Gary A. White, President,
P’Chelle International

All he wanted to be was a farmer.

Farming had captured his imagination since he was a young lad. When classmates were playing baseball or hunting varmints in nearby pastures, Walter Knott was cultivating vacant lots around his home in Pomona, California. He was doing his share to support his widowed mother and younger brother. He graduated, not from Pomona High School, but from vacant lot farming to the “real thing.” In 1909, after earning a little money as a farmhand in the Imperial Valley the previous year, Walter and his cousin Frank Comer leased twenty acres of promising farm land in the Coachella Valley.

With a soft economy and the challenges of a start-up business, Frank was forced to find employment elsewhere. Walter was left on his own to plant, harvest, pack, sell and deliver, although he did get some help from local Indian laborers. Walter avoided the usual means of  marketing…broker, distributor, large grocers…selling directly to small grocers, who appreciated the abundant variety of produce, competitive prices, and excellent service. At the end of the season, Walter realized a profit, which he shared with his cousin Frank, and returned to Pomona with five hundred dollars warming his pockets and fueling his ambition.

Walter and Cordelia Knott, Courtesy of Knott’s Berry Farm

Back in Pomona, Walter was hired by a local masonry company, eventually becoming the company bookkeeper and finally a construction foreman. Showing a frugality that served him well throughout his life, he saved his money, purchased a lot and built a house. Life was good for the twenty-one-year-old Walter Knott except for one integral void in Walter’s life. That void was filled when Walter convinced his high school sweetheart Cordelia Hornaday that her life would be fuller as Cornelia Knott. The matrimonial “knott” was tied on Saturday, June 3, 1911, creating one of the most successful husband-wife teams in American business history.

On January 26, 1913 Walter and Cordelia had their first child, Virginia. Life was good; a secure job with a good salary, a brand-new home, marriage to his high school sweetheart and a beautiful baby daughter. But he wanted to be a farmer, not a masonry construction foreman. He and his family were still young enough to follow a dream. In 1914, when the fields of Europe would soon be turned into the bloody trenches of World War I, Cordelia acquiesced to Walter’s argument of short-term struggle for long-term prosperity. It is doubtful she was totally convinced, especially when she found out they would be farming a 160-acre homestead in the Mojave Desert, twenty-five miles east of Barstow! Walter was confident he could make it work. He was successful in the desert of the Coachella Valley. Why not the Mojave Desert?

Walter and Cordelia sold their house, a sacrifice far greater for Cordelia than Walter, purchased farming supplies and headed to one of the hottest, driest and most forbidding locations in the world. There was a house on the property. It had little resemblance to the house they left behind in beautiful, garden-like Pomona. They now occupied a small, primitive two-room adobe building serviced by an out-house and little else. Their lawn was blowing sand. Their trees were sagebrush and cacti. The previous owner failed to occupy the land for three years, the required time to qualify for ownership. Not surprisingly water was an issue. There was water, but it was buried in aquifers deep under the desert sand.

Walter’s primary well consistently failed and filled with sand. He eventually resorted to the house well, functioning, but too limited for a 160-acre farm. They couldn’t afford to build a proper well. They needed to grow and sell a crop to survive, difficult without a reliable water supply. Walter’s dream was crumbling like the walls of his well. Walter and Cordelia had grit. What they didn’t have was money.

Money finally came when Walter was hired to build new buildings in a dead mining town, approximately twenty-six miles southeast of their farm. Calico, California held a special place in Walter’s family history. His maternal uncle, John King, while sheriff of San Bernardino County, was the primary investor in the Silver King Mine in Calico, one of the most successful silver mines in California mining history. Ironically, in 1951 Walter Knott would purchase the Calico Ghost Town from the Zenda Mining Company for $15,000 and turn it into one of the most successful tourist attractions in San Bernardino County. In 1916 the silver was long gone except for tailings from the abandoned mines, that sparkled just enough to excite naïve investors and unscrupulous promoters. Walter soon learned that he was working for the latter. His conscience weighed heavier than his poverty and he quit. Fortunately, he found employment with San Bernardino County, working on a road crew building a highway that would become famous as Route 66. The Knotts finally met the residency requirements for their homestead. They now owned 160 acres of the Mojave Desert. The farm may not have been productive, but the Knotts were. On January 10, 1916 Russell was born and on January 25, 1917 Rachel arrived.

Picking Boysenberries on Knott’s Berry Farm, Courtesy of Knott’s Berry Farm

After three years sharecropping on a cattle ranch on the central California coast another cousin,  Jim Preston, offered him a partnership growing berries in a little farming town in Orange County named Buena Park, twenty miles south of Los Angeles. The cousins negotiated a five-year lease with a two-year option for twenty acres of  land at $1,000 a year. Walter purchased berry vines and necessary equipment. It was 1920, considered the birth of  Knott’s Berry Farm. The Roaring Twenties were little more than a muted purr for Walter and Jim, although Walter and Cordelia were blessed with their last child, daughter Marion on April 22, 1922. Bad weather spelled bad crops. Even when the weather was good, prices were bad. Walter reflected back to his success in the Coachella Valley and started selling directly to area grocery stores, bypassing the brokers and distributors, keeping his prices low while maintaining an acceptable profit.