Mi Refugio

NOTICIAS Journal Of The Santa Barbara Historical Museum

Vol. LÂ V

No. 2

In 2010 Elizabeth Erro Hvolboll presented to her family and close friends her memoir, Mí Refugio, Growing Up on a Coastal Ranch in Southern California. In this issue of Noticias we present excerpts from that memoir, detailing her fond remembrances of life on the Orella Ranch just east of the Refugio area. The Historical Museum wishes to express its deep gratitude to Elizabeth Hvolboll and her family for allowing us to publish these memories. We begin this issue with a Foreword written by her son, Eric Hvolboll.

THE AUTHOR: Elizabeth Erro Hvolboll was born in Santa Barbara in 1930 and raised on the Orella Ranch where her parents were farmers. Her family began farming and ranching in Santa Barbara County in 1837. Her great-grandparents, Bruno and Mercedes Gonzales Orella purchased the Refugio area ranches from the Ortega family in 1866. Her paternal ancestors were among the original colonists in California during the Spanish era and participated in the founding of Los Angeles in 1781 and Santa Barbara in 1782. At eighty-six she continues to maintain her grandparents’ home at La Paloma Ranch in Venadito Canyon near Refugio Beach, where her family has lived for seven generations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: The author would like to acknowledge Richard Pearce, Keith Hamm, Judy Sutcliffe, and John Iwerks for their assistance in putting these stories together for Mí Refugio, as well as her children Eric, Janet, and Sigrid for encouraging her to write them down.

All images are from the collection of Elizabeth Erro Hvolboll. Images on the front and back covers are details from the painting, Orella Ranch and Refugio Beach, 1978 by Ray Sanford Strong (1905-2006).

INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS: Noticias is a journal devoted to the study of the history of Santa Barbara County. Contributions of articles are welcome. Those authors whose articles are accepted for publication will receive ten gratis copies of the issue in which their article appears. Further copies are available to the contributor at cost. The authority in matters of style is The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. The Publications Committee reserves the right to return submitted manuscripts for required changes.

Statements and opinions expressed in articles are the sole responsibility of the author.

Michael Redmon, Editor Judy Sutcliffe, Designer ©2016 Santa Barbara Historical Museum 136 East De la Guerra Street, Santa Barbara, California, 93101 sbhistorical.org Single copies $12 ISSN 0581-5916

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M!I R!E!F! U!GIO

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by Elizabeth Erro Hvolboll

My mother, Elizabeth, graduated in a class of six from Vista del Mar elementary school near Gaviota in 1943. She left the Orella Ranch in 1948 for U.C. Santa Barbara College on Santa Barbara’s Riviera campus after graduating from high school in Santa Ynez. She graduated from U.C.S.B.C. in 1951. “Daddy” died at the Orella Ranch corrals in 1960 and “Honey” died in Santa Barbara in 1987. Elizabeth’s sister Mercedes was a schoolteacher at San Julian, Ballard and Goleta; she died in 1955. Their sister Luzena married Charlie Tautrim in 1938.

The Tautrims had two sons, Martin and Mark, who today live in Los Angeles and on the Orella Ranch, respectively. Luzena died in 1993 and Charlie in 1997. Elizabeth married her high school sweetheart, Solvang native Arne Hvolboll, the son of Danish immigrants, in 1950. They had three children, Janet and Sigrid and me.

Arne graduated in the first class of the U.C.L.A. Medical School in 1955 and 65

spent his career as an anesthesiologist at Cottage Hospital. He died in 2002.

Elizabeth’s life has been centered on her family, ranching, and singing. She was introduced to music in the late 1930s at Vista del Mar by Caroline Donahue Henning, a teacher who lived nearby at Nojoqui. Mrs. Henning introduced her students to the Spanish songs of early California. Elizabeth learned from her parents that her grandmother Josefa Erro had sung some of these songs in the ranch house kitchen at La Paloma before Elizabeth was born.

Elizabeth first sang in public as a fifthgrader at a Farm Bureau meeting in the Santa Ynez Valley in the early 1940s. As a high school teenager she sang at her first Fiesta, at Noches de Ronda on the courthouse steps in Santa Barbara. In 1951 she studied in the summer program at the Music Academy of the West. Later she performed many times at Fiesta Pequeña on the Mission Santa Barbara steps (where

66 many of her ancestors had been baptized, married and interred since the 1700s), in the Fiesta parade and beginning in 1991 with El Coro at the presidio with the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation.

She joined with Luis Moreno to reintroduce the traditional Mexican Christmas pageant, Una Noche de Las Posadas, a singing procession starting at the presidio chapel and concluding at Casa de la Guerra. Elizabeth and Luis also performed the early California songs at Elderhostel programs for many years.

In addition to the music of early California, Elizabeth studied and performed folk and social protest music in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as sacred music at the First Methodist Church with accompanist Brooks M. Davis. In 1965 she was a local hit playing the Mother Abbess in the Sound of Music at the Lobero Theatre.

For many years after that role, strangers would approach her in the grocery store or on the street and compliment her performance in that popular musical.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, at the invitation of Marla Daily and Msgr. Francis J. Weber, Elizabeth sang regularly at the annual Feast of the Holy Cross at La Capilla de la Santa Cruz del Rosario on Santa Cruz Island with Joe Walsh, Brooks Davis, Luis Moreno, and others. In 1998 she received the first Fiesta History and Traditions Award Recognition from Santa Barbara’s Old Spanish Days History Committee for her musical participation in Fiesta for over fifty years. In 1999 she received the Pearl Chase Historic Preservation and Conservation Award from the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation for her work in preserving and per-

NOTICIAS forming the music of early California. She was simultaneously honored as a Local Hero by the Santa Barbara Independent newspaper for her years of music and in particular for organizing Las Posadas. She emphasized then the historical importance of folk music, especially that of early California…”I have tried to pass on to other people some of the meaning of the music of my antepasados [ancestors] – those people who walked, rode horseback, rode in buggies and wagons, raised cattle, grew feed for their stock, on the very same land on which I have walked, ridden horseback and raised cattle.”

Our mother has always taught us to be proud of all aspects of our Californio and ranching heritage, with a family tree which stretches back thousands of years in Mexico as indigenous people who later intermarried with African slaves and Spanish and Basque colonists in the New World.

Out here in Venadito Canyon Elizabeth sleeps in her grandparents’ bedroom in the ranch house at La Paloma. Her nephew Mark Tautrim and his son Guner and their families live at the mouth of the canyon on the Orella Ranch. Our cousins the Erburu family maintain their ranch overlooking El Capitan Beach. These three ranches celebrate their sesquicentennial this year, 1866 – 2016. Other Orella cousins, the Saralegui and Alegria families, still live on their ranches to the west of us in Refugio Canyon.

Little has changed at La Paloma since Elizabeth was growing up, except our crops. Over 150 years we’ve raised sheep, pigs and cattle and grown walnuts, lima beans, tomatoes, and garbanzos. Now we maintain avocado orchards and have put in

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MÍ REFUGIO experimental plantings of coffee and blue agave. Neighbors operate a native plant nursery on a few acres and our friends, the King family, raise cattle. Our great-great grandfather worked with the Kings’ ancestors raising cattle in the Cuyama Valley in the 1850s.

Over time the ranches along the Refugio and Gaviota coastline have grown smaller while the new houses always seem to get larger. Portions of our former garbanzo field on the ocean bluff are now a group campsite at Refugio State Beach. Cattle on the coast are now more a decoration than a

livelihood. We’re fortunate to live as an anachronism – a small family farm populated by bobcats, skunks, snakes, raccoons, badgers, lions and even bears which swim in our irrigation reservoir. We’re surrounded by cousins, crops, chaparral, and sandstone fins of the Santa Ynez Range. There are cattle trails worn deep into that sandstone, and when the onshore wind is just right, we can hear the Pacific waves crashing onto Venadito Canyon beach from two miles up canyon.

—Eric Hvolboll, La Paloma Ranch, Orella, California, October 2016

The ranches of the Refugio area, 1964.

Page 65: Elizabeth Erro, 1947

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Introduction La Paloma Ranch, Orella Ranch, Venadito Canyon—words known to me before I could understand words.

La Paloma Ranch. The Dove Ranch.

Named by my grandmother, Josefa Orella y González de Erro, for the many doves there, or perhaps as cattleman Vicente Ortega said, for her little girl who was born in the canyon. This is where my grandparents built their home in 1902 and where my grandfather, Miguel Erro, built the two-mile road up Venadito Canyon with the help of two Chumash men, one horse, a Fresno scraper, and shovels.

Orella Ranch. Named for Fermín Orella, who inherited that particular one-tenth of the original Orella Ranch from his father, Don Bruno Francisco Orella. It is located at Orella, California (yes, officially, there is such a place— just look at the old maps). Orella was

where the Orella family lived in the old adobe in Cañada del Corral starting in 1866. Where the first trains stopped at the small yellow Orella Station. Where neighbors bought supplies at the Orella store. Where the adjacent Covarrubias’ Shell and the Erburus’ General Petroleum leases pumped oil for more than three decades. Where my grandmother, as a young girl, was held by bandidos for payment in fresh horses. Where I went with my dad on foot, on horseback, and in the old pickup and 1937 Chevy sedan to fire up the gasolinepowered water well pumps, to help pile lima beans, and to visit neighbors in Refugio and Venadito canyons.

Where he hauled a load of water every day from the Shell lease to supply the barn, corrals, and the house.

Venadito Canyon. Cañada del Venadito. Canyon of the Little Deer. Who

MÍ REFUGIO LEFT: A view of Refugio Beach, 1932.

named it for the mule deer leaping quietly through the grasses? For a quarter century after my dad’s death, when my mother owned the Orella and La Paloma ranches and leased the Williams Ranch in between, we had the entire canyon to ourselves. What good fortune that was. I gave thanks every time I was in that beautiful, sweetsmelling place—knowing that it couldn’t last forever.

I was born in 1930 at St. Francis Hospital in Santa Barbara and brought home to Orella Ranch, where my parents, Martín Erro and Louise MacIntyre Erro, sharecropped lima beans and ran a herd of Herefords. We lived in a very small, two-bedroom house.

I suppose we were poor. But I didn’t realize it when I was young. Until I was about eleven years old, we did not have an indoor bathroom. I took my baths in a washtub full of warm water on the dining room floor, with the little gas heater next to me on cold nights. Occasionally we would make the journey to the next ranch, in Refugio Canyon, which had been inherited by my dad’s aunt, Mercedes Orella Careaga. My dad’s brother, Mike Erro, lived and farmed there, and he had tapped a hot sulfur spring, built a small tin shack, and piped in the hot water to make a shower. Oh, that felt so good.

