End of Side A

CE: You mentioned something about your sisters. What did they go into?

NM: They went into teaching. My sister-in-law --

CE: Sister-in-law?

NM: Yes. I had two sister-in-laws that were teachers. And at one time --

CE: Do you know their names?

NM: Mary and Flora, Flora Hawkins and Mary McIsaac. They were both teachers and they both taught school in Sausalito. Flora taught in Pacheco School for a while but most of the time, as I recall, they both taught just in Sausalito.

CE: Did you know any of the Pacheco descendents?

NM: Oh, Pachescos. Oly Pacheco lived with me for seven years.

CE: Tell us about that.

NM: She was a teacher too, lived in San Rafael.

CE: What was her name?

NM: Olivia, we called her Oly. She lived with us I think seven years, a long time, she taught school there at Pacheco and finally --

CE: Is she Gumosindo’s daughter?

NM: Huh?

CE: Was she Gumesindo Pacheco’s daughter?

NM: Yes, yes. She lived with us for a long time and from there she took a school down the valley somewhere. I don’t remember just where it was, but after she’d been there that length of time she figured she ought to go someplace else, so she was down there for a couple of years.

CE: Tell us, Nellie, some of your classmates. See if you can recall some of your classmates.

NM: I can remember, yes, the girls that I graduated with, Bertha and Edna Stedman, and their father was, I guess, a wood chopper down in the canyon, down between Camp Taylor and Lagunitas. And then Olympia Mazza was our rancher’s neighbor. So the four of us graduated from the grammar school together, the two Stedman girls and --

CE: Anybody else from that school you remember?

NM: Oh, I remember all of them, I guess.

CE: Well, give us some of those names.

NM: Oh, Steadman and Mazza and, oh what else were there? Oh, I’d have to think, you know.

CE: Do you remember any of the Boyd Stewart family?

NM: Yes, they lived on a ranch right downtown. I never went to school with Boyd, though; he was a lot younger than I.

CE: When you say downtown, what do you mean, dear?

NM: Well, near Nicasio, they had a ranch right off, just within a quarter of a mile within the town of Nicasio and he went to school there at Nicasio but I never went to the school in Nicasio. I -- The only school that I ever went to was to Tocoloma School. They called it Tocoloma but it was really at Jewell’s, a mile below Tocoloma. So that was it; that’s the only school I ever went to.

CE: Tell me, did your mother teach you, on the ranch, all of the things that later one uses as a mother and wife? For instance, did she teach you how to cook, how to sew, how to mend?

NM: Oh, and what I want you to know is that both my father and mother had teacher’s credentials. My father taught school in Switzerland for two years and my mother had just graduated and had her teacher’s credentials when my father went back. He had to do military duty, you know, in those days. He made a special trip back there.

CE: Well, it was fortunate he met your mother.

NM: He met my mother there and married her.

CE: So they both were qualified teachers?

NM: Yes, both of them. My mother had never actually taught; my father had actually taught two years but my mother had her teaching credentials when she married him and came to this country.

CE: What language did he speak?

NM: He spoke Swiss.

CE: Italian, French, or German Swiss?

NM: Italian.

CE: Italian Swiss.

NM: You see, they bordered Switzerland on the Italian side.

CE: That’s the area they came from. So they taught you how to --

NM: My mother could read English just like I could. She’d get interested in a book and she’d forget, you know, what she was doing, just read.

AK: That’s wonderful.

CE: Did she teach you how to cook?

NM: Oh, I don’t know if she taught me or I automatically picked it up.

CE: And to sew?

NM: Our food was very simple in those days.

AK: Were the Chedas Swiss people, too?

NM: The Chedas? I don’t ever remember the Chedas ever living on their ranch; they may have sometime before my memory.

CE: Were they from Switzerland also, do you know?

NM: Oh yes, oh yes, I know that. But I can’t remember their living there. I know they did but I doubt very much if they ever went to the Tocoloma School. I think the school itself was built before the Chedas left and moved into San Rafael. I think that. I think none of the Chedas went to the Tocoloma, what we called the Tocoloma School. That’s the name the school went by.

