Summary:
Charles’ father bought a farm on the west end of Mt. Diablo Boulevard in 1905. His well-illustrated interview describes what it was like to grow up at a time when fruit orchards and ranches were the dominant businesses in the town.
Oral History:
Angela Broadhead: Mr. Reynolds, will you tell us when you and your family first came to this area?
Charles Reynolds: We came out here in the fall of 1905.
AB: Where did you come from?
CR: Well, we were living in Oakland. My home was in Kansas City, Kansas, where I was born. My dad bought what was known as the Simpson Ranch here in Lafayette. It was in the west side of Lafayette. My sister and I went to school where the Methodist Church in now. We had to walk; some of the children lived a greater distance away. They would either ride horseback or have a cart… possibly two or three children would ride in the cart.
AB: Where was the Simpson Ranch, Mr. Reynolds? Was it here in this area near Mosswood Drive?
CR: Yes, it was. Do you know where the Mason McDuffie Realty is? That’s where our house stood (Mt. Diablo Blvd.) Right by the creek. The orchard went down as far as where the Lafayette Rental Hardware Store is.
AB: About how many acres was it? How did your father come to buy it?
CR: It was 12 acres. One day I got my father to rent a horse and buggy and my mother and sister, the four of us in this buggy, drove up to the Tunnel Road and through the old tunnel and we went by the Simpson Ranch. There was a sign on it. Dad was born on a farm in Illinois, and I guess he had always wanted one. When we came back, he stopped and looked around. There was quite an orchard on the place. We went on the other side of town down where there are some of the locust trees around Second Avenue. We had a lunch with us, so we stopped and had our lunch. We had a sack and hay for the horse and coming back Dad stopped again, and he went in and asked who was on the place. Mr. Simpson wasn’t there, but dad found out what they wanted for it. We went on in about a month and bought the place and then moved out here. Dad worked in Oakland so he would drive up on his day off to the Claremont Hotel. He’d ride a streetcar and we’d pick him up and we’d drive him out here. It was fun; we enjoyed it. Only thing, it was a little more work than my mother should have done.
AB: What kind of ranch was it? What kind of trees did you have?
CR: We had wonderful pears. Mr. Bancroft of Walnut Creek bought our pears and shipped them. Some of our pears would go to a cannery and some were shipped back East. There were pears, prunes, and plums on the place. Later we planted more pears and my mother, my sister and I picked the fruit and hauled it into Oakland. It was an all-day trip.
We also had chickens. Dad thought he could make money on raising chickens and he bought an incubator and the brooders put them in. Our house was shaped like an “L” and in that enclosure, which was fenced off, there were 1,000 little white leghorn chickens. On the morning of the 1906 earthquake, the chimney fell off the roof and fell down into that chicken place and never killed a chicken!
AB: I didn’t realize we felt the earthquake clear out here!
CR: Oh, we sure did. Let me tell you about Phil Lamp who had a ranch up there where the Orchard Nursery is now. He had lots of cows. Phil was on a stool milking a cow when the earthquake hit. It shook the cow, and he cussed the old cow for not standing still. He moved over and tried to milk the cow again and then there was another shake. They had a water tank at the end of the barn with no roof on it. Phil looked and the water was splashing out of it and then he realized that it was not the cow’s fault that she couldn’t stand still.
We had what they call a pantry over the kitchen and there was one shelf with milk pans on it. There was milk in this pan to let the cream come to the top before skimming it off. Well, after the earthquake we tried to open the door and had a heck of a time. We had to force the door open and all of our fruit and the milk was out on the floor!
AB: Would you like to describe the area where there is now the Lafayette Reservoir?
CR: There was a dairy back in there and they had a cheese factory also. There were some orchards and a lot of hay land.
AB: Who were some of the children you went to school with?
CR: There was Bob Root who lived in Happy Valley. Bob would often ride his horse. His two sisters had roan Shetland ponies and rode in a little buggy. Rita Borgess sometimes rode with the Root girls. There was Sybil Brown and Pursis Bunker. And just down the street from here there was a house with oak trees where Hank lamp lived. There was Sharkey Raymond and Phil Lamp who lived by the Orchard Nursery. I think there were also two Lamp girls. One of the girls, Ida, married a Flood boy. The Floods were on the Upper Happy Valley Road, just north of what is now Mt. Diablo Blvd.
AB: Tell us about some of your experiences at school, Mr. Reynolds. Didn’t you and a buddy climb into the belfry of the Lafayette School?
CR: That was Harry Boyer. He lived with Mr. and Mrs. Bickerstaff who were his aunt and uncle; Aunt Jennie was his cousin. Harry used to get into more trouble. One time they were painting the roof of the schoolhouse… painted it green. The painters had left a ladder up so that they could get into the belfry. Harry and I climbed up there too. I don’t know why. We looked around and we had the idea that we wouldn’t have to go to school in the afternoon if we tipped the ladder over. So, we threw the ladder down. We had nothing to do up there, so we finally get our pockets full of rocks and slid around the ridge of the roof to where the stovepipe came through the roof. We looked down and there was a little girl sitting there at her desk. We would drop a rock down and it took quite a while to figure out where the rocks were coming from. Now Mrs. Brown, who lived across the creek, saw me and Harry up on the roof and told Miss Jones, the teacher. The teacher told us to come down we told her, “We can’t, the ladder fell down.” They couldn’t put the ladder up, so they went to the blacksmith’s shop and got Bill Thomson. He came over and put up the ladder and we had to come down.
