By M.S. Enkoji
Bee Staff Writer
(Published Aug. 17, 1998)

Drive past the mall, the restaurants that dispense food with lightening quickness and institutional blandness. Keep going.

When the traffic thins just a bit, that's where it is: Florin, former strawberry capital of the world.

From here, crates and crates of the berries left by rail even before Model T's puttered in the streets. Civic groups celebrated their agrarian riches with annual strawberry festivals -- here where railroad tracks still cross Florin Road in the south area.

The Nojiri company's packing sheds and warehouses in Florin were busy in the early 1900s. A decade earlier, shippers started filling railroad cars with ice to expand the strawberry market. CSUS Library, University Archives photo

But for Florin, it wasn't to be strawberry fields forever.

World War II and a shifting economy left fields deserted and the thriving farming community vulnerable to the spread of Sacramento's suburbs. The city, which was once a far-off destination where Florin farmers went for all-day shopping trips, is hard against the community's heart now.

What's left is a handful of storefront buildings, some occupied, some not, hugging the edge of Florin Road after it narrows from a wide thoroughfare about a mile east of Power Inn Road. The schools, the busy stores, the barbers, even a hotel are no longer here. The railroad depot that put Florin on the map is gone: The train doesn't need to stop here anymore.

The Redmen's Lodge, site of some of the strawberry celebrations, is the most imposing building left at the crossroads of Florin and Reese roads. The old white, wooden Buddhist church next door is a solitary reminder of the role Japanese immigrants had here.

It's across the street from the old Florin School, now an adult education building for the Elk Grove school district. There the children of Japanese immigrants attended school separately until 1939, when Mary Tsukamoto, a teacher, appealed to the school board to integrate the students, according to her daughter Marielle Tsukamoto.

Surrounding the little unincorporated community, wide open fields alternate now with blocks of low-slung houses.

"This was all strawberries," said Percy Nakashima, 85, gazing through a car window at passing subdivisions in afternoon heat that could bake the delicate berries into a jammy mush.

His family was one of hundreds who settled in Florin near the turn of the century and added strawberries to the landscape. His father was born in Florin and grew berries on nearly 50 acres along Bradshaw Road.

"There," Nakashima said, pointing to a roadside store with a Florin Feed Store sign on it. "That used to be an ice cream parlor."

Next to it, the Tanikawa family ran a store in a building where B.B.'s Guitar School and Arts now operates. The family used to dispense credit liberally in the lull between harvests, Nakashima recalled.

"Put it on the books, that's what they did," said Nakashima.

The community got its start decades earlier, in 1852, when James Rutter, a horticulturist, and Edwin Crocker, brother to railroad baron Charles, bought 240 acres at Florin and Power Inn roads, according to the Florin Historical Society. Impressed by wildflowers filling the fields, Crocker somehow came up with the name Florin from flora, said Dave Reingold of the historical society. Meanwhile, Rutter experimented with fruit seedlings and grape varieties, planting the first Tokay grapes in California.

After World War II, industrial jobs lured many returning farmers away from Florin's fields. A bicyclist in the 8300 block of Florin Road passes two of the area's historical buildings. CSUS Library, University Archives photo

Then the railroad came. Then the post office. Florin was on the map.

Grape growers gave rise to shipping companies in the area and some growers gave their names to streets and landmarks: Reese, French, Mack and Frasinetti, the family that established a winery, the oldest family-run one in Northern California, which is now a restaurant.

Shippers pioneered the economical method of filling railroad cars with strawberries and ice in 1893 so their market could expand.

By the 1930s, strawberries were capital.

But eventually, world events reached the small community. After the United States entered World War II, residents of Japanese ancestry had to leave their homes and go to government internment camps.

"The berries were ripe and we had to leave them hanging," Nakashima told a historian during an interview in 1992.

Some Florin ranchers tended the properties the Japanese immigrants and their families were forced to abandon. For several years, rancher George Carlisle took care of the Nakashima ranch along with two others.

"When we came back, there it was," said Nakashima.

By then, industry was offering steady salaries and easier working conditions, which lured a lot of farmers from the fields, said John Hayse, a descendant of ranchers and president of the historical society. The strawberry festivals were forgotten.

"We've more or less got a bedroom community," said Hayse, who still lives on his family's ranch. "But nevertheless, we find a tremendous amount of involvement."

New immigrants from Southeast Asia are trying to revive strawberry growing. Roadside stands dot the area. The historical group, which has 200 members, revived the strawberry festival in 1985.

Nakashima, who worked at a Sacramento cannery after the war, now lives in a home on Carlisle Street, named for the man who cared for his family's ranch during the war. A veteran of many strawberry festivals as a child, he passes them up now, he said.

"I don't really like strawberries."