Grandma Stubblefield, Part IV

Stoic as always Susan Murray, after her husband Cleveland died in 1865, continued gracefully and ambitiously down her life’s road. She and the children, with support from the neighbors, continued to run the family farm successfully. And lo and behold, a “nearby new neighbor,” Robert Stubblefield, who had been helping her boys hunting for game meat, proposed marriage to her two years after Cleveland had died. Bob was seventy, Susan fifty-seven.

About this time Susan found out about the new doctor arrived in the Valley and living down in Philo, Dr. John Brown. Becoming an assistant to Dr. Brown and his midwife wife, Susan also found herself building up her inventory of medical herbs and plants and doing first response emergency calls in her local neighborhood. 

One of those calls involved a neighbor, arguably the first Mexican to settle in Anderson Valley many years before, probably during the Mexican occupation and settlement of El Norte in the early nineteenth century. This man and a friend had deserted the Army unit they were serving with, probably forcibly “subduing” indigenous Pomo people near the Point Arena land grant, fled across the coastal mountains, settled on a large acreage and raised cattle. At work on the ranch the partner had suffered a life-threatening gash in his lower leg and was brought to Susan’s home on a wagon-borne stretcher made of tree branches. Susan immediately applied sugar to the wound to suppress the gushing blood flow, and other herbs to assist the healing process.

During his convalescence the Mexican told Bob he and his partner wanted to move back to Mexico, “Too much rain and calves killed by dam cats,” and invited Bob to buy the ranch. Two months after the accident Bob and the sellers went to the County Courthouse in Ukiah and registered the ranch purchase for $1,000.00 in gold coins, and the Mexicans left for home across the border. The partners had named the ranch, “La Leche,” the Milk Ranch, and Bob and Susan kept its name. Susan’s description of the property’s location and size is too vague for me to interpret, but it seems to have been somewhere along Rancheria between today’s Bradford Ranch and Bear Wallow, the flat west of the creek there once known as Stubblefield Opening. Later in her memoirs Susan describes selling the place she describes it as thirteen full sections, over 850 acres.

And once again Susan’s life changed dramatically. First she decided it was time to sell her and Cleveland’s homestead. . A nearby family, the Hibbards, had shown interest in the place, so she sold it to them and moved her remaining family, Bob and worldly possessions to “La Leche” Several years later her fifth and last husband, Bob Stubblefield died, age 80. He was buried in the Ledford Cemetery across Rancheria and above Highway 128, today still a publicly maintained “dusty.” (Boontling for cemetery) When I visited the Ledford Cemetery a week ago, I found a number of Ledford grave stones, but none for Bob Stubblefield.

Now Susan’s new life included building a home on “La Leche” and spending a lot of time socially down in The Valley at Kendall’s Corner with daughter Mary Ann McGimsey and family at Kendall’s Corner. Mary Ann established a school in her home, teaching her own and the neighbors’ children to “read, write and cipher,” Susan of course stopped by from time to time to “watch” their education, which included sending Port McGimsey to Petaluma to buy the right books. “Maps,” she said, “Now they know only our hills and the valley. As great as they are, let them see the magic of the whole earth.” Typical Calvinist philosopher and scientist.

Again it is hard for me to locate the exact site of the La Leche home, but she describes it as on a ridgetop facing east down into Ham Canyon and The Valley, which would put the house halfway between Bear Wallow and Philo village. Her memoirs describe in detail the construction of the new residence. It was a comfortable dwelling with a large covered front deck where she could sit, relax and look down into Rancheria and the Valley, no project plans, I imagine, just recollections of years gone past.. Her description of the barn-raising, a community event I have never seen described so thoroughly, is wonderful. The lumber came from Clow’s mill, down in The Valley, the shakes from redwoods on the property. Participants in the raising included Rawlses, Ornbauns, Ruddocks, Bivanses, Vestals, McGimseys, Prathers. “An Ingram had a fiddle and played all day long. The Boonville Anytime Saloon sent a big demi-john of something and nobody touched it, but it sure was empty when they went home,” her memoir reports.

Along with the house-building, Susan also planted a door yard orchard nearby. Commercial orchards in 1870s Anderson Valley already included the famous New York state varieties, including at my place (another story). Grandma’s included Baldwins, Bell Flowers (Bellefleur), Ganos, etc. Grandma’s Rose also was planted hear the house and the rich spring from which she could water it and the apple trees in summer. And the minute the hired carpenter finished the last nail in the home, she paid him off and he headed for the “Any Time Saloon”, already an end-of-the-workday ritual 140 years ago.

Susan’s life down in The Valley included being the camp cook during hops harvest time, usually early autumn. The episode her memoirs describes involves spending a couple of weeks with older children of families like Rawles, Tarwater, Irish, doing the harvest work at the Irish place near Philo and sleeping on the edge of the hop fields each night. She was also seen as the girls’ elder guardian at a time when teenagers were deemed too vulnerable to spend the night by themselves away from home. Not only did she prepare meals for a dozen kids all day long, but also listened as an informed counsellor to their teenage gripes about life, very important work I bet she was good at.

GRANDMA STUBBLEFIELD’S ROSE has some very interesting vignettes of the Kendall’s Corners neighborhood in the 1870s-80s. John Burgot had built a hotel at the Corners called “Anderson House.” Judge McGimsey is reported as saying his wife, Charity, didn’t like idea of the hotel bar across the street from their house: “It’s a busy place for a judge here, let alone the trouble coming from having a saloon across the road.” Also at the Corners was Stevenson’s blacksmith shop; and Solomon Levi, probably Jewish, and Harrison opened a general store nearby stocking dry goods and groceries. The memoir reports Levi had been a clothing manufacturer in San Francisco, salvaging damaged ship sails from the waterfront and making them into durable pants for the goldminers. A competitor with Levi Strauss? At the Corners he also tailored work clothes for the local customers along with running the store.

