The lumber room of the Madera County Courthouse Museum is an amazing repository of artifacts, photographs, and maps of the industry that gave birth to Madera County. It is comprehensive in its displays and thoroughly enjoyable. There is, however, one thing missing, and perhaps this is due to the good taste of the curator and her assistants.
One looks in vain in the lumber room for any record of one of the most lucrative, economic corollaries to timber harvesting in the mountains — prostitution — which grew to major proportions after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
That gigantic shift of the earth shook the ground in concentric circles from its epicenter for hundreds of miles. Shock waves were felt even in Madera, but these geological ripples were nothing compared to the social disturbances that emanated from the City on the Bay following this disaster. The major consequence of the earthquake for Madera County was to bring scores of displaced prostitutes to the vicinity of Sugar Pine, the company town of the Madera Sugar Pine Lumber Company.