Forestville stories: The Coveys, plus some research notes

The Covey family. Back row, L-R: Ella, Daniel, unknown, William, unknown, Phillip, unknown. Middle row, L-R: unknown, Sarah, Uriah, George. Of the two boys on the sides, one is Harmon and the other is James. The unidentified women are likely Ann, Clara, Lizzie and Amanda. Photo courtesy Ancestry.com.

To wrap up this series, I wanted to write a little bit about the Covey family, since the street I grew up on (Covey Road) was named for them. I’ll also include some information at the end about where I got the information I’ve included in these posts, as it was a challenging process and I might be able to make it easier for future researchers. 

The Coveys

To start with, “Covey” can mean a couple of things. In earlier English, the word describes a small flock of birds; a covey of doves or quail, for example. As an Irish surname, it comes from Mac Cobhthaigh, meaning "son of the victorious one." I didn’t trace this family’s ancestry back far enough to figure out which one applies here. But, given that the Coveys had almost a dozen children, a “small flock of birds” seems an apt description. 

Uriah Covey was born in April 1832 in Ohio; his wife, Sarah Ann Purvis, was born August 20, 1838, in Memphis, Missouri. Uriah’s family moved to nearby Clark County, Missouri, when he was a young boy, and he and Sarah married in the state in either 1856 or 1859. 

It’s not clear what drew them to California, but Uriah was appointed to serve on a Sonoma County grand jury in September 1869, and the 1870 census shows them living in Healdsburg along with seven of their children: Ann, 14; George, 13; Clara, 9; Ella, 7; Daniel, 6; Phillip, 4; and Lizzie, who was an infant. 

Uriah seemingly always worked as a farmer, which isn’t surprising given Forestville’s agricultural focus. At least some part of that work involved raising chickens or other birds: “Mrs. Uriah Covey has lost a goodly number of poultry from some cause unknown,” The Healdsburg Enterprise reported briefly in 1889. 

By January of 1874, Uriah was buying up land in Forestville, according to real estate records from the Sonoma Democrat and other local papers. An 1898 map shows that he owned a large parcel just south of the Russian River and just west of Green Valley Creek, near the north end of Martinelli Road today. 

Detail from an 1898 map showing Uriah Covey’s land claim (upper right) and others along the Russian River, including the Ridenhours. Photo courtesy the David Rumsey map collection.

In the late 1870s, Uriah felled an old-growth redwood tree on his land and donated the wood for the construction of the Forestville Church of Christ, specifically its sanctuary and bell tower. Although the church is still standing, it was heavily damaged by a fire in 2019. 

Living near the Russian River and Green Valley Creek had its flood risks, then as now, particularly during the heavy winter rains. “If you wish to know about high waters in this locality, get Uriah Covey interested and he will tell you all about it,” the Healdsburg Tribune, Enterprise and Scimitar reported March 23, 1893. 

Growing up in Forestville in the 1870s when the population was small, many of the Covey children wound up marrying kids from other local families. Ella married Edward Lee Ward, who was born in Forestville in 1858, when it was barely a smudge on a map. 

Daniel, Amanda and William Covey married children of the Ross family, for whom Ross Road and Ross Station Road, just south of Forestville, are named. And James Covey, the baby of the family, born in Forestville in 1880, married Annie Ridenhour, whose family owned land between Forestville and Guerneville. 

In 1919, William and Hattie (Ross) Covey bought the house at the corner of Covey and Davis streets built by Thomas Linton on the Davis land in 1902. This may ultimately be why the road was named Covey, which didn’t get that name until sometime in the 1930s or 1940s; before that, it was called East Street or Foerster Street. 

Uriah and Sarah didn’t live to see their name immortalized; he died in 1909 at age 70 after a long, undisclosed illness, and was buried in Forestville’s Forestview Cemetery. He willed his property and their house to Sarah, who lived until 1921, when she died at age 82 and was buried alongside her husband. 

