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On the morning before Memorial Day, volunteers will place flags on the graves of the veterans buried at the I.O.O.F. Cemetery in Hollister. Most of the markers offer only the barest details, giving only a hint of the lives they led and their service to this country.
The small white stone in a plot toward the back of the cemetery’s Section D reads “Sergt. Gustav Brown, Co. K, 1 U.S. Dragoons, 1837-1919.” There are three other markers nearby, equally brief, inscribed to Brown’s wife, Lydia, and two of their eight children, Robert and Charles.
Brown’s marker gives no indication that his nine years of service, starting in 1853, make him the earliest known veteran buried in the cemetery, according to VFW Post 9242 Commander Ryan Grimes. Or that his life in Hollister was also one of service and innovation, as a successful farmer and important civic leader.
“What intrigued me,” Grimes said, “is that here’s a serviceman from before the Civil War that we really know nothing about. I wanted to raise some awareness about him, because there’s not a lot of light put on the veterans in that cemetery.”
Grimes was able to find an outline of Brown’s life as published in the 1893 book “The Memorial and Biographical History of the Coast Counties of Central California” by Henry D. Barrows and Luther A. Ingersoll, which is the primary source for this account of his record in the military and his movements between his discharge and arrival in Hollister.
BenitoLink has also uncovered more than 100 newspaper articles that document both major and minor episodes in Brown’s life in town, from his involvement in a failed railroad linking Hollister and San Juan Bautista to San Francisco lines, to his prescient but ignored plea for a local cannery, to his service on a murder trial jury, to accounts of his children’s visits to his farm in old age.
Brown was born on Feb. 17, 1836, in Bavaria, Germany—the date on the stone is off by a year. His family sailed to Baltimore in 1843 when he was seven years old and, at 13, he left school to apprentice as a shoemaker.
He first tried to join the army in June 1852, enlisting in the light artillery at Fort McHenry in Baltimore. The 16-year-old was quickly discharged as underage, but a second attempt, when he was just shy of his 17th birthday, succeeded.
Traveling to Philadelphia in January 1853, he became a member of Company K of the First Regiment of Dragoons, later to be renamed the First Cavalry, the nation’s oldest mounted regiment. His unit was sent west during what was then described as “The Indian Wars.”
Primarily stationed at Fort Tejon in California and later in Arizona, the regiment was active in conflicts against the Apaches, Utes, Navajos and other tribes until 1861, when the Civil War broke out. Most of the regiment was transferred east to join the Army of the Potomac, where it saw action in major Civil War battles, including the 1862 Peninsula Campaign under General George B. McClellan.
It’s unlikely that Brown was one of the soldiers transferred back east. The Barrows and Ingersoll account mentions that he was discharged in 1862 after being “shot and wounded by an Indian on the Mojave Desert.”
The only account of his service that places him in any specific location is his own: an account he gave to The Free Lance, published on July 19, 1907, of being sent with the dragoons from Fort Tejon to Utah in 1859.
They were there to tend to as-yet-unburied victims of the 1857 Mountain Meadow Massacre, where members of a wagon train heading from Arkansas to California were attacked by members of the Nauvoo Legion (the Mormon Utah Territorial Militia), as was later determined at a trial of its leaders.
The account mentions Brown’s rank, quartermaster sergeant, and that another resident of the county, Mike Tynan, was also a member of the troop. (There are 13 local newspaper accounts which mention Tynan as a rancher and a Civil War veteran.)
The first newspaper mention of Brown is from Sept. 5, 1864, which says he was living in San Jose and had just married Lydia A. Morse. Together, they had three sons and five daughters: James, Charles, Robert, Annie, Matilda, Mary Alice, Cora and Minnie.
The couple lived in San Jose until 1865, when they moved to the Santa Cruz mountains and engaged in the fruit business.
There are only three newspaper accounts of him in the Santa Cruz area. The most interesting is in the Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel (Nov. 25, 1882), which describes him as an “experienced fruit raiser.”
In it, Brown comments on the failure of the local almond crop, which area farmers attributed to frost. Brown correctly ascribed the failure to Santa Cruz’s “excessive moisture,” a judgment later endorsed by a 2016 study published by UC Davis.
Brown moved to Hollister in 1883. The next sighting of him was in 1889, when he was elected as an officer of the Hollister Grange. From then until the end of his life, Brown was a fixture of the local civic scene.
In 1891, he joined with the Farmers’ Alliance of San Luis Obispo in a complaint against the local railroad commission concerning inadequate warehouse facilities near the tracks. From 1893 to 1895, multiple articles chronicle his involvement as an investor ($600) and committee member in the ultimately doomed Monterey and Fresno Railroad.
