ORAL HISTORY PROJECT OF THE MARIN COUNTY FREE LIBRARY Anne T. Kent California Room Original recording available at the Anne T. Kent California Room © All materials copyright Marin County Free Library. Transcript made available for research purposes only. All rights are reserved to the Marin County Free Library. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the: Anne T. Kent California Room Marin County Free Library 3501 Civic Center Dr. #427 San Rafael, California, 94903

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INTERVIEW WITH BOYD STEWART
by Carla Ehat & Anne Kent
September 26, 1974

INTERVIEWEE: Boyd Stewart (BS)
INTERVIEWERS: Carla Ehat (CE) and Anne Kent (AK)
DATE OF INTERVIEW: September 26, 1974



CE: Recording from the Stewart Ranch in Olema, Marin County, California; continuing the Oral History Program designed to assist in the preservation of Marin County history, this project is a combined effort of the Moya Library Guild and the Marin County Library. Today is Thursday, September 26, 1974, and Mr. Boyd Stewart has graciously consented to grant us this interview to record his early reminiscences of Marin. Joining us today is Mrs. Thomas Kent, President of the Moya Library Guild. Good morning, Mr. Stewart. Well, we’d like you to start in today, if you would, from the beginning. Were you born in Marin?

BS: Yes, I was born in San Rafael, but I actually grew up and lived in Nicasio. That was where my father was when I was born. I went to school at Nicasio and then went to high school down at the Tamalpais High School. So I am a Marin County resident and have been all of my life.

CE: Tell us, where was your father born, and what brought him to Marin County?

BS: Well, my father was actually born in Scotland but before he could remember, his folks moved to Ireland and when he was six years old his father died, leaving three children with a fourth child that was born a few months after his father’s death. That was a very poor country to live in under any circumstances and a most terrible place for a widow to be with four children and no means of support. My father doesn’t have many kind remembrances of Ireland; he always said it was a beautiful, beautiful country in which to starve. Came to this country when he was 17 to 19 years old. He wasn’t sure because he could neither read nor write, didn’t know for sure what year he was born. And when he came here he did, as all young Irish people did, from part of the country where he came from, went to San Francisco to Gilmore Stable and asked him where he should go. And Mack Gilmore, who ran the old stable in San Francisco, let him stay there overnight and the next day sent someone down to the ferry building to buy a ticket for him to the town of Tomales and that is where he started working in this country.

CE: What year would that be, approximately. Do you recall?

BS: I don’t know. I don’t know for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the process of getting citizenship in those days was less complicated, let us say, than it is today. But he would have had to come here around ’79 to ’81 or ’82, 1879 to 1881 or ‘2 as near as I can tell. The records on his citizenship papers are a little at variances with what the stories he told me. He worked on ranches and became a butter-maker, which was a skilled profession, and stayed around Tomales until he had accumulated a little money and then he started dairying for himself. When he met my mother he was dairying up above Marshall on the Fair Ranch, which is where the Zimmermans now live. My mother was Danish. Her parents came here from Denmark. Her mother came as an immigrant. Her father came by the simple expedience of jumping ship in San Francisco. He had been going to sea when he was twelve years old and when he was about 18 or 19 he quietly left ship in San Francisco. They lived in the Livermore Valley where he had a farm and continued to live there all of his life. My mother became a schoolteacher and taught school up at the Halleck School where she met my father.

CE: Where is this school, sir?

BS: The Halleck School, up north of Marshall.

CE: Oh, yes. And then your parents met and were married.

BS: My parents were married up there and they lived on that ranch for a time and in 1901 they moved to Nicasio where I was born, on a dairy ranch. My father had always dairied. And that’s where I grew up.

CE: How many cows did he start his venture with, do you imagine? Fifty or more?

BS: I don’t know how many cows they had on the ranch up above Marshall but at Nicasio, when he began, he started milking about fifty to sixty cows and eventually milked around ninety cows. It was one of those dairies where all work is done with horses, as everyone had to do in those days, and the milking was all done by hand.

CE: And you were raised in that ranch climate, of course, getting up, doing the chores, and all of that prior to going to school.

