Harmony Mural - Harmony California
Posted by: 
teeoff2
N 35° 30.509 W 121° 01.372
10S E 679304 N 3931231
Harmony is a very small town on the central coast of California, Population is only 16.
Waymark Code: WM3DPM
Location: California, United States
Date Posted: 03/20/2008
Views: 8
Taken from the following web site:
(
visit link)
History
The town of Harmony began as a dairy settlement in the late 1800s started by Swiss immigrants living near the Italian border--the same background as many of San Luis Obispo County's founders, including the Madonna Family, owners of the Madonna Inn located in San Luis Obispo, CA.
Harmony was founded in 1869 around several dairy ranches and a creamery. The operation changed hands repeatedly because of rivalries that led to a killing. In 1907, owners and ranchers agreed to call off their feud and called the town by its present name as a symbol of their truce.
The Harmony Valley Dairy Co-op was founded in 1901, and the town grew, soon hosting a dairy management office, dormitories for employees, a livery stable, blacksmith and later a gas station. Shortly, a school was built and a feed store and post office gave Harmony official status as a community. At its peak, the creamery employed 10 workers, producing high quality dairy products, including butter and cheese that gave Harmony name recognition statewide. The creamery purified butter by cooking it in the traditional Swiss way, clarifying and giving it a golden color; old-world dairymen claimed butter produced by this method never turned rancid. Tourists traveling Hwy 1 often stopped for fresh buttermilk and a famed publisher William Randolph Hearst stopped often in Harmony on his way to his opulent home in San Simeon, 12 miles northwest, as did many of the Hollywood celebrities who were frequent guests of Hearst.