Customer Reviews

Highly Respectable Families: The Cornish of Grass Valley, California 1854-1954 (Nevada County Pioneers Series)

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Imagine the thrill that touches a person at the first Springtime sighting of wild poppies in bloom. If the blossoms are gold, then it's a distinctively California experience, evoking a strong sense of place and of natural wonder. I felt something of the same qualities of delight and surprise when I read Shirley Ewart's Highly Respectable Families: The Cornish of Grass Valley California 1854 - 1954, newly released by Comstock Bonanza Press. In her words the Cornish migration and assimilation into Nevada County, California, assumes the energy of a natural force.

At the center of this ramble through local social history is a tuft of eight family stories - actually a whole meadow - that exemplify the values of the immigrants from the southwestern-most corner of the United Kingdom who came to America to find opportunity for themselves and their children. Here is a vivid and highly readable account of 100 years of nearly constant emigration from Cornwall to California. In telling the stories Shirley enumerates the values that made these families both respected and successful - self-reliance, devotion to family and church, ethnic identity, faith in self-improvement, scorn of liquor, impassive acceptance of hard work and danger, love of music. She explains how these families, who were the arms and hands of industry in the mine, and the voices and faces of faith in the church, earned the respect of the wider community. In a new land they brought an old world culture to full flower.

The vitality of the book comes from the stories themselves, accounts of representative families, such as the Henwoods, the Bennallacks, the Tremenwans and others, all of which turn on intimate moments of decision and self-revelation. The book tells the story of the George family and of Harold J. George, who was offered a cornet if he would learn to play it and who went on to conduct the fabled Grass Valley Cornish Carol Choir for half a century and to bring music to children in the Grass Valley schools. It relates the love story of Jim and Alberta Rowe (grandfather of our Cornish Cousin Winnifred Rowe Cannon) who reportedly never exchanged a cross word in sixty years of marriage, and who were determined that their son would never be "a mucker in a mine." It tells of Mary Anne Mitchell, a young widow and mother scraping by in Cornwall, who had a proposal of marriage from a Cornishmen in America she knew primarily through his letters. She considered the offer and prayed and in the end it was thinking of the future of her two children that turned the balance. In recounting these stories Shirley had the help of Harold T. George, whose name also appears on the book.

Shirley, who spent much of her childhood in St. Ives, Cornwall, and knows first-hand the hardship of immigration and the miseries of homesickness, brought a rare understanding to this work. She was never turned down for an interview, which says as much about her empathy as it does about the generosity of the families she met. She collected these stories over two decades and relates them with sympathy and skill. All of us who are part of the Cornish community owe her a debt of gratitude for preserving and relating these intimate accounts and we are indebted to her publisher for presenting them in such an appealing volume.