BS: Well, all the kids that grew up in the Nicasio Valley learned to milk at a very early age. It wasn’t the most prosperous time in the world; the period from 1900 to 1910 always considered to be sort of a base period when they’re keeping records. If you worked hard, you could make a living. You might accumulate a little money, and if you didn’t work hard you wouldn’t be there long. I learned to milk when I was six years old and that was about the age in which all children learned to milk. And I milked cows, learned to plow, and do all the things you do on a small ranch.

CE: Now there was yourself and you had a sister. Was that the extent of your family, then?

BS: I had one sister five years younger than I am and she went to school at Nicasio, too.

CE: Tell me, Mr. Stewart, when it came time for high school, did you go to Tamalpais High? And how did you get there?

BS: I went to Tamalpais High School and I got there very simply. I took the steam train from San Geronimo down to Fairfax and got the electric train at Fairfax and down to Almonte, a place that’s no longer there, and then walked up to the high school, which was fairly nearby.

CE: Well that was quite a journey every day, and I imagine from your ranch, you mentioned earlier, you rode horseback to the train station five miles or more. How far a distance was it every day?

BS: I rode a horse five miles to the train and then back at night. But that wasn’t a very bad chore. It was easier than staying home and milking and I didn’t mind the hours. The train left San Geronimo a few minutes after six in the morning and got back into San Geronimo at supposedly twenty-eight minutes after six at night.

CE: And you did that for that four-year period of high school?

BS: Yes.

CE: Then you went on to Stanford, I understand, to further your life as a rancher, or did you select some other field?

BS: Well, I had had an idea that I might like to be a doctor and when I realized, as I did soon, that I didn’t want to live in town, I majored in chemistry and botany at Stanford.

CE: I imagine botany has been an interest for you all your life, hasn’t it?

BS: Well, it was. Both chemistry and botany served a very useful purpose. I think it’s not too important what you major in in school if you work and learn to discipline your mind and learn to study. It’s probably more important that I got into classes in English and history, philosophy and things like that. I think they did me more good maybe in the end than any specialized courses I could have taken.

CE: Tell us, Mr. Stewart, we’re now at your present ranch. Would you tell us a little bit of how it all came about? How did it evolve that you are right where we are today at the Stewart Ranch? And I know it’s not going to be an easy story; it’s probably complex, but is it true that this ranch house itself was built in 1864?

BS: Yes, it was built in 1863 and ’64, finished in 1864. The people that owned this property originally, that is who bought the land from the Garcia family who held the Spanish Grant, were named Olds, Horacio Olds. And he came out here from the east, actually from upper New York, in 1852. He had been in the Mexican War and when he came home from the Mexican War he stayed home a short time and then came west to California. He spent two years riding around the state, traveling all over, and as nearly as I could tell from the stories that his son told us, he didn’t work. He was just looking for a place to locate. In 1854 he purchased some four-thousand acres of land from Garcia for himself and his folks and went back home. If I remember right, the original figures were forty-four hundred acres of land for which he paid four-thousand dollars in gold. Interesting thing is that he had the gold; he had the money to pay Garcia. He had not come out here mining and had not done any work here. He brought the money with him with which he paid for the ranch. He went home and collected his folks, friends, and neighbors. And it took quite some time and the whole family, the mother and father, two brothers and two sisters came out here and brought a number of other families. Horatio Olds, with his wife and one six year old son got back here in 1856 and moved into a little squatters cabin that stood on the ranch. The mother and father came by way of -- he didn’t bring them -- a boat around the Horn and they brought the two girls. The brothers crossed the Panama Isthmus and came up that way. And they had shipped furniture and household possessions with them. But what is rather interesting is the fact that they brought a number of other families, some of whom are still around here. They brought a family named Winslow. They brought two separate families, not related, named Miller. They brought some people named Hardman. They brought the McIsaacs and they brought some people named Monroe and a few others besides that, and the Nelsons, who subsequently ran a hotel in Olema and who at first ran a stage line to Bolinas, which was the port that they used regularly. And they brought the Randalls who bought a large piece of land from the Garcias, south of the Olds property. There was another family named Johnson that bought some land north of the Olds property, where the Bloom Ranch now is.

CE: And these people all subsequently settled in this area and have descendents, I presume, that you haven’t even met. Is that true, sir?

