The Fashauer Family In The Valley

I met Anne Fashauer at Mosswood on a wet Saturday last month for morning coffee and ancestors story-telling.  We consumed about two hours of her recollections, along with a political discussion about real estate commission rates and state laws governing them.  Both very interesting topics.

Anne began by reprising what she knew about her ancestral roots going back to her great, great, great, great grandfather Johannes Christian Fashauer, born in 1711, likely in Colmar in southern Alsace close to the French border.  These early Fashauers, among them  Johannes Christian, Anne believes, were ceramics potters.  Johannes’ descendant Louis Fashauer was born in Kayserberg, near Colmar in 1875 (Anne has visited Kaysersberg in quest of more information about her family).  Louis migrated to St. Louis, Missouri in the early 1890s, as was typical of many Germans, including my maternal ancestors, to avoid being drafted into the Imperial Kaisers’ ever-at-war army. 

Anne doesn’t know how Louis travelled from Kaysersberg to St. Louis, but we surmise he probably entered the United States via the federal immigration center at Castle Garden in Manhattan’s Battery Park, the predecessor to the Ellis Island center.  He probably travelled to St. Louis by train, the cheapest, fastest way to cross the country in the nineties.  Once arrived on the banks of the Mississippi he found a job in a retail grocery store owned by the German-American Teresa Plueck.  Not long after he fell in love with and married Teresa’s daughter, Anna.  

Anne has little knowledge of the Plueck family’s immigration story.  She does know they came from Cologne, the cathedral town along the Rhine, where she and husband Van recently visited hoping, unsuccessfully, to find out more about this side of her family.

Not long after the marriage Louis and Teresa had their first child, Anne’s uncle Louie, born in 1899, followed by her aunt Margaret a year later.  Anne’s uncle Joe was born in 1903.  Meanwhile, in 1900, Louis joined the American Army, fought with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba, another imperial adventure, which service qualified him for American citizenship.

In 1905, Louie and Anna left St. Louis and moved to Los Angeles, where Anne’s father Francis was born, and a year later to a 40 acre parcel of land seven miles east of the coast milltown of Greenwood, now Elk, seven miles east of Greenwood and straddling the old wagon road to Philo, today’s Greenwood Ridge road.  Louis also secured a job in the Greenwood US post office, in those days a relatively well-paid position that enabled him to save money as the ranch’s income supported his family.  

After settling on the ranch Louis and Teresa had two more children, Anne’s uncles Johnny in 1907 and Tony in 1909. 

Being by nature thrifty people, the Fashauers, father and sons, use their savings to purchase and add onto the family ranch.  Louis’s first purchase in 1906 was from Caspar Wallpe, likely a fellow German, was forty acres and cost $10.00.  In 1916 he bought another forty acres from the Davis family, also for $10.  In 1926 he bought 80 acres from Goodwood  Redwood Lumber Company, again $10.  In 1934, he bought 1091 acres from Elk Redwood Company.  Also during the 1930s Louis’s sons Joe, Francis and Tony bought another 2,200 acres from the lumber companies, thus bringing the Fashauer ranch to around 3,500 acres.

Early on, Louis and the family planted an apple orchard and raised sheep.  The apples the brothers drove in a REO Speedwagon truck to the family’s retail store on Mission Street in downtown San Francisco.  Anne has been unable to learn anything about this branch of the Fashauer family.   

Anne’s early 1970s childhood memories of the original Fashauer ranch recollect three houses on the property.  The original farmhouse had burned down some time in the 1920s or 1930s.  In the remaining homes lived respectively her parents Francis and  Alice, Anne and her brother Tim; her uncle Johnny’s widow Helen and her uncle Tony and his wife Leitha lived in the other two.

By the end of World War I, Louis was an elderly fifty years old and his sons Francis and Tony were working the ranch.  Francis was the actual ranch operator, as Tony pursued another craft, being the state of California-licensed bear trapper, at which task he had a fabled reputation all over the state.  Back in the nineteen thirties, the famous Berkeley academic and California state historian, George R. Stewart, devoted several pages of his epic history of California settlement to Tony and his bear hunting and trapping skills.  Unhappily when I went to my library shelf where all the Californiana titles are stored, I couldn’t find my copy of the Stewart book.  Whom did I lend it to?

In 1919, Anne’s aunt Margaret, the eldest of Louis’s children,  married Charles Hagemann, another German-American settler in The Valley.  She was 19 years old, he 39, and lived with him on the beautiful Hagemann Ranch on the south side of Greenwood Road about three miles west of Hendy Woods bridge.  Hagemann was born in New York City about 1878, migrated to The Valley in 1900 and bought and proved up the ranch around 1900. 

The Philo/Greenwood Hagemann ranch in 1900 probably consisted of scattered second growth redwoods, sheep, a small commercial apple orchard, and a tiny vineyard.  As I reported in an earlier article, Anderson Valley’s first commercial winery, built by a tenant, Rosie Frati, also stood on the Hagemann place.  And as an act of thoughtfulness toward the whole Anderson Valley community Hagemann built an outdoor dancehall, still famous in stories locals told me in the  1970s, when I first settled here.   

Charles Hagemann died in 1936, and a couple of years later Margaret married Victor Giovanetti, member of a neighboring “Vinegar Hill” family.  Margaret was uncomfortable assuming an Italian family name, so she identified herself as Margaret La Vann.  The 1940 US census identifies Margaret as “head of household,” Victor as “husband.”

Margaret was still alive when I first moved to The Valley in 1971.  Driving up Greenwood Road to visit friends, I sometimes saw her at her mailbox across the road from the ranch entrance, patiently waiting for traffic to subside so she could cross back toward home without endangering herself from car and truck drivers going too fast.  Even though I was a long-haired hippie in those days, driving an old Mercedes Benz, she always nodded and waved to me as if I were a good neighbor, very comforting to this “newcomer” recently arrived in The Valley. 

When I first moved here back in 1971 the abandoned dance hall was still standing.  It was on sidehill about two hundred feet above the north side of Greenwood Road surrounded by tan oaks and some small Douglas firs, grown back since the dance hall was built.  The back of the building rested on the ground; the front and sides were supported by redwood pillars.  It had a shake roof to protect the dancers from hot July evenings’ late sun, but no sidewalls, just open air-conditioning.

When I arrived in The Valley back then, oldtimers were still recounting stories about those evenings of fiddle music, dancing, eating and drinking, and occasional unscheduled fist fights, all part of the entertainment for whole families, parents, grandparents and children.  Thelma Pinoli, Philo Postmaster when I first moved here, would still get excitedly nostalgic remembering stories about those late afternoon til midnight festivities at Hagemann’s dancehall.

Anne’s father Francis Francis sold most of the original Fashauer Ranch to Masonite Corporation in the early 1970s and kept a 12 acre piece of at the east end of the property where he lived until his death in 1988.   In the late 1960s Tony, the California-famous bear hunter, married the widow of Gordon Wood, Leitha, who owned the current Fashauer Ranch west of Signal Ridge Road.  Tony  died the same year as Francis, 1988.  Leitha passed away in 1989.  In her will she deeded the property to Anne because she believed her niece to be a caring owner and conservator of the place.  Anne has lived there with her mother Alice, who passed on in 2022, since her college days.  After her educational career outside The Valley Anne moved back to the ranch and has lived there with her husband Van and brother Tim to this day.

Next Week: The Fashauer Family, Anne’s generation in The Valley.