Friday, February 10, 2017

Nuggets taken from Bettie Frazee's Book

North County Nuggets

By Eloise Perkins

Frazee family history

“I immediately fell in love with the grand old oaks and sheltering hills and knew I could be happy there.”
That is the way that Mrs. Isaac J. Frazee, then 83 and totally blind, looked back in memory to her first view of what now is known as Old Castle Rand in Moosa Canyon. At the time, she dictated a manuscript to her daughter, Helen Frazee Bower, which was printed privately in a small booklet.
During the recent dedication of the Escondido Mini-Museum and Library, another of Mrs. Frazee’s daughters, Elizabeth Frazee Worsley, presented one of the booklets to the Escondido Historical Society for inclusion on the shelves there. The Escondido Public Library also has a copy of the booklet, as do several local friends of the family.
“We came into the valley by descending a long winding grade, at the foot of which a magnificent a magnificent orchard lay spread out, with great ditches of water running here and there among the trees, and cool green alfalfa fields beyond.” She wrote.
This was the home of Washington Irving, nephew and namesake of the noted author.
Irving, the first postmaster when the post office was established at Moosa on Feb. 17, 1881, had come to the Pamoosa Valley in 1870. The area took its name from a rock formation in Moosa Creek resembling a face. In those days of more plentiful rain, the water falling below the formation game the appearance of a long beard.
The Indian word for “long beard” was Pamoosa. The settlers used this name until 1881, when the post office was established. The postal authorities in Washington D. C. believed that the address Pamoosa often would become mistaken for Pomona. So they changed its name to Moosa and today, even though the post office is gone, the canyon and the creek bear the shortened title.
The abandonment which the Frazees had purchased was near the Irving ranch. At the time the new owners arrived there was only a small one-room cabin in the area of the ranch where the spacious country home of Orpha Lien is located today.

First made home in tent
Mr. and Mrs. Irving (Frazee) and their little son and daughter did not move into the cabin, preferring to live in a tent while they built their first home, a frame house at Moosa. The stone house, which was to become known as Woreland Castle, wasn’t built until 1893.
The first two Frazee children had been born during the few years the parents lived on a 160 acre homestead on a hill overlooking the San Luis Rey Valley.  After Mr. and Mrs. Frazee proved up on the government claim, they rented it and purchased the land in Moosa Canyon.
In her booklet, which she titled “Journeying Through the Years” Mrs. Frazee said, “We pitched our tent under a lovely oak tree having a spread of 105 feet.  We named it the Lanier Oak, after our Southern poet, Sidney Lanier.
In 1893, Frazee engaged a Scotch mason and they began to build the stone house. The tower part of the house was three stories high and circular in shape.  When the parapets surmounted the roof, an English neighbor dubbed it “The Castle.” That name has clung to the tower over the years and it is incorporated in the modern Lien home.
Both Old Castle Road, which runs through part of Moosa Canyon, and the Old Castle Ranch take their names from the stone tower build(t) by the Frazees almost 80 years ago.
One of the Frazees’ guests at their home was Robert Todd of Kentucky, a cousin of Mary Todd, who had married Abraham Lincoln. Mrs. Frazee repeats one of the stories Todd told about his cousins.
“A Mr. B. was once chiding my cousin Mary for having married Lincoln, the rail-splitter, whereupon she rose and said, ‘I want you to know the grandeur of Abraham Lincoln’s soul will live forever and nations will still be doing him honor when anything you may have ever hoped to achieve will be forgotten!’ And subsequent events have proved that my cousin Mary was just about right.”
Another anecdote Mrs. Frazee tells concerns Arthur Collins, who later became a folk singer whose record, “The Preacher and the Bear,” made him famous. The song still is sung by many vocalists today – including Jimmy Dean and Phil Harris.
Here’s the way Mrs. Frazee tells it.

Noted singer got start in Moosa
“In the early days there were quite a few English boys living in our valley, and they decided once to put on a minstrel show. The trustees gave them permission to hold the performance in the schoolhouse if they would do their practicing elsewhere. So Grandfather (Mr. Frazee) invited them up to our place and one afternoon, while rehearsing under the big oaks, one of the boys said that one of the actors had been called away and they would have to get someone to take his place.
“It was suggested that they get the Collins kid, who lived a couple of miles down the valley.  He proved to be a natural born minstrel.  That was the Arthur Collins who became the famous coon-song singer.  Grandfather one of our oak trees the ‘Collins Oak.’” Others were named for various celebrities, such as Luther Burbank, Madam Ellen Beach Yaw, Dr. George Wharton James, Charles F. Lummis, William Wendt, and others.
Some of these oak trees still stand on Old Castle Ranch and the tower and the parapets are visible from Old Castle Road as it winds up the grade to Lilac.  The road leaves Highway 395 about 10 miles north of Escondido, near the Circle R Golf Course, and wanders eastward through Moosa Canyon, up the grade to Lilac Road.
Mrs. Frazee’s husband was a poet, artist and philosopher. He was author of the “Peace Pipe Pageant,” which was produced in 1915 and 1916 in a natural out-of-doors setting near his home in Moosa Canyon.
The play was a drama in three acts and its printed title was “Kitshi Manido,” but it generally was known as the “Peace Pipe Pageant.” In fact, none of the Escondidans taking part in the program whom I talked to more than half a century later knew it by any name but the latter.

All costumes, wigs and other paraphernalia used in the pageant were made by the inhabitants of Moosa Canyon.

Escondido Times-Advocate - Oct 7, 1971

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