The Kendall family settlers in Anderson Valley, founders of Kendall City (soon subsequently renamed Boonville) descended from English, Scots, Irish and perhaps Spanish ancestors. Y.I. Kendall’s wife Flavilla (Fanny) Burnham Kendall was Scots-English (her first name suggests the Spanish ancestry). The Kendall family genealogical archive shows her family roots date back to the eleventh century.
The first American Kendalls arrived in Puritan New England in the 1630s and settled at the fishing and farming village of Ipswich, north of Boston. Fanny Burnham Kendall’s father Alpheus Burnham had migrated from the Massachusetts Puritan colony to Windsor County Vermont where she and Young Ichabod met and married in Waitsfield, Windsor County and lived in Wethersfield. Flavilla birthed Alonzo and his sister Melissa Flavilla in 1837.
The Kendall family genealogical records show a clear pattern of longevity through the generations. Young Ichabod lived from 1814 until 1890, Alonzo Burnham from 1837 until 1929. After Flavilla died post-birthing the twins Alonzo Burnham and Melissa Flavilla. Young Ichabod married successively Josephine Maria Riford, then a third marriage with no name and date of the partner. YI did marry again in 1860, when he returned to Vermont and wed Albee Partridge of Thetford. YI died in 1890; his wife in 1906; both are buried in Boonville’s Evergreen Cemetery. Their headstones read “YOUNG I KENDALL, Died March 27, 1890, A Native of Vermont, Blessed is the memory of the just;” and MRS MARGARET E. KENDALL, born April 13, 1826, Died April 14, 1906, “She hath done what she could.”
Let me complete the marital and necrological itineraries of the first two generation of Kendall family Anderson Valley settlers. Alonzo Burnham’s sister Melissa married J.D. Ball in 1855. They had eight children, all of whom attended Boonville’s Con Creek School near the Ball ranch, where one daughter, possibly their first, Julia Flavilla, enjoyed the mysteries of fractions and at recess hunting and killing lizards. This daughter also returned to Con Creek later in life to teach math. Melissa and J.D. are also buried in Evergreen Cemetery.
Alonzo Burnham married Martha Blake in Boonville in 1859. She and Alonzo had five children, three born in Boonville, two in Manchester. Martha died in 1884. Family records show four more marriages for Alonzo, the last being to Mary Jane Severs (1858-1958). They had three children (more here on them, esp. the archivist and historian). As the previous article described, Alonzo Burnham bought 800 acres astride the Garcia River, east of today’s Stornetta ranch and the Pomo Rancheria. The farm he built astride the Garcia River was agriculturally complex and consciously managed to provide products for both local markets and San Francisco’s urban communities. Over the years its operation included cattle, sheep and hog raising, a prosperous commercial dairy business. They also grew and harvested black- rasp- and logan-berries he then pickled. All these products were sold in local and city markets.
Although the land around Manchester had once been part of a Mexican land grant to Diego Garcia, California courts had declared the grant invalid. So Garcia had sold the property in 1858 for $10,000.
By the 1870s, compared to relatively isolated inland Anderson Valley, Manchester, Point Arena, and Gualala were thriving commercial and even industrial communities on the Coast. Most important for their growth was transportation both local and regional (primarily by coastal steamers and sailing ships) enabling trade among themselves and with Sonoma, Marin counties and San Francisco.
Cargo ships, both sail and steam, came from both north and south through the large Point Arena Harbor. Moreover, wagon roads along the coast connected the area to Bodega and inland Sonoma and Marin counties. There was even a branch of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad running between Larkspur and Eureka that went up Russian River all the way to Cazadero. The only means of transportation and travel Anderson Valley had available were the dirt wagon roads to Cloverdale, Ukiah and the Coast north of the Navarro River.
All three coastal towns had thriving dry goods, grocery, hardware and grocery stores, hotels, restaurants, bars, blacksmith shops, livery stables, a tannery and so on. The Odd Fellows hall and bar still exist on main street Point Arena. And on Brush Creek in Manchester a paper mill and a tannery had begun operations in 1868. Alonzo Burnham was one of their investors, though they both failed and closed in the Great Recession of 1877-8.
As I previously noted, Alonzo’s Burnham’s son Courtney Leon was born on the Garcia River farm in 1870. Sometime in the 1890s, Alonzo Burnham deeded to Courtney Leon half of the property, on the south side of the Garcia, where Courtney built a home for himself and soon married Ada Washburn Cain. They had one child, Alonzo Francis (Lon), Sheriff Matt Kendall’s grandfather.
In my previous story I recounted that Alonzo Francis built and managed the historic Point Arena theater and ended up living in several places in the San Francisco metro area. Lon was born in 1909 and died in 1957. But Courtney Leon, his father, lived on to the age of 83, dying in 1953. Ada died in 1951. They are both buried in the Manchester cemetery.
It was also in the early 1870s that the Kendalls began another great family migration, this time to the San Joaquin Valley. It appears that Alonzo’s son Fred began the trek making an exploratory visit to the central valley to a place called The Island, south of Fresno and just north of today’s Lemoore Naval Airbase. Soon there were four Kendall family property owners along the King’s River and the Santa Fe railroad line, today the farm towns of Lamare, Riverdale and Five Points. Matt has no personal knowledge of this branch’s family or farming activities in the Big Valley.
Fred did not just pioneer the flow of Kendalls away from Mendocino County. He and his generation of migrants enabled the further dispersion of their descendants south to Bakersfield, Los Angeles and San Diego and their suburbs, and later back East in the United States, and even to Europe, Asia and Japan and into many careers and professions.
To finish this chapter of the Kendall saga, we conclude with a celebration of the family genealogist and archivist Dorothy A. Wright Kendall. Her archival work which she compiled in the 1980s, is 500 pages of typewritten exposition, quoted anecdotes, family tree charts, and photos; it is the most comprehensive and ambitious work of its kind this trained historian has ever seen. Matt has kindly lent this precious document to me for weeks now, and it has been an anchor to my reporting on Kendall family history.
Dorothy Kendall didn’t live in Mendocino County. Matt never met her and knows nothing about her. Perhaps she is a member of the Kendall clan still living in Windsor County, Vermont. Thank you, Dorothy for your contribution to the history of the Kendall family in Mendocino County.
(Next Week: The Sixth and Seventh Generations, Burl and Matthew Courtney Kendall.)
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