Today we simply turn on the faucet to get water. Back then, for us, water for our house and the cattle and horse troughs was difficult to procure. I remember when one of my dad’s second

69 cousins, John Alegria, witched two spots for us. A waterwitch is someone who can take a forked stick (probably willow, although I’m not sure), hold each of the forks in his (or her) hands and then walk slowly holding the stick horizontally. When the stick dips by itself towards the ground, there is water below and a well can be drilled.

However, neither of the wells we dug lasted very long. After that, our neighbor Nelson Rutherford allowed my dad to have water from a well just across the property line between our ranch and his. One day in the 1940s, when I was in high school and coming home on the bus, I watched the water from that well shooting forty feet in the sky.

Underground gas was blowing the water out. That was the end of that well.

Our next source of water was from an adjacent ranch that had been inherited by my dad’s aunt, Elena Orella Covarrubias. Shell Oil had dug a deep well there, expecting oil. But they hit water. Very good water. They kept a pump in it and offered the water for free to all neighbors. My dad put a large tank on the back of his cattle truck and hauled a load of water almost every day to a large concrete holding tank, which he had built up the hill to serve the house and barn.

I remember our land as a very beautiful place between the mountains and the sea. Some afternoons, my mother and I would walk across the fields of the Orella and Rutherford ranches, down to Refugio Beach.

I played for hours in the sand and small waves. Nelson and Neva

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Rutherford had a private resort at the beach, with a few vacation cabins, camping spaces, picnic tables, and a small store where I sometimes bought a box of Cracker Jack. The Rutherfords also had a private picnic area with a pergola and tables next to their very nice wooden house with huge windows overlooking the ocean. The most wonderful thing at the beach was a concrete pool on the upper edge of the sand. Mr. Rutherford piped hot sulfur water to it from a nearby artesian well. (This well was destroyed when the freeway was widened.) As children, we would sit in the hot pool, then run and jump in the cold ocean. The Rutherfords would never let us pay for visiting their beach resort—not even for the time when we took two carloads of guests. My dad paid the store clerk for our entrance, but Nelson found

out and returned the money. Friends in the country are like that.

When one’s surroundings are composed of the ocean and the mountains and the vast farms all around, it’s part of life to pay attention to the seasons and the weather. Some people say that there are no seasons in Southern California. Not true. They just need to pay closer attention.

Our shortest days come in winter, with darkness covering us at about 5 p.m. This is the coldest season, though the temperature rarely goes below freezing, and snow is very rare.

Rains come in the late fall and winter.

This climate works well for certain crops, such as avocados. Navel oranges, some of which grow on trees planted by my grandfather Erro nearly one hundred years ago, are at their best in January and February.

And the heavenly Satsuma mandarins

The hot sulfur water pool at the Rutherfords’ private resort, Refugio Beach, 1930s.

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MĂ? REFUGIO

The barn at La Paloma, 1930s.

ripen and last for about six weeks. We eat every one!

Spring is a time of rejuvenation.

Wildflowers in abundance. We have deciduous trees, like sycamores and willows, which put out their light green leaves, and the fruit trees start to leaf out. Other citrus fruits begin to ripen, including kumquats, tangerines, and those incredibly good limequats that can be turned into pies. And the grass! It comes up and turns the hills and fields green and fresh again.

Summer brings warmer weather, and also some of my beloved cool fog. Crops and fruit trees begin to produce. Occasionally we start harvesting the first of the avocados in late February and continue into summer. Unfortunately, our winds preclude us from keeping the fruit on the trees until early fall. The majority of our avocados are picked during early summer. We have sweet, luscious figs,

navel oranges, peaches, and loquats. The grass turns gold and then a burnt yellow —great cattle feed.

Fall is the most difficult time of year for me. It brings the hottest and windiest days. Without irrigation, vegetation turns darker and drier, and the threat of wildfire plants its seed of fear.

This is the season of our north winds, sometimes called sundowners, strong and hot, and exacerbated by low humidity. They almost seem to be alive and evil. During these wind events, as positive ions fill the air, the crime rate spikes and some people become anxious and irritable.

I vividly remember one night when I was quite young. My eldest sister Cedes was home for a few days and was sleeping on a cot at the foot of my bed. The temperature climbed, the north wind was blowing, and the eucalyptus trees near the house were creak-

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to my surviving sister Zena and her family, and La Paloma Ranch to my family and me. Some years later, we bought the upper half of the Williams Ranch, adjacent to La Paloma in Venadito Canyon.

Glenn Parks had been sharecropping avocados for us on La Paloma for several years. He was planning to plant avocado trees for us on this new purchase. Near the end of October, we drove up the canyon and there he was on his big tractor, pulling a huge disc— preparing the soil for a big crop of barley! He looked so happy. It was then that I realized how much I have missed watching Glenn, my dad, and my family doing the hands-on work of farming. Tears welled up in my soul for all of that, and how it’s gone from my life.

The avocados are fine and they produce more income than the old crops, but they’re not the same as the old farming and the cattle.

Times are changing and old ways of life are threatened by the modern world. The term Gaviota Coast is relatively new. It’s a political term, really, describing the coast, from ocean’s edge to mountain ridge, stretching from Ellwood to Point Conception. And over the past twenty years or so, the Gaviota Coast has become a battleground between the forces of preservation and the forces of development. The thought of my family ranch someday falling under blades of development and so-called In the 1980s, my mother divided progress quite literally gave me nightthe ranches, giving Orella Ranch and mares. Then we found a way to prothe ten acres of the Covarrubias ranch tect our ranch and to preserve the

ing and roaring. I sat up in bed. Cedes was sitting on the edge of the cot with her head in her hands. Neither of us made a sound. We just sat there in the heat and noise.

At times the north wind blows harder at La Paloma Ranch, two miles up the canyon. Other times it blows in the upper regions of the canyon, but is quiet on the coast. Sometimes it is twenty degrees hotter at La Paloma than by the ocean at Orella. And there are times when the north wind and the ocean breeze “fight.” We can sit on the front porch and experience the alternating dry heat and moist coolness. Fortunately we have many, many days that are pleasantly warm and often with a refreshingly cool ocean breeze from the west. These cool breezes have a healing effect on me.

Yes, we do have rain, although during some years, it is in very short supply. Farmers and ranchers depend on rain. Often, when rain began, Daddy would find a metal bucket and turn it upside down outside the bedroom window in order to really hear the rain. In the country, we live very close to the natural world, watching the grass turn the land green, then slowly gold, then brown.

During the last few summers and falls, as I am growing older, I wonder if I will see another spring with its green hills and wildflowers that I love so much.

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MÍ REFUGIO way of life it has supported for many generations: we signed a conservation easement with the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County. The nightmares went away.

A small part of this memoir is about that: finding a way. The rest is about my life growing up on the rural Southern California coast west of Santa Barbara.

Discovering and remembering our ancestral past has always been a part of the family culture. And along the way I have found that both family and land Martín Erro in front of the corn crop, Refugio Canyon, 1916.

are bound by a common truth: If we lose whence we came, we lose a little bit of who we are.

My Family Daddy (Martín Erro) Kneeling in the chair, watching at the window at night. Very few cars coming down the highway. It was seldom that Daddy came home after dark, but when he did, I kept my eyes steady on the headlights, hoping for his safe return. I was always frightened I might never see him again.

Daddy suffered his first heart attack in 1917. He was twenty-seven years old. Doctors told him he had probably two years to live.

For the next twenty-eight years, though, he did quite well.

I was fifteen when he had his second heart attack, and after that he decided to give up the hard, physical labor of planting, cutting, and harvesting lima beans and baling bean straw. He leased his farmable land, but kept his cattle.

Over the decades that I saw him at work, it seemed to me that Daddy was very careful about everything he did and, even with some of his health problems, he never asked his men to do anything he wouldn’t do.

His work clothes were always overalls, partly because he had an umbilicial hernia that was never repaired, and wearing a belt was very uncomfortable. Underneath

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his overalls he wore one-piece long underwear with long sleeves. One time I washed his white long underwear with some red clothing and his underwear came out pink. I think I was more embarrassed than he was.

Another medical issue that was never diagnosed but occasionally bothered him a great deal was the ringing in his ears, especially when he was very tired from a particularly hard workday. He would sit at the dining room table with his head cradled in his hands for a long time and there was nothing we could do to help him.

On good days (which were most of the time), when he would come in from the bean thresher or baler, with dust and tiny pieces of bean straw in his eyes, I would crawl up into his lap and clean his eyes with a tissue. Another thing that he liked for me to do was to scratch the pad

of his right thumb. I don’t remember how he had injured it, but it was flat and hard, the print completely erased, and it itched. I also liked to crawl up into his lap in the evening so he could help me read the funnies. “Skeezix and the boys and all of it,” I would say.

I was his tomboy. I went everywhere with him, when he allowed.

Sometimes we’d climb into the old Ford pickup and take the trash down across the highway, very carefully across the railroad tracks, and turn left onto the old county road, the only road from the time of the Ortegas and their land grant, Nuestra Señora del Refugio.

Once in a while, he would let me crawl up into his lap and steer! We would throw the refuse into the gully, which reached down to the beach.

I also walked with him often over to Venadito Creek to start the motor on

Martín Erro raking and piling hay on the Orella Ranch behind his two horses, Blue and Rosie, 1920s.

MÍ REFUGIO a well pump. And once I watched him hunt rabbits there. I didn’t enjoy that particular excursion very much.

At night by the light of a kerosene lantern he would take me with him up to the barn to check on the horses and the milk cow and her calf. On those evenings I would stand very quietly with my hand in the horse trough until the little frogs started croaking and swimming around again, and eventually a few would jump onto my hand!

Sometimes we gathered eggs in the barn. One day I was looking for eggs and found a snake curled up in a chicken’s nest in one of the horse-feeding troughs.

I left the barn immediately! I always enjoyed watching Daddy throw forks of hay and horse manure out the front windows of the barn. One day he let me help pile beans on the flat just east of the house. It was harder work than I had imagined, but I kept at it until I picked up a bunch of cut bean plants and found myself looking down at a nest of small rattlesnakes.

It was wonderful to see my dad returning home on horseback after a day out in the fields, riding slowly across the flat. Vicente Ortega once said how my dad always rode at a “little walk.”

In the 1940s Daddy built a wooden cattle chute in the corral by the barn at Orella Ranch. A few years later he also built one on the lower Williams, across the creek from Venadito Canyon Road.

But in the 1920s and ‘30s he didn’t have a large enough corral or a chute to work his cattle as some neighbors did —such as his brother, Mike Erro, on the

75 Careaga Ranch in Refugio Canyon. Often, neighbors would get together at the railroad corrals across the highway from our house to work their cattle.

They all helped each other then, and they still do today.

