But this is Chico, too

Has Beans Creekside coffeehouse, which I mentioned in my last blog, is a new business on Humboldt Avenue. On the same street, a few blocks to the west, is Café Coda, another new eating establishment. While I was having breakfast there last Sunday, I was doing some more thinking about this long wedge of a neighborhood, which links downtown to the freeway and lies between Eighth Street and Little Chico Creek.

Today, Eighth and Ninth are the neighborhood’s key thoroughfares, but back in the early days of Chico, Humboldt was the main road. It started at the Junction, where Main Street and Broadway meet and turn into Park Avenue, and went all the way to Susanville.

One of my favorite conceits is the idea that places have energy. In my Enterprise-Record column “But This is Chico,” I’ve written about places that are vortexes of energy. The Junction is one of them. As the western terminus of what was known as the Humboldt Wagon Road, it was a hub of commerce. It had livery stables, hotels, a brewery, saloons, restaurants, a laundry, a grocery store, drug stores, blacksmiths and an iron foundry. In the illustration for this entry, the building on the right, which dates from 1874, started out as a brewery.

Humboldt Wagon Road was built in 1864 by John Bidwell and three partners to establish a route to transport supplies to the silver mines in Nevada and Idaho from San Francisco Bay by way of the Sacramento River, Chico and the southern edge of the Cascades.

If, in fact, places do have energy, Humboldt Wagon Road must have been a lightning rod, and not just because it was a vital transportation route. It embodied Bidwell’s energy. If he had a mind to do something, he did it. It didn’t matter that he would have to cut across 100 miles of mountainous terrain to reach Susanville. He decided it had to be done, so he found a way to do it.

He wanted to be a farmer, so he bought Rancho Arroyo Chico. He wanted a town to be next to it, so he founded Chico. He wanted the new branch of the state Normal School to be in Chico, so he campaigned to get it here and donated land not far from his house to make sure there was a site for it. He wanted to be in politics, so he became a state senator and a U.S. Congressman and ran for governor several times. Once, he even ran for president.

If, in fact, people can imbue places with energy, there was nobody in Northern California in the late 19th century who could have done a better job of it than John Bidwell.