AK: I was thinking, too, about the hospitals. Was Dr. Hund’s hospital the only one, or -- Where was the hospital?
HM: Dr. Hund was in San Rafael. You’d have to look for the records; either San Rafael or San Anselmo. He never was out our way. We had him come, yes. I don’t know if we ever had Dr. Hund come but we had Dr. Jones and Dr. Sawyer come out at different times from San Rafael when we needed somebody, before there was a doctor in Point Reyes. A long way to come.

CE: Tell me, Nellie, did you ever know any of the Mailliard family?

NM: I never -- Not personally.

CE: There were still some Mailliards on the San Geronimo Rancho though.

NM: See that was too far; the horse and buggy days you didn’t get around the way you do now with an automobile.

AK: A long way, that’s right.

NM: I knew of them, yes, but I couldn’t say that I can remember meeting them personally; I can’t remember that.

CE: Other than his Masonry work, did your father ever go into any community efforts? Did he ever consider running for supervisor?

NM: No, I don’t think so.

CE: There were some West Marin families who made that contribution: Marshall, for example.

NM: Oh, he probably helped out, yes. He was always very much interested in politics, but not for going in for himself. I have no memory of it, anyway, that he ever ran for anything excepting school trustee. He was trustee of the school for --

CE: Well, that’s a community endeavor.

NM: He was trustee of the school there for many, many years. He signed the old -- I don’t know but what I still have or they have over at the ranch, the old, what would you call it? The registry, you know where they made out the checks for the new teachers.

CE: Where would you go to church?

NM: Well, we didn’t go, period.

CE: Was your family Catholic?

NM: Yes.

CE: Where would be the closest church, in Nicasio?

NM: I think so.

CE: Probably.

NM: I’m just trying to think. I think I was baptized in the Nicasio. See that Nicasio Church is a very old church and I have a hazy memory of the Olema Church being built, just a hazy memory.

CE: At Olema. You perhaps remember the old hotel at Olema, do you?

NM: Oh, yes. Well, the old hotel is still there, isn’t it?

CE: Well, they’re trying to restore it. It’s kind of in wrack and ruin but -- Do you remember who owned it then?

NM: Nelsons owned it.

CE: Nelsons.

NM: Nelson owned it and they used to run a stage from Olema to Tocoloma.

CE: They’d meet the train.

NM: Passengers that came up, you know, for the hotel. And bring the -- And the mail would be thrown off there at Tocoloma and taken over to Olema at the post office over there.

CE: Today we think of these hotels as being rather close together with the rapid communications today, but in those days they weren’t too competitive, were they?

NM: No. Although I can remember the Tocoloma Hotel just being packed. I don’t remember how people got up there.

CE: Do you remember who owned the hotel?

NM: Bertrand built the Tocoloma Hotel, I can remember that.

CE: Bertrand. What does the name Tocoloma mean to you?

NM: Well, to me I always say its “touching the earth.” Toco in Swiss would mean touch and loma would be soil, so I always figured that Tocoloma means touching the soil.

CE: I like your definition.

NM: That was my version of Tocoloma, that it meant “touching soil.”

CE: Well, there are so many Indian derivations, but I like your definition.

NM: Well, to me, I always felt that way, that toco in Swiss would mean touch and loma would be soil. More than that, I couldn’t tell you.

CE: Would you describe your mother for us? Do you resemble her?

NM: Oh yes. Just a hard working person, that’s all.

CE: Did either of your parents ever have the opportunity to return to Switzerland for a visit?

NM: Yes, they went back the year of the epidemic.

CE: The flu epidemic here?

AK: Polio?

NM: They had -- What? It wasn’t polio; they gave it another name. But anyway, they went back expecting to stay three months. When they left our place, they expected to stay three months and they stayed three weeks; they were afraid of the epidemic. It took them a week to get there and in a weeks’ time they saw all their relations and then they came home. They were just afraid of contracting --

CE: The epidemic was there?

NM: Yes, oh yes. Of course they didn’t know when they left that it was there or they wouldn’t have started out.

CE: How would you communicate in those early days of your marriage with San Rafael or the county seats or the major cities around? Did you have a --

NM: Horse and wagon.

CE: I mean was there a newspaper?

NM: There was mail, yes.

CE: There was a newspaper from San Rafael that came out, Marin Journal.

