Ward Ranch homestead, milepost 43.67
Last week’s travelogue ended up at Wes Smoot’s childhood family home on the Morrow Ranch, Highway 128 milepost 44.75. From there Wes and I motored another mile down the road and past the Ingram/Hill ranch to a small house immediately off the highway’s east shoulder, milepost 43.67. I had driven over the speed limit past this small one story wooden home shaded under scattered hardwood trees for years knowing nothing about its heritage. Wes identified its first owners as the Ward family, unrelated to the early settler Philo Vista Ranch Wards.
The south-of-Yorkville Wards owned about two thousand acres on either side of the old wagon road and the current highway. The hills to the east they probably ran sheep on. The hills across Dry Creek to the west supported redwood and Douglas fir timber the family likely logged and sold to the nearby Ingram/Hiatt mill that dated from the 1880s. The Ward ranch ran north along the creek halfway to today’s Yorkville to where the contemporary Lawson family home on the west and the Vidmar vineyard entrance across Dry Creek on a railroad flatcar bridge.
The farmhouse is a quite small one story rectangle under a high pitched roof and a small porch across half its front for the family to enjoy the afternoon breeze and greet the neighbors passing by on the old wagon road. There could also be a bedroom or two up under the pitched roof, though these spaces would have little actual head room due to the angle of the roof. The single story wing on the back of the house was likely added as a cooking area later on in its life. Wes surmises the gravelly river bottom soil along the creek enabled the Wards to participate in the early tobacco planting of the 1890s along Dry Creek.
Duane Ornbaun home, Milepost 38.45, east side of the current highway
As Wes and Steve Sparks’ ‘Then And Now’* describes, This small one story home was directly behind the second of five Yorkville US post office locations in the Yorkville area between 1877 and today. The house is another small, elegantly maintained single story wooden cottage about 25 feet square occupied today and for many years by Duane Ornbaun, a widower, now about eighty years old. The home’s typical design includes a front porch extending under the roof overhang half the length of the house, the purpose already described in the Ward home story above. That late afternoon respite from ranch work was an important part of everyone’s daily life all across rural America.
The photos in ‘Then And Now’ show both the post office building right on the old wagon road with second postmaster Charlie Hiatt standing on its front deck raised to a height to accommodate unloading heavy mail bags from the Cloverdale stage coach. This Charlie, second generation in the Yorkville founding family, was also the current retired Boonville logger Charlie’s great grand-father, I am guessing.
The post office and Duane Ornbaun home were a few feet south of the first settler Hiatt family’s home, barn, shearing shed. The home went through stages of renovation to serve as a stage stop hotel, and now back to being a family home. More dramatic in my time in The Valley was the huge, well maintained red barn for farm and logging right on the old wagon road and current Highway 128, with an equally large white Y painted across several of its front doors. I always looked forward to seeing that lovely building as I came back from trips to “the city” after crossing Beebe Creek at Burger Ranch. The barn told me that I was now back home in Anderson Valley. Sometime in the 1970s the barn burned down, a heart breaking event for me.
Today, the current owner has constructed an interesting piece of Victorian architecture right on the highway where the barn stood. Rumor reports the two story building plans to be a winery tasting room.
Shamrock Inn, Mervyn Perkins home, left side of Highway 128, milepost 30.67
I have been wondering about the credentials for this elegant arts and crafts house since moving to The Valley half a century ago. I never did find out even after attending a big barbeque for the whole local softball league Mervyn’s son Charlie Perkins threw after our season’s final game back around 1975.
As Wes and I pulled off onto the house’s extensive road-side parking area, a middle-aged, bearded gentleman wearing an old baseball hat came down the front steps, out the gate, and asked us if we needed help. A great excuse to include the owner’s knowledge of the place with ours. And to both my and the homeowner’s surprise Wes informed us that the Perkins home had originally been a recreational guest resort, the Shamrock Inn, first opened in the 1920s, not a domestic dwelling.
The house itself is one of the most elegantly designed and constructed two story buildings in The Valley. Two ridgepoles support the roof, one facing the highway, the other at ninety degrees to the first frames the house’s south side. Under the first ridgepole is a full length front porch, about thirty feet long. This summer recreational abode is supported by four sets of support pillars for it and the second floor space, each set being two slim 4 X 4” wooden posts.
In its heyday a century ago the inn was another of the numerous recreational resort businesses that sprung up in Anderson Valley around that time. I surmise that places like the Navarro Inn, Ray’s Resort, Archie McDougalds Tumbling McD on Rancheria, and others all thrived due to the opening of the paved state Highway, Navarro-to-the-Sea and the growing population of family-owned automobiles like the Ford Model T, Chevrolet, Cadillac, Dodge, etc.
The Shamrock Inn operated episodically all year long to satisfy the urban “bright-liters” interest in rural recreation, swimming in the river, the deer hunting season and once the Navarro opened up at its mouth the steel head fishing season. Summertimes there were still trout to be found in the deep holes up and down river system all the way to Yorkville. Historically there were eight small cottage, sleeping quarters, scattered under the oaks behind the main building. When I went back to the site for a second look last week, I noticed a small eight by ten single story building, front door, two windows, in a state of deep neglect. Perhaps one of the cottages?
Donald Pardini Home, Boonville: Highway 128, left side, 100 yards north of the Fairgrounds rodeo stadium parking lot
This elegant Craftsman style one story home was built in the 1940s for a man named Bidon Ogle; Wes knows no more about Ogle. Next door to the south in a lot on which a replica early Valley farmhouse home has been recently built was the famous bar, the Track Inn, a one story wooden building opened in 1937 that became a famous locals hangout during the post World War II logging and mill period. The Track was closed and abandoned when I first came to the Valley in 1971, but I nevertheless heard fond stories about its renowned boisterous day and night culture from customers who became my friends when I moved here.
