After my last post about Hichijiro Ito, Tomiye Mizutani and their family apple farm in Forestville, California, my dad and one of our former neighbors reminded me that our properties used to be part of a chicken farm before they were divided into smaller parcels in the 1960s for individual homeowners.
That sparked another wave of research, and I discovered who lived in our house and ran that chicken ranch: Malcolm Melville (no idea if he’s related to Herman) and his wife, Mary Vargas.
Malcolm and Mary purchased the land from Minnie Lehn Winkler in October 1944 (we’ll get to her in a future post!). At the time, the land was an apple ranch, according to a family history book titled “The Spilman Papers,” which makes sense, considering that much of the town was apple orchards and there was a fruit-drying operation down the street. They converted the land to a chicken farm in 1949, selling the eggs for “table use,” or home cooking, the history book says.
On the other hand, the previous owners placed a help-wanted ad as early as 1919, saying they were looking for a husband and wife team to run a chicken farm, so it’s hard to say for sure when it converted from one to the other.
Let’s go back to the beginning.
Malcolm Leslie Melville was born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 18, 1897, to James Melville and Nannie Spilman. He grew up in nearby Wilmette, attended New Trier Township High School and, in 1916, went to Clark College in Worcester, Mass. In 1917 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served in WWI, becoming a radioman. After the war, he worked as an assistant radioman at Pearl Harbor, then took a job in 1925 with the Associated Oil Company. They brought him to their San Francisco office, where he served as an accountant for almost 20 years.
His first marriage was to Irene Neff of Nebraska, in 1920; their son, Malcolm Jr., was born in 1921 or 1922. The marriage was brief, and Irene and their son stayed behind in Illinois when Malcolm moved out to California, where he married Katherine Lovejoy Morgan in 1927. But they split up, too, and Malcolm married Mary Vargas on September 26, 1939.
They were married at A'ts'ina/Inscription Rock in Morro, New Mexico, under the pines in a “simple but impressive ceremony” followed by “a supper in the Custodian’s cabin.”
Mary was born April 29, 1901, in Brooklyn, a former town in Alameda County, California, that was later annexed to Oakland. Her parents were Joseph Vargas and Rose Victorino, both of whom were born in the Azores. Malcolm was her first husband and, as he worked as an accountant in San Francisco, she worked as a typist. They lived with Mary’s dad in San Leandro.
It’s not clear what prompted them to leave the big city and gamble on an apple farm in Forestville, but in 1944, Malcolm was 47 and Mary was 44; maybe they felt it was time to get out of the corporate world. As the chicken business spun up and WWII ended, they hired local Japanese-Americans and trained them to raise chickens, gather eggs and handle other aspects of the business.
One of those workers was Michiko Kameshima, who later became known as Betty Carr; she later founded Forestville’s Carr’s Drive-In with her husband Henry and, later still, Mom’s Apple Pie. She recently died, on May 19, 2026, at the age of 95. You can read her obituary here.
Betty (Michiko) Carr with a Gravenstein apple, courtesy of the Mom’s Apple Pie Instagram page.
In the early years at least, it seems like business was good. In 1947, a local newspaper reported, “Mr. and Mrs. Melville have been remodeling their home on Covey Road, which is now considered one of the attractive homes in Forestville.”
A few years later, in April 1952, they had a scare when Malcolm was burning brush in the yard and a cinder floated up to the roof, sparking a small fire. A newspaper reported, “Very little damage was done and all was covered by insurance. Mr. Melville had the fire under control by the time the firemen arrived, but commended the boys on their speedy answer to his call. He feels that much more damage would have been done if he had not discovered the blaze in its infancy.”
Malcolm and Mary’s work with Japanese Americans led the Japanese government to invite them to the country to travel around the islands and speak to farmers about the poultry business. They went twice, in 1956 and 1962, for a few months at a time.
It appears business took a turn for the worse in the mid-1950s; records show that Malcom and Mary remortgaged their property in 1955, 1957, 1959 and 1961. They formally retired from the chicken business in 1960 and sold the land to Katherine Murdock in 1963, when Malcolm was 66 and Mary was 63. Murdock was the one to subdivide the land, leading to a number of new homes built around theirs/ours in the 1960s and ‘70s.
The couple retired to Medford, Oregon, where Malcom died in 1972 at 75, and Mary died in 1990 at 89. They’re buried together in Siskiyou Memorial Park.
When we moved into the house, in early 1980, there were few signs of the former chicken farm or even the apple farm before it, aside from a dilapidated shed and a couple of Gravenstein apple trees. One side of the shed became an occasional playhouse for my brother and I and his friends, and we used the other side as a chicken coop for a while, until raccoons came for most of our hens.
At the bottom of the garden was a concrete retaining wall and patio that extended beyond the fence and to our neighbors’ yard, where a large round basin in the concrete used to be filled with water for the chickens to drink from. It may still be there.
I’m fascinated by the idea of “land ancestors” — people who had a relationship with a place before we did. These folks are some of my land ancestors, and I love that they had a close and agricultural connection to the place where I grew up.
Next time, I’ll write about the lives of Minnie Lehn Winkler and her first husband, William Lehn, who ran a successful winery in Forestville in the years before Prohibition.