The last surviving children of Uriah and Sarah lived until 1957. Harmon, born in about 1877, died in May 1957, and his sister Amanda died about two months later. Both are also buried in Forestview. 

Forestville Church of Christ in March 2024, courtesy of Google Maps.

Research and process notes

I used a handful of main sources to trace the histories in this series: Historical maps, deed records, genealogy records, and historical newspapers. 

Historical maps for Forestville are difficult to come by, though there are a handful, particularly on the David Rumsey map collection website. Those maps helped me get some of the names of people who owned the land my family lived on, even if a) the roads weren’t all there and didn’t have their current names, b) the maps were very generalized, and c) most don’t show any structures. 

The Sonoma County Library’s historical archive does have two Sanborn fire insurance maps of Forestville, and Sanborn maps show structures, but they were limited to the town center and didn’t show the areas of town I was most interested in. 

Deed records from the mid-1960s to the present are available to research by the computers at the Sonoma County Recorder’s office, and earlier ones are digitized and available online at this link. This was painstaking, but the most important, work. I needed to know the names of potential owners and roughly when they might have purchased or sold the land, which both genealogical and newspaper records helped with.  

Once I had names, I could use genealogical records (I prefer Ancestry.com, despite its ownership), such as census, marriage and death records, to fill out the details of each person’s life. I also researched them in the invaluable California Digital Newspaper Collection. Luckily, early newspapers had a legal obligation to print real-estate transactions and often had room to report everyday events, such as Malcolm Melville’s larger-than-average egg or Levi Davis’ theories on carp management. And they also offered key details like the location of the Lehn family home, along with deaths/obituaries and family tragedies. These are the kinds of stories that make history more real and engaging. 

There’s also a book I found useful at certain points: “Images of America: Forestville” by Penny Hutten and the Forestville Historical Society,” published by Arcadia Press in 2008. Although it’s incomplete, this volume offers a look into the early days of Forestville, using many family photos in the historical society collection that aren’t available elsewhere. 

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. I’ve enjoyed putting these stories together and going deeper into my understanding of the town my family called home for almost 20 years. 

Forestville stories: The Davises, the Lintons and the attempted murder-suicide

Left: Rebecca Lakey and Levi Davis. Right: Lydia Davis with her grandmother (and Levi’s mom), Rebecca Jack.

Content warning for discussion of domestic violence and suicide. 

Levi Davis wasn’t the first settler of Forestville, but he was one of the early ones. 

Born in Indiana in 1822, he married fellow Hoosier Rebecca Lakey in 1842, when she was 15 and he was 19. They lived in Missouri for several years before arriving in California and settling in Petaluma with their flock of eight children. Their youngest, Lydia, born in 1865, made nine. 

Levi was a farmer, which meant he could pick up and move just about anywhere there was good land. By 1870 the Davis clan was living in Forestville, across the street from where the El Molino/Laguna High School campus sits now. Davis Street is named for them. 

I should point out that the Southern Pomo were living happily on the land along the Russian River for thousands of years before settlers arrived, tending the river and the redwoods, including the areas that later became Forestville. This was not untouched, vacant, free land, and probably most of Forestville (like most of Western Sonoma County) was covered with redwoods before settlers came. 

One of the first settlers was Captain Juan Bautista Rogers (J.B.R.) Cooper (brother-in-law to General Mariano Vallejo), who set up shop northeast of town along Mark West Creek in 1834 and built a water-powered sawmill that hastened the destruction of the redwoods. In the 1860s, saloonkeeper Andrew Jackson Forrester purchased 100 acres of land, set up a new saloon and hotel, and named the town (Forrestville, at first) after himself. 

As other settlers arrived, early roads were laid out, and were usually named after whoever built a house there. Travis, Templeman, Anderson, Ross, Covey and Van Keppel roads (and many more) all got their names this way. 

The Davis house in roughly 1890.

Levi built his house on the northwest corner of what became Covey and Davis roads and set up a small farming operation, along with an unusual business: carp ponds. He and neighbor John Reeves Hassell Oliver established large ponds full of the fish for people to purchase and eat. 

