Compiled by Patricia Hall
This book is a collections of all the minutes of the women's auxiliary to the Jacinto Businessmen's Association of Farmers. All the extant newspapers contemporary to the minutes were read and relevant articles selected for inclusion in the introduction.
Themes that were followed were: the building of the Central Canal and subsequent controversy over rights to that water; the rice experiments and the development of the industry of growing and milling rice; the state of technological development, that is, the automobile, roads, the state highway, the railroad along the river, telephones and farm machinery; and the social activities of members of the community who were followed by the press, especially anything about the members of the Bayliss Association of Domestic Science and their husbands and associates.
Some items having to do only with Willows were included to give an idea of the place.
Minutes of the Bayliss Association of Domestic Science, 1912 - 1914
My memories of Bayliss are from the early forties, of visits to see the relatives.
The roads were dusty and there were more weeds than there are now. Many of the houses were small and rustic without indoor plumbing. Water was hand pumped in the yard and carried into the house.
The women wore housedresses, which were buttoned to the waist, sleeves to the elbow, and ankle length until the war. The men wore bib overalls of blue denim with lighter blue cotton shirts. They wore cowboy hats, felt or straw with the brim rolled in various ways.
The food was good: fried chicken, corn on the cob, tomatoes, either fresh or from a mason jar, potatoes with milk gravy, and apple pie. The people were friendly and good and kind and generous, at least to the little girl I was then.
But that was the forties. I came back to learn about Bayliss in my mother's time. This volume began when I tried to show my son and his wife where my mother grew up and what things were like in my childhood. We drove the ten miles from Chico out to Bayliss. It has changed somewhat. The roads are paved, there are road signs, the houses I remember have been replaced in some cases. The old schoolhouse is gone. But the rural atmosphere remains.