Artichokes, horses, open hills—and the family photographs that bring the old valley into view.
With the reporting of Bill Swank · Clairemont Times, April 2, 2016
In 1946, Dr. Charles Isham bought 101 acres at the mouth of Tecolote Canyon. He wanted his children to grow up on a farm.
They remembered vegetables, livestock, the high road and the low road, and horses named Chico, Tango, and Klondike. Their pictures preserve the valley before streets and houses filled the hills.
At Tecolote Valley Farm, the old barn and the home that grew around it carry those earlier chapters into the present.
An 1870 map places the old bay, the canyon, and the pueblo lands on the same sheet. An earlier map carries us into the valley’s nineteenth-century landscape.
Two pirate ships wait offshore. A boat enters Mission Bay. A narrow chest disappears into the owl’s valley, leaving only three marks: an owl, a stream, and a tree.
Follow the lantern into the canyon, where a sailor’s secret waits between the pages.