In a July 1878 letter to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, he wrote that Oilver’s carp were suffering. They drained the main pond and found “four ‘water dogs’ (salamanders) and one mud turtle, all of which I think have been living on his young fish,” Davis wrote. The carps’ breeding rates had declined dramatically, and two fish had their tails bitten off. “The necessity of a close watch over our fish ponds is thus apparent. — There is nothing wrong with mine.” 

Lydia and Thomas

Lydia was very young when her family moved to Forestville, and it was likely the only home she could remember. I couldn’t find much information about her early life. Her family doesn’t appear in the 1880 census, and most of the 1890 census was lost in a fire in 1921. 

But in 1889, when she was 24, she married Thomas Linton, who was born in September 1861 outside of Bloomington, Indiana, and arrived in California with his family around 1870. They were living in Vallejo when Thomas’ dad, Sanderson Linton, died in 1871. A few years after Thomas and Lydia married, they bought 15 acres of land in Forestville from George Nathaniel Schaumberg. It was part of a larger parcel that had changed hands a number of times since the 1860s, according to the earliest surviving maps. 

In 1886, the block of land between today’s Covey and Travis Roads, and between Highway 116 and roughly Anderson Road, was owned by a man named Whitney. By 1867, a man named Williams’ name was stamped on the same region. Before 1884, someone named D.T. Callahan acquired it, and they sold it to Schaumberg that year. In 1895, Thomas bought the 15 acres from George, but also sold George about 3.5 acres in a land swap, according to real-estate listings in the Petaluma Daily Morning Courier. 

This may seem tedious, but it was all part of my effort to figure out who, ultimately, built the house my family lived in in the 1980s and 1990s. By working both forward through time, starting with Cooper and Forrester and Covey (I may get to the Covey family in another post) and backward from my family to Malcolm Melville and Minnie Lehn Winkler, I eventually worked out the most likely answer: The Lehns. 

Back row: Lydia Davis and Thomas Linton with their daughter, Maude Grace. Front row: Rebecca Lakey and Levi Davis. Mid-1890s.

But just up the street from the Lehns, the Davis-Linton household was busy. Lydia and Thomas adopted a baby girl, whom they named Maude Grace, who was born in San Francisco in 1891. I can’t help but wonder if she was born to one of the women or girls in the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum. It’s a distinct possibility, but there’s probably no way to find out. 

In 1901 and 1902, Thomas sold off sections of his land to the Santa Rosa Bank, William Lehn and Mary A. Jewett, and in August 1902, the Press Democrat reported that Thomas was tearing down the old Davis homestead and building a “new mordern (sic) residence” in its place. 

A year and a half later, in March 1905, Levi Davis died at home, of cancer. “Man Who Imported Carp Passes Away,” the headline read. He was buried in Forestville’s Forestview Cemetery, along with many of the town’s early settlers. 

Maude Grace

Maude was only 13 at the time of her adoptive grandfather’s death, but within two years she was married to Stuart Faudre, the youngest son of a famous local chairmaking family (which briefly operated where the Lehn winery later set up). Maude and Stuart ran off to Portland, Oregon, and eloped on July 12, 1907, when he was 33 and Maude was 15.  

Stuart had already been married once, to a woman named Agnes or possibly Nettie, but they’d divorced by the time he married Maude. And it sounds like Stuart was bad news all around: The Petaluma Argus Courier reported in early July, 1907, that Grace (Maude) was missing and that Stuart had “enticed” her from home. “Last Tuesday evening she went to her room as usual, as if preparing to retire for the night. The following morning she had disappeared, and her room had not been occupied for the night.”

