The Fashauers On Greenwood Ridge (Part 2)

Anne Fashauer’s first recollections of her life on Greenwood Ranch were of the original Louis Fashauer Ranch. Around 1970 she was, age three, living with her parents, Francis and Alice, at the original homestead on Greenwood Road seven miles east of Elk.

Her formal education began at the old Greenwood School in Elk to which she rode the school bus daily. The school, the old building still standing next to the Catholic Church, included grades Kindergarten through eighth. There was one teacher leading all the classes, their sizes being typically 3-4 students per grade. The teacher for first couple of years in Elk was a woman named Lael Leslie. Lael was followed by a trio of successors, Judy Minkus and Mark and Jessica Morton.

Anne attended Mendocino Middle School from sixth through eighth grades and for ninth grade moved on to Mendocino High. She then became the first person in her family to continue their education at university. She applied to University of California, Santa Cruz and to the private Catholic University of San Francisco. She chose the latter school because of its intimate size and small classes. At USF she majored in sociology with a minor curriculum course in theology.

After receiving her degree at USF in1989, Anne joined the labor force working for the US Defense Department. In 1993 she moved on to graduate school at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, a consortium of colleges that collaborated to provide a curriculum in history and world religions doctrine. After three years Anne received a Masters degree. Her undergraduate and graduate studies had a strong influence on her personal and business life, Anne told me last week. She was particularly impressed by the Jesuit Order professors at both schools she made friends with, specifically their intellectual and moral rigor, particularly regarding social justice and how these issues influenced her personal and professional life. 

In 1996, having finished her formal education in Berkeley, Anne moved back to The Valley, now living at the second Fashauer Ranch with her mother Alice. Seeking employment around The Valley, she began by working as bookkeeper for Don and Laura Shanley’s Proseed professional landscaping business. Next in her career was innkeeping, concierge-like work, for the Elk Cove Inn and Restaurant in Elk, then owned and operated by Elaine Bryant.

Anne reports her most interesting work was with the Taylor Roberts interior design company. Though its main office was in Philo, the firm’s principle business was doing interior design and decoration work for large homeowner construction businesses catering to families in the San Francisco Bay area. Anne started as an assistant to the firm’s owner, then became the “furniture designer,” which meant she selected and purchased the actual new home furnishings. She then succeeded to Project Manager for each new home’s interior design and purchasing. The Taylor Roberts business flourished until the financial crisis of 2008 when homebuilding dramatically declined. 

Anne’s career in real estate began in 2008 working as a licensed agent for Century 21 Seascape Realty in Mendocino. A few years later she took a job closer to home as a licensed agent with Michael Shapiro’s North Country Real Estate. As we longtime residents know, Valley people are Valley people, with no desire to live or work elsewhere. In 2015, when it became time for Michael to retire she bought his realty business.

Anne also began making personal investments in local commercial real estate, including the railroad cars and caboose next to Boont Berry Farm in Boonville and one I claim is aesthetically most important to the Anderson Valley community, the Tarwater Live Oak Garage building, now a winery retail tasting room along with the small one story units behind it housing her real estate office, a hairdresser and a body care parlor. 

The Tarwater garage was an auto and truck repair shop that dated back to the 1920s, had been owned by a Valley first settler family who no longer live here. The owner previous to Anne, Tim Mullens, purchased and repaired the building but then decided to leave The Valley. Luckily for us all Anne was able to purchase the building in 2017 and restore it.

The ensemble of structures around Tarwater garage I think make it one of the most eye-catching array of historic retail commerce in downtown Boonville. The most dramatic piece of the property for your reporter, a lover of water tower architecture, is the tower behind the garage Anne so carefully rebuilt along with the rest of the property. I believe it aesthetically more pleasing than the one adjacent to the Rossi Hardware store down Boonville’s main street a few steps. But that’s a matter of taste.

In 2000, Anne and her brother Tim planted six and a half acres of vineyard on the gently slopping ground south and east of the Fashauer home. The vineyard is situated in a lovely southeast facing bowl of what was I suspect once deep loamy redwood timber soil. 

In 2014, Anne married then-Kendall Jackson winemaker Van Williamson. Van took over the vineyard’s management and left KJ to found his micro-boutique winery, Witching Stick. Witching Stick’s tasting room is in the old Elsie Skrbek home next to Lemons’ Philo Market. The original vineyard was all Zinfandel grapes; in 2014 Van grafted over to Pinot Noir about a quarter of the Zin. 

Today Witching Stick produces more or less a hundred cases of Pinot and 150 of Zin, depending on each year’s crop size, in a very local microclimate accommodating both. The early ripening Pinot benefits from the cooler Valley floor climate that climbs up the Greenwood Ridge via Ham Canyon; while the Zin ripens typically a week or so later than at the famous old Pronsolino/DuPratt vineyard, now owned by Ariata, typically in mid-October, thereby enabling a long, slow maturation process conducive to a complex tasting wine. It is amazing to me how much the graceful sloping flat framing the vineyard with the redwoods framing it looks like the original Fashauer apple and sheep ranch depicted in last week’s family story.

The two interviews I had with Anne, the second at their home on Greenwood Ridge were great fun because both of us are grateful for having lived most of our lives here in The Valley, she of course local-born. 

Of all the Valley people I have explored their family roots and history, she took me back further in time to find her ancestors than anyone else I have interviewed, so far. 

It’s been a long journey for the Fashauer family from Alsace to Greenwood Ridge, but the stories Anne has told me confirm it’s been a rich odyssey, a European and American saga including ranching and farming, timber harvesting, viticulture and winemaking, in formal education in sociology and theology, in business from pottery to real estate to grapegrowing and winemaking. It appears to me the family was willing to try anything.