Summary:
Ray Peters was interviewed by Julie Sullivan in October, 2005. He came to Lafayette in 1962 when he co-founded a civl engineering and surveying firm, and he soon became fascinated with its history. Ray used his skills to locate the sites of the three homes built by Lafayette’s founder, Elam Brown, and in 1978 he and his wife Barbara purchased the city’s oldest house. He occasionally dressed as Elam Brown in order to bring history to life for school children and other audiences, and he wrote a book on Lafayette’s history, “Thirty Cents an Acre”.
Oral History:
It may be because he lives in the oldest house in Lafayette, or perhaps it’s because his work as a surveyor and civil engineer brought him into contact with Lafayette’s past, but whatever the reason, Ray Peters is fascinated with Elam Brown, Lafayette’s founding father – so fascinated he becomes Elam Brown for special occasions.
Ray and his wife, Barbara, moved to Lafayette in 1978, where Ray and his partner Gilbert Verdugo had run Peters and Verdugo, a civil engineering and surveying firm, since 1962. He joined the Lafayette Historical Society in the early 70’s and later served as president. “I had done some research on Elam Brown and was fascinated by him,” Ray says. “Various documents said he had owned three houses here at different times. I obtained the original field notes of the survey of Rancho Acalanes, done around 1852. I plotted the location of Elam Brown’s third house on my computer. It was just about where Petar’s Restaurant is now. The historical society built a monument there with a picture of the house.
“Later, the Historical Society asked me to fill in as a speaker. They wanted me to describe how I located the Brown house. I didn’t think anybody would want to hear about that, so I decided to portray Elam Brown.” Ray didn’t realize it then, but his performance would be repeated dozens of times over the years.
“I went down to the Wayside Inn and rented a top hat, necktie, Victorian coat and cane,” Ray remembers. “Then I went hobbling in, and the audience applauded on sight. I had more fun. Then I toured around the grammar schools. I’d say – I’m Elam Brown, and I’m 200 years old.” What Ray calls his swansong portraying Elam occurred at the Sesquicentennial celebration of the Lafayette Methodist Church in 2005, but not everyone is convinced he’s really through.
Ray is as passionate about details as he is about history. “The question remained – where were Elam Brown’s first and second houses. A lot of information said he went up to where Happy Valley Road is now. I had it absolutely isolated that a place up in Happy Valley had to be where his first house was. There was a house nearby, and I talked to the owner and told him we wanted to build a monument alongside the road. He said, ‘This can’t be where his house was because there’s no water here. We’ve drilled wells and never hit water.’ I explained that’s why Elam moved; it’s in the history book. He moved there in February when the creeks were flowing, but by June he didn’t have any water. He had a little horse drawn mill. It was the first mill in Contra Costa County.
“So he built a second house and a steam mill. I learned that by reading in the history section in the Pleasant Hill Library. They have his actual ledgers there. I’m sure his mill was alongside where an apartment building sits today, adjacent to the Park Theater. He bought huge volumes of oak firewood in the summer, and I thought, ‘why did he buy this?’ I eventually figured out he had a steam powered mill. One book called it a stream mill, but it wasn’t stream. He took water from Lafayette Creek and had a steam mill. The creek flooded the whole thing one year, and he went to a little higher ground, where Petar’s is now, and built his third house. A lot of history is just a logical conclusion,” Ray explains.
Ray was born in St. Louis and attended St. Paul’s College in Missouri. He served in the army from 1948-51 and was stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco. After being discharged, he studied civil engineering at the Missouri School of Mines. “It was so gorgeous our here, I moved back,” he says. His first job was with the State of California, working on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. He met Barbara, an exchange elementary teacher from England, and they were married in 1955. The couple has two daughters, a son and five grandchildren.
“Gilbert Verdugo and I decided to start our own business, and he chose Lafayette,” Ray explains. Ray and Barbara were living in Pleasant Hill then. “I’ve always had a passion for old homes,” he continues. “A friend told me about this house (their current home on Martino Road). I talked to Louis Martino, who lives up the road. He was the son of Nat Martino (the former owner, who had passed away). Nat emigrated here from Italy. I think he bought the house in 1919. Everybody calls it the Martino house. It was built in August, 1876 by Fred Easton. It’s older than the Pioneer Store.”
Living in an historic house required some adjustments. “When we moved in, there was only one closet in the entire house, and all the woodwork was painted brown. We started scraping paint and discovered the stairway handrail was virgin redwood,” Ray remembers. “The base of a water tower was still standing between the garage and the carriage house. Louis explained there was a big concrete cistern across the street. A pipe ran along Springhill Road – there was a spring that gave the road its name – that fed water into the cistern. Louis had to go across the street every morning and start a gasoline engine that pumped water from the cistern into the water tower so they had running water in the house.”
