The Hay Tree is a 120 year old camphor tree where local dairymen from Hynes and Clearwater would bid on hay back in the first part of the 20th century. I don’t think there’s any more significance to the tree beyond a couple guys saying, “hey, let’s meet under that big tree over there.”
I made it my mission in life to see the Hay Tree after finding this advertisement for the Rieger Hay Company in a box of family heirlooms. It has a picture of my father, Walter Houtz, and his brother Larry. I don’t know of any connection my family had to the town of Hynes, now part of Paramount.
There’s not much on the internet about the Rieger Hay Company except that a man named Frank Payton stole 100 tons of baled alfalfa from their barns. Payton’s appeal was prosecuted by Attorney General Earl Warren who went on to become governor of California and then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
The Homestead Blog has a nice write-up about the city of Hynes. The town grew up around the dairy industry and was mainly notable for farming beets and alfalfa. But the growing number of oil wells in Long Beach, combined with a proposal to route a branch of the Pacific Electric through Hynes to Long Beach, quickly turned the area into a bedroom community for the oil industry.
The subdivision of Hynes and its eventual incorporation with Clearwater into the town of Paramount left the Hay Tree out of work, with nothing else to do besides offer shade. And become an historical landmark in 2004.
On the tail end of my adventure to visit the Hay Tree I discovered something else interesting. Just up the street is the birthplace and headquarters of the Zamboni ice resurfacing machine, which is an interesting story in its own right.
See Also
For other small adventures around Southern California see the notes at the bottom of 2024: the Year of Microadventure
