I began hearing about Hop Flat, the short-lived logging and millcamp west of the rocky bluff at Highway 128’s milepost 5.50, when I first moved to The Valley in 1971. The old Navarro woodsman bachelor and local story-teller Alvy Price whom back then I regularly sat next to at the Floodgate bar told me his father lived and worked at Hop Flat until the stud mill and railhead there shut down. When the parent mill burned down, Alvy’s father moved to Wendling, now Navarro where George X. Wendling, San Francisco capitalist and mill entrepreneur, established first a shake mill and brick kiln, later a sawmill. And so did the Hopper and Mabery families’ ancestors too.
The Hop Flat mill site was a subsidiary of the several mills established at the mouth of the Navarro River beginning in 1861. I have written inaccurately about their history in previous stories. These mills exploited the surrounding woodlands by building a rail line in pieces up the Navarro at the end of which would be for a year or two, a summer logging camp complete with cabins for the loggers, bachelors and family men, a common dining room and other amenities, perhaps a company store, infirmary, church, often a dance hall for Saturday night’s entertainment. Once the surrounding forest was clear cut, the rail line and work camp would be extended a mile or two upriver to a flat big enough to support the mill and temporary town.
The rail system bringing logs to the mill, probably a single track, ran along the south side of the Navarro for over three miles where it crossed the river at today’s famous Iron Bridge swimming hole at Highway 128 milepost 3.65. Bill Witherell told me the rail bridge there was literally made of steel. Whether there was a logging camp established at Iron Bridge, we archeologists have yet to find out.
The rail line later continued from Iron Bridge upstream along the river to Hop Flat where it ended due to the almost vertical rocky bluff descending from the flat’s east end straight down into the river making it impossible for the rail line to go any further. It was only in the 1920s, when the state built Highway 128, that the construction crew carved out the rock wall with steam shovels and dynamite to create its right-of-way.
Today, Hop Flat is entirely reforested with second growth redwood trees, sometimes three feet and more in diameter on the stump and huge pepperwood trees almost as fat at ground level. The flat area, about a quarter of a mile in length and over a hundred yards in width, is part of the California State Park system that stretches from Flynn Creek on Highway 128 down to about milepost 1.76 where redwood forest more or less terminates. About a hundred feet up the north slope of the flat an explorer can find every so often prominent yellow metal plaques mounted on fence posts calling out “Boundary” between Mendocino Redwood Company timber land and the state park.
Twice this spring, once in early April, and again on the first Sunday this month a cadre of amateur archeologists, John Pitts and Mike Reeves, experienced placer gold prospectors, Brad Wiley, your reporter, and in June retired logger and well informed local historian Ernie Pardini went down to Hop Flat armed with metal detector devices, shovels, trowels, prospecting pans and mosquito repellant, to practice our craft.
After accumulating six hours of labor and about five pounds of metallic artifacts, I have to acknowledge that the reporting that follows is very speculative about how the Hop Flat community was organized. Nevertheless, it appears that the railhead serving the logging and milling lay on sandy loam about twenty-five feet above the river. There was enough room for there to be two parallel tracks to serve the woods products to be hauled away downstream, though no evidence to prove the point. The stud mill whose purpose was probably for making two-by-fours from the smaller diameter logs we suspect lay right about where the Highway 128 right-of-way is today.
But we found some evidence north of the millsite, partly on the flat, partly on the sloping sidehill to the north, that the cabins for the woods and millworkers were located there. How many cabins there were we could not tell, nor did we find any evidence of where the cookhouse and dining hall stood, never mind the dance site which gave Hop Flat its name. Perhaps people just danced on a wooden platform as they did up at Hagemann’s “dance hall” up on Greenwood Road.
So now it’s time to discuss the historic evidence, actual artifacts, we amateur archeologists uncovered. Beside the anecdotes Hop Flat descendant Alvy Price and longtime Navarro resident Bill Witherell told me, my sole source of local mill history is an illustrated catalogue of the industry’s history organized by towns called ‘Mills Of Mendocino County,’ published by the Mendocino County Historical Society in 1996.
This resource states the H.B. Tichenor & Co. built the first mill on the Navarro River in 1861, and that after numerous riverine wharves for loading lumber onto ships bound for the San Francisco area were destroyed by storms, in 1878 the company built a six hundred foot long pier twenty four feet wide, likely out into the ocean. I have found evidence of steel pier fastenings drilled and cemented into the sandstone cliff face at the north end of the beach that suggest the location of this pier.
