Since I submitted my Hop Flat explorations story last week, I have stumbled across some additions and corrections I would like to share with your readers.
The most interesting of them was a coincidental consequence of my rereading local journalist Donna Pardini’s collected portraits of colorful Anderson Valley old-timers like Luster Bivans, Edna Wallach, Cecil Gowan, Alvah Ingram, Russell Tolman, Smoky Blattner and more; and of various forgotten communities like Peachland and Evergreen Cemetery, and historic public places like Missouri House, Wiese’s Bar and the Track Inn. These vignettes, along with her weekly column about the births and deaths, comings and goings of Anderson Valley people and their friends, Donna reported between 1978 and 1980 for the then owners of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Nan and Ward Scharrer.
Donna grew up in Anderson Valley and was a good friend to and an awed admirer of its local characters and culture in the post-World War II era, and was a compelling journalistic storyteller. Unhappily her reporting career lasted only a few years before her too-soon death in 1981. Fortunately for us her loyal husband, Donald and sons Ernie and Tony self-published her collected stories, accompanied with historically valuable photographs of people and places, under the title ‘An Anderson Valley Love Story,’ which it was.
One of Love Story’s old-timer portraits was of Alvy Price, the old Navarro woodsman I noted in my Hop Flat piece last week where I claimed Alvy had been born in Hop Flat. Not accurate. It was not Alvy but his mother who was born in the old mill town a long today’s below today’s Highway 128 west of Rocky Bluff, and moved from Hop Flat when the mill closed in 1902. Donna’s story also said Alvy’s mother told him the Hop Flat community also included a schoolhouse, which gives some indication of the size of the local population.
In Donna’s Luster Bivans story, this old-timer reported that one of his father’s many itinerant jobs was hauling tan bark out of Ray Gulch, just east of the high bluff where the rail line supporting the Hop Flat mill ended. Luster described an operation in the gulch flat as harvesting hand-split redwood railroad ties and tan bark on the side hill, the product then conveyed in a chute off the side-hill down onto the gulch flat and across the river onto sleds or railroad cars. Luster’s dad was crossing the Navarro in the chute when a single random tie slid down the chute and killed him. Apparently there was a whole work camp in Ray Gulch because Luster reported that his mother stayed onsite for two years after his Dad’s death and supported the family by taking in laundry.
Interesting details on the Caltrans Hop Flat survey maps include a dotted double line track identified as “Traveled Way,” which I take to mean a wagon road parallel with the railroad tracks; two areas with solid boundary lines called “Cultivated Fields;” and along the railroad right-of-way a rectangular box identified as an “old railroad trestle,” probably crossing a small stream or simply a swampy spot in the river silt.
Luster Bivan’s account of his Dad’s death provoked for me an interesting question. He describes the ties conveyed across the Navarro to the south shore and onto railroad cars. Does that mean that the Navarro River mill’s rail tracks were on both sides of the river? I believe that to be the case. I have walked pieces of the river south bank right-of-way all the way from Highway 1 upstream about two miles, around the prime swimming hole at Guest Camp, MP 6.48, and from Dimmick Park up to Mal Pass and found a well-graded roadbed. In later years, I know from personal encounter that this right-of-way was used by logging trucks, and, before the truck era, could have been a rail line as well.
Any local railroad buffs know?
Regarding the old Caltrans surveyor maps and the areas marked “Cultivated Fields,” one time back in the 1970s, Alvy Price took me on a guided tour of his and his father’s temporary summer farming activities along the logged over Navarro west of Hop Flat. In 1916. ’17 and ‘18, when Alvy was a teenager, he and his Dad had a two acre field surrounded by a thirty inch high split redwood picket fence where they planted and harvested potatoes in those years.
The logged-out flat Alvy and his Dad farmed was just west of Hop Flat, around MP 4.50. In the early 1920s a local forester and pioneer forest environmentalist, Walker Tilley planted redwood seedlings on the flat. A close observer of the current forest system here will notice that many of these plantings, now a hundred years old, stand in a straight line across the flat about twenty feet apart, and are of the same height, more or less 100 feet. The site is a bit confusing as there are randomly spaced a number of taller redwoods, likely suckers off the roots of the old growth trees clear cut a quarter of a century earlier than Tilley’s tree farm project.