Daddy roped very well, and I remember a story about one of the days when he “couldn’t miss.” It was during a roundup at the railroad corrals. A car stopped beside the highway and two men climbed up on the fence to watch.

When the work was finished, one of the men went over to my dad and congratulated him on his fine roping ability.

That man was Will Rogers.

Daddy was also good at simple blacksmithing. I liked to go into the windowless shop near the barn with him and watch as he built the fire and shaped tools. As most of the farmers in the area did, he took the big work to Jim Smith, the blacksmith in Goleta.

One of the biggest projects was figuring out and building a bean cutter that would work well on Orella Ranch.

Daddy was a large but gentle man.

He was over six feet tall and had big feet. He called them vasco patón. Later in life, his niece, Marian Erro Long, said to me, “You don’t usually say this about a man, but he was sweet.” And he was. He also had a mild manner.

Only once in my lifetime did I hear him swear. He was changing a tire in the driveway, hit his hand with a tool and he yelled, “Damn!” I was playing in the yard nearby. That short explosion frightened me—it was so unlike him.

He was a kind man too. As all farmers did, he had a manual gas pump by

76 the garage (filled up by the Seaside gasoline truck). When drivers on the highway ran out of gas, they would come to our house and ask if they could buy some. My dad would pump some gasoline into a red watering can and charge twenty cents per gallon, which was what he had paid for it. They always returned the can. With its red paint almost worn off now, it sits today on the creek porch at La Paloma and I water my potted plants with it.

One day, when my father was working with the tractor on the flat to the east of the house, he saw a small plane hit the ocean. The pilot had been spraying on the Careaga Ranch at the mouth of the Refugio Canyon, but had become sick and was trying to land on the beach. Fortunately, he landed in the kelp where the plane was caught. He was revived by the cold water and crawled out onto a wing. My dad got off the tractor and drove down to the beach, but oil men from Erburu got to the pilot first and picked him up.

Another story that speaks to Daddy’s character happened during World War II. Nearby on the Edwards Ranch, just west of Dos Pueblos, there was a camp for German prisoners of war. At the time, most young American men were in the war, and the government allowed the prisoners to help in the local fields. My dad hired some of them to hoe weeds in the lima bean fields, watched over by a guard or two. My mother and I were in the house that day and had no inkling of what was occurring in the field very near the house.

NOTICIAS One of the neighboring Californio men worked on Orella Ranch for several years. My dad often said that he was the best worker he ever had, but he was a “wino,” as they were called in those days. He could work for about two or three weeks, then he’d take his pay in cash and hitchhike to Santa Barbara. This time he had been gone longer than usual, drinking a lot and barely eating anything. No food plus lots of alcohol makes people crazy.

Sadly, one of his sons had just been killed in the line of duty in the South Pacific. He came home that day and when he saw the Germans in the field, he went to his little house up by the barn and came back with his gun. It was probably a rifle. In those days, every man who lived in the country had a rifle and a shotgun. He walked up to the prisoners saying something like, “You killed my son, and now I’m going to kill you.” My dad turned to him and said, “Give me the gun.” The man responded, “I’ll kill you, Martín,” and he kept saying it over and over.

“No, you won’t,” my dad said, walking toward him. “Give me the gun.” There were no shots fired. My dad took the gun, took the man up to his house and put him to bed to sleep it off. Then my dad came to the house, sat down at the dining room table, shaking, and put his head into his hands.

Every summer we went on vacation as a family, and as we prepared for the trip my dad would always tell people, “I’m not going—they’re taking me.” He loved his life and the ranch, calling it God’s country. But the first time that

MÍ REFUGIO

Elizabeth Erro, 1948.

we went as far as Williams Grove in the Humboldt County redwoods, I saw him rest and enjoy the vacation very much. It was good to see him relax and roll his own cigarettes with tobacco from small cloth sacks.

When my sister Cedes died of gastric cancer in 1955, Daddy stopped smoking completely and his health remained fairly good until the time of the attempted murder of his youngest sister in early 1960. It affected him very deeply. A few weeks later, while working the land for Sudan grass for his cattle, he had a massive heart attack.

Then he drove the tractor home! I don’t know how my mother got him to the hospital—she didn’t drive. They had a phone; they had it installed in 1955 when Cedes moved in with them during her fight with cancer.

Daddy was in the hospital for a

77 time and after he got home, he didn’t look at all happy about lying in bed. He had always been very active. Glenn Parks, whose family lived in the bigger adobe on the Covarrubias Ranch, was a young friend and neighbor. He finished working the ground and planted the Sudan. Thanks to Glenn, the cattle were well-fed that year.

On April 9, 1960, Daddy gathered his family, his friends, including Vicente Ortega and his son, Albert, to bring in the cattle and vaccinate them in his small corral by the Orella barn.

My husband, Arne, drove Daddy up in the hills where Vicente was riding alone, bringing in all the cattle by himself in heavy fog. (Arne commented later that Vicente threw down his handkerchief at a bifurcation of the trail. That was to keep the cows from taking the wrong trail.) During the course of the morning, the women were in the house fixing dinner when a cow almost escaped from the wooden holding chute. Daddy jumped back, then fell to the ground. Arne and I gave him CPR, to no avail. He was carried to one of the small pepper trees immediately outside the corral and covered with an old gray army blanket. He was sixty-nine years old. He had lived much longer than any of his doctors had expected. Perhaps his life of hard work had helped him stay strong and live longer and perhaps it was that hard work that finally did him in. I do know this: he died doing what he knew and loved.

Everyone started to leave the corral, and I said, “What about the cows?” The

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men all returned and finished the job.

Then there was a quiet little scene, which no one else probably noticed. I shall never forget it. After the work was finished, Mr. Ortega opened the upper gate in the corral and stood silently, holding his horse by its reins as he watched the cattle walk up the long chute and into the pasture.

Back at the house, my mother said sadly, “I feel as if I’ve gone through this many times.”

Daddy loved what he did all his life: the simple blacksmithing, repairing the machinery, planting the crops, watching them grow, then harvesting them, milking the cow, and taking care of the beef cattle, and he especially loved his family.

There was a mass for him at Misión Santa Inés and he was buried next to their daughter, Mercedes, in Oak Hill Cemetery in Ballard.

Honey (Louise MacIntyre Erro) Daddy told me he was afraid of teachers—but he ended up marrying one. My mother’s name was Louise MacIntyre. We all called her Honey.

When my sister Cedes, the oldest of the Erro children, was learning to talk, she imitated Daddy, who called our mother Honey. It stuck.

Honey attended Santa Barbara High School her senior year, and the 1912 Olive and Gold yearbook says of her: “And sikerly she was of greet disport, And ful pleasant and amiable of port.”

Honey wished to go to college but there was no money for that. In the

Louise MacIntyre, 1913.

summer of 1913, she passed the state teachers’ exam, and in the fall she began teaching elementary school in Orcutt—at both Martin School and Pine Grove School. During that year she lived with the Norris family on what is now Clark Avenue.

In the fall of 1914 Honey taught at the one-room Orella School on the flat in Refugio Canyon. She first boarded with the Ramón Saralegui family, who had homesteaded beside a gorgeous part of Refugio Creek in the upper part of the canyon. She soon moved down the canyon to the homestead of Patricio Alegria, Ramón’s cousin. Ramón and Patricio were two of the three nephews (the other being Julián Orella) for whom Bruno F. Orella had paid passage from Spain to California in the late 1800s.

Honey soon moved over the eastern ridge and lived with Miguel and

MÍ REFUGIO Josefa Erro and their family on La Paloma Ranch in Venadito Canyon. This was the portion of Bruno Orella’s holdings that my grandmother Josefa had inherited. There, my mother met their son, Martín Erro, who was twenty-four; she was twenty.

In 1915, Honey became ill with rheumatic fever and went to Porterville in the San Joaquin Valley to stay with her mother for the rest of that school year. When she was better, she returned to the area. She and Martín were married in December of 1915 in a Catholic church in Los Angeles.

In 1916, they lived on his aunt Mercedes Orella Careaga’s ranch in Refugio Canyon. My father and his brother Miguel, (“Uncle Mike”) farmed there together. During this time, Mercedes Josefa (“Cedes”) was born in Porterville, where our grandmother, (“Gam”) was living. In 1918, Luzena Violet (“Zena”) was born in a house that they rented on Orella Street in Santa Barbara.

In 1919, they farmed on the Careaga place near Los Alamos. They were there for a year. Honey later said that it was a good rest, but there wasn’t enough land to work and make a living. They moved back to Refugio in 1920.

In 1923 my parents moved to my dad’s uncle Fermín Orella’s ranch (Orella Ranch) which is adjacent, to the east, to Aunt Mercedes’ ranch. The buildings were on the coast. They were living there when the 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake struck. Honey said that from the kitchen windows she

79 could see the flat undulating. Zena was sick for several days from the rocking.

On April 2, 1930, I was born in St. Francis Hospital in Santa Barbara, delivered by the general practitioner, Dr. Nagelman, our family physician for many years.

My sisters left home to go to high school by the time I was three years old, and subsequently I was raised almost as an only child. When I was young, my parents took me along when Honey went to fulfill her two community jobs. She was secretary of the board of Vista del Mar Union Elementary School District, which met in the auditorium of the lovely school, built and maintained with oil money on the coast just east of Gaviota, near Alcatraz. She was also secretary of the Coast Farm Bureau, which met alternately at Vista del Mar and Ellwood schools. I would become so bored and sleepy that often I would fall asleep sitting on one of the hard chairs in the front row.

I remember the trip each Saturday to Santa Barbara for the weekly shopping. Honey didn’t drive so Daddy drove wherever we went. Our first stop was fascinating to me. It was at the bank on the northeast corner of State and Carrillo streets. There was always the guard whose uniform intrigued me.

He walked around the bank, smiled at me, and replaced the pens on the desks when they needed ink. There was the huge painting on the wall above the balcony of what I thought were Bouchard and his pirates coming

80 ashore at Refugio Beach in 1818. It now hangs in the Santa Barbara Courthouse.

My mother cashed a check for ten dollars for our shopping.

Often we stopped at Aunt Mercedes’ house on West Figueroa Street, less than a block from State Street. She had told my dad that we could park in her driveway whenever he wished.

Sometimes Daddy would park there or drop us off on State Street and he would go off on his errands.

My favorite thing to do was to go into one or all of the three dime stores (Kress, Newberry’s, and Woolworth’s) on State Street and choose a bag of candy from the bulk containers at my eye level. Honey would often choose pink wintergreen lozenges, which had been Gam’s favorite candy. We also frequented Ott’s Hardware. And one Christmas time, in Montgomery Ward, we picked up a copy of the very first printing of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.

