Sometimes, when I’m alone and I'm able to escape the daily drone of people and machines that drive us all a little closer to the edge of insanity, I close my eyes and I drift off to where I can visit my oldest memories.
In those moments I often find myself thinking about the many days of my youth that I spent on the ranch that my family once owned. I guess it wasn't really a ranch, it was just some land that we owned, but everyone in the family always referred to it as “The Ranch,” more specifically, “The June Ranch.” It was a sizable spread, 940 acres of open grasslands and mountainous redwood forests. The property was obtained over a number of years, by my great-grandfather, Harwood June.
At one time the land was not a 940-acre property, it was split up into individual 30- and 40-acre parcels, owned by a host of characters who, for one reason or another, would eventually sell to my great-grandfather Harwood June.
One parcel was once owned by a Mr. Daniel Jeans, a black man who was well known around Anderson Valley to be an escaped slave from the post-Civil War South. How he ended up in the mountains above Anderson Valley is, to this day, a mystery, and a narrative long ago lost to history.
What little is known about Mr. Jeans is that he lived on that stretch of land as far back as the late 1870s until the late 1890s or possibly into the early 1900s. He made his living in the laborious task of cutting and selling firewood as well as maintaining a small fruit orchard he planted, and a fruit dryer that he built himself as well. We also know that at some point he married a Native American woman who may have been from one of the local bands of Native Americans known as Pomo. Together the couple raised two sons, Albert and George Jeans.
Evidence supporting the family's existence on the land can be found in the meager remains of the fruit dryer and the trees of the small fruit orchard. Almost all of the fruit trees are still standing to this day like monuments to his behalf. Remarkably most of them still bear a decent amount of fruit. The cabin that they lived in was located very near the fruit orchard, but the original structure collapsed from the weight of time.
The old cabin was haphazardly put back together in the late 1950s by a logging crew that happened to be working in the woods nearby. Sadly that resurrection has collapsed as well, leaving very little for the eye to recognize as ever being a cabin.
There was also a huge barn that stood just east of the cabin. It most likely was used for the manufacturing of the dried fruit as well as boarding any livestock they may have kept on the property.
Unfortunately that big barn no longer exists. It was accidentally set afire in the late 1940s by a couple of young boys from the valley who were out there hunting deer one evening and decided to make their camp inside the barn. Their campfire got away from them and in the span of just a few minutes a fiery inferno engulfed the barn. It was completely destroyed. If you know where to look you can still find a few of the old burned timbers hiding in the tall grass.
John Jeans doesn't show up in any census data but his sons do, but not until the early 1900s, where they were both listed as living down in the Anderson Valley. This isn’t surprising as the census taker would not usually travel far up into the hills searching for people.
It can be surmised that when their father, Daniel Jeans, passed away, the boys sold the property to my great-grandfather and then moved down into the valley where the census taker would have found them.
All the history of Daniel Jeans and his family up in those hills, those now abandoned hills, is something I always showed great interest in, though I never went the extra mile to properly investigate the property for artifacts.
Now the property, the whole June Ranch for that matter, has been sold to a large timber speculator from Sonoma County, whom I imagine has little to no interest in the history of the property. Having to ask someone I don't know for permission to go up there now, just feels wrong. There’s the strong possibility of being turned away which keeps me from asking at all.
Sometimes a person just has to let go of the past. But damn it, this one is a hard pill to swallow. That ranch was a focal point of my youth. Numerous memories of pre-teen camping trips with my cousin and our crew of buddies leave me with grand images that never seem to fade with age.
In our childhood my cousin, Eric June, and I would build secret forts in the poison oak thickets that grew in great numbers on the bottom half of the property, and no one ever found them. Once we decided to set up some kind of communication device that would run from Fort to Fort by way of two tin cans and about 50 yards of 50-pound monofilament fishing line that we absconded with from my father's old tackle box. Our voices were muffled but when we yelled loud enough we could make out the words. Thinking back on it now though, its success was most likely due to the fact that we were only 50 yards away from each other and it was our loud screaming that we were actually hearing, not the tin cans.
What kind of Fruit? It’s kind of like saying they had children without saying girls or boys…
When I was around ten years old, my sister and a friend put up a string on little posts so we could send message to the neighbor kid by attaching them to the string and pulling it through. But we didn’t have much to say.