BS: Yes. They settled the little town of Olema, actually. There was no one in Olema but the Garcia family when they came. The Garcia home was right where the little community of Olema is now, a little adobe place. And the Winslows and the Nelsons and the Millers and the Hardmans settled right in the town itself. Winslow ran a store; Miller, who was a blacksmith; Nelson set up a stage line and hauled the stuff from Bolinas and supplies out to the lighthouse way out on Point Reyes. At that time Olema was the only town north of Bolinas until you got up to Tomales which was also a water-served town, served out of Tomales Bay. The two bays served as a supply area, Bolinas Bay with its little harbor and Tomales Bay served the entire area. While people brought goods into Tomales Bay and brought it all the way down the bay from its entrance to the town of Olema because in those days the bay came up to the town of Olema; the sloughs did.

CE: You mean -- We’re talking about Tomales Bay now?

BS: Tomales Bay.

CE: The sloughs and estuaries went way up to Olema?

BS: Yes, the sloughs and estuaries. The sloughs actually came all the way up to the town of Olema and directly west of the town across Olema Creek there is shown on the old maps a small body of water called Olema Lake. That was a big pond that provided a great deal of the food for the people that were here at the time because it was full of ducks and wild geese all year round.

CE: Well, we’re talking about a hundred years ago, over a hundred years ago, aren’t we? A hundred and twenty-five years ago?

BS: We’re talking of the 1860s and the condition of the country then. At that time Bolinas Bay had deep water, almost up to the Wilkins Ranch, to what is now a marsh land. Tomales Bay had deep water literally to the foot of the town where Tomales was built. And there was a wharf right where the county roads goes up into the town of Tomales today. It didn’t take too many years for the heavy stocking of the land with cattle and the farming that began to cause erosion enough to fill all those bays. They filled very, very rapidly and that is what happened to them.

CE: Well, then you had water traffic, either by schooner or whatever, from San Francisco to Tomales Bay and also Bolinas, and that was how the marketable goods were transported?

BS: Everything that they produced went out either from Tomales Bay or Bolinas and from here where the ranch is it went to Bolinas because there was regular boat service up to the town of Tomales. There wasn’t boat service down the length of the bay. That was only on special occasions when they were bringing in lumber on barges and things like that.

CE: Well, Mr. Stewart, you’re old enough to have remembered then the passenger boat. I presume that -- what’s it called? The Owl that used to have a two and a half or three hour run from San Francisco to Bolinas?

BS: The Owl ran regularly and hauled everything: butter, hogs, calves, cattle, into San Francisco from Bolinas.

CE: Did you ever make the run yourself?

BS: No, I never traveled on it myself. One of my schoolmates who grew up at Nicasio worked on the Owl. It was a cheap, efficient means of transportation and not only did it come into the wharf at Bolinas, it had served the ranches that lined the Bolinas Lagoon or Bay. And each ranch had a little dock. You can still see the remnants of the docks opposite some of the old ranch sites around there.

CE: I notice there’s a pier off the Audubon Ranch and that’s probably left from those days.

BS: That pier off the Audubon Ranch was one that was used to serve that ranch.

CE: Well, you know we’re interested in gathering history about the early water transportation in Marin County. For example, we have talked to people who were familiar with the Corte Madera Creek and the shallow drafted vessels that went up to Ross Landing, for example. And the Hay Scows. And Judge Martinelli recalls the Hay Scows coming up the San Rafael Canal. In fact, he worked as a young man off-loading hay and I had no awareness that hay was brought down from the Sacramento Valley to feed the horses in San Francisco that drew the horse carts and some if it came up here.

AK: Did you know that?

BS: Yes. And the area around San Rafael did a great deal of trucking, horse trucking, and they used a great number of horses and San Rafael was the center of all of eastern Marin ranches and business. And of course, you had a brickyard, had one brickyard down by the Corte Madera slough.

CE: Yes, I found out that McNears, the brickyard, was not the only brickyard by a long shot in Marin.

BS: And all of these places used a large number of horses and they couldn’t possibly raise enough hay in the area. They brought hay in in scows.

