Humboldt County
Loleta
Loleta is located fifteen miles south of Eureka and a few miles west of Highway 101, near Ferndale. Loleta was part of the ancestral home of the Wiyot People before Anglo-Europeans arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century and pushed them aside. The first immigrants to the area turned to planting crops (mostly potatoes), but, by the 1870s most of the land use had been converted to dairy farming. Commercial fishing was also an important element in the local economy at that time, the nearby Eel River being an important salmon habitat. In 1883, the Eel River and Eureka Railroad extended it's lines from Eureka to this region. Samuel A. Swauger was a prominent landowner and the earliest emerging community was known as Swauger's Station after the railway stop.
A post office was established in 1888, and the name of town was changed to Loleta. (Loleta, the town, is totally unrelated to Lolita, Vladimir Nobokov's controversial novel about Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze. Loleta is a name derived from three words in the Wiyot language which mean Pleasant Place at the End of the Slough.) In 1893, the Diamond Springs Creamery opened in town. In 1929, the Humboldt Creamery Association was formed and became a leader in natural farming methods that stressed the well-being of cows, claiming that dairy cows raised naturally, lived longer, and produced better milk with a higher butter fat content. (California's famous Happy Cows.) Humboldt Creamery still operates a large facility east of town. The local railroad was eventually acquired by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, and in 1903, was reorganized, first, as the San Francisco and Northwestern Railway and subsequently, in 1914, as the Northwestern Pacific Railroad. Today, it is owned and operated by the North Coast Railroad Authority.
The Loleta Cheese Factory and the Bear River Casino are the two best known institutions in town. The Casino is owned by the Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria, and the Loleta Cheese Factory, founded in 1982, is a locally owned and operated company that produces organic cheese using traditional processes.
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