NM: I don’t remember how it ever got there, but we got it at Nicasio. When I lived over at Nicasio we got it at the post office at Nicasio. And at Tocoloma, why my memory of it many years ago was that when the train went through there they would just throw papers off, you know. On the train they would have kind of a -- - What would they call it? The post office? And when you’d get to the different towns you’d throw the mail.

CE: That’s right, they would be sorting it while they were traveling.

NM: And if you wanted to mail a letter, you’d have to be over there and throw it onto, you know. Either that or go over to Olema or Point Reyes. I don’t remember where else you’d have to go. But I know that I used to go over there and when the train would stop just throw the letters, mail, in.

CE: Very good.

NM: That’s my memory of it. So, those were supposedly good old days, huh?

CE: Well don’t you think they were?

NM: Oh, I think they were. Oh, my yes. I think they were happier days then now.

CE: The simple life.

NM: You appreciated little things in those days, don’t you think? And they were little.

CE: Well I think that’s inherent in the Swiss nature, too. They know what it is to live simply.

NM: My father and mother made one trip back to Europe together after they were married and that was the year of the epidemic.

CE: Over there, yes. I imagine they were glad to come home.

NM: Oh, they were afraid to do anything different. They got over there and they were planning to stay for three months. And it took them a week to get there and they stayed a week and saw all the relations and they beat it right home. They were just afraid of contracting the illness.

CE: Now tell me, Nellie, when your children were born, and you said they were born in the hospital, in San Rafael?

NM: The first baby that I had was born at the ranch.

CE: But the other two children were born in San Rafael?

NM: Yes.

CE: And then they lived on your ranch?

NM: No, I take it back; my first baby was born in Berkeley.

CE: Berkeley.

NM: I had a friend over there who was a doctor.

CE: What was her name?

NM: A girl that -- They were family friends and this girl was a doctor and who took care of me but I lost my baby, my first baby.

CE: Well, that’s an unusual thing for a woman doctor then. Mrs. Stewart’s mother was a doctor. Do you recall this doctor’s name?

NM: Oh, yes. Perroni, Dr. Perroni. She’s gone now. She’s Dr. Mead now. That is her last name; she married a doctor, but she was Dr. Perroni in those days.

CE: Well then, when you had your other two children, they were born in a hospital where? In San Rafael?

NM: Wait. I’m just trying to think where they were born. One of them was born right there at the ranch. I’d had a bad time with my first baby and I sent for Dr. Cavanagh and my father was ill at the time and Dr. Cavanagh, I used to come and see him about every once a week or something like that. And I considered him just a family friend, but when he came, why, he said, “Nell you can’t go you‘ll have the baby on the way.” And every pain I had I‘d think, “Oh, if I can only get out of here. If I can only get out of here.” “But Nell, you can’t go, you can’t go. You’ll have that baby on the way.” After two days of having the baby on the way, why, I said, “I’m afraid I’m gong to lose this baby, too. It will be just like the first one.” By then the nurse I had hired arrived and they went out in the kitchen and got the big pan and put the instruments in that and boiled them up, sterilized them, and then went to town. You could have heard me down at the Crossroads, I think, when that baby was born.

CE: Is this David?

NM: Donald, yes.

CE: Well now, the children then stayed on the ranch, and when did they go to school? Where did they go? By that time they had the other school.

NM: There was a school down there at Jewells. You know where the Jewell place is? There was a school right there and that’s where they had their education.

CE: Then did they go, on to high school?

NM: Then they went to San Rafael. I think that -- We had our own horse and cart and they drove that way to San Rafael. But both of them graduated from San Rafael High School, both of them.

CE: And do you remember any of their teachers? Did you ever hear them mention an Eleanor Murray?

NM: No, no. Well I had -- I knew the Murray girls but that’s so long ago that I couldn’t speak for them. I was very fond of Kate Murray. Kate Murray had a case -- My brother-in-law had a case on her. Eventually he lost his wife and they were very friendly for a while, he and Kate. But her sister didn’t like her to -- But nothing ever came of it.

CE: Nellie, did you ever have time -- I know being a rancher’s wife is a demanding thing, but did you ever have time to join any women’s organizations or affiliations?

NM: I joined the Druids in Olema there; that’s about the only one that I ever joined.

CE: Now that’s the building that’s still standing.