CE: Well that’s very interesting. Now, getting back to your property here, we’ve almost touched to where you acquired it. Now can you continue that story?

BS: Well, it was a complicated sort of thing. We originally arranged to buy the ranch in 1923 and it was rented at that time with a lease that ran until 1926. And we couldn’t move on it of course so we stayed at Nicasio. I was in college at the time. And in 1926 the tenant on the ranch left and we took it over. In 1927 we had -- I have to go back. In 1926 we also bought the business on the Bloom Ranch, which is the ranch that lies just north of this one.

CE: And is that ranch still in existence, sir?

BS: That ranch is still in existence. It was known as the Bloom Ranch for many, many years. A man named Bloom had moved onto it in the 1890s. We bought the business on it and rented the ranch on a long-term lease and then in 1927 my father got kicked by a horse and died two days later. He got kicked by a pet mare that I had ridden all the time I went to high school, a mare that was thirteen or fourteen years old or more at that time. She was turned loose in the yard and ran by him and lashed out and struck him in the temple. And I found myself promptly in the dairy business with many complications. We had the ranch at Nicasio that we were milking cows on and we were milking cows on the new business that we had bought just the year before, the Bloom Ranch, and we had the ranch where we now are vacant. We rented out the ranch where we now are.

CE: And how large in acreage is this ranch we’re talking about?

BS: The ranch where we are at that time had almost a thousand acres, just a little under. The depression came along shortly and I found myself in grave difficulties. I found myself faced with problems I really couldn’t solve. I couldn’t understand all the time why things had to get worse continually and it was quite an education. The net result was that we discontinued milking at Nicasio and we milked up at the Bloom Ranch for a few years, three or four years. Then we were able to sell the lease at the Bloom Ranch and in 1932 moved all of our dairy operations down onto this ranch where we are now and started to buy it all over again. I always think that you have a peculiar regard for a piece of property or any possession that you buy twice.

CE: A unique feeling

BS: It wasn’t very nice at the time. I look back at it and wonder if I would do it all over again but I guess I would.

CE: Stewart Ranch.

BS: I should tell you how we managed to survive when we started to buy the ranch all over again. I had been fortunate enough to marry a girl who was a good music teacher and she had a job and a car.

CE: Very important.

BS: She brought in the money that we lived on for a long time. We didn’t even have a car on the ranch. We had an old 1916 Ford truck that was really not too good. We continued dairying here, and had a pretty rough time during the depression years, as everyone did. Fortunately, the banks didn’t want ranches and Marin County has a most impressive record for stability. In west Marin during the depression itself there were no bankruptcies, a most remarkable thing. Some years later in the middle thirties, Federal Land Bank came into this country and wanted, because they were expanding their operations, and they tried to make loans and they found that they had no basis for making loans here because land here was higher-priced than the areas where they were making loans and yet the ranchers had uniformly survived and stayed on their ranches. Now it isn’t only because of the ranchers; the bankers were very, very tolerant. There are instances where ranches would have going broke if the bank hadn’t extended and then extended again credit to them. They were sure that the stability of this dairy industry was such that they would pay out and it did on all of them. I could tell you a story but I won’t take your time about an occurrence in the Bank of America where a manager had to go bring a client back who thought he was broke because old A.P. Gianinni said, “If he’s not back on the ranch, you lose your job.”

CE: Oh, very good, very good.

BS: That really happened, by the way.

CE: Well, did you continue the ranch up to the present time with the dairy efforts or did you diversify in any way, Mr. Stewart?

BS: We continued dairying here and we bought some additional land so that we had approximately two thousand acres of land. Bought the land in part because we wanted pasture, although it wasn’t very good pasture. But the main reason for buying it, the chief reason was that it had a lot of water on it and we needed the water. We had operated a manufacturing milk dairy all of my life up until the mid ‘30s when we became a market milk dairy. We had mechanized in 1928. ’27 and ’28, we began to use milking machines instead of hand-milking and then in the mid ‘30s we put in refrigeration, better mechanical equipment, and we began to sell market milk, milk for fluid consumption into San Francisco.

CE: How many cows do you have on your ranch, at present, involved in this?

