. The words have a specific meaning that was easy to read in nineteen twelve when the valley around Modesto was only two decades into large-scale irrigation. Water meant the irrigation districts that had transformed dry wheat land into orchard land. Wealth followed from water. Contentment and Health were aspirational. This was a valley that had been desert scrub within living memory, and the people who built the arch wanted visitors to understand what they had made of it.

The goat line, meanwhile, has not been forgotten. The Modesto history community considers it a fine piece of frontier idiom and returns to it with affection every generation or so.