Delta Pears

Wilton Rancheria, the only federally recognized tribe in Sacramento County, calls itself “California’s Capital Tribe.” Its citizens are mostly Miwok and Nisenan people. The Tribe’s history describes the tule boats of the Delta’s first people as a sign of their “river-and-marsh adaptation,” and the Julpuns Miwok, who hunted and fished on Sherman Island.

On October 24, 1811, a Spanish boat party came up the river to a large Plains Miwok village near what is now Walnut Grove. The Tribe’s timeline records what followed: an attack on its ancestors on a marshy island in the north Delta in 1813, and the malaria epidemic of 1833. Its federal recognition was restored on June 8, 2009.

The orchards stand on land that used to flood every year. Federal and state Swamp and Overflow Acts, in 1850 and 1861, opened the Delta’s wetlands to anyone who would drain them, and between 1860 and 1880 three to four thousand Chinese laborers did most of the work. They cut drainage ditches, built floodgates and piled up the levees by hand, reclaiming 88,000 acres. Most came from Guangdong, and they brought levee-building know-how from the Pearl River Delta.

The first orchards along the river grew stone fruit. Then debris from hydraulic mining raised the bed of the Sacramento, and the water table with it. The stone fruit failed, Bartlett pears tolerated the wetter ground, and the river towns turned to pears. By 1890 a county history wrote of “the famous thirty-five miles of orchard along the left banks of the Sacramento River,” from a few miles below Freeport to six miles below Isleton. Growers ran their own steamboats to carry the fruit to market.

By 1865 Walnut Grove was shipping Bartlett pears down the river. Its Chinatown, and later its Japantown, became a center for hundreds of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino farmworkers, as pears and asparagus spread along the river.

When fire burned Walnut Grove’s Chinatown in 1915, a group of merchants from Heungshan County, led by Bing Lee, built a new town on about nine acres leased from George Locke, a pear farmer. California’s 1913 Alien Land Law let them own the buildings but not the ground under them; the law wasn’t struck down until 1952. Locke grew to about 600 residents, with as many as a thousand seasonal farmworkers in the harvest, and in 1925 Southern Pacific enlarged the packing shed across the street. Locke became a National Historic Landmark in 1990.

Walnut Grove’s Japanese families built their own Japantown a block north after the same fire. In 1942, after Executive Order 9066, it became a ghost town almost overnight. Most of its families came back after the war, though many didn’t stay long.

Courtland holds its Pear Fair on the last Sunday in July. Volunteers run it, and the 52nd fair was on July 26, 2026.

Stillwater Orchards, run by the Elliot family since 1951, still packs its own pears, cherries, apples and kiwi in Courtland.