“Welcome to Clovis” is the message offered from this early, hand-colored postcard of a typically vast San Joaquin Valley vineyard during harvest. The Clovis community began in the 1870s when Stephen Hudson Cole homesteaded 320 acres of government land in Fresno County. In 1872 he gave four horses to his 16-year-old son, Clovis M. Cole (1856-1939), who became a teamster and hauled lumber from the Sierra Nevada mountains to purchase land to grow
grain for feed and seed. A very successful wheat farmer and land investor by the late 1880s, he farmed 50,000 acres in the valley and gained fame as the “Wheat King of America.” In 1890 he sold a right-of-way across his land to the new railroad, who agreed to establish a depot named “Clovis” at the edge of the property. At age thirty-four Clovis Cole became the namesake of a valley town situated less than ten miles from Fresno, the county seat and economic hub of the surrounding areas predominantly tied to large-scale agricultural production, including many of the early vineyards and winery operations owned by men of wealth.
