Last week, I wrote that Malcolm Melville and Mary Vargas bought the house I grew up in in 1944 from a woman named Minnie Lehn Winkler. But who was she?
She was born Minnie Stridde on May 23, 1878, in California to Carl Stridde, an immigrant from Prussia, and Marie Gustafsson, an immigrant from Sweden. How they met and married is unclear, but Minnie was probably the youngest of seven children. In the 1880 census, the family was living in Santa Rosa, where Carl was a farmer and Marie was a housekeeper.
As a young adult, Minnie began working as a teacher in the Star school district, a couple of miles southwest of Windsor and northeast of Forestville. She was a popular teacher; at the end of the fall term in November 1899, her students gifted her a gold pen. The school had just undergone a number of significant repairs thanks to William Lehn, a 32-year-old bachelor whose father, Charles, grew grapes and made wine next door.
Over the next couple of years, William bought several parcels of land in Forestville on the corner of Covey Road (back then called Foerster or East Street) and the county road (now Highway 116) and got to work building a winery of his own. By February 15, 1902, he’d produced enough bottles of wine — which varietal was never specified — to sell 165,000 gallons to the thirsty denizens of San Francisco.
I can’t say for sure, but it’s very likely that William, with his new income and his building skills, raised the house on Covey Road where my family lived. Records state that the original structure was constructed sometime around 1900, with significant remodeling in 1920.
Before Lehn’s winery arrived on the corner of Covey and 116, the site hosted a hotel for early travelers, called the Johnson Hotel for its owner, James W. Johnson. In the early 20th century, Forestville was changing constantly. Lehn successfully petitioned the county to bring telephone service to the town in 1903, and was instrumental in bringing an electric rail line to Forestville not long after, perhaps to help him ship so much wine. Johnson moved the hotel a block or so south, next to the railway, and renamed it the Electric Hotel, which freed up land for Lehn to expand his winemaking operation.
Meanwhile, a romance was blossoming between William and Minnie, who married January 3, 1907 in Berkeley. Their only child, William Duncan Lehn, was born February 24, 1908. He was probably the first child to grow up in the house I later knew as my own.
Left: (L-R) Minnie, William Jr., and William Lehn, probably around 1915. Right: William Jr. and Minnie sometime in the 1930s. Photos courtesy Ancestry.com.
The winery endured hardship many times, including in the 1906 earthquake. “The wine tank could not withstand the strain and burst in every direction. I lost in the two cellars about two hundred thousand gallons of wine,” he wrote to a colleague, Leopold Justi, about three weeks after the quake.
Already, that year’s vines were dry and struggling; someone who’d offered to buy them had backed out. “I believe the best thing is to burn them for I do not believe anyone would buy them at any price.”
Most years, though, were pretty good for William and Minnie. Newspapers eagerly reported the winery’s impressive output once or twice a year in their occasional “news from Forestville” segments.
But in September 1915, hardship struck again when the winery caught fire, igniting in the distillery building, damaging buildings and machinery and destroying about 400,000 gallons of wine. Some of that wine, local papers reported, flowed to a nearby hog ranch, where they:
“quaffed copiously and long of the flood of vintage. They drank so much, too, that they became intoxicated so that they could do nothing else save lie down in the crimson stream. The hogs would have been drowned, too, had not the farmer and his men gone to their rescue. They had to be pulled out of the wine, and from Forestville came word Monday that they were still sleeping off their drunk.”
Sanborn map showing the Lehn winery property in Forestville in 1911. The house would have been off the map to the left/north, beyond the cultivated field.
Another misfortune was looming on the horizon. The temperance movement had been building for decades, and several other states had already outlawed the manufacture, sale and purchase of alcohol. Prohibition became law in California on January 16, 1920, wiping out William and Minnie’s livelihood.
That May, William sold what appears to have been his last batch of wine, according to a local newspaper:
“Word of the sale of another large consignment of Sonoma county wine was told Wednesday by W. D. Wiley, well known Green Valley grape grower and orchardist. Wm. Lehn of the Forestville winery has sold 100,000 gallons of wine at fifty-five cents a gallon, following a previously announced sale of two carloads at fifty cents a gallon. This will be good news to a number of grape growers of the Forestville section, who had their grapes crushed at the Forestville winery last year, the financial return from which depended upon the sale of the wine. Mr. Wiley is one of the fortunate grape growers who disposed of his product in this way last year.”
And in late June 1920, four teens broke into the winery to steal as many bottles as they could get away with, before they were surrounded “by a posse of citizens and taken into custody” and charged with malicious mischief.
In September, William ran a help-wanted ad, seeking a man to assist with farm and ranch work. It’s possible, even likely, that this is when the property began converting to apple-growing.
On a rainy day in March 1922, Minnie, William, and William Jr. were in a car with their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Newman of Santa Rosa, driving to San Francisco when the car hit a slippery patch of road near San Rafael and went off the road, plunging 20 feet down an embankment.
William’s skull was fractured and he sustained internal injuries. Minnie’s leg was broken. Charles also sustained internal injuries, and his wife and William Jr. came away with cuts and bruises.
William died of his injuries the next day. Minnie was hospitalized for months, and finally returned home August 5, 1922; she was still walking with crutches. It’s not clear who looked after William Jr. during this period.
Love, and perhaps also necessity, led Minnie to remarry in December 1927. Her groom was Edward Winkler, who’d grown up just south of Forestville. He’d been married before, too, to Maude Newell, and they had two sons together, Orlo and Elmer. But by the late 1920s they’d divorced and Maude was living with Orlo in Oakland. After the wedding, Edward and Elmer moved in with Minnie and William Jr. in Forestville, and Edward was employed running a farm operation — possibly at the house.
William Jr. married Margaret Chalmers when he was 29, and they moved soon afterward to Kings County, California. Minnie and Edward remained in Forestville for many more years, until Edward’s death on July 18, 1942. Minnie, then 64 and potentially still disabled from the crash, probably got tired of rattling around the big old house by herself or struggling to keep up with the farm and home maintenance, and sold the property to Malcolm and Mary in 1944.
Minnie traveled some in her later years, including to England and Hawaii, and eventually went to live near her son in Kings County, where she died in 1970 at the age of 91. She is buried next to Edward in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Santa Rosa, while William Lehn rests in a nearby plot. William Jr. died in 1979, at age 71. He and his second wife, Evelyn are buried in Lemoore Cemetery in Kings County.
An obituary of Minnie’s life confirms that “as a young woman she lived in Forestville at the corner of Covey and Van Keppel roads with her husband, William Lehn, and young son, William.” There’s only one other house on that corner, and it was built in 1952, too late for it to have been their home.
Next time, I’ll get into the story of Forestville native Lydia Davis, her dad, carp farmer Levi Davis, and her husband, Thomas Linton, who sold the land to Willliam and Minnie Lehn that they built their house on.