The Kendall Family In Mendocino County

In early January I spent a couple of fascinating hours with County Sheriff Matt Kendall and his wife Melissa at their home off of Highway 253  west of Ukiah soaking up their ancestral stories.  Both Matt and Melissa are good story-tellers, and their accounts are backed up by the thorough records capturing family affairs kept by their antecedents.  Altogether, it is a rich ancestral odyssey across much of Mendocino County.

The first Anderson Valley settler generation of Matt’s family, Young Ichabod (Y.I.) Kendall, migrated from Weathersfield, Vermont, to Anderson Valley in 1852.   Y.I.’s occupation in Vermont is unknown to Matt, but he describes his ancestor as a commercially ambitious personality whose entrepreneurial spirit early nineteenth century rural Vermont could not fire up.  Wethersfield village was in Windsor County, on the west bank of the Connecticut River about a quarter of the way up the river to Vermont’s border with Canada.  The community lay about three miles west of the river in hilly country and its citizens’ principle occupation was sheep-farming, not a strong econosystem for market-based agriculture or commerce.

Y.I. married in the 1830s.  His wife Francis Flavilla Kendall had twins soon after marriage, Alonzo Burnham and Melissa Flavilla. But she unhappily died soon after childbirth.

Y.I. arrived in Anderson Valley in  1852, travelling from Wethersfield by ship around Cape Horn, likely landing in Gold Rush era San Francisco.  The Sierra gold fields were of no interest to Y.I. and immediately upon arrival in San Francisco he set out for northern California in search of a rural place capable of supporting market-based agriculture and commerce.  One glance at Anderson Valley and Y.I. knew this was his “promised land,” with no Spanish land grant property encumbrances. 

Right away Y.I. partnered up with J.D. Ball and began farming hogs and cattle to ship to Petaluma slaughter houses for the San Francisco market (likely using the wagon services of John Gschwend whom I wrote about in an earlier story).

J.D. Ball had arrived in Anderson Valley in 1852. He bought some 800 acres of land north of today’s Boonville and along Con Creek.  J.D. Ball was born in New York City in 1827, and, entrepreneurially restless like the Kendalls, had been a farmer in Wisconsin, then came to California in pursuit of gold, and settled in Anderson Valley.  Beside raising pigs and cattle, he also built a wagon stop hotel at Con Creek and also arguably one of the first apple dryers in Anderson Valley.  Do I remember back in the 1970s some aging apple trees where Elke vineyard is today just south of Con Creek?

Y.I.’s partnership with J.D. Ball included helping him farm the hogs and cattle, arranging their haulage to  the Petaluma slaughterhouses with John Gschwend and accompanying him on his livestock transport business.  Petaluma’s stockyard served Sonoma, Marin and San Francisco meat and grocery markets.

In 1854 Y.I. brought the twins Alonzo  Burnham and Melissa to The Valley and immediately put Alonzo to work assisting him and Ball with the hog and cattle herds at Con Creek.  Judiciously he was saving his and Alonzo’s incomes in preparation for his next entrepreneurial venture.  

In 1859 Alonzo married Martha Blake in Boonville. Together they sired five children, three in Boonville before they moved on to Manchester, and two on the Coast.  Martha died in 1884.

Sometime around 1858 or 1859 Y.I. and Martha bought land on either side of the dirt wagon roads at the intersection of today’s state Highway 128 and 253, and began building a “city” at the intersection, initially modestly naming it Kendall’s Corners.  On the right side of the wagon road junction connecting Anderson Valley to Petaluma to the south and Ukiah, the county seat, to the east, they built a two story hotel, called The Anderson House, opening in 1862 complete with a bar and dining room on the ground floor. 

Next to the hotel on its south side Y.I. and Alonzo built a livery stable for the stage wagon horses, which they also rented to a blacksmith.  Across the wagon road and on the southeast side of the intersection he built in 1862 a commercial building, which he then rented to Levi Strauss and a partner who opened a dry goods store.  This building was constructed after the photo below.

Dry goods in those retail commerce days meant all the necessities required for supporting a household on the rural frontier, including work pants, shirts, hats, socks, underwear, cooking and dining utensils, shoes and boots for the whole farm family, and so on.  These stores also carried some hardware necessities like nails, small tools, etc.  Levi Strauss who, along with his partner, Alpheus Burnham, leased the store from the Kendalls was the same Strauss who started the Levi’s manufacturing plant in San Francisco’s Mission District about that time.

In his travels with John Gschwend doing his livestock transportation to Petaluma and points south, Alonzo Burnham a few times went by himself to San Francisco.  In San Francisco he met, either by design or chance, I don’t know, Levi Strauss.  He somehow   persuaded Strauss to come to Kendall City to run the dry goods store with his partner, never mind the clothing factory in operation in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Strauss obliged Alonzo Burnham and came to Kendall City with his partner, Burnham, and operated the store for a number of years before returning to his principal occupation back in the city.  Burnham apparently decided he liked his life in the rural Anderson Valley and committed himself to it to the extent he became Kendall City’s and Anderson Valley’s first postmaster, appointed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1861.