If the marriage wasn’t rocky from the beginning, it soon became so. According to the Press Democrat:

“Then from the lips of other Forestville people it was also learned that Faudre had declared on more than one occasion that he would … shoot his wife and then kill himself. Faudre had lived in the Forestville section since boyhood and his marriage to the young woman … occurred when she was about sixteen years of age. It was an elopement, and had a tinge of romance connected with it. … It is claimed that the marriage was celebrated before Faudre had been divorced from his previous wife for a year. She was a pretty girl and as time passed by Faudre is said to have become insanely jealous of her. She left him on a number of occasions, and he went after her and induced her to come back home.”

In the summer of 1907, Maude began seeking a divorce or restraining order (or both). She traveled north to Ukiah to stay with friends, but Stuart caught up with her on Tuesday, September 14. Before locating her, Stuart purchased a revolver. They were seen walking down Perkins Street together that night when a number of people heard him threaten her. 

She said, “I don’t care if you do shoot me.” A few moments later, a struggle began, and he knocked her into the street, firing a shot at her as she fell. “She pleaded with him not to kill her and started across the street. He shot again and she fell and he ran up and shot again as she lay on the ground begging for her life. Several bystanders ran towards them and Faudre ran across a vacant lot and disappeared in the darkness.”

Bystanders helped Maude get medical care while Faudre ran to an apple orchard about a half-mile away, where he knotted a rope into a noose and fastened it around his neck before shooting himself in the head, ending his life. His family brought his body back to Forestville and buried him in Forestview Cemetery. 

Although the newspaper initially reported that Maude’s condition was such as to give no hope for recovery,” she did ultimately survive the shooting. 

Her attending doctor, named Whitlock, told the Press Democrat that:

“she was shot twice in the back on each side of the spine. One bullet grazed the spine. Neither bullet was located as the result of probing and the use of the X-Ray on Wednesday. Dr. Whitlock stated that both bullets would undoubtedly have gone clear through Mrs. Faudre’s body but the steels in her corset prevented."

Perhaps not surprisingly, Maude Grace mostly disappeared from the public record after the shooting. Even though her abuser was dead, her name had been splashed across newspapers around the region, giving her a kind of notoriety that was undoubtedly hard to live with. She remained in Ukiah for some time after the shooting. 

Maude’s mother, Lydia, died at home on January 9, 1915, a few months after a reported surgery. She was buried in Forestview Cemetery. Thomas got remarried five years later to a woman named Lenora Horr. They moved to Santa Rosa sometime in the 1920s, where he worked as a poultryman. Lenora died in 1944 and is buried in Santa Rosa Odd Fellows Cemetery. 

In November 1942, Maude took out a marriage license with a carpenter named R. George McAlister in Tacoma, Washington, but there’s no definitive record showing whether they ever married. On the application, Maude wrote her name as “Margerate” and said she’d been married once before, but was divorced. She and George had been living at the same address in Tacoma for the past six months. 

Her father, Thomas, died July 29, 1957, at age 95, and joined Forestville’s settlers in Forestview Cemetery. Maude had no siblings, and it appears she had no children. I haven’t been able to find any record of her death, when or where it may have happened. If she wanted a private life after the shooting, it appears she got it. 

More Forestville stories: Who was Minnie Lehn Winkler?

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. 

More Forestville stories: Malcolm, Mary, and "Mama" Carr

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. 

The apple-growing Ito family of Forestville, California

(This is NOT a bite-sized entry, apologies; it turned into something much bigger)

I’ve been researching my hometown, Forestville, for some writing I’m working on. I was looking through the California Newspaper Digital Collection (CDNC), because the Wikipedia article on the town mentions some kind of fire that took place in the early 20th Century and destroyed most of the early buildings. I didn’t definitively find any reports (though it could refer to this fire at the Lehn Winery in September of 1915 that resulted in a bunch of drunk hogs). 

But I did find something else: Information about a multigenerational Japanese family that ran an apple farm in Forestville from sometime in the 1910s until after World War II. I’d like to share what I’ve learned, because it’s a story I never learned growing up there and I really wish I had. 

