Recently the Courier visited the final resting places of the Levi Carters who among the first white settlers in Ceres.
As it turns out, most of the Carters are at rest together in the Stockton Rural Cemetery with some other Stanislaus County pioneers like Louis Hickman, namesake of the town east of Hughson.
The Stockton burial ground also has the remains of George Henry Tinkham (1849-1945) who authored the 1921 book, “History of Stanislaus County, California: With Biographical Sketches of the Leading Men and Women of the County Who Have Been Identified With its Growth and Development From the Early Days to the Present.”
In the veterans section is a grand memorial to Reuel Colt Gridley who gained national fame before his time running the first mercantile store in Paradise City in 1868. Paradise was one of the river towns that popped up near Ceres and later died off when Modesto took off in 1871.
During the winter of 1867 and the spring of 1868 early pioneer and founder of Turlock John W. Mitchell laid out the town of Paradise City on the north bank of the Tuolumne River in the area of Paradise, Grimes, and Pauline avenues west of Ceres. Gridley, who earlier gained national fame for the repeated sale of a single sack of flour and was mentioned by Mark Twain in “Roughing It,” had a store in Paradise City, which is about five miles from Ceres as the crow flies.
Gridley previously operated a store in Austin, Nevada in April, 1864 as Gridley, Hobart & Jacobs. The Civil War was in progress and there was considerable feeling between the thick Northern Democrats and the Southern Democrats. Gridley, was 35 and a staunch southerner from Hannibal, Missouri. On the outcome of a local election contest for mayor, Gridley made a wager with a Dr. Herrick. The loser was to carry a 50-pound sack of flour two miles between the towns of Clifton and Upper Austin to the tune of a song. Gridley lost, and on April 20 he fulfilled his bet by carrying the flag-bedecked sack from Upper Austin to Clifton, accompanied by the Austin Band playing “John Brown’s Body.” As he delivered the sack of flour to Dr. Herrick, somebody in the crowd sald, “Let’s make hot cakes out of them.” But Gridley suggested that the sack be auctioned off for the benefit of the Sanitary Fund, the forerunner of the present Red Cross. Acting as auctioneer, he started the bidding at $200. The high bid was $350, knocked down to T. B. Wade, a mill man.
Wade said “Auction her off again.” And again and again that sack was auctioned off until Gridley had collected $4,549.80.
Other towns heard of this stunt, and that started a chain reaction that finally terminated in New York some six months later. In Virginia City Gridley collected $8,000; in Sacramento $10, 000; in San Francisco $25,000; and finally, after the tour ended in New York, Gridley had collected $275,000 for the Sanitary Fund for that single sack of flour.
But Gridley was a broken man, both in health and finances. He had paid all his expenses out of his own pocket and he returned to his home in Austin to find his firm near bankruptcy. Closing out the business, he moved to California in an effort to regain his health.
He moved to Stockton, and in 1868 moved to the new town of Paradise City. Here he opened the first mercantile store and also served for a time as postmaster.
Gridley never recovered his health, and on November 24, 1870, he passed on.
