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History - page 4

Turlock’s history, historic places, institutions and the people who shaped the region.

Timothy Olyphant: A Modesto Farmhouse, a Swimming Team and a Cowboy’s Career

Elmore Leonard, Graham Yost and Timothy Olyphant together at the Peabody Awards in 2011.
Elmore Leonard, Graham Yost and Timothy Olyphant at the Peabody Awards in 2011. Photo: Anders Krusberg / Peabody Awards / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0. Cropped and resized.

Timothy Olyphant grew up beside a Modesto swimming club. His early route to Hollywood involved a farmhouse, competitive backstroke and an architecture-school conversation that lasted about ninety seconds. Olyphant was born in Honolulu and grew up in Modesto. The Modesto Bee identifies Norwegian Avenue, Standiford Elementary and Somerset Middle School among his childhood connections. He later attended Beyer High School, also the school of Jeremy Renner. A farmhouse within walking distance of the pool In… Keep Reading

Jeremy Renner: Modesto’s College Stage, Old Houses and a Second Career

Jeremy Renner at Phoenix Fan Fusion in June 2023.
Jeremy Renner at Phoenix Fan Fusion, June 2023. Photo: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped and resized.

Before Jeremy Renner played a superhero, a Modesto Junior College instructor encouraged him to pursue acting. He later worked on the college stage and developed a second career restoring houses, including an old home in Modesto. Renner was born and raised in Modesto, where he attended Somerset Middle School and Beyer High School. The Modesto Bee’s account of local entertainment figures documents those school years. The elective that became a career The California Community Colleges’… Keep Reading

Marvalene Hughes: The President Who Changed Stanislaus State

Sequoia Lake along Crowell Road on the Stanislaus State campus in Turlock.
Sequoia Lake on the Stanislaus State campus, November 2018. Photo: Cameron11598 / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0.

Marvalene Hughes helped reshape Stanislaus State’s Turlock campus, including its lakes. She later became president of Dillard University in New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina struck just weeks into her tenure. Hughes led Stanislaus State from 1994 to 2005, becoming its first woman and first African American president. When she died on January 3, 2026, at 88, the university remembered its longest-serving president through buildings and water features, but also through conversations students and colleagues had… Keep Reading

Colin Kaepernick’s Turlock Years: Schools, Sports and Family

Colin Kaepernick at the ACLU Biennial Awards Ceremony on July 24, 2026.
Colin Kaepernick at the ACLU Biennial Awards Ceremony, July 24, 2026. AsaQuathern / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0. Cropped.

Before Colin Kaepernick was a 49ers quarterback, he was a Dutcher Elementary student writing to his future self. He wanted to play professional football for San Francisco or Green Bay. Years later, a reporter interviewed him at his parents’ Turlock home after the 49ers drafted him. That childhood letter is one of the familiar parts of his local story. Less familiar are the hundred recruiting DVDs his family mailed, the baseball team that drafted him… Keep Reading

Brad Bates: Turlock’s Former Mayor, Parks and City Growth

The former California State University, Stanislaus entrance sign on University Circle, photographed in January 2009.
The former Stanislaus State entrance on University Circle, January 2009. Photo: 5thLargestinAfrica / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0. Resized and compressed.

Brad Bates has a park named after him. His daughter has a play park named after her. Augusta was ten when she championed Donnelly Park’s wooden playground; Brad helped turn the proposal into a project that thousands of volunteers could build. Bates served as Turlock’s mayor from 1982 to 1990. His years in office included debates over growth around the college and a new signal for its entrance. Later came park-building, campaign-finance proposals, a 2018… Keep Reading

Sandra Tovar Medeiros: The Teacher Behind the School’s Name

Aerial view of Turlock with neighborhoods and surrounding agricultural land.
Turlock from above, September 2014. Photo: formulanone / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0. Cropped.

Sandra Tovar Medeiros taught children to read. Years after her death, a school bearing her name gave one young student an ambition of her own: to come back and teach there. In 2026, that student stood before the school’s twentieth-anniversary gathering as a first-grade teacher. The teacher behind the name Medeiros was born September 5, 1959, and died August 1, 1998, of cancer. The district’s school accountability report preserves those dates and remembers her enthusiasm… Keep Reading

The Crowells: Farms, a School Fountain and Turlock’s Complicated History

Historic aerial photograph of downtown Turlock, with the railway, streets, buildings and surrounding fields in 1936.
Turlock in 1936, from a San Francisco Examiner advertising folio. San Francisco Examiner folio / Wikimedia Commons · Public domain. Cropped.

In June 1927, Turlock students presented a new fountain to school trustee Arthur Crowell. The faculty supplied water lilies and goldfish. The family’s history includes farming, Swedish settlement, schools and irrigation, as well as a record of racial exclusion. Two brothers start again in Turlock George H. Tinkham’s 1921 county history describes brothers Charles C. and Arthur G. Crowell leaving the Hanford area after a fire damaged the family’s cheese business. They bought land in… Keep Reading

The Bonanders: Cars, Community and a Turlock Courtship

Main Street in downtown Turlock, California.
Main Street in downtown Turlock, August 2008. Photo: Intothewoods29 / Wikimedia Commons · Public domain. Cropped.

The Bonander name is easy to spot on a car lot. One of its less obvious places in Turlock history is a dentist’s office—where a young man met the woman he would marry, connecting the Bonanders, Woods Furniture and a longtime mayor’s family in one ordinary appointment. A postwar business—and a name that changed Bonander’s truck business dates its service to the Valley to 1946. A reproduced dealership history describes Emory Bonander returning from World… Keep Reading

William Edward Bridegroom: Turlock’s Railroad Mayor and the Arguments of the 1920s

Historic aerial photograph of downtown Turlock, with the railway, streets, buildings and surrounding fields in 1936.
Turlock in 1936, from a San Francisco Examiner advertising folio. San Francisco Examiner folio / Wikimedia Commons · Public domain. Cropped.

Turlock’s police chief survived a burglar’s gunfire in 1923, then resigned after the mayor questioned his judgment. William Edward Bridegroom explained his concern for the officer’s safety with an unexpected qualification: 33 years in railroad service. The surviving newspaper reports introduce a mayor who managed a seed warehouse, called for volunteers to plant highway trees and became caught in disputes over police work, Prohibition and military preparedness. A railroad man at the seed warehouse A… Keep Reading

Mary Stuart Rogers: The Name Behind Turlock Scholarships and a Modesto Stage

Exterior of the Gallo Center for the Arts in Modesto, March 2012.
Gallo Center for the Arts in Modesto, March 2012. Photo: OsotedeMonte / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 3.0. Cropped and resized.

A student sorting out financial aid in Turlock and a concertgoer finding a seat in Modesto may pass the same name without knowing the connection. Mary Stuart Rogers’ foundation turned a share of the Carnation fortune into scholarships, classrooms and a theater, continuing her work after her death. Stanislaus State’s Mary Stuart Rogers Building makes her name familiar in Turlock. The campus became an important part of a philanthropic network based in Modesto and reaching… Keep Reading

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