A Trip to California by Thomas Sewell Inborden
"A Trip to California" is a travel memoir and advocacy pamphlet by Thomas Sewell Inborden, principal of the Joseph K. Brick Agricultural, Industrial and Normal School in Bricks, North Carolina, published August 15, 1922, as a supplement to the Brick News. It records a five-month, roughly twelve-thousand-mile journey Inborden took through the northern, western, and New England states between late 1921 and March 1922, undertaken as a rest and reward for his twenty-seven years of service to the school and thirty-two years with the American Missionary Association, though he could not resist turning it into an occasion for fundraising addresses and racial and agricultural observation. The narrative opens with a brief introductory letter summarizing the itinerary, then unfolds as a discursive travelogue: from Bricks through Washington, D.C., the Shenandoah Valley, New York, Brooklyn, Springfield, New London, New Haven (where he witnessed Marshal Foch receive an honorary degree at Yale), Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, before turning west. The bulk of the account traces the transcontinental leg by rail — South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana's mining country around Butte (including a 2,200-foot descent into a copper mine), the Cascade Mountains into Spokane, Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland, then south through Oregon's fruit valleys into California. Inborden lingers over Sacramento, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, the Bay ferries, and a swing through Southern California — Los Angeles, Hollywood, Culver City, San Bernardino's orange show, and the Imperial Valley — cataloguing crop yields, irrigation projects, oil production, and civic infrastructure with the enthusiasm of an agricultural educator. The return route runs back up the coast to San Francisco, then east through Salt Lake City (with an extended account of Mormon history and the Tabernacle), the Rockies, Denver, and the Midwest to Chicago and home. Throughout, Inborden weaves in the addresses he delivered — twenty-eight in all — to Black and white congregations, ministers' associations, and civic groups, profiling prominent African American clergy, professionals, and former Brick School students he encountered in each city (Rev. H. H. Proctor in Brooklyn, Rev. William DeBerry in Springfield, Rev. Harold Kingsley in Cleveland, Rev. Robert Bradby in Detroit, Dr. R. R. Robinson in Los Angeles, among others). He comments repeatedly on race relations, comparing the relative absence of open hostility in the West with Southern conditions, noting instances of both welcome ("You are welcome to Lee County") and exclusion (Black mechanics barred from work in Ashboro, North Carolina), and reflecting on the presence of Japanese and Chinese farmers and laborers he met along the way. A substantial second portion of the pamphlet shifts from travelogue to didactic essay. "Farm Life" argues against the shiftless, tradition-bound farming methods Inborden associates with the old rural South, urging Black farmers toward modern machinery, scientific method, business literacy, banking discipline, and — most emphatically — cooperative organization, citing examples like a shared peanut thresher and pooled plow teams at the Brick School farm. "Rural Life" recounts a follow-up automobile tour of eighteen central and western North Carolina counties undertaken with Rev. P. R. DeBerry in July 1921 for the Negro Farmers' Congress, county by county tallying Black landholding, school enrollment, farm demonstration agents, and road conditions, and noting the transformation of Moore County's sandy waste into profitable peach orchards as a model of underused Southern land ripe for Black economic advancement. The pamphlet closes with "Brick School in Perspective," a history of the school's 1895 founding on land donated by Julia E. Brewster Brick with the backing of General Oliver O. Howard and the American Missionary Association, an account of its curriculum (agriculture, trades, domestic science, and academics) and notable graduates, and a closing appeal — echoing the farm essays — for continued support, cooperative farm loan organization, and community uplift through education, industry, and interracial "compatibility." A final page of practical school information (fees, enrollment, transportation) serves as an advertisement appended to the whole.
By Thomas Sewell Inborden · First published 1922 · Genre: Travel Narrative, Memoir/Autobiography, Social Commentary · 33,112 words
First lines
August 15, 1922 Supplementary to the Brick News
A TRIP TO CALIFORNIA
And Several Addresses to the Negro Farmers' Congress of North Carolina
BRICK SCHOOL IN RETROSPECT
What this Textopian page supports
A Trip to California is listed on Textopian as a novella by Thomas Sewell Inborden, dated 1922 CE.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Novella
- Author: Thomas Sewell Inborden
- Date: 1922 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Travel Narrative, Memoir/Autobiography, Social Commentary, Descriptive Literature, Historical Non-fiction
- Length: 33,112 words
- Structure: 1 section, 263 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
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- Work identity for A Trip to California by Thomas Sewell Inborden
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
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Genres
- Travel Narrative — The primary work is a first-person account of a 5-month, 12,000-mile journey across North America with detailed descriptions of routes, stops, scenery, and experiences along the railroad and highways.
- Memoir/Autobiography — The text is intensely personal, with the author reflecting on his life achievements, dreams of forty years, family obligations, and spiritual transformation during the journey across the Continental Divide.
- Social Commentary — Extensive observations and critiques on race relations, farming conditions, community life, labor organization, industrial development, and the status of African American communities across multiple states.
- Descriptive Literature — Elaborate, lyrical descriptions of landscapes, mountains, rivers, cities, and natural phenomena demonstrate artistic attention to scenery and environment throughout the narrative.
Tags
travel narrative · adventure · California · exploration · memoir · travelogue · historical journey · westward expansion · frontier · Americana · 19th century · geography