There is a beautiful red brick church, Hollister United Methodist, and, within walking distance, an array of well-kept Victorian homes, but there are empty storefronts and vacant offices, too. It is a strangely complete town, like something out of a Richard Scarry book.
There are factories, farms, schools, railroads, horses, sheep, goats, and barns. There are men wearing cowboy hats and driving pickup trucks. There is a baseball-card shop. A sign for the high-school homecoming dance advertises its theme: A Disney Ball. On this visit, I remembered it being close to the town center, and, sure enough, I found it easily.
But something seemed different. I parked and looked more closely. So I walked up the left-leaning white steps, noting that the sculpted cherubs on the front portico had been repainted without great care. Great Deals. In the lobby, on a low table, there was a tidy array of brochures and business cards for taxi operators, churches, faith healers, and purveyors of bail bonds.
Enriching, Developing, and Empowering, the Human Potential. But there was no one inside. A thumping. I followed it down the hallway to a door. Voices could be heard amid the hip-hop, and for a second I was so happy to know that there was someone in this building that I thought about going inside. But instead I left. On the front lawn, under an old willow, I stood with no clear idea of what to do.
I watched a man across the street cutting his grass and I cycled through a series of conclusions and emotions. I was saddened by the state of the building. The interior was gloomy, and the tenants seemed temporary and uncommitted to the upkeep of the building.
And I cared about this why? For years, employees of Hollister stores, during orientation, were given the story, and it goes something like this: John M. Hollister was born at the end of the nineteenth century and spent his summers in Maine as a youth. He was an adventurous boy who loved to swim in the clear and cold waters there. He graduated from Yale in and, eschewing the cushy Manhattan life suggested for him, set sail for the Dutch East Indies, where he purchased a rubber plantation in He fell in love with a woman named Meta and bought a fifty-foot schooner.
They had a child, John, Jr. When John, Jr. He was an exceptional surfer himself. His surf shop, which bore his name, grew in popularity until it became a globally recognized brand. None of this is true. According to the L. Times , students at a local high school worried that their sports uniforms would engender more legal letters. In an effort to smooth things over, town leaders suggested to Abercrombie that the company open an outlet in Hollister.
The company does not have any recollection of this request. Most of them work on the surrounding farms or in the few nearby factories. Hollister is an unglamorous town, but its name is now associated with some degree of taste and status all over the world.
Which is odd, because the town benefits in almost no way from this success. The rise of the Hollister brand has been especially strange to me, because it was my great-great-grandfather T. Hawkins who helped found the town of Hollister. Growing up, I was confronted daily by his white-bearded face, in an old photograph that hung in our living room in Illinois.
A few feet away, his rifle, which he carried from Missouri to California, rested over our mantel. This is when T. Hawkins was born, the eldest of nine children, his parents farmers, their people having travelled from Ireland and England and Scotland to the early Virginia settlements. The Hawkins family lived in two adjoining log cabins with one roof covering both. The boys of the family slept in the attic, near the clapboard roof, and listened to the tapping of the rain in the summer.
But in the winter when the wind blew the fine snow would drift through the interstices between the boards of the roof.
In the morning, we would awake to find the bedding and the floor covered an inch or more in drifted snow. It seems at this distance a rough life; but I do not remember that we ever considered it so, and it certainly served to make one hardy and self-reliant. They hunted squirrels and quail and the occasional possum, and they ate their own pigs, in bacon and ham form, three times a day, for months on end.
You have to assume it was a fabric that breathed. Hawkins attended the customary one-room schoolhouse, a few months a year, until he was sixteen.
At that point, with his younger brothers able to take on his duties at the farm, Hawkins was freed to pursue his education. He tried his hand at teaching, and then medicine, before returning home with three hundred dollars. I was content to remain idle for a short time, spending my days floating down the Meramec in my canoe or resting under the shade of the trees.
But this could not last long, and soon I commenced to look around for something to do. From our home the nearest village was twenty miles. Scattered here and there was a country store.
There was none nearer than seven or eight miles from our place, and I conceived the idea that I could establish myself in the business. I immediately went to work with a carpenter, and by the end of July, I had a building twenty by forty feet, with shelving and counter complete. I had already gone to St. Louis to a firm who were engaged in the business of furnishing country stores, and as I was entirely ignorant of what I needed, they selected a stock invoicing about two thousand dollars, on which I paid my three hundred dollars, and the balance they carried for me.
First, a wholesaler provided T. Second, although Hawkins had no experience in retail sales, the wholesaler was risking the credit, with no collateral. Third, Hawkins was all of twenty-one years old.
The store was successful. As a good many rough characters visited the mountains, it was not considered safe to leave the store, a half mile from the nearest house, over night.
The next year, he married Catherine Patton, a well-bred woman from two old Southern families. Within a year, her health began to fail, and their doctor recommended that they move to a milder, drier climate. Learn about the people who lived there through stories, old newspaper articles, pictures, postcards and genealogy. Are you from Hollister? Do you have ancestors from there? Tell us YOUR story! Undecided about a name for the new town, an association member, Napa vintner Henry Hagen, was tired of Saint and Spanish names in nearby towns and suggested the name Hollister.
The City was incorporated on August 29, The county was expanded eastward in to include portions taken from Merced and Fresno Counties.
Read on! Read MORE For every females there were For every females age 18 and over, there were About 6. From to , Hollister experienced a state-mandated building moratorium due to inadequate wastewater infrastructure. The United States Census reported that Hollister had a population of 34, The population density was 4, The racial makeup of Hollister was 10, Hispanic or Latino of any race were 22, persons The Census reported that 34, people There were 9, households, out of which 5, There were 7.
There were 8, families The population was spread out with 11, people The median age was There were 10, housing units at an average density of 1, The homeowner vacancy rate was 2.
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