Tension was in the air in Madera in 1947. The long-standing exclusion of African-Americans from the City’s swimming pool was being challenged, and the integration attempts weren’t setting well with some of the town’s power brokers, especially the publisher of the Madera Tribune. Howard Clark, whose father had founded the paper in 1892, took umbrage at what he was calling outside interference that sought to upset the “natural tendency toward segregation” of the races, especial

For The Madera Tribune Stagecoaches like the one shown here in front of the hotel at Hildreth, not far from Coarsegold, carried passengers from the mountain towns of Madera County to the Valley. Most of the trips were safely conducted, but occasionally disaster struck, like that time in 1901. It seems so far in the distant past, and yet it hasn’t really been all that long since the only method of transportation from Madera to the foothills and back was in buggies and stagecoa

For The Madera Tribune Hiram Rapelje is shown here, second from the left, posing with the posse that shot train robber John Sontag, who lies wounded on the haystack. Madera County has produced its share of rough and tumble, two-fisted drinking, street fighting pioneers. They pop up all through the pages of local history to spice up the pieces of our past. Very near the top of a list of such characters is Hiram Lee Rapelje, a local stage driver who was as quick with his guns a

For The Madera Tribune Duane Furman, shown here, was MUSD superintendent during the racial unrest of 1974. In the summer of 1974, racial trouble erupted in Madera. A 16 year-old male student at the high school threw a young coed, fully clothed, into the school swimming pool. Two female high school teachers, Rose Harper and Sharon Weldon, tried unsuccessfully to question the perpetrator. Madera High Vice Principal Perry Harper and Learning Director Barry Crow intervened, and b

For The Madera Tribune Coarsegold, home of the Magnet mine. William McNaughton was foreman of the Magnet gold mines near O’Neals at the turn of the 20th century. Apparently the community did not hold him in very high repute, especially when it came to paying his debts. Such was McNaughton’s reputation that when one of his prospective miners learned the kind of fellow for whom he was going to work, he quit before he started. Strangely enough, when the man didn’t show up for wo

For The Madera Tribune Tung Lin Leong, a young resident of Madera’s Chinatown is shown here in this 1903 photograph taken in Madera. The Chinese were among the first settlers in Madera. Most of them came here from the little town of Borden, four miles to the south. By the late 19th century a bustling Chinatown thrived in the area that had been set aside for them by the founding fathers, who fought to keep the Chinese on the west side of the railroad tracks. There they operate

For The Madera Tribune “Captain” Russell Perry Mace, Madera’s first resident. The United States was celebrating its one hundredth birthday. Custer had just made his last stand, and Ulysses S. Grant was in the last year of his presidency. The year was 1876 — a watershed not only in the history of America but in that of the San Joaquin Valley as well, for that was the year Madera, California, was founded. The appearance of civilization between the Chowchilla and Kings Rivers ha