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Making the Grade: FEW TAILGATERS ON THIS ROAD

Part II of a series on Nate Harrison and the grade named after him.

By DAVID ROSS

Many years ago they used to iron out the ruts and holes in Nate Harrison Grade by dragging a tree downhill behind a team of horses. Often logs would be dragged behind wagons whose owners were afraid that their brakes weren’t up to the challenge.

About 1904 (according to Leo Calac) a Moravian Missionary to the Indians bought lumber from the mill on top of Palomar Mountain. He used it to build the chapel that is still used at the Rincon Reservation.

The missionary, David Woosley, not only brought the lumber for the church, but also for his house down the grade by horse and buggy, dragging the log as a brake.

Another minister, Baptist preacher Thomas J. Wood, who homesteaded Witch Creek (near Santa Ysabel) in the 1870s and used to take his buggy up Nate Harrison Grade once a month to bring God’s word to the mountain top.

According to his grandson, Jim Wood, on the way back down Wood would stop and get a drink from Nate. Then he would pay him a quarter to cut him a pine log to drag behind his wagon as a brake.

Some parts of the road today look like they might be kept “flat” the same way. About two miles into the grade from the valley floor it becomes just wide enough in most places for two cars to pass each other, although there are many switchbacks and hairpin curves where you could very easily have a crack-up.

Fortunately, there’s not enough traffic for that to be a real problem.

A resident of the Mountain told me that when he first moved in thirty years ago, he used to honk his horn on all the blind curves just like the DMV handbook recommends. After a few years he fell out of the habit.

As the grade’s surface started to get ragged in places, Don Seitz in his International Scout and Petei McHenry in her jeep and her passenger Theresa Gallagher slowed down so much that it was possible to make out details in the off-white buckwheat that were growing in such profusion just out of reach.

“I can’t believe how green some of these plants are!” exclaimed Seitz.

It was true, despite being July the climate was already starting to change as we scaled the mountain. “It’s a great motorcycle road!” he said enthusiastically as we went through one of those turns, although, fortunately, he was taking the turn that way in his memory and not in reality.

He recalled how as a youth, he used to ride his motorcycle on this road, sliding into the turns and using the momentum to pull out.

Once he got his bike up above the snow line and into a stretch of road where it was so slick and gooey that he found himself losing control as he went downhill. He was forced to abandon his bike for a time.

But now, with a few more decades under his belt, he was enjoying the sheer pleasure of driving. “No one has passed us from the opposite direction yet and no one has tailgated us (Petei had disappeared back behind one of the switchbacks in her Jeep). This is my kind of a road!”

Once you leave Pauma and are a few hundred feet up, it’s almost like the years are being left behind on the valley floor. There’s no sound besides the sound of the car and you can always turn the ignition off. . .

For the first fifty years or so after he settled on the mountain Nate Harrison used to greet wagons with buckets of water for their horses. He adapted well to the Twentieth Century, and towards the end of his life he would greet automobiles with water for their radiators.

The Memoirs of Abel M. Davis quotes Mary Connaghan Newell of Escondido, who called Harrison the Good Samaritan of Palomar. He would introduce himself as “the first white man on the Smith Mountain.” “Endearing himself to thousands of visitors over a period of more than 70 years, he was literally ‘the man by the side of the road—watching the world go by.’

He is said to have come from a Southern state as a slave accompanying his master who was prospecting for gold in Merced. He was one of the “Forty-Niners” who helped get California off the ground by the giving the whole world a gold transfusion a hundred and fifty years ago.

“The master died and Nate drifted south until he reached the Palomar area and settled down to spend the rest of his life in an old cabin and being a ‘character’ to all who knew him. He had little worldly goods, but was rich in kindness, generosity and possessed a lively sense of humor.

“Records show that as early as 1850 there were families who piled into their wagons and drove to Palomar for cooler weather and a vacation.”

Of course, the Indians had been going there for centuries to gather acorns for the making of Wee-Wish, which made up 60% of their diet.

As Davis’s memoirs observes, Harrison operated what in today’s parlance was the first “filling station” along the route, comparable to our own 7-11’s, except, instead of Big Gulps, he offered cool buckets of Palomar spring water.

“After horses and sightseers were refreshed, Nate would amuse them with his comical remarks and antics. He soon became a ‘must’ on the traveler’s list to watch for.”

He got along equally well with the native Luiseno Indians who visited the Mountain each fall. According to Calac “They always stopped off at Nate Harrison’s place to water their horses and themselves from the cool spring. Nate bought supplies at the Rincon store and got along very well with the Indian people.”

One of his favorite pastimes was to tell tall stories about how he sought refuge on the mountain and didn’t know for years that there had been a Civil War and that one of its results was to free the slaves.

But it appears he made that story up, according to an article published in Southern California Rancher in May of 1952. That article says Lysander Utt came from Virginia during the Gold Rush, bringing one slave with him. He was operating a trading post in Tustin when California issued a decree making slavery illegal.

Harrison probably came to Palomar because his former master had property interests in Agua Tibia. He first settled in Doane Valley and then moved below the snow line and planted an orchard.

One or two of the trees that he planted remain today, still bearing fruit if you can get to them before the birds do.

Although one might suppose that, as an “escaped slave” Harrison was an outlaw, actually he was always on the side of law and order. He was on the posse that tracked and strung up the murderers of the Smith that Smith Mountain was called after. The mountain was a refuge for cattle rustlers and Harrison often helped the sheriff catch them too.

Nate Harrison at his house early in the Twentieth Century.