NM: I’m just trying to think if I ever joined some of them in San Rafael, but I don’t think I did. It doesn’t stand out, anyhow, whether I did or I didn’t. But I did join the Druids over there in Olema.

CE: What do the Druids do? Or is that secret information?

NM: What’s that?

CE: What do the Druids do? Or is that secret information?

NM: Oh, that’s nothing very much; it was just a happy get-together. That’s about all it was for us. Periodically we’d have a dance or we’d have a lunch.

CE: Social.

NM: That’s about all we ever did; we never did anything. They had the meetings, the State meetings, of course, the Druids would somewhere but I never went to any of them.

CE: Tell me, Nellie, did you ever get over the hill and go down to Bolinas, by the seashore?

NM: No, not the real -- Once in a while. That was a buggy ride, you know. There wasn’t really any special attraction at Bolinas for us.

CE: You didn’t want to escape the heat and get over near the water?

NM: No. No I never did anything there. To me, it was, when the trains came in there, why, getting on that train, going in to San Francisco and staying a couple of days, that was a treat, really a treat. I had friends in San Francisco and --

CE: Would you ever go in and go to the theater?

NM: Do what? Oh yes, go to the shows or something like that that was for doing.

CE: Did you attend the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition?

NM: Oh my, yes. That was an event; we couldn’t miss that.

CE: Did you stay overnight at the Inside Inn ever?

NM: Oh I don’t remember where we stayed. No, I have an idea we just stayed with friends. My father had planned to go. We had a nurse with my father. He was bedridden for pretty near three years and she had planned on taking him to the fair. I don’t know how she was going to do it. I never did find out, but anyway he died the day the fair was opened so he never got to it. But nevertheless, why, the plans were that she was going to take him to the fair and how she was going to do it, as I say, I don’t quite know. But she was a wonderful nurse.

CE: Tell me, Nellie, did you fell any of the repercussions of the earthquake in that morning in 1906?

NM: It was quite a sensation, believe you me. And still, you know, the funny part that I never could understand -- It was a two-story house, and my mother and I were on the upper floor and my younger brother, who was only six or seven years old at the time, had a room up there and the two of us jumped right out of bed and met right out in the hallway and the both of us had one mind in that boy in our mind, in getting over to him. But, the funny part of it, and I can’t understand yet, you’d think that the upper part of that house would have been demolished, but it wasn’t. It was the lower floor. The plaster all had to be replaced. Four rooms downstairs, the plaster had to all be replaced.

CE: Did it scare the cattle?

NM: Oh, I suppose it did. They stampeded.

CE: Did you lose any livestock?

NM: I don’t think so. I don’t think we did.

AK: But you all ran out of the house? Outside? Or what did you do?

NM: Well, I don’t remember that. I just laid in bed until it was all over with. I just shivered. I didn’t know what it was all about. But that afternoon, I had a friend, Maureen Olson, was staying with me that night and they had been on a ranch out at the Point and were leaving; they were going up the valley somewhere, and they had relations, the Vonsens, on the other side of Red Hill and the father and mother were over with them and Marie stayed with me and she just fretted about them so in the afternoon my father just simply hitched up the wagon and took her over to her mother because she was so worried about them not knowing what had happened.

CE: Had you heard the story of the cow that was lost in the crack?

NM: Oh yes, the crack. I’ve seen that cow afterwards with the tail hanging out.

CE: You have actually seen it?

NM: Yes, oh yes. You could just see the --

CE: Well, we interviewed Oscar Shafter’s granddaughter, Mrs. Christ, and she went over couple of days after the quake and saw it.

NM: I never went right over to the cow but on the road going by you could see part, you know, part of her back and the tail sticking out.

CE: So it is a true story?

NM: Oh yes, it is that, oh yes.

CE: Nellie, in concluding, if you would be good enough to kind of describe a typical day on the ranch. After you were married and had your babies, when did you get up, for instance?

NM: Oh, around six o’clock in the morning and had breakfast with the boys when they came in after doing their milking jobs.

CE: They’d been up for a couple of hours or more, three o’clock?

NM: No, around four o’clock in the morning they’d get up.

CE: They’d have a couple of hundred head of cattle to do?

NM: Oh, the McIsaac Ranch was great for hunters. They had friends in San Francisco, you know, periodically that came out and stayed a couple of days.