Brown gains several mentions as a grand juror and, in one case, as a juror in the 1893 murder trial of a former Tres Pinos resident, Mariano German. The jury could not reach a verdict and German was acquitted at his second trial.
In 1894, Brown used his military connections to bring 200 soldiers from the Fourth United States Cavalry to a racetrack in Hollister to “perform their maneuvers for the citizens.” Brown was praised in the April 27, 1894, issue of the Free Lance as having “significantly stimulated local business through the purchase of supplies and provender.”
A “strenuous effort” by Brown the next year to “convince the Presidio troops to spend their summer vacation in the Hollister vicinity” failed; the soldiers chose to go to Monterey instead. Brown’s success, bemoaned the May 17, 1885, issue of the Free Lance, would have brought “a great deal of loose change to the village.”
There is an interesting thread of Brown’s advocacy of local farming and ranching issues. Besides his periodic pleas for warehouses near railroad tracks, Brown produced a report on the profitability of his dairy operations in the March 13, 1896, issue of the Free Lance.
Detailing that he had milked 16 cows and sold 19,049 pounds of milk to the Hollister Creamery for $165.40, he argued that his net profit of $49.90 was far more fruitful and less labor-intensive than making and selling butter himself, urging other farmers to do the same.
On Oct. 30, 1896, the Free Lance reported that Brown had suffered a “distressing accident” when a cow he was milking stepped on his leg, breaking both bones above the ankle. “Given his age, his friends and the community considered the injury a serious matter.”
Despite his injury, the Free Lance reported a month later that Brown was advocating for a feasibility study to build a cannery in Hollister. Finding no support among local farmers, the paper reported on Jan. 15, 1897, that Brown had traveled to San Jose to get technical data and estimates for the project. He brought back the manager of the San Jose Fruit Packing Company to help plead his case, to no avail.
He was ahead of his time. The Hollister Canning Company (later known as San Benito Foods) was opened by Frank and Joe Felice in 1915.
Throughout 1898, both the Free Lance and the San Benito Advance documented in great detail Brown’s efforts to irrigate his lands with a series of wells and what were described as “novelies,” 5-inch centrifugal pumps that pumped water directly into a reservoir on his property.
After his appointment as a “judge of election for the enterprise precinct” in 1898, most of the references to Brown and his wife relate to their social status rather than his professional life. There are accounts of them traveling with Hollister railroad and banking magnate William Palmtag, the weddings of his children, and visits from his family from as far away as San Francisco and Hawaii.
There are also frequent references to celebrations and dances hosted by the Browns for the A. M. O. Club. Though no context is given to identify the organization, it could be an offshoot of the Ancient Masonic Order. Hollister had a strong Masonic presence through San Benito Lodge No. 211.
Brown sold his ranch and farm to C. W. Sammis in January 1908 and settled into retirement. He saw his son Charles die in 1911, his daughter Minnie graduate as a nurse in 1913, and another son, Robert, die in 1913 as well. (Both sons are buried in the family plot.)
The last references to Brown during his lifetime are accounts of his and Lydia’s 50th wedding anniversary in August 1914, which was attended by 36 family members, “many of whom traveled from San Jose by automobile.”
At the celebration, a group of “Presbyterian ladies,” who seemed to have regularly held social gatherings at the Brown home. presented the couple with a “handsome mission rocker.”
Brown died on Sept. 11, 1919, and memorial services were held in his home on Santa Ana Road two days later, followed by his interment in the I.O.O.F. Cemetery. In the obituary, his name is misspelled “Gustave,” as it was in many other articles during his lifetime.
The Free Lance noted, on Sept. 14, 1919, that “the services were attended by many,” including relatives such as James Brown of Fresno and Mrs. A. Kemp, Brown’s sister, of San Jose. Following his death, Lydia moved to San Jose, dying there in January 1923. She is buried next to Brown.
According to Post Commander Grimes, Brown is one of 585 known veterans buried in the I.O.O.F. Cemetery. Along with the 5% of the county’s current residents who are veterans, Grimes said, both are strong indications of the love of country ingrained in this rural county.
“Many veterans played key roles in forming Hollister and the county,” Grimes said, “even if they aren’t always highlighted for it. They were present then, and they still are today. That tradition continues to be strong with the veterans who are living among us.”
VFW Post 9242 is seeking volunteers to plant flags on the graves of veterans starting at 10 a.m. on May 24 at I.O.O.F. Cemetery, 600 Buena Vista Road, and Calvary Cemetery, 1100 Hillcrest Road. Families and individuals of all ages are welcome to participate, and flags will be provided.
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