Oral History: Curran Family

A History of the Curran Ranch, Glenside Drive, Lafayette

Most people in Lafayette, especially those who live in Burton Valley, drive by land that once belonged to the Curran family. Today, it is still a cattle ranch where Reliez Station Road joins Glenside Drive. Open acres extend into the hills above Michael Drive, all the way over the ridge to Rossmoor. Until recently, there was a little old house sitting abandoned on the property near the road.

The Curran family, Gussie and Patrick, bought the 101 acres in 1920. There was a small house on the property which promptly burned down, maybe due to a chimney fire, maybe because of a Christmas tree—no one is sure anymore. Another house, the one many of us have seen, was built to accommodate the Currans and their five children, Charles, Patrick, James, Hester, and John. It stood for 85 years until being removed a few years ago.

Patrick Stanislaus Curran was born in Wildcat Canyon (now part of Tilden Park) in 1874 to an Irish immigrant family who farmed hay and had dairy cattle. As a young man, he went north to work in a logging camp near Mt. Shasta. There he met Gussie Hall. She was born in 1888 and raised in the small town of Paskenta near Red Bluff. They were married in 1907. They moved to Oakland to live with Patrick’s parents who by this time owned a livery stable. After producing four children, they were finally able to buy their own land. Another child was born after the move to Lafayette.

With hard work, the Curran family thrived in Lafayette, raising milk cows, producing milk that they bottled and sold to residences, mainly in Berkeley and Oakland. Patrick died in 1928 from pneumonia. Gussie and her five children continued to operate the dairy.

In 1934, Gussie married Joe Botelho, of Portuguese descent, who owned a blacksmith shop in Walnut Creek. It was located on the corner of Mt. Diablo and California, where Cost Plus World Market is now. A street nearby is named after Joe’s father, Antonio, who had owned a lot of property in downtown Walnut Creek.

After marriage, they switched their operation from a dairy to raising beef cattle, and they grew walnuts. The kids would have black hands from the walnut husks. They would have wonderful picnics in front of the house. All “hands” would gather for barbecued steaks or ham hocks and beans.

Walnuts were an important crop in the region, and in 1936, Gussie’s daughter, Hester Curran (named for Gussies’s mother), was crowned Queen of the very first Walnut festival, still held every year in Walnut Creek.

Gussie converted to Catholicism when she married Patrick Curran and remained devout her whole life, listening to the rosary on the radio every night. She had a keen sense of ethics which she passed onto her children and grandchildren. A grandson remembers wanting a certain pocketknife very badly. Finally, he could almost afford it, but he had to borrow 98 cents from his brother. He was walking around showing off his pocketknife to his siblings, and anyone he could find, when Gussie sternly told him that the knife was not his! It wasn’t his to show off until he paid his debt to his brother.

While Gussie could be a bit of a drill sergeant, she was also loving and fun. All the children learned to count by playing cards with her. She loved to play volleyball and swim. The family would gather for picnics and go swimming in Mitchell canyon near Mt. Diablo. Gussie was the first one in the water and the last one out. She swam sidestroke waring an old-fashioned pantaloon bathing suit, like Popeye’s Olive Oyl. She let her kids swim through her legs and generally had a good time.

One of the fondest memories her grandchildren have is of her making them Doughboys—water flour sugar—cut into circles with a glass or broken cookie cutter and deep fat fried until they puffed up. The grandchildren would try to guess what each one looked like—a turtle, or Bob Hope’s nose. They would sit around the kitchen table, mostly on milk crates because there were not enough chairs. Gussie was very definite about the fact that the doughboys and the maple syrup to dip them in had to come out evenly! Any of one or the other left over, and the children would get no more. The children carefully calculated to be sure to sop every bit of maple syrup with no doughboy left over so they could have another serving. Gussie also baked sugar cookies using her mother, Hester Hall’s, recipe. Because she used a wood stove, she tended to burn the cookies often, but they were still a hit with the kids. Gussie would bake a lot of cookies for the camping trips the family took in the 50’s and 60’s near the McLeod River. This was in the Mt. Shasta area where Gussie had been raised. She loved to camp. The children, grandchildren, and spouses would all go. They would attach tarps to the trees, dig a hole for a toilet putting a box with a toilet seat over it, put watermelon in the river to chill, and make apple sauce with apples the laboriously hauled in.

The cookies were so popular on camping trips that Gussie invented a game to ration them. She would put an empty tape spool on a nail on a tree. The spool had numbers on it. A child would guess a number, the spool would be spun, and if the number was correct the child got a cookie. If not, the child got a cracker.

Her grandchildren would never forget the image of Gussie driving down St. Mary’s Road on Sundays, in the middle of the road, the cherries on her church hat bobbing. She was a beloved force to be reckoned with.

As Gussie became somewhat frail, the family felt it would be best for someone to stay at the ranch with her at night. Grandson John was happy to help her out. Every week, Gussie would wash the linens, but insisted that we only sleep on one side of the double bed in the extra bedroom. It didn’t take John to realize that about midweek, Grandma would go in and completely remake the bed putting the “fresh” side of the linens on his sleeping side. She didn’t have to do more wash, and he had the pleasure of fresh linens twice a week.

Gussie Curran Botelho died in 1968, at the age of 80, still living on the land where so much of her rich life had been lived.

Beginning in the 1950’s plans were made to build a freeway from Pleasant Hill Road and 24 that would go through Burton Valley to Moraga, Canyon and finally Oakland, called the Shepherd Canyon Freeway—Highway 77. The freeway would have gone right through the Curran land.

After Gussie dies, the state (CALTRAN) began negotiations to buy the land for the freeway. Finally it was sold in the 1970’s. Gussie’s son James (Toby) Curran then leased the property from the state for horses and cattle.

One of the first Environmental Impact Studies ever done in the state was conducted over this proposed freeway. There was also a grassroots protest, with demonstrators carrying signs reading “No to Highway 77”. Finally, after twenty years, the plans were dropped. What a different place this would have been!

Eventually, someone bought the land from the state, and the Curran tenure was over. Cows still graze the hills, and the Curran family still cherish the memories of its life lived on the 101 acres of the Curran Ranch.