CE: You misunderstood me; did you have a couple of hundred head of cattle to milk?

NM: Oh, a couple hundred, no. If we had a hundred, it was a lot.

CE: Then the men would come in, you’d cook them a breakfast and I imagine it was be huge. What would you fix?

NM: Well, some mornings it would be hotcakes; some mornings it would be sausage, sometimes just ham and eggs.

CE: How many men would you feed?

NM: Well, I had my brother-in-law living with me for thirty years, and I had him and usually two others in help.

CE: And your husband, of course.

NM: Yes, my husband, yes. I had four to cook for.

CE: Then after breakfast, would they attend to other chores outside?

NM: Yes, they had a lot of plowing and one thing or another. They had no tractors or anything in those days; it was all following the plow, you know, plow the land and plant.

CE: What was your stove like?

NM: My stove? An ordinary wood stove.

CE: And who’d would cut the wood?

NM: Well, my husband had to.

CE: And he always had it going for you. Did he fire it up in the morning?

NM: Well, sometimes yes and sometimes no. After all, he was up a couple of hours before I was and if he had done it then the fire would have been out. So, usually, why, we’d lay the fire, you know, the wood and everything in the stove, when we went to bed at night so all I had to do was fire a match in the morning.

CE: Did you have kerosene or gas light?

NM: Eventually we had gas.

CE: Electricity, yes. Are we talking about kerosene lanterns at that time in your life?

NM: Oh, yes. I had to go back to lamps. You know, at the Tocoloma Ranch my father was very progressive and he had an acetylene plant, his own acetylene plant, and the whole place was lit up, the barns and the dairy and the house and everything. Acetylene lights upstairs and downstairs in the house and --

CE: It must have been a showplace.

NM: Oh, it was a showplace. I had more than one person speak of it as a showplace. He was -- Everything had to be just so. The fences had to be so. When he built a fence, he had a marker. The pickets had to go down to a certain distance and they were just so far apart from one another. I can remember my father building those fences, how they just had be so --

CE: Well, the Swiss are very much perfectionists.

NM: Oh, I know but he was exceptional.

CE: I bet everything was whitewashed frequently.

NM: Oh yes, every year everything had to be whitewashed, every year.

CE: Tell me, did your mother and you have a little vegetable garden?

NM: Oh, we had quite a vegetable garden and I had a beautiful flower garden. Oh yes, my father’s place was a showplace there, it really was.

CE: Is it still going, your father’s place?

NM: Oh yes, the house is still there but it’s very different to what it was in those days.

CE: Who owns it presently, do you know?

NM: I think it’s in my son’s name. As I recall, I’ve turned everything that -- Eventually was mine, eventually, because my brothers all died and when they died they left their interests to me, but a number of years ago I turned everything over to my son because I felt that I wasn’t going to live forever and I knew what we had had to give the government. You know what that means, and I wasn’t going to have them go through it again. So I have nothing in my name now. Even the little house that I have been living in. Hartzel built that house a number of years ago and it was sold and eventually Dee and I moved into it, and first we paid rent and eventually we bought it. So even that now is in the boys’ name, I have nothing, just nothing.

CE: You seem kind of happy about that.

AK: It’s a very smart way to do.

NM: I think so. I feel this way about it: my boys are always going to take care of me.

CE: Of course they will.

NM: They’re not going to let me want for anything. I know what I had to do when my husband died, what I had to pay the government, you know, and I just can’t see any sense to it. You work all your life accumulating something and then have to turn it over to the government; that’s all tommy rotten. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in my name now.

CE: Nellie, in closing now and in retrospect, you had a happy, full life, didn’t you, out in West Marin?

NM: I should say so.

CE: Is there anything different you would have done about your life?

NM: Oh, I suppose there were. I suppose so.

CE: But don’t you feel you led a very rich life?

NM: I had a very happy life as long as my husband was alive but since then it, you know --

CE: It’s been lonesome.

NM: It has been lonesome.

CE: Well, Nellie, we want to thank you, Mrs. Kent and I, for letting us come and talk with you today.

NM: Well, I certainly have talked. I don’t know if I’ve told you anything that was worth listening to.

CE: It’s been a pleasure and we are, feel privileged to have chatted with Mrs. Nellie McIsaac today, and we will leave her now in Novato and maybe we can come and see you again.