BS: Well, when the -- There are two kinds of dairy ranching involved here. When I said we ran a manufacturing milk dairy and that’s what I grew up on, you ran the number of cows at the ranch itself would support.

CE: I see.

BS: When we went into the market milk business, we milked in common with everyone else. We milked more cows than we had on the manufacturing milk dairy. We milked the cows uniformly, that is, a uniform number of cows, so we would have uniform production all year round, whereas on the manufacturing milk dairy all the cows freshened in the fall and you milked them in the fall and winter, in the spring, and then they were all dry, not producing, in the summer months. So it was a major change in the same type of industry and we continued to run a grade A dairy here for a good many years. We had Jersey cows; we had them always. Matter of fact, my father had bought stock that came from Mailliard family in San Geronimo during the time that I can remember and we always had very good Jersey. And eventually when the girls took the dairy over, my daughter and her partner started to operate the dairy quite a number of years ago; they changed over to a purebred herd. We continued operating this dairy. They did because they were running it then, continued operating it as a dairy until 1970 or ’71 and at that time they were milking 250 purebred Jerseys. But labor was becoming a serious problem. It had gotten to the point that if you wished to get cows milked you had to hire wetback labor and they didn’t choose to do that so they sold the dairy, sold the purebred cattle to two other purebred cattle breeders in the Sacramento Valley where the herd is still -- Both herds are still maintained and they went into the beef business exclusively. For a good many years, oh, some thirty or thirty-five, we had been running a number of beef cattle on additional land. We had rented outside pasture and eventually we brought another ranch that was just for beef cattle and dry dairy cattle. And at the present time they have about 500 head of beef cattle.

CE: Tell me, Mr. Stewart, you raised this daughter and sent her to Dominican. How did she get involved in this ranch business? Was that of something you suggested?

BS: Well, there are several reasons why JoAnn got involved in the ranch business. They’re no different than the reasons a lot of parents have for getting their children involved in their business. The only thing we had to give JoAnn was a ranch. We didn’t have any free money, we never had. Any money we could ever get our hands on we put into land. And land is a thing that has to be used; it has to be managed. And it’s very disconcerting to spend a good many years of very hard work acquiring land and then think that the day you quit operating it yourself it’s going to somebody else. And JoAnn liked ranching. She was interested by it, but whether she had liked it or not we would have insisted that she know how to take care of the land and manage the business because it’s just too common to see business lose a great portion of their value because the children have no idea how to preserve them. Even if they want to dispose of them, they let them go to pieces before they do. And that was a feeling we had, but JoAnn liked ranching; she liked horses and liked to ride. Of course, it’s pretty easy to get girls interested in riding nowadays, in ranching nowadays; just let them start riding horses. And this has happened many places not only here.

CE: And what year about are we talking about now, 1950?

BS: Well, when JoAnn got out of -- After she went to Dominican she went up to Davis for two years and came back here and that’s when she started running the ranch and shortly thereafter her friend Pat Swift, whom she had met there, joined her in operating the ranch and they have operated it ever since. For a good many years now the cattle have been owned by them because they were operating it. They were changing the herd. They developed the purebred herd, something that I had never done. I had not had any purebred cows. We always bought very fine purebred bulls but we never had purebred cows. My wife and I had been content to operate as a grade dairy. The girls, as a matter of principle and pride, wanted to have purebred cattle so they took it over entirely and ran it.

CE: Tell me, Mr. Stewart, in the 1960s when the Point Reyes National Seashore was being resolved and then years later in ’72 when the Golden Gate National Recreation Area came into being, how did this directly affect your ranch.

BS: Well, that question can’t be answered simply. In the first place, for many years, in common with other members and directors of the Marin Conservation League, we had been trying to get a park made out of west Marin, particularly the Point Reyes Peninsula, the area from Bolinas up to and including Pierce Point along Tomales Bay. When it did happen, then, the first thing in Point Reyes National Seashore, the land that we had bought to add to the ranch lay within the boundaries of the seashore and that was sold first. Then, recently, with the development of the idea that they and -- The legislation that was passed to set-up the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the rest of the ranch, including the house and all of the pasture lands was purchased by the Federal Government. We have in common with anybody who sells land to a National Park Service -- We have the right to keep our home during our lifetime. Actually, that retention of the home, the tenancy of the home, it will be for JoAnn’s lifetime, past Joseffa and myself. The pasture land was leased back to us on a long-term lease. So we will continue to operate here as long as the girls are interested in running the ranch and we’ll continue to live here.