Occasionally we would shop for a dress for Honey in Andera’s or Hitchcock’s or for underwear in TeresaAnn. Hitchcock’s had wooden floors and that wondrous vacuum tube that carried the money to the upstairs office.

The customers’ change was returned to the clerk. There was also Levy’s that carried women’s clothing, but we never shopped there because the merchandise was too expensive. Occasionally we would shop for a hat for Honey. I was rather amused watching her try on one after another. I was never quite sure why women wore hats that were so much fancier than the work hats and

NOTICIAS even the dress hats that men wore.

Sometimes we would shop for shoes for me in Rodenbeck’s and Runkle’s.

The latter had one of those newfangled x-ray machines where I would put my feet into an opening and we could see my bones and how close they were to the inside of the shoes! Luckily those were banned before they harmed too many children.

Sometimes we would meet Daddy for lunch or supper at Johnston’s Cafeteria on the east side of State Street.

When I was that age, I didn’t like most food, but I loved their mashed potatoes and gravy, which would be my whole meal with a glass of milk. On other days, Honey and I would have a bite sitting on the stools at the lunch counter at one of the dime stores. My lunch was always a peanut butter and jam sandwich.

Very occasionally we would go to a movie, either at the Mission or another theater. The most dramatic to me was Stagecoach, a rough-and-tumble western, which was a new experience for me. We drove home after dark, which was unusual. I curled up in the back seat of the car and, in the light of the full moon, thought about the story all the way home.

At the end of the shopping day, we would usually go to visit with Aunt Mercedes, or Honey and I would go to the library and read until Daddy came to pick us up. On the way home, we stopped at Coffey’s Grocery in Goleta.

Honey would read her list aloud or give it to Mrs. Coffey and one of the sons would go throughout the store,

81

MÍ REFUGIO picking up the items. Once in a while Daddy would say to me, “Do you want a soda?” I’d always pick cream soda out of the ice-filled bin—what a treat!

(Coincidentally, Mrs. Coffey was a sister of Frances Alegria, who lived at La Paloma Ranch for several years.)

Often, Daddy would go next door to visit with Jim Smith, the blacksmith, who was a very talented man. He fabricated many tools for the farmers in the area. He and my dad together made a lima bean cutter to suit my dad’s needs. In those days, I didn’t appreciate those topics and became very bored listening to them brainstorm a project.

In Santa Barbara during Old Spanish Days Fiesta every August, we watched the parade on Thursday, always from the “good side” of State Street, which is the west side, in the

shade. In those days, horses, mules, donkeys, and oxen were the only means of transportation that were used in the parade. It was fun to be there with my dad. He knew some of the people who were riding and those who were driving the carriages, wagons, and stagecoaches. One year he entered his palomino, Pájaro, but had someone else ride him.

For many years, Fiesta was scheduled during the week of the full moon in August. The moon added the most to the last night of Fiesta when there was a musical show in the County Bowl. I always enjoyed it and will never forget the ending. A man with a small torch in his hand came down the hillside trail on the south side of the stage and lit a number of large torches that had been placed in the ground.

Louise MacIntyre taught at the one-room Orella School in Refugio Canyon in 1914.

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They then lit the way for a number of horses in full regalia with riders who brought them down the path. It was a beautiful sight.

Back home at the ranch, from our little 20-foot by 40-foot, single-wall, board-and-batten house, there was a view of Refugio Beach and, rarely, San Miguel Island, off to the west. To the south and east, were views of Santa Rosa Island, Santa Cruz Island, and occasionally Anacapa Island, and the coast to Santa Barbara. On clear nights we could see the intermittent beam from the lighthouse on Anacapa.

Honey loved her life on the ranch very much and never tired of the view, watching the changes in the color of the ocean, the different reflections of sunlight on the water, the glorious sight of the full moon trail on the sea, the fishing boats, the kelp cutter, and the oil

tankers that anchored and took on oil from the huge storage tank on the Erburu Ranch, about a mile to the east.

Writing letters and reading were her beloved pastimes. She read a few magazines to which she subscribed and every so often Lida Rutherford from Refugio Canyon would stop by with some of her magazines and they would trade. Honey also loved books about rural topics, inspirational thoughts, and travel.

Honey cooked three meals a day for Daddy and a hired man who worked with him and lived at the ranch in a small building near the barn. (For years it was Leonardo Ortega, Vicente Ortega’s brother, and then it was A.C. Fierro.)

During the autumn bean harvest, she cooked for a threshing crew of more than twenty men, and during bal-

Louise Erro, at left, with family and friends at Las Cruces Store, 1923.

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MÍ REFUGIO

Martín and Louise Erro at La Paloma, 1920s.

ing season, for about a dozen. Often, during that season, she had a woman from the neighborhood come every day to help her. She let me set the tables for the hired men and neighbors who helped my dad, as he helped them in turn, with the threshing of the lima beans and baling of the bean straw, which was excellent cattle feed. She learned a big lesson the first time she fed a crew of men. At breakfast, she served scrambled eggs on a large platter, which was to be passed around the table. She handed it to the first man and he scraped all the eggs onto his own plate! Today, the homemade wooden table, which she used to feed the workmen, is on our porch at La Paloma where we use it for family meals and supper with friends.

Honey also cooked for the hobos walking the highway and riding the trains. It is said that every house that

would grant food to these men was marked in some way, though I’ve never found a marker. Every so often, a hobo would come to our back door. Honey had told me, and later her grandchildren, to stay in the house while they were there. She always fixed them fried-egg sandwiches.

Perhaps twice a year, the “Watkins” man stopped at the homes along the highway. He sold sundries. My mother always bought vanilla from him, but not much more. I enjoyed his short visits in the driveway. He was a cheerful man and always gave me a penny sucker.

One of the community activities in which my mother was involved was elections. When I was quite young, I remember going twice with my folks to the large building south of the highway on the eastern side of the creek on Rancho Dos Pueblos where the neighbor-

84 hood people voted.

Later my mother became part of the election board. Sometimes an election was held in Nelson and Neva Rutherford’s house at Refugio Beach.

Several times the polling place was at Orella Ranch. The voting booths were in Gam’s house. There were both men and women on the board, and each brought something for a potluck at noon. When I came home from school I would find all that delicious homemade food on the big table on the back porch of our house. I enjoyed that!

During the time my parents were married—forty-four years—their travel was primarily up the coast because of my dad’s inability to tolerate higher altitudes or even to drive over high passes. We spent numerous summers camping in the redwoods of Big Sur and Big Basin but mainly in Williams Grove in Humboldt County. Daddy could finally relax and rest. He asked me to make a sign for our campsite: “El Campo de los Flojos” or “The Lazy Ones’ Camp.” We also made two camping trips to Spokane, Washington, to visit Honey’s youngest brother, Malcolm MacIntyre and his family.

Combat in World War II was largely an overseas affair, but for us, on February 23, 1942, it hit much closer to home —literally. I was eleven years old. We were listening to a speech by President

NOTICIAS Roosevelt. We were startled when the speech was cut off before he was finished. Then, outside the house, we heard something that sounded like the dropping of bombs. For weeks, we had watched as pilots from the Marine Air Force Base in Goleta did just that, regularly, out over the channel. We went to the front porch, which had nearly a 180-degree view of the ocean. To the east, toward Santa Barbara, we saw pops of light and more noise. We thought the pilots were out there practicing at night for the first time. About two hours later, we heard a report on the radio that the coast of California had been shelled by the Japanese.

Years later Arne told me what happened to them that night. They were living next to Highway 101 about five miles north of Buellton.

A highway patrolman stopped at their house to tell them that the coast was being shelled and there might be an invasion. Why didn’t anyone stop at our house, which was much closer to the shelling?

There were a number of big guns along the coast during the war. One was directly across the highway from our house and another was on the western end of the beach in front of ABOVE: The Edwards Ranch, east of Orella, was the site of a German POW camp during World War II. This 1966 view shows the remains of a camp watchtower.

MÍ REFUGIO Monroe Rutherford’s house. They were not hidden, but in plain sight. I was only twelve years old, but that puzzled me.

We were already under blackout conditions at the time of the Ellwood attack. Honey made heavy draperies for all of our windows. If one drove by at night, only parking lights were allowed. My parents never drove at night during the war, but once Zena did. She and I went to see a movie in Santa Barbara. We saw very few cars that night.

It was exciting for me.

I have vivid memories of the rumble of Army trucks in long convoys going past our house in the darkness of night. Some would go by during daylight hours as well. One day, my friend Mildred Moffitt and I stood in the yard and waved at the men going by. One, who was standing on the back of a truck, called out, “I’ll be back in five years!”

During the war we sometimes camped near Matilija Creek above Ojai.

One day in 1945 we drove to Ojai for supplies. We walked past the newspaper office and saw a bloodcurdling announcement in the window. Someone hand-painted a notice in ink and posted it before the ink was dry. The letters were all dripping down the page: “U.S. dropped atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”

When people from out of town would come to visit us on Orella Ranch, they would sometimes ask my mother, in a puzzled tone, “What do you do here?” They assumed that there was nothing much that was interesting to do in our little house. Well, my

85 mother had plenty to do. She kept house and cooked for her family and all the hired men. She had chickens to care for. She loved just watching the large expanse of ocean with its changing colors. She read a great deal and corresponded with friends and family.

During World War II she exchanged letters with several local boys who were fighting overseas. The arrival of the mail from Goleta, delivered by Mr. and Mrs. Weatherbee at almost exactly 11 o’clock every morning, six days a week, was a happy event. When Cedes came home for the holidays, she and Honey made candy from our walnuts, grinding the nuts with dates or raisins and forming the mixture into balls as a gift for the Weatherbees. Some were kept for us to enjoy too.

Christmas! When I was growing up I loved Christmas. We always had a small tree—oh, that wonderful scent— in the living room. I would beg to get a tree and set it up. Honey always had me dust the room completely before we could do that. We wrapped presents ahead of time and had them under the tree. On Christmas Eve we all had a wonderful time shaking the packages and trying to guess what was in them.

We used bigger boxes than were necessary, put rocks in with the gifts to make them heavy, or we put in something that rattled. It was great fun.

Honey made cinnamon rolls (from the Bisquick package) on Christmas morning.

Daddy always had something he had to do, and we would have to call him to come in for unwrapping.

86 When I was little, we often went to my Aunt Rosalie and Uncle Bob Welch’s on Christmas Eve. Their living quarters were attached to the back of their Buttercrust Bakery on Anacapa Street between Anapamu and Sola streets. One year on Christmas Eve we came home in a cold, driving rainstorm. I expected that since we were so late Santa might have come. But, oh, what a disappointment. When we went into the chilly room there was nothing new under the tree. Next morning, however, there was. One Christmas I was given a red wagon.

Later I was given a small scooter that had small hard tires. I wore it out.

