UC Merced Library

In the wake of the Southern California land boom of the 1880’s, two Midwestern businessmen, Elisha S. Babcock and H.L. Story purchased all of Coronado and North Island,California in December 1885 with dreams of creating the premier resort destination in Californiafor Eastern elites. After incorporating into the Coronado Beach Company, they embarked on a publicity campaign facilitated by the local ​Coronado Evening Mercury​ and the very rails thatmade the land boom possible, netting enormous profits from lot auctions drowning inmiddle-class spectacle. This entire endeavor was contingent on the production of Coronado as athriving, sophisticated metropolis, with both cultural continuity with Eastern elite society andopportunity for advancement into middle-class whiteness. This project locates the cooperative construction of Coronado’s image between the Coronado Beach Company and the local presswithin the larger American project of incorporating the West into the nation through thecontinuation of established Eastern conceptions of gender, race, and class, resting on theideology of Anglo, middle-class male dominance.