CE: Mrs. Kent is with us today. Anne, do you have – Are you aware of any property in your area, around Stinson or Bolinas Lagoon that’s similarly affected by this Golden Gate National Recreation Area?

AK: No, no. I just don’t know a thing about it.

CE: I see. Just up this Olema Valley and over to the – touching on the Point Reyes National Seashore –

BS: The boundaries of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area are rather simple to describe. The most northerly boundary is the Sir Francis Drake Highway where it crosses from Olema over to the Lagunitas Canyon and then the boundary goes down the canyon including the portion of Taylor Park that is on the west side of the highway and it would include the Water District land that is on the west side of the highway and it runs along the foot of Mount Tamalpais, above Stinson Beach and then includes the area where the Tamalpais State Parks are, and goes around Muir Beach, which it leaves there, and then takes the land at Green Gulch and Tennessee Valley and down to the area, the old Sausalito Land and Cattle Company’s land that is now called Marincello. The boundaries in the Olema Valley is one that is common now with the Point Reyes National Seashore until you get down to Dogtown.

CE: Where is Dogtown? Because that appears in all of the old writings of early Marin. Does it have – Is there a spot in the road, a stake or something?

BS: Yes. Well, there’s no name there anymore. I don’t know why; for several years there was. It’s a little north of Bolinas right on Highway 1 and it was a settlement where they had saw mills many, many years ago. By that I mean the 1870s.

CE: Is it halfway between where your ranch is and Bolinas?

BS: No, it’s about two miles from the – probably not more than a mile and a half from the northerly end of Bolinas Lagoon on Highway 1. There’s a little settlement there and that was the home of the Briones Family. The Briones Family owned all of the land around where Bolinas is and on north into the Point Reyes National Seashore. They and the Garcias owned all of the land in this general area of West Marin.

CE: I see. Do either of these families – Were they recipients of original Mexican land grants, or did they get the property from somebody else?

BS: They had Mexican Land Grants. Garcia and Briones were both in the Mexican Army and were in the little force that was stationed in San Francisco.

CE: At the Presidio, sir?

BS: Yes, at the Presidio. And incidentally, there is a Rose Briones alive who would be the granddaughter of the Briones Family, and she has a little house down where the Dogtown Schoolhouse used to be.

CE: Mrs. Kent, we should try to contact Rose Briones. She is the granddaughter?

BS: She is a granddaughter. She is quite elderly.

CE: Do you think we can find this place?

BS: Joseffa would find her for you.

CE: Very good.

BS: One day in the early ‘30s a gentleman showed up at the door of the house and asked if he could see the house. And Joseffa, of course, is always delighted to have anyone look at the old house and she said, “Of course.” And he came in, didn’t introduce himself, didn’t identify himself, and went all through the house, went up the front stairs to the upstairs section and came down the narrow back stairs, turned to Joseffa, and said, “It’s just the way it was when Father built it.” He was the six-year-old boy who moved in here with his father in 1856 and he had left here--

CE: I thought the home was built in 1864.

BS: He moved on the ranch in 1856. When he was six years old they came here. And they moved into the old squatters cabin that I had mentioned and then he was here when they built the house and he was the kid that ran around and picked up the tools and he buried the thumb of the man who chopped it off with a hatchet, in a little shoe box. And he left here with his father and his brother Stanley before the railroad was built. And they left a married sister who had married a man named George Mason on the ranch and subsequently Mason acquired full possession of the ranch. The old folks, the grandparents, the father and mother of Horatio Olds -- The mother had died and the father, who was still alive, went away with them. And he had made one visit back here to see his sister in 1895 and he got off of the train over at what is now Camp Taylor and walked over the top of the ridge and down to the ranch to see his sister and that was the only time he had been here until he came back in the ‘30s. So he had very, very sharp recollection of the ranch. And from that time on, because Joseffa was fascinated by him, tall, very tall, handsome man with a close, clipped, white beard, just as erect as could be, and she invited him to come and visit us and every year until he died at the age of 95 he came up and spent ten days with us.