Probably two years later, there appeared a bigger one with better tires. I rode it first from the house down the driveway and later clear down from the barn.

My mother sewed a great deal and crocheted. She didn’t ever knit. She had tried when she was a girl, but she said it hurt her back. Her sewing was superb and necessary for herself and her family of girls to have enough clothing.

She also made clothing for her two granddaughters. She was an active member of the Women’s Home Department of the Farm Bureau. They provided hands-on lessons in sewing, upholstery, cooking, and other homemaking skills.

Her back often hurt, and when it did, she would make a fist and pound on the sore spot. When I was a child, she was plagued by migraines. But the pains in her body didn’t seem to affect her mood. She had the most even tem-

NOTICIAS perament that I have ever known.

When I was little, she would become upset with me occasionally, but as I grew older, she never did. My son Eric once asked her how she could be like that. She responded that she didn’t know, except that she had always been that way. I saw her cry only once. It was a rainy night and she went outside to use the outhouse. She slipped and fell and when she was returning to the house, she was covered with mud and crying.

In February 1957 there was a terrible incident which changed the rest of Honey’s life. My folks were driving to Los Angeles and on the curved bridge on the Rincon, an oncoming driver crossed the middle of the highway and crashed into them. My dad escaped with a broken bone in his foot and bruises on his chest.

However, my mother’s right hip was dislocated and her right knee was shattered. The doctors didn’t think that she would ever walk again. But after several months in traction at Cottage Hospital, she went home with a walker. And, of course, she never complained! She strengthened the leg quite well and after a while was able to walk with a cane—and do some traveling.

She later had a second hip replacement and was in a walker for the rest of her life. But her cheerfulness and positive attitude never changed.

Arne said that when he, Zena, and ABOVE RIGHT: This pass allowed the Erros access to Refugio Beach during the war years.

MÍ REFUGIO Zena’s husband Charlie went to see Honey in the hospital in Ventura on the night of the accident, she greeted them as if they were entering her living room and was apologizing for not being able to get up.

On June 30, 1960, Arne finished his residency at U.C.L.A. Medical School and joined the Anesthesiology Medical Group at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. We moved to Orella Ranch and stayed with Honey until October, when we moved into a house, which we purchased in Santa Barbara. Over the years, Honey continued to read a great deal and she took care of the bookkeeping for the ranch. After she was widowed, Honey fulfilled her lifelong dream of sailing to Australia.

She also made three bus trips around the United States and into Canada, including the Alcan Highway into the Yukon Territory. She celebrated her 80th birthday in 1974 at La Paloma.

Zena and Charlie were living there and hosted it. Quite a few old friends and relatives came.

In October 1984, Honey became a bit more dependent and her eyesight was deteriorating. In February 1985 she caught a virulent flu that came home with Arne from the hospital, and never regained a fully functioning mind. A few days later, she was taken to Cottage Hospital. From there she went to

87 several care facilities and in July 1986, we moved her to the infirmary at Valle Verde in Santa Barbara where the care was very good. She died there peacefully on April 5, 1987. She was ninety-two. My son Eric and I were with her.

There was a graveside service for her at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Ballard.

Our friend, Brooks Davis, officiated. He played the autoharp and my daughter Janet, her guitar, while I sang.

Her great-grandsons threw earth from Orella Ranch and La Paloma Ranch into the grave. She was buried beside her husband and their daughter Mercedes.

Honey’s sister-in-law, Margaret Steiger MacIntyre, who was ninety-two at the time, attended the funeral. Afterward, she wrote to me: “I’m so glad I got there. The service was beautiful and Brooks handled it so well. I loved the music—the little trio and your lovely song with Janet and Brooks with you.

I’m sure your Mother would have loved it and recognized the love that went into preparing it. I would need a book to say all I think of—and the joy I had. Magic!

And meeting so many old friends was wonderful, too. My memories of Louise are so full of happy times—they include so many years and so much of what she stood for and enjoyed. The family—I saw you grow mostly in letters—but such good letters.”

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NOTICIAS The Land Orella Ranch

Orella Ranch was one of the ten ranches that were carved out of my great-grandfather Bruno Orella’s landholdings in the Refugio area. It was inherited by my father’s uncle Fermín. As a young man he had studied medicine in England, and later became a physician in San Francisco. He married Albertine Schweitzer, of the Schweitzer Beer Company family.

They lived in a beautiful three-story Spanish-style home on the Marina in San Francisco.

Uncle Fermín and Aunt Albertine stopped at least twice at Orella Ranch when I was at home. They came sitting in the back seat of a big, black Cadillac driven by their Chinese cook. Aunt Albertine did not get out of the car, but Uncle Fermín did. He did not come into our house. He stood in the drive-

way and talked to my dad about the ranch. Honey mostly listened and I stood silently listening. Aunt Albertine sent me lovely gifts at Christmas, including a doll when I was little and later a lovely compact, which, of course, I never used. She also gave me a beautiful embroidered evening purse which I used, and still have.

Orella Ranch did not pass to my dad when Uncle Fermín died; it did later, when Aunt Albertine died. Daddy was sure that Uncle Fermín had told him that enough money would be passed along to pay the inheritance taxes, but that didn’t happen. My dad occasionally said, “They didn’t give the ranch to me—I bought it.”

I was born in Santa Barbara in 1930 and taken home to Orella Ranch. I don’t know if my father was hoping for a boy, since he already had two girls, but the neighbors thought that he should have had a son. He never indi-

Martín Erro at work on the Orella Ranch, 1924. The house and its outhouse may be seen at left.

MÍ REFUGIO cated to me that he was disappointed, and I’m sure that he didn’t tell his friends that either. Honey often said he was very happy that I was a girl.

My grandfather, Miguel Erro, was a farmer. After he married Josefa Orella, they lived on a farm in the eastern part of Ojai. I believe all their children were born there and I assume that all or most of them went to school there. My dad only made it into third grade. He said that the teacher whipped him because he couldn’t speak English. He was the oldest boy and his dad needed help on the farm, so he quit school and worked on the farm. The family moved to La Paloma Ranch in 1902 when my dad was 12. He continued to help with the farming, and he met my mother while she was boarding with the family while teaching at Orella School, just over the ridge in Refugio Canyon.

There had long been a fairly nice, large home on the Orella Ranch.

However, it had burned, and Uncle Fermín used the insurance money to build a much smaller house. My family moved into that house before I was born. It was built of single boards, with battens on the inside and outside, and was about eight hundred square feet.

The back door was on the north end of the house, but was used as the front door, in that it was the main entrance and exit used by everyone. The door opened to a very small porch, which on the outside wall contained a covered box for dirty clothes. On the other side of the porch was a pantry, which opened from the kitchen, and beyond that, on the outside, was the entrance to

89 a small cellar. I was never allowed into the cellar and it was filled in and boarded up when I was quite young.

Adjacent to the kitchen was a small dining room. It had a table that sat six people when pulled out from the wall.

The room also contained a small builtin bookcase, a small desk that had been built for my grandfather Erro at La Paloma, and a small china cabinet. Beyond those rooms were the living room, with the door from the kitchen, and two small bedrooms. The living room had five doors: the door from the kitchen, the actual front door to the east (which was very rarely used); the doors into the two bedrooms; and the fifth door that opened to the front porch and overlooked the highway, railroad, and ocean. The latter had a long row of steps leading down into the yard.

If you can understand what I just wrote, you will realize that it wasn’t a very comfortable arrangement, and you might ask, “Where was the bathroom?” There was no bathroom. We had an outhouse, outside to the west. It blew down in a rainstorm when I was in about fourth or fifth grade. I was very embarrassed when I saw a note being passed around the schoolroom saying, “Elizabeth’s toilet blew down last night.” It was rebuilt under the pepper tree.

Of course, going to an outhouse at night is not the easiest thing. We had enamel pots in our closets, which we used at night when it was necessary.

Later my folks took out the small back porch and the pantry. In their place, and extending farther out into the

90 parking area, they built a large porch.

At its western end was a small room with a flush toilet and an adjacent room with a shower, built-in dresser and mirror. What a luxury! We were careful never to let the toilet run. In no time it would have emptied the water tank that supplied the house and the barn.

On the porch was a cot where every day after lunch my dad took a short nap. The cot also served as a couch where he would sit and talk with neighbors. We still use it at La Paloma today.

Our neighbor, Mr. Osborne, built a very large table and benches, which served as a dining table when there were hired men to feed. He also built a large cupboard on the outside of the shower area. At the eastern end were two large windows, which looked out over the ocean toward Santa Barbara.

The pantry was gone so Mr. Osborne built cupboards and a work area in the kitchen for my mother.

The large table and the two cupboards were moved to the house at La Paloma when the Orella Ranch house was destroyed by the widening of the freeway in 1969.

About the time I was born, my folks built a little house just a few steps away for my grandmother, Gam. Her house had an arbor with a cement slab in front of it where the washing machine was kept. I had a tire swing in there for some time. There were two or three steps up into the house. It was one room with a large closet on the side in the back and a door into a tiny room and then another door onto a very

NOTICIAS small back porch. The porch had an outside door to the left, a window, and a door to the right, into a storage room.

In 1950, before Arne and I moved into the little house in Santa Barbara, we put all our wedding gifts in Gam’s house. The doors were locked, but so were the doors into the main house.

One day we came home and someone had broken into the main house and gone through it. There had been a half empty aluminum pail on the back porch, which served as Honey’s garbage pail. When it filled up, she would empty it over the barbed wire fence across from the house into the pasture land. There was a telephone pole there. A seagull would always land on the pole and fly down to pick up the garbage, a little at a time. But, I digress! One of the strange things about the break-in was that the person took that pail, but we never found where he had thrown the garbage. He didn’t take very much—the garbage pail and an old unloaded handgun in my dad’s dresser. And, fortunately for us, they didn’t bother to enter Gam’s house.

The food-cooling system in our house was the same as in almost every other house in those days. There was a floor-to-ceiling cupboard in one corner of our kitchen with shelves made of three or four boards with about half an inch between them. At the bottom of the cupboard was a hole so that the cooler air from under the house could come into it. There was a screen over the hole so that no varmints could crawl in. My mother put the morning’s

MÍ REFUGIO milk into two large pans in the cupboard. When the cream had risen to the top, she would skim it off. We drank the milk at almost every meal. She churned some of the cream into our butter and then used some of it in their morning coffee. The cream would eventually sour and from that she made the most delicious sour cream cake imaginable!

There was one morning’s milk that I will never forget. My dad always had one cow which, with her calf, he would

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let out into the pasture every morning.

He brought them in at night and separated them so that there would be milk available in the morning. One night, for some reason, they weren’t brought into the barn. There were green mustard plants to eat outside and that morning’s milk had the rankest odor that anyone can imagine. The stink filled the entire house!

