Roots: Watermelon

On the American River

The Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians Language Department gives the watermelon, an introduced fruit, the Nisenan name santiiyá, borrowed from the Spanish sandía. Santiiyá grows today in the Tribal Community Garden.

In August 1852 the watermelons and cantaloupes shipped each day from Sacramento to Benicia and San Francisco came in “enormous” quantities, and the steamer New World carried ten tons of them down the river on a single trip. Most were grown near town, “on the banks of the American river, and in Yolo county.” Boats carried melons from the Sacramento to Stockton too. In July 1858 a sloop landed 800 watermelons there, and in August 1861 a firm on the Stockton levee took in more than a thousand watermelons and cantaloupes from the Sacramento River.

In July 1865 thirteen boys between eight and fourteen were arraigned in Sacramento for malicious mischief. They had gone into Hubbard’s garden, eaten all the melons they wanted, destroyed the rest and pulled up nearly all the vines in the patch. In August 1869 the steamer Reform, which ran between the Sacramento River ranches and San Francisco, unloaded a large cargo of produce at the city’s Jackson Street wharf, watermelons among it. “The cantalopes and watermelons have not been very good this year,” the San Francisco Bulletin wrote, in an item the Sacramento Union reprinted.

At the end of June 1886 crates of watermelons from John Spicer’s ranch in Yolo County, four miles above the city, were shipped East, the first heard of in the state that season. Spicer had ten acres of melons. The Pacific Rural Press printed the Sacramento Bee’s item beside first-melon claims from Fresno and Winters and asked, “Which was the earliest?” In June 1897 the Sacramento Union named Yolo the first county to answer the season’s demand, with melons brought into the city from T. W. Tittemore’s ranch up the river.

“The name santiiyá comes from the Spanish word sandía, which speakers adapted to sound like a Nisenan word.”

Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians Language Department

The Watermelon Center

In August 1879 a letter to the Pacific Rural Press signed “Granger, Lodi” counted some 500 acres of watermelons around Lodi. Growers shipped melons to San Francisco and other places for two months, July and August, and left the rest in the fields. The writer wanted the summer-fallowed ground of the district planted to melons for sugar and syrup, and said farmers would give the land free of rent to anyone who would do it.

One of the leading Lodi growers shipped 100 carloads in 1879, at about $100 a carload, and the ground gave something like a carload an acre, the Pacific Rural Press reported in October 1880. The season began about July 10 and lasted three months, and the average melon weighed 25 to 29 pounds. Growers saved seed from the melons left in the field and sold it “at a fair profit.” In 1880 handsome melons of at least 30 pounds sold some days for as little as $3 a hundred and retailed in the city for five cents each. In parts of the San Joaquin Valley, the paper wrote, “the melon is almost a weed.”

A Lodi correspondent wrote in October 1888 that the melons there were never irrigated, “but thoroughly and for the first two months almost constantly cultivated,” on summer fallow and sometimes among young fruit trees. In September 1895 the Stockton Record called Lodi the “Watermelon Center” when San Francisco and Stockton cyclists rode a “Watermelon Run” there.

In August 1901 Lodi melons went to San Francisco and Portland at $75 to $100 a carload of about 1,200 melons. That summer’s strike held the boxcars: over 800 cars at San Francisco and 700 at Port Costa sat on the sidings loaded with wheat, and the railroad was “exerting every effort to remedy the situation at the Watermelon Center.” An oak water tank, a Lodi landmark that fell in 1924 after 35 years, watered the teams that brought in “great loads of watermelons,” and many a youth bought melons there from drivers loading the cars.

“From that time on until the frost comes they are left to rot on the ground, thousands of tons of them.”

“Granger, Lodi,” Pacific Rural Press, August 30, 1879

Melon Sugar

The 1879 Lodi letter ran under the heading “Melon Sugar.” Another correspondent answered in the same paper that a company had once been formed in California to make sugar from melons, with its works to be at Isleton on the Sacramento River. “The whole undertaking, from beginning to end, was a failure,” he wrote.

In September 1879 E. W. Hilgard of the University of California offered to analyze three to six sample melons for sugar. “Certainly the fervid plains of the San Joaquin ought to make the melons as sugary as they are in any place in the world,” he wrote. He examined seven melons sent by a reader at Lodi and reported in December that “only 2.66%, or not quite one-third by weight, is cane sugar,” which disposed of the idea of watermelon sugar “in the negative.” The melons would make a syrup, though always a dark one.

“A 25-pound melon will, on the average, make about a pint of good syrup.”

