By Dwight Miller
February 2026
According to Caltrans statistics, about five million cars pass by Merryman Station each year. It is doubtful that many of those travelers have any real sense of the history of that location. The current owner of the Merryman Station Event Venue, however, does. Amanda Hill-Thomas was gracious enough to give me a tour of the facility (https://merrymanstation.com), a delightful place where many couples each year celebrate their weddings in classic style. Amanda has poured an enormous amount of time, money, and heart into restoring the property. Her love of history—and her desire to preserve as much of it as possible—is reflected in the original Visalia Electric Railroad tracks in front of the building, installed in 1905.

The site began as a fruit packing house, though it has served multiple purposes over the years. The building itself has housed a dance hall and several restaurants over the years.
The research and preparation for this story connected me not only to Amanda Hill-Thomas, but to several others as well. Nick Nielsen, born and raised in Exeter, has a deep interest in genealogy and his own family history. Though he is not related to the Merrymans, he shared with me a 1905 book on their genealogy. According to that volume, the first Merryman in America was Walter Merryman, who was kidnapped from an Irish port around 1700 and transported to Boston, Massachusetts. His passage money was paid by a man named Simonton, who taught him the trade of shipbuilding in Portland, Maine. Shipbuilding was passed down to subsequent generations.
Tina Dungan-Paige, granddaughter of A. C. Dungan, also shared elements of her family history. Both her grandfather and her great-uncle, John Smith Dungan, worked for the Merrymans in the earliest days of the Bonnie Brae Ranch. The above photograph of the Bonnie Brae packing house was shared by Tom and Ann Dungan. Finally, I had the opportunity to meet Louise Greene, a great-granddaughter of A. C. Merryman. Each of these individuals offered a unique perspective on the family and the Merrymans’ influence in Tulare County.
Who was Andrew Curtis Merryman, Sr.? How did he come to invest significant sums in helping to establish the Exeter citrus industry? And what sort of legacy did he leave in Tulare County? This article is the first of two that will tell that story. My next presentation at CACHE, on Monday, February 16 at 7:00 p.m., will expand further on the Merrymans and their lasting impact on our area.
Andrew Curtis Merryman was born in Maine in 1831, the second of six children. At age seventeen, he and his older brother Robert were trained in the family business: shipbuilding. At twenty-four, Andrew built a two-masted cargo ship and named it the A. C. Merryman. Shortly after 1855, the two brothers sought better opportunities in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where they spent ten years building a lumber business that included timberlands and a mill.
In 1862, at age thirty-one, Andrew married Fannie Colburn, the younger sister of Robert’s wife, Carrie. Their first son, Reuben Colburn Merryman, was born in 1863. A few years later, Andrew sold his interests to his brother and relocated to Marinette, Wisconsin, on the Michigan border. Tragedy soon followed: in 1867, Fannie and their second son, George, both died.
Three years later, at age thirty-nine, Andrew married twenty-one-year-old Louise Brown. Together they had four children—Bertha, Amy, Andrew Curtis Jr., and, in 1881, when Andrew was fifty years old, their youngest, Louise, who completed the family.

Andrew was highly entrepreneurial and ambitious. In Marinette, he invested in numerous ventures beyond lumber and paper mills, including a sugar company, flour mill, broom company, heating company, the Merryman Manufacturing Company, and others. He also expanded his timber interests into Oregon. Known as a gracious host, Andrew was a committed prohibitionist and never partook in alcohol or tobacco. He was also an avid sportsman, frequently hunting and fishing on lands he owned in the forest country.
It was Andrew’s oldest son, Reuben, who introduced him to the idea of investing in farmland in California. Reuben married Phoebe Woodhall in 1883, when he was nineteen, but she died young in 1890, and they had no children. Reuben remarried the following year, to Agnes Hathaway; they also had no children. Agnes’s brother, Harry, however, was involved with the Pioneer Fruit Company in Porterville, California.
During a visit to see Harry in 1895, Reuben met George Frost, who convinced him that purchasing citrus land in Tulare County would be a profitable addition to his father’s holdings. By 1896, Andrew was sixty-five years old and ready to spend his winters in a warmer climate. California looked appealing. Andrew and several other Wisconsin investors joined with George Frost to provide the capital needed to establish the Bonnie Brae Ranch.
Within a few years, Bonnie Brae produced harvests suitable for shipment to eastern markets. A packing house was built in Exeter, just west of the Southern Pacific tracks, at what is now the location of Exeter Engineering on Pine and G Streets. The fruit was hauled by horse-drawn wagons from the orchards northeast of town into Exeter, where it was packed and rushed onto rail cars headed east, chasing high prices.
When the Visalia Electric Railroad opened in 1905, the Merrymans moved the entire packing operation east to what became known as “Merryman Station.” The area grew into such a hub of activity that it earned its own place on the map as “Merryman.” A correspondent from the small rural community sent weekly columns to the Visalia Times-Delta titled “News from Merryman.” That same year, at age seventy-four, Andrew Curtis Merryman died of pneumonia while wintering in Exeter. His body was returned to Marinette for burial.
Reports on the value of the Merryman estate varied widely. Some newspapers estimated it at between $5 and $10 million—equivalent to roughly $185 to $370 million today. Others placed the value between $2 and $5 million. The final probate figure listed the estate at $800,000, followed by reports that Andrew had already given each of his five children approximately $500,000 in assets prior to his death. Regardless of the accounting, each child ultimately received one-fifth of the estate and moved forward with their lives.
The year after her father passed, twenty-four-year-old, Louise Merryman married another prominent Marinette figure, John Van Cleve, Jr. Her much older half-brother, Reuben, also in 1906, built a magnificent country home northeast of Exeter called Green Acres. That home has an interesting ownership history, but its longest residents were Paul and Elizabeth Dobson, who lived there from 1933 to 1979, raising their children and entertaining countless Exeter residents.
As Reuben’s farming interests expanded, so did his need for irrigation. He persuaded his new brother-in-law to join him in Exeter, where John Van Cleve helped establish a concrete pipe manufacturing business. John’s brother Ralph later became a partner, and the Van Cleves prospered in that enterprise for the remainder of their lives. The business was passed down through others and continued operations until just recently. Reggie Ellis of the Exeter Sun-Gazette wrote an excellent article on the company several years ago. We will include it below.
Next month’s article will focus on Reuben Merryman and the next thirty years—and beyond.