No doubt you never heard of it. It was not named for pesky insects or pushy people either. An irrigation ditch was named as such, too. Buggytown, in its unique way was not even a town, but more like a sprawling affluent neighborhood in the late 1800s, located to the west of Leavitt Lake.It was so named as one of the first settlers possessed a buggy when such luxuries were rare on the frontier. It would later become known as Clinton, which consisted of a store, post office and the Riverside School. In 1973, it was transformed when the first phase of the Leavitt Lake Subdivision began.

Tim

P.S. – Some where in my files is a photograph of Ben Leavitt, in his buggy, who was Buggytown’s most prominent resident. I am not sure which category/topic I filed it under.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, there was a colony movement in the American West. As readers may recall Standish was a planned utopian colony based on the beliefs of Myles Standish. When Litchfield came to being in 1913, the promoters took a much more subtle approach with its Litchfield Acres.

The next proposed colony, one comprised of Scandinavians to be located on the east shore of Honey Lake, south of Amedee.  This was in 1915, Rosendal Minster was the promoter, He even named the settlement after him—Rosendale.  Minster had a lease/option to purchase the lands and the pumping plant of the Standish Water Company. He then formed the Farmer’s Land Company to operate the holdings.. The properties were split into 40-acre tracts with a price range of $45 to $65 per acre. He was able to attract a handful of settlers. While Minster vigorously promoted the project, but due to debts he quickly accrued, he abandoned it the following year.

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William Smythe, who in the mid-1890s, was a key figure to develop a utopian community of Standish in the Honey Lake Valley, had numerous observations of the territory.. The region left an impression on him. He dubbed the Lassen, Modoc and Plumas area as the California Highlands. In his opinion the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys were the California Lowlands.

Smythe noted some of the quirkiness of the residents of the Honey Lake Valley. One particular item that caught his attention was the local vernacular. Smythe wrote “When a Honey Laker contemplates a journey to San Francisco, or any other point on the other side of the great range, he says ‘I am going down below.’” Smythe continued “These peculiarities of local speech plainly reveal the physical geography of the country.”

The phrase going down below remained in the local lexicon for many decades. When I was growing up, it was still widely used, though it has since gone by the wayside.

Tim

In the 1800s and early 1900s there were a lot of dreamers and schemers whose desire to transform the sagebrush lands of eastern Honey Lake Valley into productive farm lands. It first began with Capt. Charles A. Merrill, who in 1878, proposed to use water from Honey Lake to irrigate the same. It should be noted that this is the same Merrill who worked relentlessly for twenty-five years to tap Eagle Lake for irrigation of the Honey Lake Valley. By 1891, there were so many reclamation projects underway, it was remarked that the Eagle Lake water would not be needed for irrigation, but it could be used to keep Honey Lake full for the pleasure of the members of the Amedee Yacht Club, among others.

In 1910, the Standish Water Company built a pumping plant on the east shore of Honey Lake that they believed would transform the region into a major sugar beet production. It went bust. Then, in 1916, the Honey Lake Valley Irrigation District thought that they had a viable plan to tap Eagle Lake that went nowhere. Last, but not least was the Southern Irrigation District that was to transform the region with water from the Little Truckee River. By the 1920s, after so many failed attempts for reclamation the entrepreneurs gave up.

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