E. W. Hilgard, Pacific Rural Press, December 13, 1879

Melon-Exhausted

In May 1904 the Lodi Sentinel counted half the melon acreage of the year before.

“Time was when Lodi shipped as many as twenty cars each day of the season to the different markets,” the Sentinel wrote. The Sentinel blamed the soil: the melon “only thrives in new soil, and will not make a good crop on the same soil the next season,” and northern San Joaquin was “‘melon-exhausted’ for the present.” It added that the markets had fallen off and growers found more profit in other crops, and it passed the title to Fresno. Lodi still shipped at least a carload a day that July, from a crop below the ten-year average.

In June 1905 F. Christesen, who grew watermelons at Manteca with Ed. Powers, told the Lodi Sentinel that 150 acres were planted to melons there. In July 1912 the Stockton Independent expected no more than 1,000 acres of watermelons in northern San Joaquin, after a year of poor prices when the melons averaged $65 a car. The first carload of Lodi melons went to San Francisco at the end of that July, when an estimated 25 carloads a day were leaving Turlock.

By July 1918 all the large Lodi growers, Lange Bros. among them, had gone out of melons for crops that paid better. Lodi had shipped no more than a dozen cars the season before, and in 1918 it expected to ship none. Bay Area dealers still sold “Lodi watermelons,” grown mostly around Fresno, Manteca and Escalon. At one time some of the dealers were arrested for it, the Stockton Independent reported.

20Cars a day at most, before 1904
12Cars at most, 1917 season
NoneCars expected, 1918

“…they proved that the melon seed came from Lodi, and therefore to all intents and purposes, in the view of the court, they were Lodi watermelons.”

Stockton Independent, July 25, 1918

Klondike R7

In 1937 D. R. Porter of the University of California wrote that in many districts of the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, losses from wilt made watermelon growing “hazardous or unprofitable,” and that thousands of acres suited to the crop had been “wilt-sick” for many years. He wrote that “infested soil probably remains so indefinitely; crop rotation will not eliminate the causal organism.” California growers wanted melons like the Klondike, with its “deep-red color, and high sugar content.”

J. T. Rosa worked on resistance from 1923 until his death in 1928, crossing for it with Angeleno, Chilean and Klondike, then the three most important varieties in the state. The station had too little infested soil for the new program, so the breeders took a severely infested field at Lodi. By 1930, Porter wrote, the Lodi district grew melons only on small tracts not used for them before. The field chosen had been planted to watermelons in 1929, and less than 2 percent of the plants lived. In 1930 the breeders planted 10 pounds of Klondike seed there, about 100,000 seeds.

The work stayed at Lodi until 1934, when Davis had enough infested ground on University property. That year the first harvest of resistant strain C67-1-5-7-4 at Davis came to twenty-one marketable melons from ten plants. The offspring of plant 10 were named Klondike R7, and the seed crop of the seventh generation, grown at Davis in 1936, was released under that name. NC State’s history of watermelon breeding says Klondike R7 was popular in California for many years and lists it, crossed with Dixie Queen, as a parent of the Miles variety.

“Many years ago the Lodi district enjoyed an enviable reputation for its high-quality watermelons.”

D. R. Porter, UC Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 614, 1937

Seed

Up the valley, Sutter County had a banner melon year in 1908. That August eleven loads of watermelons went through to Marysville, nearly all of them grown in District 70, and S. J. Stabler, who could not sell his load, gave it to the cannery workers for a melon feed. In 1919 the Colusa Herald called a grower named Schafer “the watermelon king of Colusa county.” In 1921 about 50 families, most of them from Oregon and Washington, settled in the Rio Oso colony near Nicolaus and turned largely to corn and watermelons, County Agent C. E. Sullivan reported.

In December 1922 Mon Sing of Colusa shipped 18,000 pounds of watermelon seeds to San Francisco on the Sacramento Northern, for Chinese manufacturers who made fine confections of them.

In 1997 Colusa, Sutter and Glenn counties grew more than 80 percent of California’s cucurbit seed, which takes in cucumber, cantaloupe and mixed melon, squash, pumpkin and gourd, and watermelon seed, according to a UC guide by Mike Murray, the Colusa County farm advisor, with Timothy Hartz and Kent Bradford of UC Davis. In the lower Sacramento Valley the seed crop goes in from May into early July and is harvested from mid-August to mid-October; watermelons take 85 to 100 days. In 2024 Colusa County harvested watermelon seed from 2,024 acres, 506,000 pounds worth $8,587,000. Sutter County’s 886 acres gave 222,000 pounds in 2025, worth $6,878,000.