Hichijiro Ito was born in Japan on May 10, 1875 (as I’m writing this, his birthday would have been yesterday). His mother’s name was Ecishi; I’m not sure what his father’s name was. His wife, Tomiye Mizutani, was also born in Japan, likely in 1881 or 1883. She most likely married Hichijiro in Japan and immigrated with him, though I was unable to find very much about her life. They had a son, Yoshinobu, who was born in Japan on October 12, 1905. 

The Ito family came to the U.S. and settled in Forestville sometime in the 1910s. They set up an apple farming operation on Covey Road near Davis Road, where El Molino High School was later built. It’s worth noting that the apples were Gravensteins, which were a popular Sonoma County crop, brought to the U.S. by the Russians who settled at Fort Ross in the early 19th Century). 

On November 7, 1923, a fire broke out on the Ito property, destroying two houses and damaging the Ito family’s apple-drying machine. The dryer had been used that day, but the boy who tended the kiln had made sure the fire was out before he left for the night. Neighbors said the fire started on the roof around 1 a.m., and a reporter suggested that a spark from the kiln became lodged in the vent and later ignited the roof. 

Most critically, one of Hichijiro and Tomiye’s sons, likely Yoshinobu, was in danger from the fire. He was asleep in their home, but an unidentified someone ran into the house and pulled him from his bed. 

The Oakland Tribune reported that the Ito dryer was located next door to the Sebastopol Apple Growers’ Union packing plant (another paper identifies it as the The Forestville Union Packing house). The fire could have spread to the packing house — and to the rest of the town —if not for “hundreds of people” who woke and came out to help fight the fire. Forestville, then and now, was an unincorporated part of Sonoma County and didn’t have its own (volunteer) fire department until 1938, so neighbors had to rely on each other when fires broke out. 

Aside from the apple dryer and two homes, the fire consumed 20 tons of green apples and eight and a half tons of dried apples. Newspapers reported that the fire caused about $5,000 in damage (almost $100,000 in today’s dollars), $3,800 of which was covered by insurance. 

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported that, after the fire, Hichijiro “is ready to rebuild, providing the residents do not object. The residents will no doubt object, as the drier was located near the heart of the town, which was in immediate danger, due to the inadequate fire fighting apparatus.”

I can’t help but wonder if that was the only reason neighbors might have objected. Although World War II was almost two decades away, anti-Japanese and anti-Asian sentiment was well entrenched across California.

Still, it appears the Itos rebuilt their operation. In July 1931, Hichijiro and his son Yoshinobu certified themselves as co-owners of a “retail green and dried fruit business under the name of H. Ito and Son” in Forestville. 

Circa 1930 Gravenstein Apple Show display of an huge apple, made of apples for the town of Forestville exhibit. Photo by William S. Borba.

Another member of the Ito family appears in the 1930 census, a boy named Kazuo, born December 8, 1922 and identified as Hichijiro’s grandson. Hichijiro and Tomiye had another son before Yoshinobu, but I have not been able to find much information on who he was. (He’s identified in this interview by the American name Frank, and in Kazuo’s obituary as Yoshimatsu.)

In mid-January 1932, Yoshinobu Ito, then 26, and Tsugive Hatanaka, 18, of Oakland, took out a marriage license. They were formally married on January 21, 1932, likely on the Ito property in Forestville.

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported: 

Elaborate Japanese Wedding Is Performed at Forestville

FORESTVILLE, Jan. 21. An elaborate Japanese wedding took place here Sunday, uniting Tsugiye Hatanaka and Johnnie Y. Ito in marriage. All members of the bridal party and the minister were Japanese. The Rev. T. Friljii of the Sebastopol Japanese Methodist church performed the ceremony. Following the wedding, 200 guests were entertained at a bridal dinner with K. Akutagawa as master of ceremonies. Talks were given in both American and Japanese. The bride is a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Hatanaka of Oakland. She was dressed in a white satin gown with a beautiful lace veil. The veil was held in place by a cap of lace and pearls. The bride was attended by the following bridesmaids and flower girls: Miss Jlatanaka, Miss Xishioka, Miss Kobuka, Miss Takemoto. Miss Ikeda, Miss Akiya and one of her younger sisters. Ro was supported by cousin, Tommy Ito. The groom is the youngest son of Mr. and Mrs. H. Ito and attended schools here. He is associated with his father in fruit growing and packing. The couple left Sunday night for a honeymoon trip to Los Angeles and other parts of southern California.

