Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1182230
W hile heading south on Highway 1 toward Big Sur, the iconic road sweeps past a vast expanse of fallow land straddling Highway 1 just beyond the Carmel River. To the east, contented black cows graze the grasses under the gaze of the Santa Lucia foothills. A handful of small, bright red cabins stand sentinel on the southern edge; a strange, flat truck-like vehicle sits idly rusting away near the roadway. To the west, a few weathered, dilapidated buildings poke up from wildly overgrown vegetation. From the vantage point of a vehicle on the roadway, there is little visible evidence that this land was once a thriving, profitable farm, tended by three generations of the Odello family. But a short hike up a trail that leads to the aptly named Inspiration Point reveals a vista that shows the land is still marked by what were once neat rows of what is to this day an important cash crop for Monterey County: Cynara scolymus or, the globe artichoke. Born in 1885, Battista Odello came to America in 1909 from the com- mune of Nucetto in Piedmont, not far from Turin in northern Italy. He knocked around California for a time, chopping ice for used in iceboxes, trying his hand at gold mining and toiling in a steel mill at Oyster Point in South San Francisco, among other pursuits. In the early 1920s, he leased part of the Palo Corona Ranch, a plot of marshy river bottom land from the Thomas Oliver family. With 13 partners—all Italians save one, a man named Lantz, whose last initial would become part of the brand name, Photo: Authur McEwen/Courtesy of the Odello Family