An interesting day in Raymond

At noon we showed up at our neighbors Bruce and Candy’s ready to head out to the nearby town of Raymond. It was a special day because we would get to tour the town museum’s new caboose. Lynn Northrup, the curator of the museum held the stepladder as we ascended to enter the car, made in 1941. It desperately needed some restoration, and Bruce was elbows-deep into the project. The entire caboose, above the running gear, was wooden. And the years had taken their toll. The sidewalls had been replaced years ago with plywood, and the top was covered with leaky composition roll roofing. On the interior, the tongue and groove woodworks were mostly sound, but some of the flooring needed replacement. Bruce talked with one of the volunteer restorers about what it would cost to make plain old douglas fir boards into tongue and groove, which was used throughout. Fifteen cents a foot, and that’s if you supply the wood. And there would be the need for a whole lot of wood. I suggested a place that would charge much less.

We then entered the museum on the site. It was the restored house of the man who founded Raymond in the late 1800s. Lynn pointed out the hand-dug well on the property, “33 feet deep, dug by hand, and it still supplies all the water we need.” Inside the house was an intriguing collection of artifacts contributed by the people of the area, everything from baskets and arrows from the Indians to tools and utensils from the pioneers. The most intriguing thing about the museum is that almost everything on display can be handled by the visitors. Very little was protected behind glass.

Lynn is so contagiously enthusiastic about the whole town. It was a much more interesting place than just about anybody would suspect. Mainly it had a very busy railway coming up from the San Joaquin Valley that brought people to the stage line that took them to Yosemite. “Two trains a day, and right out the window was where they turned it around for the return trip.” She pointed out the grass-covered space where the turntable used to be. The track split into three to accommodate the passenger cars and the freight cars that were loaded with Sierra White granite from the nearby quarry. Raymond granite is widely on display in San Francisco, from common curbstones to the steps of the US Mint and the façades of many other prominent buildings. Lynn excitedly told the story about John Muir, on hearing that President Theodore Roosevelt would be in San Francisco, raced to the city to try and convince him to come to Yosemite. Roosevelt agreed and rode the train to Raymond, got on the stage, and a couple of days later toured Yosemite with Muir. Roosevelt was convinced that making the place a national park would be a wise move. I told Lynn that I had read that Roosevelt and Muir traveled around the park alone—no Secret Service accompaniment. What a different time!

Lynn is interesting in her own right. She and her husband made their living being actors in soap operas, As the World Turns and Days of our Lives, if I remember correctly. Several years ago they came to our area and bought some property. (Their land abuts ours about a mile north of the house.) Lynn fell in love with the funky, stuck-in-time town of Raymond and is now its chief promoter. She bought the museum property and got the railroad track installed by the road and rounded up a caboose to sit on it. Sometimes it takes an outsider to wake up the populace to the historic treasure they inhabit. I have a feeling we are going to get involved in her vision of Raymond’s renewal.