The yard around our house was fenced to keep me from wandering off.

It was built of redwood posts with woven wire nailed onto them. My feet Martín and his granddaughter, Janet, haul water for the washing machine at Orella Ranch, would fit into the gaps in the wire and I would climb up, but I knew that I late 1950s. wasn’t to go over the top.

During the time that we lived there, we didn’t have enough water to irrigate anything in the yard. My folks found some plants that grew well without water.

Honey had planted some four o’clocks, some irises, and nasturtiums, which reseeded every year in great abundance. When the nasturtium plants dried, my dad raked them up and dumped them near the creekbed in Venadito Canyon. Every spring those nasturtium plants bloom again between the Venadito Canyon Road and the creek.

When we drive by, we say “There are Honey’s nasturtiums.” There were two lemon trees to the west of the house, outside the din-

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Mechanization made a big difference in farming practices on the Orella Ranch.

Here Martín Erro runs a bean cutter, late 1930s.

ing room, which bore fruit. Someone had built three terraces with railroad ties on the east side of the house and there was an acacia tree that did well in the upper terrace. I often used the shade when I was playing outside.

Once I remember gathering a dozen or more snails, then took them under the tree and put them in a line to “race.”

On each side of the arbor at the entrance to Gam’s house, Honey planted a Cherokee rose. I loved the blossoms and often would make arrangements of them for the house. On the east side of the house, below the kitchen windows was a large mock jasmine. In the 1960s, I planted one on the arbor at La Paloma

and it has flourished, too. There was a red rose farther down that side of the house. I tried to transplant it at La Paloma, but it died. However, I succeeded with transplanting a white climbing rose that Honey called “seven sisters.”

It climbed up a trellis to the bottom of the south window in my parents’ bedroom. It is now in the yard at La Paloma, where it has nothing to climb on, but is making a nice show as a bush.

Against the fence on the east side was an oleander bush with pink flowers.

The aroma was very sweet and I liked it. One day I inhaled and inhaled, enjoying it, until I became very sick at my stomach! After that I could never eat 7-

MÍ REFUGIO minute Frosting. It was a favorite of the ladies in the community and they would often frost cakes with it for potluck gatherings. Before my oleander flower experience, I had liked the frosting. But no more! It tasted like oleander!

When I was about twelve, my dad asked if I would like to have a lawn in front of the house. Of course, but what about the water? Well, a very lowgrowing plant with small dark green leaves and white flowers called Lippia was proving that it could grow around the house at Refugio Beach. My dad planted some and it did fairly well.

When barefoot, one had to be very careful, because bees love the nectar in those flowers. Then he bought four or five Cotaneaster bushes and put them in a curve around the “lawn” on the side toward the highway. They grew fairly large and created a small space that was more private than the rest of the yard.

There are very few good aquifers near the coast, therefore, one of my parents’ concerns was a supply of water for the house, barn, and the cattle in the fields. Crops that needed irrigation were not planted. We had several wells in different places on Orella Ranch, none of which lasted very long. When I was fairly young, I remember walking with my dad to Venadito Creek where he had a small gasoline-powered water pump. He would put just enough fuel in it to pump the amount of water he wanted. Later on, the Rutherfords let us use water from their well on the easternmost part of their ranch. It was

93 not far from the line fence between us, on the west where the long line of eucalyptus trees stood. In 1944 it blew up!

I’ve transcribed (with a few clarifications) the Santa Barbara News-Press article about it: Harmless Hole In Ground Turns Into ‘Young Faithful’ For a perfectly harmless appearing hole in the ground, “Young Faithful” up Refugio Canyon [it wasn’t up the canyon, it was just above the highway] has had an unusual career and for the past week has raised more dickens with the peace and calm on the W. L. Rutherford ranch than almost anything since the shelling of Ellwood’s oil fields.

Now “Young Faithful” should have been satisfied with its individuality before this latest ruckus because since it fizzled out in 1929 as an oil well, it has given out millions of gallons of warm, sulphurous water which was very useful in the Refugio neighborhood as a source of warm shower baths and for other domestic uses.

SUPPLY DOWN: But for the past few years the water supply has gone down until it was supplying only one household [that of Martín and Louise Erro].

Then along about 10 a.m. last Friday the pump house caught on fire. The blaze was extinguished but in a short time the house was blazing all over again.

By this time folks thereabouts discovered that “Young Faithful” was kicking up a ruckus again, this time giving out with highly explosive natural gas which was being ignited by sparks from the pump engine.

94 ITS OWN FIRE HOSE: That was bad enough. But, apparently out to display its versatility, the well started playing fire hose itself, burping a stream of hot, gaseous water which almost lifted the pump house from its foundation. The battered pump house was removed and left panting off to one side while “Young Faithful” continued to shoot its hot, smelly stream 100 feet into the air—well, anyway, 85 or 90 feet.

This it continued to do, sputtering out its 8-1/2 inch stream at the rate of 200 gallons a minute until late Wednesday when it was capped by a Signal Oil company crew.

MAYBE PEPPERMINT: The Rutherfords and their neighbors figure “Young Faithful” will rest on its laurels for a while until it can figure out something even more unusual. From the underground comes the report that the well’s best friends have “told” “Young Faithful” so next time Refugioites may see green and red striped water with a peppermint odor.

For many years there was a small water tank on a stand at the lower edge of the pepper tree on the edge of the parking area near the front of the garage. Daddy would pull the tank onto the back of his truck and take it to fill it with drinking water for the house. Later, Shell Oil drilled a well that had no oil, but very good water.

They didn’t shut it down. They let their neighbors pump it. At that point, Daddy got a larger tank, which he put on the back of his truck, filled it from the well, and was able to fill a larger cement tank that he built uphill from the barn. It supplied water for

NOTICIAS the animals at the barn and also for us at the house.

In the late 1950s he hired one of the Anderson boys to help him build a pipeline beside the canyon road from the La Paloma well, then across the lower part of Orella Ranch to the tank above the barn. He was proud of that accomplishment. He would say, “An old man and a boy laid that pipe.” From then on, until the destruction of the buildings by the Division of Highways, there was water for the stock in the barn and for the house on Orella Ranch.

It was wonderful for our family to have received Orella Ranch. My mother carried on after my dad died, except that she sold the beach frontage—the land on the ocean side of the railroad between El Capitan and Refugio beaches—to the State Parks in the 1960s.

If she hadn’t sold it, the state would have taken it by eminent domain. She asked a fairly low price because she believed in the State Park system. Some of the neighbors were upset with her because they thought it might mean lower prices for their future sales. In some ways it was a relief to be rid of it, because people trespassed there all the time. Frequently, someone would cut the lock on the gate at the railroad crossing and drive onto our farmland. Glenn Parks was growing hay there in the 1950s and ‘60s. One day (or night!) someone rolled most of his bales down over the cliff onto the beach. Another time someone set a fire in the dry hay stalks. An Orella family lawyer, Mr. McCaughey, called my mother one day

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MĂ? REFUGIO to tell her that his son had trespassed there and had driven his car into a ditch.

He warned her that if someone else did that, they could sue her.

How did laws get in the books that say that a property owner is responsible for the welfare of trespassers and vandals?

The old County Road crossed the piece of Orella Ranch that was between the tracks and the ocean bluff. I used to ride over there with Daddy in his little pickup. We dumped trash in a gully on the cliff. A palm tree grows there now.

East of our house, on the flat and next to the railroad tracks, was the small Orella railroad station. It was in full view from our east-facing windows. Bruno Orella had given or sold the land for the tracks and station. It

was what I think was called a flag station. There was a wooden flag that could be pulled up when a passenger wanted to board the train. People in the area often made round trips to Santa Barbara on the train. Also, cattle were loaded and freight was unloaded there. There were large cattle corrals to the west of the station. They stretched as far west as our house, which was on the north side of the highway. The railroad built them because cattle were herded from the Santa Ynez Valley over Refugio Pass and run into the corrals and held until the train arrived.

Walker Tompkins was a Santa Barbara writer. He lived here for many years and wrote numerous books about the area. Also, he had a short spot on a

Roundup at Tajiguas Ranch, 1936. Left to right: Monroe Rutherford, Ralph Williams, MartĂ­n Erro, Mike Erro, and Joe Gracia.

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local radio station every morning for several years. On one of those broadcasts, he mentioned a stampede at the Orella Station. My mother wrote the following letter to him: 618 W. Pedregosa St. Santa Barbara, Cal. Jan 5, 1979 My Dear Mr. Tompkins, I was especially interested in your broadcast the other day about the cattle “stampede” at the Orella Station. I remember the incident but we were living in Refugio Canyon at the time, so I didn’t see any of it.

I have another story of a cattle drive over Refugio Pass that you may not have

heard. I don’t know the exact date, but it was after we moved out to Orella in 1923.

While helping bring a herd of cattle over Refugio an Indian rider from Santa Ynez (I never knew his name) had his horse fall with him and break his leg - the man’s leg, not the horse’s! Emmett Edwards, who was also riding with the group, came to our house and asked Martín [Erro] if he would take the man to a doctor.

Somehow they got him into the back seat of our touring car and Martín and Emmett took him down to the County Hospital. But, when they got there, he wouldn’t let them take him out of car or do anything for him. Martín spoke fluent Spanish but nothing could persuade him to let them help him. People went to hos-

Mouth of Refugio Canyon, 1920s. These cattle were driven from the Santa Ynez Valley over the mountains for shipment by rail from Orella Station.

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MÍ REFUGIO pitals to die and he wasn’t having any part of it!

So they came back to Orella, reported to his boss there, and then on over Gaviota Pass and to Solvang where they located Dr. Hanze. The Indian rider knew Dr. Hanze and no hospital was involved so he let Dr. Hanze set the leg!!

I’m ashamed to admit we never knew how well it healed. We have a photo from Nelson Rutherford’s collection which was taken from the west end of Refugio Beach and there are no buildings except a fisherman’s shack that I remember. There is a freight train on the track headed east. Our house is hidden by the tall eucalyptus trees but the old Orella station and corrals are there. There was a water tank there, but I can’t see it with any magnifying glass I

have. It seems to me it must be a professional photograph as “kodaks” weren’t too good that far back.....

Most sincerely, Louise M. Erro (Mrs. Martín Erro) Daddy had hired men who lived on the ranch for some time. The first was Leonardo Ortega who was Vicente Ortega’s brother. Another was A. C. Fierro. On occasions several years apart, each man was struck by a truck and killed when walking drunk back to the ranch. They were each walking on the side of the highway, on the Orella flat, just a few hundred feet from our home. Mr. Ortega would often bring me a bag of candy when he came home

Same view, 1950s. Road to left headed down to Refugio Beach.