Seedless melons are triploids, which Kihara found in 1951 to be mostly seedless. Seedless varieties made up most of California’s watermelon acreage by 2009, and their seed cost $700 to $1,200 a pound, according to UC’s production guide. A triploid seed field yields about 20 to 40 pounds of seed an acre, about a tenth of what an ordinary field would, by NC State’s figures. In 2017 Syngenta watermelon breeder Matt Kinkade said nearly every seedless watermelon grown in North and South America was developed at the company’s Woodland site, a 150-acre station off County Road 98, AgroPages reported. At Seminis’s Woodland field day in 2013, breeders Greg Tolla and Jerome Bernier showed seedless watermelon lines; the two breed watermelons for the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Australia.

“If you have a thousand pounds or so and feel that you can spare them, call up Mon Sing and he will make you a price.”

Colusa Herald, December 7, 1922

Watermelon Now

California harvested 514 million pounds of watermelons in 2025. Yolo, Colusa and Sutter are among the leading watermelon counties the state agriculture department named in 2026, by acres harvested and value, though Colusa and Sutter report their watermelon mainly as a seed crop.

The Durst family has farmed in Yolo County since the late 1800s, and by 1989 it grew its first organic fresh-market tomatoes and mixed melons for Bay Area markets. Durst Organic Growers, in Hungry Hollow near Esparto, grows seedless watermelons organically and waters them with buried drip tape.

J&J Ramos Farms brings watermelon from Hughson, in Stanislaus County, to the Sacramento Central and Midtown farmers markets. At the Davis Farmers Market, Feather River Farms and Food Tree Field, a Yolo County farm, list watermelons. Local melons are in season from July to September; melons from farther away come in May and June and again in October.

Melons in season: who grows them and where to buy them

“We grow seedless varieties due to popular demand--probably because people would rather use their time eating more of our watermelon than spitting out seeds (we can relate).”

Durst Organic Growers

Timeline

August 1852 Sacramento ships melons grown on the American River and in Yolo down to Benicia and San Francisco; the steamer New World carries ten tons on one trip. The melon trade
July 1858 A sloop from the Sacramento lands 800 watermelons at Stockton. The melon trade
July 1865 Thirteen Sacramento boys are arraigned for raiding Hubbard’s melon patch. The melon trade
1879 Lodi has some 500 acres of watermelons, and one of its leading growers ships 100 carloads. Lodi
December 1879 E. W. Hilgard of the University of California finds Lodi watermelons too low in cane sugar to make sugar from. Breeding and seed
June 1886 Crates of watermelons from John Spicer’s Yolo ranch are shipped East. The melon trade
September 1895 Cyclists ride a “Watermelon Run” to Lodi. Lodi
August 1901 A strike leaves boxcars on the sidings full of wheat while Lodi melons wait. Lodi
May 1904 The Lodi Sentinel reports half the melon acreage of the year before and calls the ground “melon-exhausted.” Lodi
August 1908 Sutter County has a banner year for watermelons. The melon trade
July 1918 Lodi’s large melon growers have quit, and the town expects to ship no melons at all. Lodi
December 1922 Mon Sing of Colusa ships 18,000 pounds of watermelon seeds to San Francisco for Chinese confection makers. Breeding and seed
1923 J. T. Rosa begins breeding for wilt resistance with Angeleno, Chilean and Klondike. Breeding and seed
1930 About 100,000 Klondike seeds are planted on wilt-infested ground at Lodi. Breeding and seed · Lodi
1934 The strain that becomes Klondike R7 gives its first harvest at Davis, and the breeding moves there from Lodi. Breeding and seed
November 1937 D. R. Porter’s bulletin describes Klondike R7, released from the Davis plots. Breeding and seed
1997 Colusa, Sutter and Glenn counties grow more than 80 percent of California’s cucurbit seed. Breeding and seed
2017 A Syngenta breeder says nearly every seedless watermelon grown in the Americas was developed at its Woodland site. Breeding and seed
2024 Colusa County harvests watermelon seed from 2,024 acres. Breeding and seed
2025 Sutter County harvests watermelon seed from 886 acres, and California harvests 514 million pounds of watermelons. Breeding and seed · The melon trade

Sources

Checked November 7, 2026. Quotes from old newspapers keep their spelling, with obvious scanning errors corrected. The watermelon at the head of the page is Vilmorin-Andrieux’s Black-seeded Water-Melon, from the 1920 English edition of The Vegetable Garden.