Mt. Whitney Power Company

The Mount Whitney Power Company

The following history is excerpted from Beulah: A Biography of the Mineral King Valley by Louise Jackson.

One large company [came] to the East Fork of the Kaweah River in the late 1890s. For years, Ben M. Maddox, publisher of the Visalia Times, and William H. Hammond, one of the owners of the Visalia City Water Company, had been trying to arouse interest in their idea of using the Kaweah River to generate electricity for their town.The people of Visalia were certainly willing. They would have liked more electric power.But the idea seemed too big, too complicated, too expensive. There was no one in that part of the country who knew how to promote such an undertaking.

Bill Hammond did not know how to promote it, but he had a brother who knew how to engineer it. John Hays Hammond had gone to Yale, had learned electrical engineering and had become one of the world's most successful mining engineers.In 1880 he had been appointed to the U.S. Geological Survey of the California gold fields. Then in 1893 he left for the Union of South Africa to explore the gold, tin, coal and diamond deposits there. While in Johannesburg, he became involved in the controversy of the Boer War. He became so involved that he was arrested and sentenced to death. Diplomatic channels had the sentence reduced to 15 years. imprisonment, then reduced again to a heavy find, and John Hammond was released.

John returned to the United States and went to Visalia to visit his brother. Bill wasted no time. He started talking, and John's next project was decided. They and a group of Visalia businessmen, including Carl and Harry Holley and A.G. and Emory Wishon, formed the Mt. Whitney Power Company.

John Hammond knew many people, influential and moneyed In 1908 he would decline the nomination for the vice-presidency of the United States. He would attend the coronation of George V of England as the representative of President Taft. Now he would use his connections to finance his project. He had no trouble.

In 1897 the company purchased Atwell's Mill and cut a million board feet of Giant Sequoia lumber for a flume running from oak Grove to the hydroelectric plan they were building above Three Rivers. They named their power station Hammond, and by June of 1899 the Mt. Whitney Power House No. 1 was in operation.

The flow of the water from the East Fork was good, but John Hammond worried about of effects of dry years. The company decided it should build dams at the lakes above Mineral King and at Wolverton Meadows on the Middle Fork above Giant Forest. In 1896 Wilcox and Moffet had located possible sites for reservoirs. In summer of 1899 the lakes above Mineral King were surveyed by Jim Broder.

The ranchers in Three Rivers and the Central Valley below had never been certain about the whole project. They had been promised that their water would only be used temporarily and then returned to them, but they had been skeptical. Now there was talk that the water would be dammed and held back, restricting the flow to their ranches. They objected.

By 1902 the company had timbered all the Sequoias it needed, and Atwell's Mill was sold to Henry Alles, the son-in-law of Isham Mullenix, the original owner. Then the power company turned to its projected dams. In 1904 and 1905 it started work. Dams were built on Wolverton Creek and at Monarch, Crystal, Franklin and Eagle Lakes above Mineral King. Trails were cut up the mountain sides to the dams.

By this time the old-timers of Mineral King were upset. An ugly flume snaked its way down the East Fork, visible all along the road below Oak Grove. The Giant Sequoias at Atwell's Mill were nothing but stumps. And now the sides of their valley were scarred by trails, zig-zagging their dusty way through the manzanita and higher meadows and forests.

But if the Mineral King people were upset, the Central Valley irrigationists were livid. They brought suit against the Mt. Whitney Power Company, claiming the storage of water denied their rights to it. The court ruled in their favor and prevented the building of any more dams. But the company was granted the use of those already constructed, and Bill Clough was hired to open and close the gates each year to regulate the flow of water.

After the scarring of the trails had been softened by new growth and time had eased the shock over their existence, the Mineral King residents began to realize the benefits. The idea of trails was not new to them. In December 1897 a group of them had met in Visalia and framed a petition to Congress asking for $30,000 to build trails and roads in the Sequoia National Park ad Sierra Forest Reserve.

Already there were three trails; one over Farewell Gap; another across Timber Gap and Tar Gap to Hockett Meadows; the third to the White Chief Mine. And these new power company trails and the dams created more to do. Now whole families could take a picnic lunch and go on a hike for a day's outing. The lakes were deeper now and more beautiful, the fishing even better, if that was possible. And those who lived in Visalia could hardly complain. The big enterprise was helping them all.