Paperback: 307 pages
Publisher: Eugene:The University of Oregon (1939)
ISBN: None

William Turner Ellis (b. 1866) was the son of a Marylander who became a well-to-do merchant in Marysville, California. Turner carried on the family business and served on Marysville’s Levee Commission for forty years. Memories (1939) contains Ellis’s account of his boyhood in Marysville and the town’s early history from the 1850s and his experiences as a local business and political leader.

More than half the book is devoted to W.T. Ellis’s service on Marysville’s Levee Commission. He proudly displays the knowledge of flood control that helped protect Marysville from the Feather and Yuba Rivers and recounts related controversies including the impact of hydraulic mining on flood control costs.

[The following is from the Introduction]

ABOUT nine months ago, my friend Frank Nickey, loaned me a book to read, saying, “Here is a book which may interest you, it has considerable to say about Marysville in early days.” The book was entitled, MY SEVENTY YEARS IN CALIFORNIA, the author, being Mr. J. A. Graves, President of the Farmers and Mechanics Bank in Los Angeles. Mr. Graves told of his experiences in California, his family having lived at various places in the State, at one time in Marysville, and he mentioned many old pioneer residents of Marysville, many of whom I had known personally. The thought came to me, why not a book entitled my SEVENTY-TWO YEARS IN YUBA COUNTY, particularly with the idea of embodying a record of a lot of accumulated data in connection with flood control, levee construction, hydraulic mining litigation, river records, etc., a large amount of which I have been accumulating in my office for many years and most of which, I was quite confident, no one but myself has.

There is a saying, that, “when a person gets old, he lives in the past,” and as a result of this “thought,” for the last nine months, I have been living in the past and at odd times have been “punching out” on my typewriter, my “memories,” as contained herein. It has been a comparatively easy task for the reason that, besides having this accumulated data, mentioned above, I have been one of those “cranks” who keeps a “scrap book”; in fact, I have five large scrap books, containing clippings, etc., of local interest, and extending over a period of fifty years and, in addition, I have two other books of photographs of various flood pictures, etc., all of which make for a rather condensed “history” of interesting local events.

In addition to the above, I have accumulated throughout the years, a mass of reports relating primarily to floods, their effects, and measures taken for their control, not only on the rivers of California, but of other States in the Union and of various rivers of Europe and Asia as well, but such matters, while they have been interesting to me, might be of little interest to others, possibly none, so I have not included any such data. After having completed the following (112) chapters, I was tempted to add nineteen other chapters, mainly on other local past events, all of record but, no doubt, either forgotten or possibly never heard of by many. However, time mellows many things and sometimes it is best to “forget and forgive,” so I resisted the impulse and have endeavored to chronicle only those things which I felt might prove of interest and worth perpetuating in this book; as it is, possibly I may have “stepped on the toes” of some, but if so, it has been without malice and has been done only with the idea of recording events, as they have occurred.

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