Grass Valley And The Philosopher
I was drawn to this local pictorial history, "Grass Valley" (2006) through my study of the American idealist philosopher, Josiah Royce (1855 -- 1916). A friend and colleague of William James, Royce taught at Harvard for over thirty years. He was born in Grass Valley to pioneers without money who had traveled across the country in search of a better life. Royce spent much of his boyhood in Grass Valley as a shy, bookish, child in a rough and tumble new mining community. Near the end of his life, Royce wrote an autobiographical sketch and commented on his earliest years:
"I was born in 1855 in California. My native town was a mining town in the Sierra Nevada, -- a place five or six years older than myself. My earliest recollections include a very frequent wonder as to what my elders meant when they said that this was a new community. I frequently looked at the vestiges left by the former diggings of miners, saw that many pine logs were rotten, and that a miner's grave was to be found in a lonely place not far from my own house. Plainly men had lived and died thereabouts. I dimly reflected that this sort of life had apparently been going on ever since men dwelt thereabouts. The logs and the grave looked old. The sunsets were beautiful. The wide prospects when one looked across the Sacramento Valley were impressive, and had long interested the people of whose love for my country I had heard much. What was there then in this place that ought to be called new, or for that matter, crude? I wondered, and gradually came to feel that part of my life's business was to find out what all this wonder meant."
Later in his Autobiographical Sketch, Royce identified the idea of community as the driving force behind his philosophical thinking, and he identified his Grass Valley boyhood as an important source of the development of his understanding of community: "I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered about the Idea of the Community, although this idea has only come gradually to my clear consciousness. This was what I was intensely feeling, in the days when my sisters and I looked across the Sacramento Valley and wondered about the great world beyond our mountains."
Claudine Chalmers' book on Grass Valley aptly captures the sense of Grass Valley as a community from its earliest days to the present. I think Royce would have loved the book, both because it covers his home town and because of its focus on community. Royce in included twice in the book. His portrait appears together with a brief biography (p.42) Later in the book, there is a photograph of the local library which was constructed on the site of Royce's birthplace and which, in 2005, was named after Royce. (p. 106)
Like America as a whole, Grass Valley showed it could have room both for bustling, entrepreneurial activity and for the rarer life of art and of the mind as exemplified most famously by Josiah Royce. So too, the early days of Grass Valley frequently approached lawlessness, but with time Grass Valley's residents learned to govern themselves and to live together as a cohesive community. From the mid-19th Century, Grass Valley had a modern character, for its day, and integrated the present with its frontier past. From Chalmers' account, today's Grass Valley properly keeps alive its history and sense of itself as a community while moving forward.
I enjoyed thinking about Royce in reading this book and learning about the town in which he grew up. There is much to be learned from Royce about the nature of community and much to be learned about studying local communities themselves, such as this account by Chalmers of Grass Valley. Arcadia Publishers, the publisher of the Images of America Series, kindly sent me a copy of this book to review.
