In the 1880s, California beckoned pioneering immigrants. Promises of verdant pastures, perpetual summers and unlimited possibilities lured people like German-born Adam Wiegand to venture west to seek his future in Olivenhain, now part of Encinitas.
In 1885, Wiegand, with his fiancee, Christiana Berger, nee Schmidt, selected blocks 48 and 49 in the Colony Olivenhain for their future home. A genealogy report compiled by descendants of the Wiegands shows that their hoped-for future seemed doomed to fail. After the couple were married in Lake View, Cook County, Ill., in 1886, they returned to discover their deed was worthless. Undaunted, they abandoned the colony and filed for a 160-acre homestead two miles east of Olivenhain, where they built a home in Aliso Canyon, according to the report.
Five children were born there: Alwin, Elizabeth, Herman, Amelia and Fritz. In 1903 the Wiegands were offered “a good price for their homestead ranch” so they sold it and moved back to Olivenhain to rent property that was known then as the Water Company Ranch. That area is now at the end of White Owl Drive.
The Wiegands called this home for three years, until they built a ranch on Manchester Avenue. The family finally would settle on 246 acres, where they raised livestock and grew grain, lima beans, vegetables and fruit.
Adam Wiegand has a past that reads like a gothic novel. He was born in 1851 in Wittenberg, and he fought in the Prussian War, was captured by the French and detained as a prisoner of war. The redheaded and moustached, slightly built young man managed to escape and boarded a ship that was sailing for the United States, arriving in New York in 1870.
Permission was never granted to leave Germany, but Wiegand was determined to start a new life.
“He learned to speak English, he denounced the emperor of Germany and became a naturalized citizen of the United States,” the genealogy report states.
He eventually settled in Chicago, working for the Union Meat Packing Co. He lived in a boarding house, where he met and courted his future wife.
Christiana's past was equally colorful. Wiegand family stories tell of how Adam Wiegand returned to Chicago from California to marry 30-year-old Christiana – known then as Anna – after her first husband died and she received about $3,000 from his life insurance policy.
Chicago Tribune archives showed that in 1886, Christiana's Swiss husband, Emile Berger, a packing-house worker, died from hemorrhage of the brain, the result of a severe blow delivered during a labor dispute fight known as the Haymarket Square Riot.
The Wiegands thrived as farmers in Olivenhain. Twice a year, Wiegand drove his cattle to market in San Diego.
“While Adam was away on business, which was frequent, it was Christiana that held the family together,” the genealogy report said. She was a “thrifty hausfrau” cooking meals on a wood-burning stove and baking a week's supply of bread at a time in an outdoor, beehive-shaped adobe oven, according to a 1948 history published in the San Dieguito Citizen.
Their own farm supplied the wheat, which then was hauled by wagon to Pala to be milled into flour on the Rincon Indian Reservation. At Christmastime, Christiana would bake traditional honey cookies – lebkuchen – often laced with rum, and she would read the German Bible to her children in her native tongue.
Adam Wiegand died in 1921 in Olivenhain. Christiana lived 29 more years. She died at age 94 in National City, where she spent her last few years. Of their five children, Herman lived the longest. He died at age 103 in 1993.
Diane Welch is a freelance writer based in Solana Beach.