Yoshinobu and Tsugiye had two sons, Hiromu, born in May 1934, and Akira, born in May 1939. 

On July 2, 1940, the Oakland Tribune ran an article about a rivalry between apple growers from Sonoma County: 

Two produce firms this morning reported the receipt of Gravenstein apples, the first to be received in Oakland for the current season. Jack Oliver, of W. A. Rouse & Company, received a shipment from H. Ito, rancher of Forestville, Sonoma County. Ito usually "beats" his competitors. This year, however, V. Sangiacomo, of Sonoma, shipped to Angeli Brothers on the same day They were put on display by Joe Cellini of that firm. The fruit was quoted for from $1.85 to $2 per lug.

Kazuo graduated from Analy High School in Sebastopol in 1940. After World War II began, at 19 and a U.S. Citizen, he registered for the U.S. Draft. His registration card lists him as five feet two and a half inches tall and 144 pounds, with brown hair and a ruddy complexion. He reported that he was “working for parents” and gave an address of P.O. Box 84 in Forestville. He also listed the Merced Assembly Center in Merced, California as an address, but crossed it out. 

The Merced Assembly Center was a temporary internment camp for Japanese Americans that operated for about five months between May and September of 1942 before prisoners were sent elsewhere. The U.S. kept Kazuo along with the rest of his family in Merced before sending them on to “Camp Amache” or the Granada War Relocation Center in Granada, Colorado, hundreds of miles from Forestville. 

They were registered in Granada on September 9, 1942. Hichijiro was 67 and Tomiye was around 60. The little boys, Hiromu and Akira, were 8 and 3. 

A friend of the family, Tom Perry, said in a 2003 interview that his parents took care of the Ito ranch while the family was imprisoned. He grew up playing with one of the Ito kids, whom he identifies as Keith (probably Hiromu). Perry said: 

Anyway, I know that Johnny (Yoshinobu) ran the dryer and he and Sue (Tsugiye) lived on our ranch there for a while before the war and before they bought a place on Hurlbut Avenue (in Sebastopol). Their sons were Steve and Keith, who was just a few months younger than me, and Keith was my first playmate. I have a number of pictures where we were toddlers together. And Keith and I went all through school together, through grammar school, high school. I was four years old when the war began, so I don’t remember much of what was going on. I remember my mom talking about them being back in the camps. I knew about camping, that sounded like fun. So that was how much I knew back in those days when the war started and the internment situation took place. 

While most of the Ito family were in Colorado, Hichijiro was accused of criminal espionage and shuffled around the country.

Tom Perry recalled: 

So Grandpa disappeared. [He] was accused of being a spy. He was sent first to Louisiana, then to New Mexico. He was accused of having maps in his place. Maps! If you have maps in your house you’re obviously suspicious, and he was accused of having $40,000 sewn into his clothing. $40,000 in those days would be about a million today. Not too likely, but this was the story. Supposedly he was convicted. So he wasn’t able to join his family until 1944, when he joined the rest of the family in Amache. I’m not sure whether he was acquitted later. It was rumored this was the case, but for sure he was put away for some time for “committing the crime.”

Perry’s mom, Lea Perry, wrote letters back and forth with Kazuo while he was in Merced and later Granada, discussing and coordinating operations of the Ito ranch in Forestville from 1942 until they were released in 1945. Incredibly, all of these letters were donated and digitized, and are available to read online in Sonoma State University’s digital collection. The Itos apparently sent the Perrys small amounts of money in thanks for running the ranch in their absence, and at least once, Lea told them she could not accept the money, knowing they were receiving so little in the camp. 