AB: And then what happened? Did you get chastised?
CR: Well, Miss Jones was a heck of a nice lady. She couldn’t spank us. But another time when I got in trouble, I got sent home. I walked home and went down the driveway and my Dad was sitting at the woodpile. He had been cutting wood. He had a big handlebar mustache. He wanted to know what I was doing home. “The teacher sent me home”, I said, and I told him the story. He didn’t say much but I knew he was laughing because his mustache was wiggling. “You can sure help me cut wood”, he said and so I had to help him cut wood all afternoon.
AB: Did you take your lunch to school?
CR: We took our lunch to school in a lard bucket. All the kids had one. During rainy weather we used to eat our lunch in the first school building which was in back of the schoolhouse. We drank water; we never carried milk because there was no way to keep it cold. We had sandwiches and my mother always had cake or some kind of cookies for us. A boiled egg and fruit. Girls always ate along one side and the boys always lined up along the other side.
There was one teacher for all eight grades. After Miss Jones left, they got a male teacher. His name was Seaman, and he was a good teacher. He wouldn’t stand for any foolishness. One day he was going to give harry Boyer a spanking. He went out and cut off a limb from the locust tree and there were thorns on it. Harry stepped back and Clif Thomson was where Harry should have been in the line. So, the teacher grabbed Clif instead of Harry and in the scuffle, he threw Clif against the stove. Clif yelled, although he wasn’t hurt. Anyway, after school the teacher went across the creek to square things with Bill Thomson, Clif’s father. Well, the next day the teacher came back with his teeth knocked out and his eyes all black. Bill and he had quite an argument. This was about 1908 or 1910.
Mr. Seaman was a man of about 40 to 45 years. He tried to impress on the boys especially the necessity of a good education. He liked astronomy. When Harry and I found that out we would try to get him talking about astronomy and he would forget about giving us extra studies.
I finished the eighth grade about 1910 and I went over to the Root ranch and helped Bob Root round up horses in the hills. We put them down in the big corral and Mr. Root, Bob’s father, would tell us to separate the horses into different corrals. We had lunch at the ranch house. Mr. Root would drive the camp wagon with a canvas over the hoops. Our bedding and cooking utensils were in there. Mr. Root was a great horse traded and that afternoon we started over towards Alamo. We put up there overnight where he bought hay from a farmer for the horses. The next morning, we got over to the Santa Rita Junction and we stayed there two days. From there we went to Tracy and were there for a week. There was an auction sale, and we sold a lot of the horses. After the auction, we headed back home. We were gone about two weeks.
Mr. Root was injured when a horse fell on him and the horn of his saddle struck his stomach. He had to use a stomach pump to clear himself out. Once I helped him do it. I couldn’t keep my cookies down.
AB: You mentioned the McNeil family that had a store in town. Did your family buy from them or did you go into Oakland for supplies?
CR: We bought everything from Bob McNeil. Staples, bran for the calves… everything. I remember the store, the hotel on the corner, and right across the Plaza there was Thomson’s blacksmith shop. East from there up on the hill was the Methodist Church. A lane went up on the east side of the blacksmith shop and the Thomson’s house was up here. A Swedish fellow had lots of chickens back in there. It was not much of a town. The Plaza was just a weed patch. No fence around it.
I’ll tell you about one Halloween when Bill Thomson got a couple of new spring wagons at the blacksmith shop. He had a grandson, Lex. Some of us, Stuart McNeil and others, took one of those wagons out of the crate and put it on top of the roof of the blacksmith shop. The next morning Mr. McNeil asked why Thomson had the wagon up on the roof. Mow, Mr. Thomson was a very religious man… great in the church. Thomson looked up and when he saw the wagon he said, “Shit, Shit, Shit.” It took about all day to get the wagon down and it had taken us kids about an hour to get it up there. Nobody told who’d done it, but I think I had an idea.
AB: How would you describe the hotel in town?
CR: Well, I was never in it until I moved away and later came back. They had rooms upstairs and they had a dining room and a bar. I went there with two other fellows when we came out here for a dance on a day about 1914 or 1915. We took the Oakland-Antioch train and rode out to Lafayette late in the afternoon. We went over to the hotel and had a drink, found out about the dance, so we stayed for the dance. There was a misunderstanding up there and Frank Thomson, who was as big as a horse… a great big guy… came over and told us we had better leave. So, we left. We went down and the cars were all parked across the street. And we noticed a man and a lady go over to a car, pull out a bottle and have a drink. Well, one of my friends said that if they could have a drink, so could we. So, we made all the cars and did all the drinking we wanted. After that we caught the Antioch train and went home.
It shows in this book (Lafayette: A Pictoral History) people driving cattle down in town. You would drive cattle down any country road. When you waited to take cattle down into Butchertown (now called Emeryville), you rounded up your cattle. I went with Bob Root and we rounded up 75 to 80 cattle in the afternoon, slept in the barn that night and the next morning we started out. Instead of going down the Tunnel Road, we went over the old Fish ranch Road. You came out there by the Claremont Hotel and from there on down into Emeryville. It was an all-day job. We didn’t get home until late that evening. There was no water along the way, and it was hot in the summertime.
AB: Thank you Mr. Reynolds, for telling us about Lafayette when it was a small country town.
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