The Story of El Dorado Hills
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This is a story of the early development of El Dorado Hills. The original idea for this large development was exclusively Allan Lindsey’s. Over a period of approximately ten years, he assembled and managed a very large and diverse group of people with backgrounds in the real estate industry. Allan passed away in September 2003. I am one of the few remaining people who were a part of the original team.
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About the Book
This story of El Dorado Hills is about Allan Lindsey’s pursuit to create a completely new town.
It is not commonly understood about the total human, physical, and financial challenges required to create a new community from scratch. This story is about such an event beginning in the late nineteen fifties through today.
El Dorado Hills has now reached a level of maturity and identity and is frequently described as a very desirable place to live, work, and play for approximately 45,000 residents and still growing.
I was part of the development team for the first ten years in the original stages of conceiving the project and getting it started. My responsibilities included the coordination and oversight of the land acquisition, planning, obtaining entitlements, and land development activities.
About the Author
Carl Kowall was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1930. He attended Catholic grade school and a public high school, where he enjoyed athletics and lettered in swimming, track, and football.
After graduating from high school, Carl traveled to Sacramento, where he lived and worked with one of his uncles.
In the early 1950s, he returned to Pittsburgh and joined the United States Coast Guard, in which he served for three years. His military assignments included an educational program in damage control and a tour aboard a destroyer escort in the Atlantic, where he and his shipmates logged more than 300,000 miles at sea. He attained the rank of first-class petty officer.
After leaving the service, Carl married his high school girlfriend and they returned to Sacramento. His wife took a teaching job at a women’s juvenile detention center while Carl attended Sacramento City Junior College on the GI Bill. The young couple then moved back to Pennsylvania, but soon separated. Carl returned to Sacramento once again.
Over the next five years, Carl worked as a junior mechanical engineer, developing production drawings for a school furniture manufacturing company while also attending Sacramento State College. In 1958 he took a position as a residential real estate salesman at the Moss and Moss real estate firm. He remained with that company and its successors for the next ten years. He also married his second wife, Lorie. The story of those ten years is the story of the origin of El Dorado Hills.
After leaving El Dorado Hills in 1968, Carl purchased a small industrial distribution firm in Sacramento. He successfully owned and managed the Sacramento Rubber Company for the next twenty years. During this period, Carl also completed a three-month MBA course called the Stanford Executive Program.
Carl went on to teach classes and serve as a guest lecturer on principles of real estate at Sacramento State College and the University of San Francisco, where his brother Richard was the director of the paralegal program. Around 1970 Carl and his wife purchased a small farm in Clarksburg, where they bred and raced quarter horses and thoroughbreds.
Today Carl still works as an independent commercial real estate broker with an office in downtown Sacramento. He and Lorie have been happily married for fifty-five years, raised two children, and are enjoying two beautiful granddaughters.
This is his first book.