In this Dec. 11, 2009 photo, Paul Felix, is seen at his desk in hisn Florence, Ariz. home.Felix is the grandson of Jesus Felix, who founded the family's ranch near Florence in 1865. (AP Photo/The Casa Grande Dispatch, Susan Randall)
CASA GRANDE, Ariz. (AP) — A longtime ranching and farming family in Pinal County will be inducted into the state’s Farming & Ranching Hall of Fame on Feb. 27.
Paul Felix’s grandfather, Jesus Felix, started ranching and farming in the Florence area 145 years ago.
Jesus was 9 years old when his father, Salvador, was killed during an Indian uprising around 1860 in Mexico’s Bacatete Mountains. Jesus and his mother, Dolores Valenzuela Angulo, fled to northern Sonora.
Jesus joined his uncle, Gabriel Angulo, on a trip to the Arizona Territory in 1865 to find a better place to farm.
Jesus helped his uncle clear a small piece of land northwest of what would become the town of Florence. Then they cleared another piece of land for Jesus farther to the west on the north side of the Gila River.
When they arrived at the ranch, the water table was 6 feet deep, Paul said. “The trees and mesquite were ideal for cattle.”
Jesus returned to Mexico to bring his mother to the ranch. On the way back, he worked for a short time as the custodian at San Xavier Mission south of Tucson. Besides running cattle, Jesus hand-dug ditches to bring water from the Gila River so he could raise grain and hay for his cattle. He and his neighbors built brush dams in the river to catch the water.
Judge A.C. Lockwood of Cochise County initiated water rights proceedings in 1914 to determine the legal appropriation of Gila River water. He issued a decree on April 6, 1916, giving Jesus Felix rights to Gila River water dating back to 1868, with a note that it had been farmed several years before.
Jesus acquired more land in 1872 and 1873, enlarging the ranch to 318 acres. He later increased it to almost a section, 640 acres. Jesus also grazed cattle on the open range as far north as the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.
Before Florence and Casa Grande existed, Jesus and his cowboys drove their cattle 70 miles to Phoenix once a year to sell them. On the way back, they bought supplies at the Hayden Flour Mill where the ferry crossed the Salt River — now part of Tempe.
Jesus married a neighbor, Antonia Lopez, in 1874. They had two daughters, Antonia and Delores, but their mother died while carrying her third child. Jesus remained a widower for six years, working on the ranch and hauling freight from Casa Grande to Florence after the Southern Pacific Railroad reached Casa Grande in 1879.
In 1884, he married Carmelita Salazar at Assumption Catholic Church in Florence. Her father, Mateo Salazar, owned the flour mill in nearby Adamsville.
Jesus and Carmelita had seven more children: Salvador, Pedro, Refujio, Carmen, Encarnacion, Juan and Manuel. Because there was no school for them to attend, Jesus built a one-room school at the ranch. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1894 in Pinal County District Court.
Paul’s Uncle Salvador said in an undated interview that the family seldom went to town because it raised almost everything it needed on the farm.
“Once a year we made the trip by covered wagon to Phoenix to see the Ringling Brothers Circus,” Salvador said. “The visit usually lasted a week — two days in Phoenix and the rest of the time on the road. That was our big entertainment spree of the year.”
The farm’s first piece of mechanical equipment was a three-stroke hay press.
“It was powered by a horse traveling in a circle to turn the cam,” Salvador said, “which in turn drew back the ram and released it against the loose hay in the baling compartment. The machine was stationary, and hay had to be brought to it from the field.”
Jesus and his four sons put up as many as 10,000 bales of hay in a season and sold most of it to cattle-feeding operations, including the well-known Tovrea’s in Phoenix. They also sold grain, thrashing the barley by trampling it with a horse, then using big wooden shovels to toss it into the air and let the breeze blow away the chaff and straw.
After Arizona became a state in 1912, Jesus learned that his ranch was in one of the sections of land that Congress had set aside to support education. He had to purchase it from the state.
In the 1920s, Jesus was approached by Arizona Eastern Railroad for an 18-acre easement across his land. He offered to sell the easement for $1 if the railroad would build a siding so he could load his cattle. His cattle drives ended after the siding was built where Attaway Road and Hunt Highway meet today.
As Jesus’ sons grew up and married, they each built homes on the ranch. Jesus turned the farming operation over to them in 1926 and divided the land so each son would have some farmland and some desert land. He gave his daughters houses in Florence.
Juan was still farming when his son Paul graduated from high school.
“I was farm-oriented,” Paul said. “The whole family, we were farmers, period. But the farm was not big enough. My dad had three brothers, and as the kids grew, they had to move out.”
Paul’s first job off the farm was during World War II, guarding Italian and then German prisoners of war at the camp where Florence Gardens is now.
“I went to work down there, because they told me, ‘Paul, if you want to have a good job, go Civil Service.’ Well, I didn’t know what Civil Service was.”
His next job was working for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. By the time he retired in 1984, he had helped survey and design the leveling for most of the farms in Pinal County. When the Soil Conservation Service became the Natural Resources Conservation Service and began using computers, Paul helped the programer understand what he had been doing so she could write the program. She understood the computer, but not the engineering terminology.
“He used to come home all upset trying to talk to her,” said Paul’s wife, Katie.
“For me to translate to them what this stuff was was almost a fist fight,” Paul said.
Farmer Jim Henness said he has known the Felix family for a long time.
“They are a wonderful family,” he said, “wonderful people, and a great deal of the success of agriculture, of farming in this valley can be traced back to the Soil Conservation Service and its personnel.”
Paul made a career working “hand in glove” with farmers to conserve soil and water in the desert, Henness said.
“And following in Paul’s footsteps is his son Mark, who has continued that rich tradition of the Felix family … They were incredibly valuable people to all of us landowners and farmers and ranchers, and we owe them a great debt of gratitude.”
Information from: Casa Grande Dispatch.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.
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