First came the miners and then the ranchers. They were followed by the lumbermen, and by the late 1800s, the farmers showed up. Within a few years, their family farms replaced the lumber flume as the economic base of Madera County.
The history of agriculture in this area is, in the main, a story of tremendous achievement, as immigrants and native-born alike moved to Madera to till the soil. Their efforts were crowned with success — with one notable exception — the John Brown Colony.
Brown was born in Warren County, Illinois, in 1860, and moved to Madera in 1889 to realize his vision of building a successful farming colony here.