The ‘Mills’ resource notes that the Tichenor & Co. mill was sold to Navarro Mills Company and its several owners in the 1880s. Beelu Oswald Robinson, mother of Zac Robinson and Husch Vineyards owner, informed Mike Reeves that one of the Navarro Mills Company’s owners was her ancestor, Miles Standish, a famous investor in the timber industry all over Mendocino and Humboldt County, including the Standish-Hickey mill and forest, now a state park near Leggett, and Albion Lumber Company in Albion. Subsequently the Navarro mill burned down in 1890 and was rebuilt in a new site a mile east on the Navarro’s north side. This mill burned down in November, 1901, and ceased operations the next year.
The Historical Society book also shows the Navarro Mill Co. letterhead, with a picture of the first mill, a large steam-powered operation with a bridge just downstream of it across the Navarro River, various mill cottages behind it and perhaps the still-surviving mill manager’s dwelling on the scene’s left edge. Text framing the drawing says “manufacturers of and dealers in shingles, posts, railroad ties, etc. Redwood cargoes sawn to order.” The address for the company is 42 Market Street, San Francisco. An aerial photo on the same page shows a large mill building with what looks like railroad tracks entering it from the downriver side, next door a three bay round-house-looking building with tracks going to the bridge across the river. I am guessing the mill used the rail line to move finished product to the wharf for loading onto schooners and steamers headed for the Bay Area.
The photo also shows behind the mill and worker cottages, several large two story buildings obscured by the mill boiler smoke that look like hotels or guesthouses for bachelor millworkers, and several non-descriptly shaped buildings whose function (perhaps one is the cookhouse/dining hall) I can’t determine.
Meanwhile, back to Hop Flat: our April exploration was not a very successful one. Michael, John Pitts, metal detectors and tools, and I spent over two hours trudging over both sides of 128 and on the north’s sidehill where we supposed the cabins to have been. The largest number of items we found were a half dozen small wood screws and finishing nails and two bobby pins (modern roadside camper debris?) all in a small area on the north side of the road flat about forty feet inland. Could they have been fasteners for redwood board or shake cabin siding and roofing? Walking the rest of the flat and a little ways up the sidehill we found no further evidence of cabins or of anything else.
The most dramatic find was on the south side of the highway, again about forty feet onto the flat where we surmise the stud mill and railhead were. Both the metal detectors screeched over two square feet of ground among small ferns. Our frantic digging first found a square foot of thin rusted sheet metal under which we dug up a deeply rusted 4 X 1” bolt and nut about four inches long. A machine bolt would not be part of housing construction, so we surmised that what we found was associated with the stud mill machinery or from railroad equipment.
We also found in this location a very rusted eight inch wide cast iron skillet. We are still arguing about whether this artifact, obviously an element of household life, was evidence from the cabins on the north side of the flat or a remain from a later campsite. Michael is doing further research to support or deny our hope it came from the cabins.
Our June expedition began around 10 AM on a warm windless late spring day and included Ernie, Michael and Brad. We parked further down the flat than we had in April and began our recon by walking away from 128 north two abreast with Brad the senior citizen stumbling along behind the forward patrol leaning on his shepherd’s crook. About a hundred feet up the sidehill above the flat the metal detectors started whining around a three foot square site nestled among ferns. Digging revealed a different kind of soil from the sandy silt down on the flat. It was a dense clayey dirt more typical of the Franciscan soil on my Navarro ranch. The Hop Flat sample was more red than the brown soil at my place and filled with rusty red rocks that the detectors’ fussing told us were filled with iron magnetic enough to stick to Michael’s prospector trowel magnet.
This particular dig site also revealed the only evidence of camp cabins we found that day: a relatively square two inch piece of redrock that upon close inspection we all three archeologists agreed was evidence of a chimney brick. We spent another hour or so patrolling the north side of the highway both east and west, sidehill and flat, regularly getting detector signals identifying iron-filled rock or dirt on the side hill, and way too many beer cans and tabs down on the flat. But no further signs of cabin remains beyond the one piece of brick evidence.
