Navarro’s Lost Sister City

Down the road from Navarro, very near the 1964 high water mark, there was once a thriving little town complete with post office, a school and a telephone exchange. It has disappeared almost without a physical trace, and when the last children of the last people who once lived there are gone, Hop Flat, a suburb of Navarro when Navarro itself was large enough to support three hotels and a round-the-clock brothel, won't even be a memory.

Hop Flatters are remembered as hard working people who danced every night until midnight and then fought each other until the sun came up when it was time to go to work, hence Hop Flat. The town boomed when the big mill at Navarro boomed and died when the big mill died with the end of World War Two.

Situated in a leisurely bend of the Navarro river, and almost hidden by that perpendicular point of upthrust rock which still rises 200 feet above the river bed, Hop Flat was spread out along the slopes above the Navarro less than a stone’s throw from the white stenciled high water memorial the traveler marvels at on that pinnacle today.

When winter floods forced the Hop Flatters out of their homes, they moved in with their neighbors higher up the hillside on the south side of the river. When the river dropped and the sun came back out, the Hop Flatters scrubbed their floors free of silt, lit a big, drying wood fire in the stove, and moved back in.

The banks of the Navarro River, which overflows almost every winter, especially at its narrow juncture where the town was unaccountably situated, would seem an unlikely place to build a town, but Hop Flat was up and thriving in the floodplain by 1880. The village, like a rainy day mushroom, simply seemed to appear, established by tough, resilient, resourceful families who worked the woods for the Navarro Lumber Mill and its adjacent railroad that ran up through Hop Flat to Comptche, and then on to its terminus at Albion where the mill’s lumber, and usually a few passengers, were loaded onto schooners bound for San Francisco.

The town got its name from the many weekend dances, or “hops” held there by the exuberant loggers and mill workers and their lively families. The 200-foot cliff where the Navarro River crested in the famous downpour of December 22, 1964, looked directly out at these spirited gatherings and the town hosting them. As late as 1970, there was a white post with “Hop Flat” lettered in black on it, and a small sign, also of wood, that said “Ray Gulch R” which marked the site of the railroad that ran up the canyon. They're gone now, but even if they survived who would believe that that narrow bend of the Navarro once rang with happy laughter and the merry sounds of fiddles?

Wholly a creature of the early timber industry, Hop Flat was reached by the also long gone train that ran from Christine, on the Boonville side of Navarro, up through Comptche and on out to Albion where passengers and lumber would make sea connections for points north and south. Rounding the high water bend on what is now Highway 128 by train, you soon burst into the throng and bustle of the thriving hamlet, and just as quickly the community was lost to view when the railroad took another turn, meandered through Ray Gulch and on up to Comptche.

If the train lingered at Hop Flat, the most imposing building a passenger would see was the tannery, then the surprisingly large, pleasingly ornate hotel, and next door to the hotel, a post office and a small structure housing a telephone office and a laundry. And there was the one-room schoolhouse in which all the town’s hopes were invested, as they were then invested in every hamlet of the Northcoast. The rest of the village consisted of neat little dwellings with carefully tended gardens surrounding them.

When they couldn't find any other housing, single mill workers stayed at the Hop Flat hotel not far from the barn that sheltered the bull teams that hauled the logs from the woods to the railroad. There were several cookhouses, each of them presided over by a Chinese cook.

The famous dance hall was unromantically located in a large room over the tannery vats. These much anticipated events temporarily helped the revelers forget how hard and for how little they worked. When the work ended, the Hop Flatters and their music moved on to new stands of timber, and there hasn't been a song sung in the high water place since, but the descendants of two generations of Witherells, Mains, Grants, McCartys, Hargraves, Quinns, Andreanis, Devers, Kings, Freemans, Whiteds, Simpsons, Stumps, Linscots, Rileys, Shirles, Bradburys, Franklins, and Dyers, if they pause on a still night at that unlikely bend in the road where the river one December night in 1964 ran higher than it ever had, they might hear laughter, and fiddles playing the old songs quick in time with dancing feet.

From the establishment of the first lumber mill at Mendocino in 1853, fires periodically destroyed much of San Francisco which, tragic as they were for San Francisco, provided a large impetus for Mendocino County's fledgling timber industry, and inspired the mills of Anderson Valley as the loggers worked their way inland from the coast. Sailing ships called dog schooners, many of them built at Fairhaven, a small town near Eureka, carried lumber to the larger ports from tiny landings on the Mendocino coast called “dog holes” because they were so small the sailors said that a dog could hardly turn around in them.

The Wawona, a Yosemite Indian word for Spotted Owl, was a lumber schooner built in Fairhaven in the late 1800s. The Indians believed the Spotted Owl was the guardian of the forests. Indians, however, were unlikely to appreciate the irony of a lumber schooner being named after their sacred bird, but they might be somewhat mollified that the owl would again become a talisman wielded by environmentalists, many of whom regard themselves as white Indians. The white Indians say if an area of forest is home to the owl, it is relatively healthy. No Spotty, no health.

Beginning in 1880, shipbuilders installed boilers on the old schooners, which meant that the new hybrid sail and steam vessels could now get up and down the California coast faster and mostly on time. Prior to the installation of the boilers, a sailing schooner, if the winds were right, could get from Fort Bragg to San Francisco in 15 hours. If there were no winds, the voyage might take a month.

The schooners were retired by the time of The Great Depression and they, along with the many dog hole ports and the little Hop Flat towns that went with them, in all those numerously improbable inlets from Bolinas to Crescent City, were gone.

In 1911 the Skunk rail line running between Willits and Fort Bragg linked the Mendocino Coast to the north-south rail line running between San Francisco and Eureka. By 1935, lumber was moving from Northcoast mills mostly by train, with a few trucks toting an increasing share of the load. Then the trucks replaced the trains and Hop Flat and the rest of us have been on the road ever since.