Most of Ray’s business clients were local developers and property owners. “We did a lot of work for the City of Lafayette,” he adds. “Most of Mt. Diablo Boulevard is our design all the way from about the old Veterans Building to the Park Hotel. That was our idea, the parking bays and the left turn lane. At one time I think we had the largest surveying and engineering organization in Contra Costa County.
“After we re-routed the intersection of Mt. Diablo Boulevard and Golden Gate Way, I worked to get a gazebo alongside the Regional Trail. The East Bay Park District wouldn’t come up with the money. Then I was appointed to the city Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. My time had come! The gazebo was dedicated September 20, 1987. Many people don’t know there’s a time capsule beneath it, to be opened fifty years from the dedication.
“The contributors that really made the gazebo possible were the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The Lafayette Garden Club maintains the grounds and the adjacent Virginia Anderson Garden.”
Ray calls Lafayette a typical American strip city. “Unless you dig everything up and start from scratch like Houseman did in Paris, I don’t think it’s possible to do much more,” he says.
“They used to call the area on the south side of the BART station the BART Block. We made some preliminary plans on spec and a model that had a five-story garage, and people about died. Lafayette has a very strong feeling they don’t want any development north of the freeway. The Johnsons wanted to build a senior center around the BART station – I thought that was the most marvelous idea – but people were so against it. They were afraid it was going to impact their wallets. They said they would have dogs barking all night. There was a time when Don Young Ford wanted to build there. He had a big dealership in town. He wanted to build on one of those lots, and he was willing to build a multi- story garage for BART if they would sell him the piece of land. All these ideas were considered reprehensible. Lafayette’s not very business- oriented.
“I hear this about semi-rural. I think it’s a plague we’ve brought on ourselves with these big lots. It means that public transportation systems don’t work. I have to drive to BART, then there’s no place to park. They can’t bus us, because we’re so far apart.”
For a time Peters and Verdugo had a third partner, Bob Hull, and the firm went into real estate development. “We got into one on Reliez Valley Road we figured would take a year, and it took four years,” Ray remembers. “We decided we didn’t want to do that again. Developers make good money or they go broke.” Ray retired in the mid 90’s and started writing books. A baptismal font that had supposedly belonged to Jean Lafitte (a 19th century privateer in the Gulf of Mexico) was donated to the Historical Society. Ray became fascinated with the history and researched it in New Orleans, resulting in The Lafitte Case, a book of historical fiction published in Colorado. He’s currently working on a “dandy book” about Ancient Egypt.
In the late 90’s Ray received a letter from Caltrans inviting him back to work. “I had maintained my surveyor’s license, and they needed people badly,” he says. “I’m working for them again in Oakland.”
Ray remembers many of Lafayette’s early figures, several who were neighbors. “Bob Keeney owned Buckeye Ranch back at the end of Springhill Road. It was a Western ranch with riding stables and a little Western town. He used to make sets in Hollywood. He was a cowboy. Eventually it became part of the Park District, but they didn’t have the money to maintain it as a riding stable.
“Jack Marchant lived right down the street off Springhill Road. Springhill was his development, and he made Blackhawk Road the beautiful street it is today. He was a sweet guy. Talk about an unobtrusive fellow. He wore blue overalls and a straw hat when he walked around, and he looked like an old farmer. A big, cheery face with red cheeks.
“Ernie Marriner was Lafayette’s first city manager. He was formerly city manager of Pittsburg. He was a ‘down easter’ from Maine. A city planner said, ‘If you ask Ernie a question he’ll answer it perfectly but never go beyond that.’ Everybody liked him. He was a great organizer, which is what they needed when they started the city. Originally the BART station was to be at the end of Pleasant Hill Road. If Lafayette hadn’t been a city at that time, things would be different now.
“The original Petar’s was in the BART Block,” Ray remembers. “I was good friends with Petar. He used to have a cable car on a truck chassis he supposedly bought in an auction from Disney. When he sold the restaurant, the new owner got the cable car. He wanted to donate it to the Historical Society, and it was parked on my lawn for a long while. Mt. Diablo School District took it to a high school shop to restore, and eventually sold it to a company that did auto body work.
“There was a lumber yard where the Park Hotel is now. Payless wanted to build there, then the hotel came along. You have to be able to see something good and do it. Now the hotel is a focal point of town. You never really see Lafayette change much when you live here,” he adds. “I think the rest of my days it’s going to be exactly like it is now.”
This interview is excerpted from Voices of Lafayette, by Julie Sullivan. This book is available for purchase in the History Room.
Leave a Reply