The memoir also describes the migration of the village from the Corners north to “Kendall City,” half a mile north on the wagon road. Storekeeper Levi she describes as the civic leader behind the move. He got the neighbors to cut down the eucalyptus trees on either side of the road to widen it enough so they could skid existing commercial buildings north to the new urban site surrounding the just built wagon road hotel. I assume this building is today’s Boonville Hotel, still called the “New Boonville” when I first arrived here in The Valley in the early 1970s. Alonzo Kendall wrote the US Postal Service in Washington to ask for a certified Post Office. 

Soon a letter came back from the capitol signed by President Lincoln. The authorization required another town name choice as there already was an “Anderson” in California. The ambitious entrepreneur William Boone had recently moved to The Valley, bought out a local storeowner and opened a livery stable near his hotel. Everyone thought Boone a “go-getter,” and named the town after him. Susan’s daughter was also greatly relieved by the migration of the corners hotel and town north. “Oh, mother, the place is so much better that I don’t hear loud wagon loads of working men talking at the hotel and bar…Also as my children run free in the back acres I feel they are alright,” Mary Ann reported.

By the late 1880s Susan found her large family scattering, moving away from Anderson Valley in pursuit of grander business opportunities. In the 1860s, Cleve, Jr. and Isaac had left home and moved to the mill town at the mouth of the Navarro River, and then up to another mill at Hop Flat upstream on the Navarro. Son Rollett apparently possessed the Cody gene. He migrated back east, worked as a cattle herder, driving stock from Texas to the Chicago stockyards. Somewhere along the trail he met cousin “Buffalo” Bill and joined his Wild West Show for a while, then settled back in North Platte, Nebraska in 1893. About that time Mary Ann and Port McGimsey and family moved to Cloverdale, closer to the center of his livestock trading and drayage businesses. 

Then in March, 1889, during an equinox storm night her loyal youngest son, Cloda drowned trying to cross Rancheria near Bear Wallow. He had been participating in an alcohol-fueled poker game in town that became hostile to the point of threats with pistols. Cloda had left the saloon in a hurry, found his horse and ridden home in the dark. Days later his body was found under silt and gravel downstream in Ham Canyon and his horse back upstream with the saddle tied to the horse by the stirrups, evidence the family believed suggested a vengeance murder, as did the departure of the alleged killer from the Valley that night.

Ever the project-motivated stoic, after Cloda’s death, Susan sold the “Milk Ranch” property and moved to Boonville, to a house on lambert Lane she had purchased speculatively in 1884. Her memoir describes this new home as the only two story building with a front porch. Last week I drove up Lambert Lane, and there it was, just as she describes it. A modest two story building with its back facing the evening sun, and the front porch the Lane so she could observe all traffic ln the lane. I imagined I could see Grandma sitting there checking up on the neighborhood. Apparently after her death neighbor and sometime business partner Robert Rawls bought the home. Subsequently it served as the main house for the larger Rawls Ranch spreading west across the Valley floor and up onto the mountain side hill. 

Susan’s memoir reports family were regularly teasing her about her buying and trading land, saying she ought to be a real estate agent. Her reply: “When I see a good buy I think about it quite a long time, a week or two, and then I buy it. I don’t want to lure people into buying anything but I like to see money made by interest, especially since interest now is at 10%.” Excellent speculative investor behavior. The start of her real estate and banking career is a little vague in 'Grandma Stubblefield,' but around 1884, she offered to purchase part of son-in-law Port McGimsey’s Kendall’s Corners home property in order to provide him with enough cash to support his investments in the Hiatt steam-powered sawmill on the Ingram (now Hill) ranch south of Yorkville, and in timber land along the Navarro River. 

The memoir also reports her owning and selling homes in Missouri, Yorkville and Boonville. She even had a successful business relationship with Lambert Lane neighbor Robert Rawls, also a land speculator, wherein they lent one another money at interest to assist their individual purchases of speculative property. Pretty complex financial activity for frontier Anderson Valley.

One day in May, 1895, Susan awoke early not in pain but “felt herself floating away.” Her daughter-in-law, Ida, Cloda’s widow, coming into the house that morning heard Grandma Stubblefield’s last words, “It’s been a lovely life, but I am tired.”

“A lovely life” this reporter admires with respect and awe. Having been kind of a late twentieth century “pioneer” in grape-growing, starting with a vision and not much money, I have some sense of the stress and anxiety settling the American frontier creates. For Susan Cody-Williams-Murray-Stubblefield, as it was for her French Calvinist ancestors, the frontier challenge was also a wonderful adventure she and her partners always seemed to manage with serenity and pleasure. Grandma Stubblefield is buried in Evergreen Cemetery along Witherell Creek. 

I visit her headstone from time to time and think about her pioneering life. Behind her grave is a tall vigorous pink rose bush, not the Stubblefield Rose. Somewhere in its odyssey from France and across America from the Hudson River to above Ham Canyon the Grandma Stubblefield’s Rose odyssey ends. Its myth lives on, however, for her great-grand daughter Zola Rosalia Burke planted a replacement over six generations ago. The rose is still healthy but needs some nutrition and pruning. I will take care of that this winter and take a cutting to root and plant in my home “dusties” here in Navarro.

(Next week: Another ‘”Arkie” story, but about a Texan.)