CE: How wonderful.

BS: And that’s how we acquired some knowledge of things that had happened in this community in the 1860s and up to the time he left in 1870.

CE: Well, tell me, Mr. Stewart, for a house that’s 110 years old, did you contribute largely to its restoration?

BS: We didn’t restore it. We have remodeled the inside, the kitchen area inside. And my wife, who is like a lot of other women, likes wide doorways, widened one doorway between the two living rooms but the house is the same as it was then. And there’s an old picture here hanging on the wall in the living room that is a steel engraving that a man made around 1871, ’69, something like that, of the place. And the picture shows the house looking the way it does now. It was built out of redwood. The foundation at that time was hand-hewn redwood timbers. The beams on which the house is constructed above the foundation were hand-hewn redwood and all of the studs, walls, and the outside of it is redwood and it’s as good now as it was then. We did put in a cement foundation. We took out the old mud sills, as they called them, and put in the cement foundation. And the house had a tremendous earthquake occur to it in 1868 and old Mr. Olds said, “It didn’t hurt the house at all but it did crack the top of the chimney.” And they moved the fireplace which at that time was in the center of the house to an outside wall where it is now.

CE: Well, lumber was a big industry in this whole area, was it not, Mr. Stewart, around the 1850s?

BS: At that time when the Olds Family was here, there were no saw mills and there was no lumber industry here. The lumber that they built the house from was sawn by the Joy Mill up above Occidental and brought down by boat, pulled into Tomales Bay as far as they could go with their boat and then using a small, flat boat they moved it up to the town of Olema and then hauled it down by oxen from Olema to here.

CE: Was this to supply the city of San Francisco with firewood, construction wood, or do you know, sir?

BS: No. The city of San Francisco bought a great deal of lumber from down around Bolinas. They didn’t get any from right in here. They didn’t get any from out of the Lagunitas Canyon. The lumber here that was sawn later by the Shafters out of an area called Five Brooks that we owned and was used to built the barns on the Shafter Ranches after they had obtained the land.

CE: Tell us, Mr. Stewart, if you will, a little bit about the Morgan horses on your property.

BS: We raise Morgan horses here, the girls do. They own some very fine pure-blooded registered Morgan horses. But they always had Morgan horses on this ranch and Morgan horses where I grew up in Nicasio. The Olds Family had some Morgan horses that were imported from the east and they had a Morgan stallion. The Mailliard Family, where we bought Callo from, had a fairly good-sized Morgan horse farm. They had a number of blooded mares and they brought stallions by boat around the Horn from the east. Mailliard had enough money so he could do that. Other people had to walk them across the plains. But we always used Morgan horses. They weren’t registered and many years ago there were stallions that traveled around the country. The man who owned them would drive them around with a cart and if he had to he’d ride one and lead the other and that was the stud service that the ranchers had. Very few ranchers kept stallions because it was too much of a task and they didn’t want to feed them and they couldn’t work them with their other horses. And all of the horses, of course, that they had, many years ago that they had when I was a boy, were dual-purpose horses, generally. You used them on the road for teaming, team trucking. You used them in the buggies or spring wagons and carts. But we didn’t use many buggies in this country; the roads were too poor. There were some specialized, light, rather light-riding horses that people just used for cattle horses but they rode their work horses, their light work horses, all the time.

CE: Well, Mr. Stewart, this has been a fascinating morning that you have shared with us. We’ve been here over two hours, Mrs. Kent. I think we should allow them to make a break for lunch. We have one hour of solid reminiscences from this gentleman.

AK: Ray Strong is their friend --

CE: Well, we can’t get to everything today, but I do want to -- It’s been a pleasure today to talk with Mr. Stewart and to meet his lovely wife, Joseffa, and his daughter JoAnn Wisby, who, we understand, with her friend Pat Swift, is carrying on the family tradition here at the ranch. I hope sometime at your convenience we may come again if we make and appointment and hear some of the anecdotes of this area and perhaps involve Mrs. Stewart in some of her reminiscences. Until then, we thank you so much and we’ll leave you to have your lunch and I know it’s a little overdue.