Willows: The Drover's Rest Becomes a County Seat

For decades in the mid-eighteen hundreds, cattle drivers pushing herds south along the Sacramento Valley made a habit of stopping at a shady grove of willows surrounding a natural watering hole. They simply called it The Willows, and the name stuck. A post office opened here in eighteen sixty-two.

Then in eighteen ninety-one, the California Legislature carved Glenn County out of the northern half of Colusa County, naming it for Doctor Hugh James Glenn, who had been the largest wheat farmer in the state before his murder in eighteen eighty-three. Willows was made the county seat just six days after the county was created, and its courthouse went up three years later. What cattle drivers used as a rest stop became the civic center of an agricultural county.