In the year 1900, the quiet township of El Cajon, California typified an agrarian, middle class, politically conservative community, of northern European origins. It was as if a whole town from Nebraska or Illinois had moved to this agricultural suburb of San Diego. Valley merchants would create a commercial heritage and community identity that would culminate in the incorporation of El Cajon as a township by 1912. Using the year 1900 as a slice-of-time, the reader will visit this rural valley and a sample of its citizens as they encounter a national census, drought, legal battles over irrigation, a presidential election, commercial expansion, and a winning baseball team--all helping to give the town an identity as a rising agricultural community.
  From its early Spanish beginnings, El Cajon, which in Spanish means large box, found use as pasturage for cattle and cultivation of grapes and barley by the padres of the Mission San Diego de Alcala. After the Mexican Government secularized the land, governor Pio Pico granted the El Cajon Rancho to Donna María Estudillo Pedrorena to repay a $500 debt to her husband. By 1868, Issac Lankershim, a San Francisco businessman, purchased most of the valley for $1.00 per acre, and opened it for settlement the next year (Charles V. Birkett, "The Fiftieth Year," San Diego Historical Society Quarterly 8 (October 1962): 46.).
  Lankershim hired Amaziah L. Knox, eastern entrepreneur and former deputy sheriff, to manage his rancho. He also granted Knox ten acres of land on the north and ten acres on the south side of the main street. ⁴ Seeing the land boom and the Julian gold rush as opportunities, Knox built the Knox Hotel in 1876. At that time the valley's population consisted of twenty-five families with a total of ninety people (San Diego Union, 16 January 1887). Thus began commercial growth in the valley and the formation of a rural, agrarian community as can be seen by the 1900 census of the United States.
  El Cajon boasted a population of 563 people that equaled less than 2 percent of San Diego County's total population of 35,090. Males comprised 59 percent of El Cajon's total population, or 334 men, beating the national level of 51 percent males, California's 55 percent, and San Diego County's 52 percent. This reflects the presence of a male labor force common in an agricultural community. El Cajon's 229 females totaled only 41 percent of the total population, compared to the national average of 49 percent.
  Women in El Cajon maintained traditional positions as keeper of the home and mother. Forty percent of the 229 females were of school age or below, and 8 percent consisted of invalids, elderly, family members, boarders, or visitors. Of the town's remaining women, 79 percent (93) remained at home caring for husbands and children

in the rural lifestyle. Lilie Walker stayed at home and cared for her farmer husband Louis, son Harold, and daughter Alice. Five widows in the community served as female heads of household, leaving twenty-two women in the community with outside jobs. Twenty "old-maids," with an average age of thirty-four years, served the community. Sisters Isabelle (thirty-three) and Emily (thirty-one) Liscar taught school, while Mary Shepard (forty-five) and Martha Briggs (fifty-two) maintained incomes through cooking and dressmaking. Other women worked as fruit packers, artists, poultry keepers, and housekeepers.

The  complete text and photographs are available at the San Diego Historical Society's website:
http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/90fall/elcajon.htm