For the Ogle family the noise the bar and its parking lot generated nightly made living in their home impossible, so they removed themselves from the visual and aural chaos by building the modest more set back house next door to the north and migrated there. In the 1940s Donald and his family moved from Navarro, where his Dad Ernest’s family had run the Navarro Inn for a generation starting in the 1920s. Donald, age 88, still lives in his Boonville home.
The house itself is an elegant one story wood framed structure whose pitched roof ridgepole faces the highway. The building sits on a two foot high brick foundation, possibly original, and the whole building is sided with four inch redwood shiplap modestly painted a light tan. There are a generous array of beautifully framed wooden windows across the front and the north and south sides of the home. Roof overhang frames the front porch stretching the whole length of the house.
The front porch extends the length of the house and is covered by its roof. Four formidable pillars equally spaced support the porch and the rest of the house. The pillars as well as the porch enclosing façade appear to be plaster-faced cement. Each pillar gently compresses from sixteen inches square at foundation to about twelve at their top. Two three opening bay windows frame the front door, a very magisterial house facade indeed.
Donald and family spend a lot of time in this exterior “room” twenty feet from the highway and inside the formal low chain link fence relaxing, socializing, even dining sometimes. I know as a fact the deck space is important to Donald, seeing him out there by day when I drive by and honk the car horn. The last time I visited him one late spring afternoon, he was out there reading the newspaper and watching the neighbors pass by.
Joe Dutro’s home, oldest house in Boonville today
Further north and next to the driveway into the Apple Fair grounds is the oldest domestic dwelling in Anderson Valley. Today it is a real estate office for Hansen Realty. The house was built in the 1860s, Wes knows not by whom and was later occupied as a family dwelling by “Kid” Dutro for years until the 1960s. Dutro was an accomplished blacksmith with a shop and forge in the house’s backyard; his customers came from all over The Valley.
The only name Wes knows for “Kid” is “Kid,” named by local tradition. His older brother, Joe Dutro, was the renowned blacksmith whose shop was located on the wagon road/ McDonald-to-the-Sea highway next to the Guntly general store at Christine down near Floodgate.
Notice the simplicity of the one story home, and that its dominant feature is the front porch facing the highway/main street of Boonville. Again I like to imagine Joe Dutro, after a sweaty, sooty day at the forge out back, sitting in the shade of its overhang, having a cup of iced tea, (or a glass of wine?), and engaging with neighbors walking or riding on by. I wonder if before the McDonald Highway was paved “rush hour” vehicle traffic floated a dust cloud onto the porch those late afternoons.
Arthur Johnson Home, north of the Boonville Methodist Church, west side of Highway 128
This one story home, smaller though more elegant than the Donald Pardini Craftman is about twenty five feet across its front. It was built in the 1928 as his home by Glenn Johnson’s brother, Arthur. Arthur and Glenn were partners managing the Yorkville area Johnson Ranch my previous article wrote about. Wes believes that Glenn felt Arthur was an inadequate ranching partner, and persuaded his less work-motivated brother to move to Boonville and reside in this home. Today Neil Kephart and family live in this lovely piece of roadside architecture.
I particularly appreciate the small but gracious front porch elevated about four feet above the front lawn and enclosed beneath the home’s dormer-like ridgepole. (The main roof ridgepole runs parallel to the highway.) Bay windows, each with three glass openings frame the front door.
I suspect there is something quite aristocratic about sitting out there at the end of the day watching The Valley go by. Too far back from the highway to actually engage with passers-by. I also enjoy the way a handful of ancient apple and walnut trees in the north part of the front yard partly obscure the house, making it a bit more mysteriously magisterial.
Last Sunday I walked up the driveway to look more closely at its design features and had the good fortune to run into Mrs. Kathleen Kephart, Neill’s wife. Mrs. Kephart said that, yes, the brick chimney on the south side of the house was original, but no longer used to heat its interior rooms. She also said the shiplap siding was also original and in good repair. But the roofing material, an elegant asbestos slate material, diamond-shaped, was a couple of years old, as the original tarred shingle roof began leaking in winter had to be replaced.
Most dramatic design feature of the house were the two grand windows one can’t see from the highway. They are on the south and north sides of the house, each are three bayed in a ten foot rough opening, but also bowed out from the house about a foot and of course elegantly wood-trimmed on all four of their sides.
The house and its, for Boonville, large home lot are also shaded by five nicely spaced trees Wes believes Arthur Johnson planted a century ago to provide afternoon shelter for the whole house. On the south front corner an eucalyptus tree, then a couple of feet from the brick chimney a sixty foot tall palm tree, further to the back of the lot an oak to shade the house and Neil Kephart’s work shop, and finally back from the northwest side of the house a grove of three or four redwood trees.
Mrs. Kephart also told me that when the family first occupied the home there were also the remnants of the domestic water system. More specifically a windmill to pump the property’s domestic well water, and a water tower like the one at central Boonville Rossi Hardware store which provided the house with adequate pressure for the indoor plumbing. Those remnants of the past had to be taken down due to their abandonment and neglect.
(Next Episode: More Travels with Wes, Boonville to Navarro. * Wes Smoot & Steve Sparks, ‘Then and Now,’ An Anderson Valley Journey, 2013, $21.00.)
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