Alonzo Burnham Kendall had struggled with asthma his whole life, and upon visiting Manchester about that time, he clinically appraised the coast climate as cooler and less dry, certainly in the summer and dramatically so in winter, in both seasons warmer days and nights, and milder rainstorms than the windy, cold, sometime snowy ones in Kendall City and Anderson Valley.  So he moved to the Coast in 1864.

But I want to describe one more entrepreneurial venture that Alonzo partnered with J.W. Boone to accomplish around 1864.  Boone had showed up in Anderson Valley around 1858 and immediately began his own entrepreneurial business career north down the road in what is today’s downtown Boonville.  (I recounted this story in an article about Boone and his generation sometime last year).  Alonzo sold the Hotel Kendall to Boone, and the whole community contributed to moving the hotel a half mile to its current location north of Lambert Lane.  

Drive slowly by the hotel today and imagine the engineering skill it took to move the building (current rear wing likely a later extension) on a horse-drawn sled skidded on rollers made from the sacrificed eucalyptus trees that lined both sides of the road almost to the hotel’s current location.  Was it 24 horses in tandem that provided the traction power?

Sometime in the 1860s, after selling and moving the Hotel Kendall, Alonzo Burnham and his wife Martha, moved to the Garcia River area east of Manchester and Point Arena.  There was yet no direct route to the area as there is on today’s Mountain View Road, so the whole family moved by wagon out of The Valley to the mouth of the Navarro River, no mill or village yet, then south the 25 miles to Manchester across the endless streams and deep gulches along the way.  There is no record of how many days this family odyssey took.

The first Anglo settlers had arrived in Manchester around 1855. Between that time and the arrival of the Kendalls, dairy and livestock had been the principle occupation of these families.  The Kendalls in the next decade followed that business model.  Alonzo bought 800 acres of land whose equal portions straddled the north and south sides of the Garcia River about a mile east of today’s Stornetta Dairy on Highway 1  and just past the Pomo rancheria.  This large farm included cattle, sheep and hog raising, a dairy, and pickled berries harvested and prepared for the San Franciso market.   

Next week’s story will describe his farming operations in more detail.

To finish this chapter of the Kendall saga, l’d like to tell a tale of a less successful Kendall family member. A story Matt told me while reviewing this article last weekend.  After settling in the Manchester area, Alonzo Burnham’s wife Martha died and four years later he married Mary Jane Severs (1858-1958), twenty years younger than he and they begat a band of five children, none of whom will appear in these articles.  The second son, Courtney Leon, Matt’s great grandfather married Ada Washburn Cain, and they begat four children, the first being Alonzo Francis (Lon), Matt’s grandfather, born in 1907.

Francis was a good-hearted neer-do-well, an itinerant carpenter around The Coast, friends to all in the community, a great story-teller, and an episodic binge drinker.  However, shortly after the end of World War I he undertook a project in Point Arena that still stands on the west side of the road in the village’s downtown which still exists over a hundred years later to our good fortune.  Francis built the Point Arena Opera House and theater, a work of architectural beauty inside and out, that still functions as a movie house and stage theater today.  And while Francis built the building, his father Courtney Leon, paid for the materials and labor.

When the theater opened in the early 1920s, Francis and his wife Fern managed and operated the theater until early 1942.  They also ran a laundry business in a building adjacent to the theatre.  When World War II broke out Francis/Lon tried to join the American military to participate in the war, but the recruiting office refused to enlist him due to his failing hearing due a busted eardrum, likely a consequence of his carpentry work.  Wanting to support the war effort in some form or another Lon took a job at Mare Island where the US government was building destroyers and military cargo ships.  His wife Fern got a job as a trained nurse at a San Francisco hospital caring for wounded American soldiers, probably at the lovely VA facility called Fort Miley at the city’s Lands End overlooking Seal Rock, Sutro Baths and the Golden Gate, a peaceful place to recover from war wounds for any soldier.

When the war ended Lon and Fern moved to Santa Rosa and lived in a new subdivision suburban home east of downtown and near the Rancho Tropicana motel.  There he continued his home building and repair activities as an independent businessman.  As earlier in his life, he kept up his occasional binge drinking, often of several weeks duration.  Local law enforcement soon learned of his alcohol-inspired recreational activities and Lon lost his driver’s license.

Around 1960, he was missing his parents, Courtney Leon and Ada and the other kin and friends living in Point Arena.  So one day he just saddled up his horse and rode back to the family homestead on the Garcia River.  Another ambitious Kendall family-style adventure.

Next Week:  The Kendall Family Odyssey, from Point Arena to Covelo, Ukiah and the San Joaquin Valley.