It's Named After: Tevis Drive and Tevis Jr. High School
It's Named After: Tevis Drive and Tevis Jr. High School
By: Lisa Kimble
There are few families in the annals of Kern County that can match the entrepreneurial spirit and high drama of the pioneering Tevis family. Lloyd Tevis and brother-in-law James Ben Ali Haggin left Kentucky and eventually made a fortune in the gold mining business before heading west. They settled in San Francisco where Tevis became the first president of Wells Fargo Bank in 1872. The two began acquiring land, including 160-acre parcels around Bakersfield.
However, the Desert Land Act signed by President Ulysses S. Grant requiring landowners like Tevis and Haggin to irrigate their “arid or semiarid” land triggered a major legal battle over water rights to the Kern River in 1881 that pitted the brothers-in-law against equally ambitious tycoons — Henry Miller and Charles Lux.
After much legal maneuvering, the men eventually decided to share the water, which led to the formation by Tevis and Haggin of what would become California’s largest landholder at the time, the Kern County Land Company. In 1896, William Tevis, the son of Lloyd and wife Susan, purchased a 300-acre parcel from Kern County Land Company. There he built a 9,000-square-foot, 21/2-story Victorian mansion. The estate was filled with European works of art and surrounded by exotic trees and shrubs collected by William’s wife, the former Mabella Pacheco whose father Romualdo was the state’s first Hispanic governor.
In 1920, the mansion was moved and demolished. William and Mabel Tevis constructed another fabulous estate in its place where Stockdale Country Club’s clubhouse is now located. William eventually lost his fortune after a failed business venture and returned to San Francisco. Several years later, William sent his son, Lloyd P. Tevis, to Bakersfield to see what he could do with the abandoned ranch. The younger Tevis decided to develop a golf course. After completing renovations on the mansion, he re-landscaped the grounds to begin construction of a nine-hole golf course. The course opened for play on Feb. 18, 1923, and was named Stockdale Country Club after Sir Edmund Stockdale, who married a Tevis relative and became lord mayor of London.
A year later the redone mansion/clubhouse was destroyed by fire. The event so devastated Lloyd P. Tevis that he sold 112 acres to a local group of aggressive young businessmen who formed Stockdale Holding Company. Not all, however, was lost in that fire, including the imposing wrought-iron gate completed in 1900 that still stands at the club’s grand entrance. A second fire, in the summer of 1940, again destroyed the clubhouse, but a new building rose from the ashes when members voted to have plans drawn up for a replacement.
Tevis Junior High, located on Pin Oak Boulevard on property owned and ranched by the Tevis family, opened its doors in 1988, and today, Stockdale Country Club, which survived two fires and the reversal of fortunes, is celebrating 85 years of golf, gatherings and membership that began with the Tevis clan.