98 to Orella Ranch from town. The night he was killed, the sheriff officers found a bag of candy beside him.

When I was about twelve, my dad bought an older mare for me. Her name was Maggie. She had been a trail horse and Daddy thought she would be well behaved. I rode her a great deal, often with my dad to check the cattle. We rode all the way up Refugio Canyon one day and visited with the Osborne family. As we went slowly along, I tried to soak in the beauty of the canyon and the creek in order to remember it forever. It worked! I remember it vividly.

When I was a child, I often wished that my grandmother had inherited one of the ranches in that canyon, because it was so beautiful. It has a creek that runs year ’round and many, many trees. But now I’m glad that we are in Venadito Canyon, because the population in Refugio Canyon has grown and grown and there is quite a bit of traffic.

President Reagan’s presence brought many people when he was staying at Rancho del Cielo (formerly the Tip-Top Ranch) on the crest of the mountains.

There is a dude ranch, Circle-Bar-B, which brings in more people all the time. They offer overnight stays and trail rides with visits to a small waterfall on a tributary of Refugio Creek, and they have a small theater with plays on Sunday afternoons and some week nights.

One weekend when I was in high school, Zena and I rode Daddy’s horse and Maggie to the top of Refugio Pass, where we met three of my friends from

NOTICIAS school who had ridden up from the Santa Ynez Valley. They stayed overnight at Orella Ranch with us and then we all rode to the top of the pass the next day. They went on home and Zena and I returned home. I was tired!

There was a sad occurrence when Daddy and I were out checking on the cattle in 1945 or ’46. We were going to cross the dry creek behind the barn on the Williams Ranch when Maggie decided she didn’t want to do that. We each got off our horses and I held my dad’s while he tried to teach Maggie to cross creeks. He took her across once and back with much urging, and then was going to take her back across when she reared and fell. Daddy dodged the falling horse, although I think it was at that moment that something happened to one of his shoulders. It never worked well after that. And poor Maggie died. Right then and there. We walked all the way back home to Orella Ranch, leading Daddy’s horse.

Around 1926 my dad planted a California pepper tree just past the garage, and below the tank house. It grew and grew and produced very large horizontal branches near the ground. It was a perfect place for all children to play. I spent hours in it, lying on the big low branches and climbing the higher branches. I remember well one particular time when Mr. McQuiddy, who had restored Aunt Nellie’s adobes in Corral Canyon, came to see my dad. He went into the house, but his wife and children stayed in the car. I was safely out of their sight on one of the higher branches of the tree. I had a delightful

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Elizabeth and her mare, Maggie, 1943.

time listening to the children fight and yell at one another.

After the tree had become quite large, Daddy built a large picnic table with attached benches that sat inside the tree and a small cupboard, which he hung from one of the lower branches, to hold the picnic dishes.

Outside the tree he put a circle of sandstone rocks with a grill on top. The beef barbecued over those small fires was always delicious!

The tank house was taken down in later years and, in its place, my dad built a large garage, big enough for three cars or small trucks. Their friend,

Raymond Richart, built a large, wooden freezer in the north end of the garage. Because of meat rationing during World War II, my parents starting killing their own beef and storing it, first in a rental walk-in freezer in downtown Santa Barbara and then in the one on the ranch. In the 1960s, Honey bought a small travel trailer and set it in between the garage and the pepper tree. The picnic table was moved over to just below the trailer.

After roundups, we would serve lunch to the men under the tree.

In 1969 the Division of Highways delivered to my mother its final plan

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for changing the route of the highway.

Before that, over several years, they had proposed at least nine other plans.

In one of them, they had suggested that we might build a gas station next to the highway. The 1969 plan was the last one and it ruined the front part of Orella Ranch. It took all the buildings and all the trees from around the house and barn, the row of eucalyptus trees on the western property line, and the ones across the old highway by the railroad track. Except for our big pepper tree. Eric, at age fourteen, wrote to many, many people, including Governor Reagan. He had verified that it was the largest pepper tree in California and he hoped that it could be saved. Wonder of wonders, the Division of Highways was persuaded to

change their plans and save the tree. It sits on a triangular piece of land, just large enough for the tree to be undisturbed, surrounded by the freeway, the southbound off ramp to Refugio Beach, and the onramp to Santa Barbara.

When the land was all around the pepper tree, it welcomed rain runoff and fertilizer from the barn above it. Since all that land was bulldozed away, it has not had enough water but as of this writing still looks quite healthy.

At Christmas of 2007, Debbie (Mark Tautrim’s former wife) and Bob Hart cut out the most obnoxious plants that were near the center of the tree. We gathered there and had photos taken of four generations of the Erro family that now live nearby: myself and my adult children Eric, Janet, and Sigrid; Mark

Portion of the plat of Rancho CaĂąada del Corral, 1860. Note reference to the Lone Oak.

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MÍ REFUGIO Tautrim and his children Kimberly Tautrim Hasselbring and Doug Hasselbring and Guner and Heidi Tautrim; and Marley and Zeppelin Hasselbring, and Sequoia and Kai Tautrim.

On the ranch, atop the first hill behind where the house was, there still stands the Lone Oak. We are told that the ships that anchored in Refugio Cove in the late 1700s and into the 1800s used that tree as a beacon to find the little bay.

The Ortegas, who owned the adjacent Rancho Nuestra Señora del Refugio, which included Refugio Cove, would ride horseback up there to watch for incoming ships. In fact, on early maps, the hill is labeled La Vigia, meaning “The Lookout.” There is quite a grove of coast live oaks behind the Lone Oak, covering the northwest corner of Orella Ranch, the southeast corner of the Careaga Ranch, and the southwest corner of the Williams Ranch.

One of my most vivid memories of the Lone Oak is during World War II. I walked up there one day to see the wildflowers. As I started back to the house, my line of sight opened up to the ocean as the hilltop dropped away.

And right there in front of me was a Navy blimp! It was right at eye level and close enough that I could see the men in uniform inside. I’m not sure why it frightened me, but I quickly flopped down onto the ground and out of sight.

That steep hill and the Lone Oak brought much joy to me as a child and teenager. It was fun to walk straight up the hill, and sometimes I would stop halfway to sit and think.

La Paloma Ranch As I have described earlier, my Erro grandparents moved to La Paloma Ranch in 1902. My grandfather had come before the rest of the family to build the road up the canyon and start on the house. The rest of the family arrived on the train later. My grandfather and my father drove the cattle from the family’s previous ranch, in Ojai.

La Paloma and Orella ranches and my Erburu cousins’ family ranch near El Capitan are the only ones of the original ten that remain in Bruno Orella’s family. Over the years, my parents bought all of his brothers’ and sister’s shares of La Paloma Ranch. La Paloma is the uppermost of the three historic family ranches in Cañada del Venadito and today contains approximately 750 acres. In the 1930s the Gracia family lived and farmed there and then the Alegria family in the 1940s.

The subject of the Gracias at La Paloma reminds me of a story about a rather rare treat in those days: ice cream. In about 1934 or ‘35, my folks purchased their first refrigerator. My mother loved ice cream and immediately started making it, with thick fresh cream from our cow. One evening, she made a tray of the treat and sent my dad and me up Venadito Canyon to the Gracias’ at La Paloma. It was after dark and for me, at four or five years of age, it was an exciting trip, especially when we were at the gate on the line between Orella and the Williams Ranch. The canyon wall drops precipitously there and I was very frightened to get out of

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Members of the Erro family pose at La Paloma, c.1918. Martín Erro stands on hay baler at rear.

the car and open that gate. (It is the closes the gates.) And, of course, “law” of the country that the person Daddy was teasing me that we had to sitting “shotgun” always opens and hurry so that the ice cream wouldn’t The La Paloma ranch house as it looked in the 1930s.

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MÍ REFUGIO melt. When we arrived, the Gracias were all sitting around the kitchen table (with a kerosene lantern in the middle —electricity wasn’t wired to that remote house until several years later) and they had quite a treat.

Although we had the refrigerator, we still sometimes used the old crank freezer. One day there was a storm that dropped much more hail than we had ever seen. The balls of ice built up along the northwestern side of the house and I begged to make ice cream with it. We did! At La Paloma, we still use the crank freezer when we have old-time get-togethers.

In 2002, after many years of very careful consideration, my family and I decided to protect La Paloma with an agricultural conservation easement.

This easement is essentially a legal agreement between my family and the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County that prohibits us from developing our property beyond three family homes and employee dwellings, but leaves the land under our private ownership while allowing us to keep ranching and farming.

When we decided to enter the deal, the Land Trust contracted with an outside appraiser to price the land in terms of condition, zoning, water supply, agricultural value, and development potential. The appraiser calculated two numbers: one valuing the property without the easement and the other with development restrictions in place.

The spread between the two numbers is the easement value, and we were paid roughly that much through grant

funding raised by the Land Trust. We agreed to continue to be our best at being good stewards of the ranch, and the Land Trust takes the responsibility to visit the property annually to see if we’ve been holding up our end of the contract.

If you ask my son Eric the incentives of creating the conservation easement, he’ll tell you three things. One: the Land Trust paid in cash. Two: because the land is no longer legally developable, its value has dropped, which lowers property and inheritance taxes. And three (and this one is probably the most important): peace of mind. Before the easement, my two daughters and I were frequented by nightmares of the ranch being destroyed by bulldozers and housing.

Once the easement took effect, those bad dreams went away.

Venadito Canyon La Cañada del Venadito runs through the middle of three of the family ranches. The upper ranch is La Paloma, the middle one is the Williams, and the southern one with ocean frontage is Orella. Venadito is a box canyon, surrounded by Cañada del Refugio to the west and Cañada del Corral on the east, both of which have drainage that starts at the top of the Santa Ynez Mountains.

Until recent years, in Refugio and Corral Canyon creeks, the water ran year round and they still have much more than Venadito ever did. In Venadito there are a few springs along the banks where some water stays all year. The

104 cattle, deer, lions, and other creatures still take advantage of that. These days we often drive into the northern part of the canyon with the ranch dogs following us at a run. On the way back, they always disappear down the creek bank for a few minutes and come back wet from a dip in a pool.

In this land of little rain, residents are always seeking water. Venadito Canyon Creek is seasonal, so water was sought elsewhere. In 1902, the Erros put in a waterline from a spring located over a mile north of the house, on National Forest land. The old pipes are still there. A few years later, my dad’s younger brother, Manuel, known as “Dukie,” pointed out that the ground in the pig enclosure just north of the house was always damp—maybe there was a spring there. Indeed there was.

They dug a shallow well, which supplied the house into the 1960s. The barn and corral were up hill and north of the house, therefore I assume that they continued to use the water from the spring up the canyon for those troughs.

