Museum of the Sierra’s Press Release
Speaker: Peter Craycroft
Born in Saint Agnes Hospital, in Fresno, California on the third of February in 1944, Peter Burr Craycroft is the son of Doctor Charles Burr Craycroft and the Great Grandson of Charles Burr (Cannonball) Shaver. Peter grew up in the High Sierra, learned much from its people, places, plants, animals and its inviting, yet often daunting terrain. He traveled north for new, more challenging, less traveled and more wild frontiers, earned a couple of college degrees and, over the past 50 years has pioneered many innovative, highly successful and breathtaking ventures, riding the cutting edge of brand making, marketing and manufacturing with trail blazing, long term partners including Hewlett Packard, Nike, Adidas, Levi Strauss and Apple Computer. Diverse in his training and practice, Peter has often been asked to teach, lecture, give and participate in presentations to widely varying groups, including school, university, civic, governmental, radio and television audiences. Peters mother, Jean Parks Hemphill grew up in Sugar Pine, where her father, John Parks Hemphill, worked his way up to General Manager of the Madera Sugar Pine Company. Jean was an inspired child of the Sierra and became a highly honored history scholar at Stanford. Jean and Burr were great mentors, chroniclers and story tellers. This always brought Peter back to the mountains of his birth. It is their voices and the stories of their families that Peter will humbly attempt to convey to you. He is grateful for the opportunity to add his voice to Sierra Voices.
CB Shaver & Lena Roberts
Presentation Summary:
The presentation will climb the trees of Lena and CB’s families to reveal the character and understandings that drove and motivated them, inspired and created the arcs of their lives and lead them west to the frontier fringe of the American west. In the process you will meet the partners that worked with them to create the foundations of the Shaver Lake, Mill, Flume, Railroad and Community, including LP, Harvey and Minnie Roberts Swift and many other pillars of the Shaver, Fresno and outlying communities. We will explore the innovations and the culture that made their times so dynamic and how they formed and were extended by their children and their children’s partners, partners families and their friends. The environments of Shaver, Rock Haven, Pine Ridge (Shaver Ranch and the Armstrong Hotel) and Muir Trail Ranch (The Diamond D) will receive special attention. The grace, power and beauty of High Sierra with its vibrant plant and animal life that surrounds us will guide and inspire our journey. The presence, spirit, understandings and contributions of the people of The First Nation will be appreciated as will the immigrant laborers without whom none of this would have been possible. The presentation will be illustrated by many original and previously unreleased photographs from the CB Shaver Collection accompanied by original graphics, timelines, drawings and illustrations.
The presentation was created on line and is in the process of being developed into a book that will be released in 2027.
click to see the presentation
