Background
The first temperance society in the Lockeford area, The Dashaways, was established there
at the instigation of Dr. Dean Jewett Locke in the late 1850s. This society had been
founded by Frank Whitney, a San Francisco fire chief, and An Illustrated History of San
Joaquin County (1890) asserts that Dr. Locke had been a San Francisco member since 1850.
The impetus for founding a local chapter may have derived from a rash of alcohol-related
killings that had taken place in the Lockeford area in 1855. The Dashaways are
represented in this collection by one songbook. Their order was supplanted in January
1860 by the creation of the Live Oak Division no. 29 of the Sons of Temperance.