Confederate Corners
To residents of farm town near Salinas, the name is history
SALINAS — Etched on the official map of Monterey County, along a stretch of Highway 68 surrounded by lettuce fields, is a striking relic of America’s past: the community of Confederate Corners.
The name of this unincorporated area — which announces itself on Google Maps and MapQuest, Foursquare and Waze — dates to the aftermath of the Civil War, when two army captains from the South resettled their families here. The moniker remains today in the
U.S. Board on Geographic Names database.
But there’s little controversy about the name. That’s mostly because few in the county, if any, use it.
“Never heard of it,” said Max Miller, 44, who works at Santa Maria Seeds, one of a handful of businesses in the area.
Some other parts of the nation marked by remnants of the Confederacy, the group of secessionist states that fought to preserve slavery, have actively sought to shed such associations, especially after deadly violence exploded from a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
But this swath of farmland 2 miles south of downtown Salinas appears to have already lost its name, at least unofficially, to the dustbin of history. The nod to the plantation South appears to have been neglected into oblivion.
As a tractor held up cars on the highway outside his warehouse, Miller ducked into his small office, decorated with two mounted deer heads, and used his computer to pull up the unexpected, and unsatisfying, Wikipedia entry for Confederate Corners.
“My dad was a history teacher,” he said. “You would have thought I would have known something about this.”
Mike Franscioni, 73, a grower whose family began running cattle in the Salinas Valley in the 1800s, was passing through in his pickup. He hadn’t heard of the name, either.
“I got a friend who might,” Franscioni offered. “He’s older than I am.”
But Jerry Carlsen, 85, also had little to provide.
“I heard the name used many years ago, maybe sometime in the ’50s,” Carlsen said. “As time goes by, you forget stuff.”
While the use of the name seems to have died out long ago, some stories behind it remain.
Rafael Casillas, 43, who owns the Beacon gas station and a market that sells $2 tacos to farmworkers, was surprised to get a question about Confederate Corners. But he responded quickly, pointing outside to a rundown barn within a chain-link fence.
“An old man used to come in — he’s dead now — and tell stories about that place,” Casillas said. “They used to gather there and talk about what was going on.” Who did? “Confederates,” Casillas said.
A couple of residents and merchants in the area had heard similar tales.
“There was a group of ranchers here who were Southern sympathizers,” said Kris Darch, 56, owner of the Feed Trough Feed Store. “Some of those guys actually wanted to split California into north and south.”
It’s no coincidence, Darch said, that the 36th parallel, which notoriously divided the nation between slave-owning states and free states before the Civil War, passes through Monterey County.
“Those guys were nut jobs, probably,” Darch said.
The legends surrounding Confederate Corners appear to be rooted in fact, but to what degree remains uncertain.
“I don’t know if they were still talking about succession when the town was settled,” said Meg Clovis, who retired in May as the county’s historian after 36 years. “But clearly, the people coming here from the South must have held on to some of their beliefs.”
County archives suggest the families of two Confederate army captains came to the area in the 1860s and were followed by a handful of other Southerners after their homeland was ravaged by war. They gave the area its name.
Several maps from the period list Confederate Corners, which today marks the junction of Highway 68 and Hitchcock Road. So does the county’s oldest surviving precinct map, which dates to 1898 and is on display at the elections office in Salinas.
According to Clovis, the early settlement included a general store, blacksmith shop and one of California’s largest wagon-making factories. But the only building still standing from the era is the old barn next to the gas station, Clovis said. Today, there are no signs, plaques or other markers bearing the name.
Exactly when people stopped calling the place Confederate Corners is unclear. But in 1947, author John Steinbeck used the place as inspiration for the fictional town Rebel Corners in his novel “The Wayward Bus.”
Though the name faded over the decades, the federal Board on Geographic Names, which is responsible for standardizing U.S. locations, adopted it in 1981. The agency was upgrading its database at the time and found Confederate Corners on U.S. Geological Survey maps, where it had been included since 1910.
Still, most people today consider the spot to be part of south Salinas.
“Nobody says, ‘I live in Confederate Corners,’ ” said Monterey County native Chris Lopez, who wouldn’t have known about the site if it weren’t for Google Maps. “It’s a dot that comes up and kind of catches your eye.”
Lopez is among many who find the area’s link to the South surprising, and the name offputting. But as long as the name isn’t commonly used, some said, it’s not much of a problem.
A 2015 California bill by state Sen. Steve Glazer, DOrinda, sought to prohibit public property from being named after anything associated with the Confederacy.
The proposed legislation, however, may not have affected federally identified places. In any event, it was watered down and then ultimately vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown, who wanted to leave naming decisions to local officials. Still, two high-profile Southern California schools that motivated Glazer’s effort, both named after Gen. Robert E. Lee, voluntarily changed their identities.
The U.S. Board on Geographic Names said it’s open to altering the names of federally designated places and has, in fact, changed some racially charged names. But it has never received a petition regarding Confederate Corners.
The head of the Monterey County branch of the NAACP, Regina Mason, said enshrining a Confederate name was a tacit validation of racism that lingers in California.
“Given what’s happening in the country right now, I think this could be become an issue,” Mason said. “I would like to see it changed.”
Still, as Mason steered the conversation from Confederate Corners to the inequities facing many of the county’s poor rural residents, she seemed to suggest there were far bigger issues that demanded her time.
“There was a group of ranchers here who were Southern sympathizers. Some of those guys actually wanted to split California into north and south.” Kris Darch, owner, Feed Trough Feed Store in Salinas