The three researchers then crossed over to the south side of Highway 128 and began our patrol over there. About thirty feet toward the river the two metal detectors got excited. And our excavation discovered, along with the drink can tabs, a very rusted 12 X ½” machine bolt with attached nut. Bingo, just what we hoped to find.
After walking another fifteen feet toward the river, the detectors became excitedly noisy in an open area surrounded by a cluster of large ferns. Digging by both Ernie and Mike began to turn up a trove of bolts, nuts and washers, including carriage, machine and lag screws between four and ten inches in length and half to a full inch in diameter.
This lode of rusted materials led us a few feet farther across the flat to a ten foot diameter old growth redwood stump with some interesting man-made additions to it. Most prominent was a twenty foot long, two inch in diameter modern galvanized pipe vertically mounted and attached to the stump with steel straps. Our recollection at the instant was that this was the site of the US Weather Service gauging station that measured the Navarro River’s daily flow for the purpose of issuing El Nino winter flood warnings or summertime alerts regarding too much water removal for ag irrigation during drought years. This service was terminated around 1990, if I remember right.
More interesting was the steps sawn into two sides of the stump to enable a person to mount it to its now rotting top. Driven into the top of the stump we found three two inch wide quarter inch thick L-shaped angle irons sticking up about two feet above its top. Digging further into the rotting stump, we found another array of carriage and machine bolts, nuts and washers of various lengths and diameters. Total weight of our findings around the redwood stump Michael estimated to be about five pounds.
About ten feet away from the river side of the stump our detectors enthusiastically told me we had found something important. We dug up a ten inch round, convex shaped steel object with something like one inch flanged on its edge. It was partly eaten away on one edge to the extent we surmised it was a frying pan, though it was far away from where the cabins and cookhouse supposedly were across 128. On Sunday, we showed it to Jeff Burroughs participating at the AV Historical Society presentation about Pomo culture prior to the European settlers. Jeff identified it as a boiler aperture cover, the deeply corroded edges had, we guess, about ten machine screws, to secure the cover to a railroad steam engine.
Our excavations were accompanied by various hypotheses about the logging/milling camp function of what we had found around our evidence-rich redwood stump. My guess persuaded the other scholars of its credibility. Acknowledging it was a much a hope as a theory, I proposed that what we had found at this site was remnants of a conveyor belt that carried finished studs from the mill to rail cars sitting on the siding or sidings at the nearby railhead. In retrospect, I can only hope that my assumption about what our diggings had found is accurate.
We archeologists then spent another half hour cruising the south side of the highway flat without the detectors finding any more remnants of the Hop Flat community. I should mention that at all of our specific April and June excavation sites, we never had to dig more than eight to twelve inches into the silt where we found our artifacts.
The end of our workday we spent having lunch at the Navarro Store, speculating about our findings and listening to Ernie Pardini tell stories about his great grandparents way back in 1924 founding the hotel Italia across the old highway from the store where the music arena is today. And the sense of tragedy in the whole Anderson Valley community when the still-operating hotel burned down in 1972.
So where did Hop Flat get its name? As we know about American small town history, every community had a dance hall or like space for the community’s entertainment on Saturday nights. And according to Alvy Price, Hop Flat had such a structure though the archeologists found no evidence of its location. But why the word “hop” to describe the community? Your journalist’s assumption is that most of Mendocino County’s immigrant labor back at the turn of the twentieth century were Scots, Welsh and Irish; no Italians had arrived yet to work in the woods.
Price, Hopper and Mabery are all Welsh or Scots names, I believe. And the style of dancing in these communities, supported by bagpipes and fiddles, were jigs or “hops.” Hence the name Hop Flat. Ernie Pardini, supported by Jeff Burroughs another local historian, however believes the name did come from the locals’ style of dancing, and was provoked by the need of participants to keep moving vigorously to keep warm on cold evenings, fall, winter and spring. I like that version too.
Confession
Most of my version of the Hop Flat story is based on speculation and the recollections of Alvy Price and Bill Witherell, along with our archeological work. The Mendocino Historical Society’s ‘Mills Of Mendocino County’ is the only historical record based on actual Navarro River mill records. If any readers of this article have some knowledge of Hop Flat supporting or revising my story, please let me know. Or if you have any pictures of the Hop Flat community, advise me.
Brad Wiley, (707) 895 2259, [email protected]
Fascinating stuff, both your information and your finds.