Lea also sent them gifts. Tomiye in particular loved persimmons, and Lea would send some on occasion. Tom Perry recalls: 

In fact, I can still remember as a five year old, the persimmon tree. I didn’t know what they were so I bit into one one day, and (laughs) thought, this is not to eat. When they got ripe, Grandma Ito liked persimmons, so my mom would send them to her. Also apples and dried fruit. Of course, it was really appreciated. I remember one of the letters told about when they were in Merced, she shipped down a box of apples and Kaz said, “I grew up with these apples. We would even throw them from time to time, as kids, like baseballs.” He said, “I never realized how good they are and what a treat it was to have them.”

The Itos were released from detention on September 26, 1945 and most, if not all, returned to Forestville and Sebastopol.

It helped that the Perry family had been taking good care of their ranch and their houses in both towns. Tom also thought that the Itos had perhaps faced less racism in Sonoma County than Japanese people had in other parts of the country, possibly because they had been established in the area so long before the war. “I think that there were enough people here who knew the Japanese and what good people they were,” Perry said. “Also, people like my folks who took care of ranches, made people feel that their home was here, and that their places were here and they were cared for.”

Enmanji Buddhist Temple in Sebastopol, California.

Perry also mentioned that Hichijiro was involved in establishing the Enmanji Buddhist Temple in Sebastopol. Before the temple, a Buddhist Sunday school and Japanese language school launched in 1926, and in 1928 a minister from the Buddhist Mission of North America visited the area to begin missionary work. Japanese Sonoma County residents met in 1932 to talk about establishing their own temple, and purchased a house in Sebastopol, opening the first temple space in 1933. Its first minister was Rev. Shodo Goto.

The current building, however, has an even more amazing story: It was constructed by workers with the Manchurian Railroad Company and used as part of their exhibit hall at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933. After the fair, the company donated the building to the Buddhist Mission of North America, which in turn offered it to the Sonoma County folks. It was dismantled in Chicago and transported by rail to Sebastopol, where it was rebuilt — without the use of nails — in early 1934. 

Difficult news continued to follow the Ito family after the war. On June 30, 1949, a newspaper reported that “The friends of Kazuo Ito will be sorry to hear that he is confined in Oak Knoll hospital. He would appreciate hearing from different ones.” And in early November 1950, Hichijiro was released from Palm Drive Hospital in Sebastopol after undergoing two weeks of treatment for burns. 

More cheerfully, Hichijiro was featured in a 1953 Press Democrat article about a group of 76 local Japanese Americans finishing a citizenship class so they could become naturalized in the U.S. Such classes were made possible by the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which made it easier for Asians to immigrate to the U.S., and for those already in the U.S. to become citizens. Among his classmates, Hichijiro was the oldest, at 78. 

Yoshinobu became a citizen in November 1954.

Kazuo was the first of the Forestville Ito clan to die, on May 5, 1955, at age 32. The Enmanji Temple hosted his wake, and his ashes were committed at Chapel of the Chimes in Santa Rosa, according to the Press Democrat. 

Hichijiro followed a few years later, in February 1958, at the age of 83. Like Kazuo, his wake services took place at Enmanji and his ashes were committed at Chapel of the Chimes. The Press Democrat reported: “Mr. Ito died Wednesday in a Santa Rosa hospital. He lived in Forestville 45 years after coming from Japan. He was an apple rancher on Covey Rd. He is survived by his wife, Tomie Ito, Forestville; sons, Yoshinatsu Ito, Sacramento, Yoshinobu Ito and Tom Ito, both of Sebastopol, and eight grandchildren.”