While Alvy probed into the silt looking for the pig-deterring picket fence, he told me the thinking behind his Dad’s temporary farming activity ten miles from the family home in Navarro. During World War I, American food crop prices including potatoes rose due to the government’s commitment to feeding its growing military force, and I believe to provide allies England and France with less perishable foods, including potatoes. Thus the Price’s migration each April down to what I call Tilley Flat to plant potato seedlings and build and maintain the pig fence.
Their first spring on the flat, they also built out of salvaged redwood split stuff a one room cottage on a little rise east of the Navarro and between Tilley and Hop Flats, no kitchen, no living room, just a place to sleep. Cooking was done outdoors. The shattered remains of the cabin still existed when Alvy and I visited the old Price farm, and I found on the site a small ink bottle still holding a stopper. Unhappily I can’t find it today in my collection of Anderson Valley artifacts and memorabilia I won’t bore the reader describing. The bottle suggests the Price family were literate and perhaps keeping an accounts book or writing a diary. We will never know.
Alvy said that once they finished planting the potato corms inside the pig fence, they went back to Navarro village until sometime in early summer. There was no maintenance work to be done until the seedlings started pushing shoots through the silty soil. When summer did arrive, they came back to the flat for the summer to do crop maintenance like weeding, pig protection, a little irrigation hand-delivered from the river during heat spells. If I remember right, I believe Alvy told me the potatoes usually reached harvest ripeness sometime in September. They then dug up the potatoes, loaded them on a horse-drawn wagon, and hauled the crop back up the river and over the hill to Ukiah, where they sold the harvest to a wholesale agent, who then transported the crop on the NWP railroad to the San Francisco-area market.
Since that exploration with Alvy years ago, I’ve often wondered what route the Prices took with their wagon to get to the Ukiah market. Alvy had previously told me that the pedestrian route from Navarro village to Ukiah was on logging roads along the North Fork of the river’s North Fork, over a ridge onto Robinson Creek and down the public wagon road that followed the creek, then back north into Ukiah. So I assume that was their wagon route to Ukiah. What I didn’t ask Alvy, as I didn’t know the local topography around those flats the way I do now, is how they got their harvest past the rocky bluff east of Hop Flat and onto the Ray Gulch flat. Was there enough of a foot trail to also support a single axle horse-drawn wagon?
To help solve this potato crop transportation route problem I got from Caltrans two more topographical survey maps covering the riverside terrain from the east end of Hop Flat, around the corners at the rocky bluff and further east to past Ray Gulch. Study of the Hop Flat doc revealed the existence near its east end of a second track or siding that exited the main track, ran about 150’ and rejoined mainline. The latter, this map shows, continued east and around the corner at the bluff.
However, the Ray Gulch area map shows only the surveyed highway right-of-way, culvert locations, etc., no railroad tracks up into Ray Gulch, nor further along the Navarro River. Nevertheless, I surmise that if the rail line did in fact squeeze past Rocky Bluff, then there was enough room for the potato wagon to drive past too and then on to Ukiah along the route I describe earlier in the story. I can imagine there being enough timber on the flats along the river and up the north side-hill to support several more years of logging, more rail line, and one or more summer labor camps. Does any reader know?
What I do know is that Alvy’s dad said he could afford to get the Navarro mill management to give him the summer off from logging work because the money he made in June, July and August was a lot more than his daily wages in the woods. I didn’t ask Alvy what his Dad paid him, though I suspect I know the answer.
About the time we were wrapping up our explorations and Alvy’s stories, his probe stick hit something solid. We dug down into the light silt about four inches and found three redwood pickets next to one another and leaning downstream of the river. A phenomenon caused by the weight of the decennial floods that began occurring later on in the twentieth century.
Thus ended a perfect day of exploration and recollection I still remember in detail. Actually there was one more destination to complete the adventure: we retired to Floodgate Bar to tell our story to the other local members of the daily Five O’clock Hour meetings.
Special Request: If any reader of this article can correct or add to this article’s anecdotes and assumptions, please contact Brad Wiley, (707) 895 2259. [email protected].
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