The great development of Fresno has been due entirely to the colony system, which has also built up most of the flourishing cities of Southern California.  In 1874 the first Fresno colony was started by W.S.  Chapman.  He cut up six sections of land into 20-acre tracts, and brought water from King’s River.  The colonists represented all classes of people, and though they made many disastrous experiments, with poor varieties of grapes and fruit, still there is no instance of failure recorded, and all who have held on to their land are now in comfortable circumstances.  Some of the settlers in this colony were San Francisco school teachers.  They obtained their 20-acre tracts for $400, and many of them retired on their little vineyards at the end of five or six years.  One lady, named Miss Austen, had the foresight to plant all her property in the best raisin grapes, and for many years drew a larger annual revenue from the property than the whole place cost her.  The central colony now has an old established look.  The broad avenues are lined with enormous trees; many of the houses are exceedingly beautiful country villas.  What a transformation has been wrought here may be appreciated when it is said that 150 families now produce $400,000 a year on the same land which twenty years ago supported but one family, which had a return of only $35,000 from wheat.  The history of this one colony of six sections of old wheat land is the key to Fresno’s prosperity.  It proves better than columns of argument, or facts or figures, the immense return that careful, patient cultivation may command in this home of the grape.  Near this colony are a half-dozen others which were established on the same general plan.  The most noteworthy is the Malaga colony, founded by G.G.  Briggs, to whom belongs the credit of introducing the raisin grape into Fresno.

Fresno City is the center from which one may drive in three directions and pass through mile after mile of these colonies, all showing signs of the wealth and comfort that raisin making has brought.  Only toward the west is the land still undeveloped, but another five years promise to see this great tract, stretching away for twenty miles, also laid out in small vineyards and fruit farms.  Fresno is the natural railroad center of the great San Joaquin Valley.  It is on the main line of the Southern Pacific and is the most important shipping point between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  The new line of the Santa Fe, which has been surveyed from Mojave up through the valley, passes through Fresno.  Then there are three local lines that have the place for a terminus, notably the mountain railway, which climbs into the Sierra, and which it is expected will one day connect with the Rio Grande system and give a new transcontinental line.  Here are also building round houses and machine shops of the Southern Pacific Company.  These, with new factories, packing houses, and other improvements, go far to justify the sanguine expectations