Yoshinobu died February 10, 1994 at the age of 88. Enmanji hosted his wake, and his ashes were inurned at Pleasant Hill Cemetery (now Pleasant Hills Memorial Park) in Sebastopol. The Press Democrat reported: “A native of Japan, he came to Forestville in 1920 to join his father in running an apple dryer and apple orchard. He was a member of the Enmanji Buddhist Church and the Japanese American Citizens League. Survivors include his wife, Tsugiye Ho of Sebastopol; his children, Steven Ito of Sacramento, Keith Ito of Concord, Philip Ito of Santa Rosa, Mildred Milne, Ft. Bragg and Katharine Legro of Calistoga; seven grandchildren and one great granddaughter.” 

Tsugiye died in May 2022, and is also inurned at Pleasant Hill. 

I regret that there are so many gaps in this account — I wasn’t able to find much information on Yoshinatsu or Tom Ito, or follow the lives of Hiromu or Akira, or locate details on the women of these families, especially Tomiye and Tsugiye. There is a much deeper story here to be told of the Ito family in Sonoma County, and Japanese American apple growers and farmers more generally. But I hope this will make it easier for family members and researchers in the future. 

Every loop and curl of the journey memorized

I only got my driver’s license the year I turned 19. It was my second semester at Santa Rosa Junior College, and my friends Elizabeth and Maia, who were my ride to school, were leaving for a semester abroad in Paris. The bus from the JC to my tiny Western Sonoma County town only ran every two and a half hours, and stopped running at 4:30 in the afternoon. I had no other option. 

When I learned to drive, it was in a 1971 Mercedes 220 that my dad brought over from Germany after a visit in 1970. Although it was the compact car of its model line, it was heavy — 3,031 pounds of steel body, with no power steering or brakes to help a petite teen like me tame it. Plus, when I learned to drive it, the engine would stall when the car stopped, so I learned to brake with my heel and feather the accelerator with my toe to keep it from dying. But soon, I mastered it. And on hot days, I drove barefoot. 

Although I was late to the driver’s seat, I came to love driving almost immediately, especially on the twisty backroads of Western Sonoma County. Pop a CD into the car stereo — Dead Can Dance, Alice in Chains, Fields of the Nephilim — and swoop along that ribbon of asphalt, deep into the woods, out to the wild Pacific shore. 

Highway 116 west to Goat Rock Beach was one of my favorites, from the drizzly redwood towns of Hacienda and Rio Nido to the cow-dotted fields closer to the coast. Or Bodega Highway west to Highway 1, steep hills rising on either side of the road until it opens out into the quintessential beach town of Bodega Bay, made famous by Alfred Hitchcock and some aggressive seagulls. 

For a while, a friend of mine lived in Joy Woods, west of Occidental, and I loved finding ever-more-obscure ways home from their place: Joy Road to narrow, curvy Bittner Road to Graton Road, with its open fields and pasture land, was a favorite. Or veer off Graton to oak-dotted Harrison Grade Road to Green Valley Road, which more than lived up to its name. I felt safe on those nearly empty roads, trees and more trees guarding me, melancholy music in my ears, body swaying as the car slalomed through the curves. 

There was a skill to it. Slow down and downshift before a sharp turn, then slowly accelerate and shift back up as you come out of it, belly dropping as you pick up speed. Heave the steering wheel like a fisherman in a rising tide. Back then, I pushed the speed limit, ever frustrated with cautious drivers and tourists who didn’t have every loop and curl of the journey memorized. The rule was, if more than five cars were piled up behind you, you needed to pull off, but not everyone obeyed. They slowed me down, interfered with my flow and flight along the road.

When I moved away to attend U.C. Berkeley a few years later, I could still picture those backroad routes in my mind. On nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d trace them: Joy to Bittner, Bittner to Graton, Graton to 116. Evergreen boughs flashing in my peripheral vision, dappled sun streaming down, painting everything gold. Or high-beams piercing the deep darkness, like something out of a David Lynch project.

I returned recently, but it wasn’t the same. I’m a much more cautious driver now, despite the power steering, and the data signal was too weak to stream more than one or two Dead Can Dance songs before the music cut out. But my feet remembered to slow down before the turn, then rev my way out of it like an aircraft picking up speed. And the narrow, tree-lined pathways still felt like home.