Not too long after my grandfather died in 1929 a well was drilled near the barn which produced good water. It obviated the use of the water from the National Forest land. After my dad died in 1960, we drilled a second well to the east of the first well. Subsequently we have drilled several more wells in various spots to the east and south. Two of them are in the lower Vaqueros sandstone and the others in the upper Vaqueros. The two sections of the sandstone are separated by a fault. One of the wells is dedicated to

NOTICIAS Orella Ranch, although no pipeline has yet been built. My mother had lived with almost no water on Orella Ranch for many years and she didn’t want that land to be without water. Stupidly, in the 1970s, my mother and I yielded to the National Forest personnel when they asked us to surrender the historic right for the water on government property.

The Separation of Orella and La Paloma Ranches Eventually it became preferable that the Tautrims and the Hvolbolls should each have their own property.

So, in the early 1980s, Honey gave Orella Ranch plus ten adjacent acres (that Exxon had cut off from the old Covarrubias Ranch) to the Tautrims. At the same time, we became the owners, with Honey, of La Paloma Ranch. Later we were able to purchase the upper half of the Williams Ranch, located in the middle of Venadito Canyon. I wish we had been able to afford to purchase the entire Williams ranch.

Williams Ranch The Williams Ranch, named by the Erro family for George Williams, who bought it in about 1907, is the middle ranch in the canyon, between Orella and La Paloma Ranches. In 1901, it was inherited by my grandmother’s brother, Antonio (Uncle Tony) Orella. He did a few things on the place, such as bring a cabin down from his claim in the National Forest. He placed it on the creek

MÍ REFUGIO side of the road and added to it. It is unclear to me if he spent much of his time there. He sold his ranch to George Williams who was a farmer and landholder in Goleta. Mr. Williams also bought the upper ranch in adjacent Cañada del Corral from another of my grandmother’s brothers, Francisco Orella. I am fairly certain that Mr. Williams never lived on either of those ranches. He hired ranch managers and/or leased the property and planted walnut trees and had cattle on all the ranches.

In the 1960s, Glenn Parks grew garbanzos on the flat. They’re quite delicious picked off the plants when they are still green. The market for these beans (actually, they’re peas) fell apart when the U.S. stopped trading with Cuba. That little island nation had been the largest importer of U.S.-grown garbanzos.

When I was very young, the Carvalho family lived in the house on the Williams. Before and after the Carvalhos, Tony George and his two children, Mary and Tony, lived and worked there. To this day, although the house has since fallen down, we call it the “Tony George House,” and it is now the location of a native plant nursery.

On August 3, 1999, Mary and I were discussing the work of an archaeologist who was searching La Paloma and the Williams for former house sites. At the site of the Tony George House, he wanted to know where the outhouse had been. I suppose it might be full of “treasures.” But Mary said

105 that there never was a hole dug for an outhouse. It sat right on the edge of the cliff over the creek bank and everything went down the bank and eventually into the creek. She said they never put anything down it except human waste and ashes from their woodstove to help absorb the odors. One time, some embers caught the little outhouse on fire.

She ran for a hose and put it out before it spread.

The George family had moved to Venadito Canyon in 1927. The father took care of the Williams holdings, about 420 acres in that canyon and more than 1000 acres adjacent to it in Cañada del Corral. In 1929, they moved to a small house about two miles up Corral Canyon.

Mary was eight years old when they moved, and her father determined that she was old enough to take care of the family (her mother had died when she was three). She did this and also went to school. Her father’s salary was $80 per month with a house provided and a place for a garden and orchard.

In 1939, Mary started college. In 1941, her father moved to the Stow Ranch near Goleta, but it was the year of the heaviest rainfall in the history of Santa Barbara County, so he didn’t have much work. The next year, he went to work for the Laranjos in Buellton. In 1943, they returned to Venadito Canyon. Also that year, Mary took a year off from college to earn some money so that she could finish. She and another woman started a preschool in Santa Paula for the children of women who were involved in the war effort.

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She was paid $110 per month for twelve hours per day, six days a week.

She saved enough to finish her education.

A story that her dad told was about a migrant family who lived in the granary on the Williams flat. At that time, the entire flat was filled with walnut trees. At harvest time, the father of this family would shake the trees and the children picked up the nuts and took them to their mother, who would remove the hulls. One morning, when Tony went outside, the family was at work. He heard a baby crying. He went to investigate and found that the mother had given birth in the granary during the night and everyone was back working in the morning. He told her to go inside and lie down! He retired, moved off the place in 1950, and bought a home in Santa Barbara.

After Tony left, my dad leased the ranch from the Williams family for cattle. My children and I remember delivering rent checks to Mr. Williams’ daughter, Mrs. Bueneman, who lived where the car dealers are now on Calle Real near Hitchcock Road.

During the time that my dad rented the entire Williams Ranch, he planted permanent pasture on the two mesas, one on each side of the Lower Williams. He called them the west pasture and the east pasture. Some years later, we started calling them the West Williams and the East Williams. When developers bought the ranch in the 1980s they made each of these pastures into roughly 100-acre parcels.

In the late 1990s our family bought what we have always called the Upper Williams, including the Williams flat: the northern 198 acres adjacent to La

Refugio Beach in the late 1920s. The Lone Oak may be seen on the hill in the back.

MÍ REFUGIO Paloma Ranch. Glenn Parks planted over 20 acres of avocados on the flat. It is the coldest spot in the canyon and we are hopeful that we can fight off the frost. In 2007, we were hit by three nights of 26-degree weather. That year’s crop was very small.

In 2006, we had two of the aging Williams buildings, originally built in 1913, restored. The house fell down in the 1990s, but we restored the bunkhouse and granary. The creek side of the barn had begun to fail, but we have had that part repaired it and have had the rest stabilized. Eventually we hope to restore it completely for ranch use.

We have left the old walnut and orange trees between the house site and the granary and have added a small fruit orchard north of the barn.

Refugio Beach This area had been the home of José Francisco Ortega, first comandante of the Royal Presidio of Santa Barbara. The Ortegas constructed their first buildings up the canyon about a mile and a half, beginning in 1794.

This was just about where the fog stops when it rolls in. The buildings are no longer there, but there are some adobe brick remnants at the site, which is right behind the house where George and Lida Rutherford lived when I was growing up.

In 1818, Refugio was one of the stops that the French and Argentine privateer Hipólito Bouchard made on his journey around the Pacific.

Bouchard ransacked the Ortega build-

107 ings, but not before the family had escaped over Refugio Pass to Misión Santa Inés. One of the small chests with which they escaped contained some valuables. It was inherited by an Ortega descendant.

Smuggling went on in this cove, particularly during the era when Spain owned it. Spanish citizens in the New World were to trade only with Spanish ships. However, sometimes it was an entire year between these visits, and the settlers would run low on goods, forcing them to trade with other ships.

There was a time when cowhides were one of the preferred payments for the goods these ships carried. The hides were called “California Dollars.”

The beach, some land to the west, a small piece to the east, and a short distance up Refugio Canyon was the inheritance of Bruno Orella’s son, Victor, who had become a dentist. He sold his property soon after his father died. It was purchased by the Rutherfords, whose family had come from Scotland.

Members of the Rutherford family also owned the Dos Pueblos Ranch.

Sometimes in the afternoon, Honey and I would walk across the fields to Refugio Road and then to the beach.

Daddy would come to pick us up after he came in from working in the fields.

He never spent much time on the beach with us and didn’t go near the ocean.

As a child, he had almost drowned in the waves at Venadito Beach.

Nelson Rutherford said that the springs above the cliffs west of the beach produced the best water in the vicinity. Men driving by with teams of

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horses would stop there to water the animals. We believe this was the site of Casil, a historic Chumash village. In the early 1970s, Arne and I bought six acres adjacent to Orella Ranch that had been cut off from the remainder of the beach property. We drilled a good well into that water-bearing formation.

Careaga Ranch The Careaga Ranch in Refugio Canyon, which is adjacent to and north of the Rutherford holdings, was inherited by my dad’s aunt, Mercedes Careaga. My dad’s brother, Mike Erro, lived there and farmed lima beans and had cattle. Although Uncle Mike’s wife, Marguerite Catron Erro, died when I was only four years old, I remember her fondly. She was pretty and very nice to me. In 1938, Mike married Florence Kitterman, who became a vital part of our family. We visited them often. My mother and Florence were friends and Uncle Mike was funny and fun-loving—to the point of almost being shot by Vicente Ortega. The story goes that Mike went to Vicente’s house at Arroyo Hondo one night and made crazy noises outside. (He drank a bit too much at times.) Vicente was about to shoot him, when he realized it was just Mike.

When I was eight years old Uncle Mike offered to let me fish in the creek.

He loaned me his pole and I can’t remember what he gave to me for bait.

After I was situated in what he thought was a good spot, out of sight of the canyon road, he left me. I actually

caught several fish and have a photograph to prove it! Despite my luck, that was probably the last time I ever went fishing.

Florence always invited us over on her January 1st birthday. One time in the late 1940s, her sister Evelyn and her husband Kelj (Kelly) Thomsen were also there. After lunch Evelyn and Kelly, Arne and I went out to the orchard to the east of the house to pick some oranges. Uncle Mike was relaxing in his big chair in the living room. With the beer or wine or whatever it was “talking” to him, he got a gun, went to the door and shot it over our heads. He said it was just a joke, but Florence really told him off! Uncle Mike died in 1952. Florence moved into Santa Barbara with her mother and she remained part of our family until she died in 1997.

Aunt Mercedes died in 1955. Soon after her death, James “Jimmy” Freeman bought the ranch from her estate.

He and his wife and sons lived there.

He had taken down the board-and-bat house where Mike and Florence had lived and built a new adobe in a slightly different place. After Jimmy died, his son Leslie took over the running of the ranch—still raising cattle— and he finished the adobe. In about 2000, Leslie made the first deal on the coast with the Land Trust to protect the property with a conservation easement.

When Leslie told my family that the deal had been a good one, that really helped us make our decision to do the same with La Paloma. The Freemans are still our neighbors today.

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MÍ REFUGIO Refugio Ranch The next ranch up the canyon was inherited by my great uncle, Carlos Orella (Uncle Charlie), and sometime in the teens it was purchased by George Rutherford. George (Uncle George) and his wife, Lida Marice (Aunty Lida), built a nice stucco-andtile roofed house on Refugio’s west ridge on the site of the original Ortega hacienda. It is said that during the tsunami that followed the earthquake of December 21, 1812, a ship was carried from Refugio Cove up the canyon as far as the Ortega homestead on the hill and then swept back to the sea.

The little Orella School was built on

the flat on the east side of the creek. My mother taught there in 1914 and rode a horse over the ridge to school every day from La Paloma.

Uncle George was a farmer and my dad’s close friend. He had been disabled before I was born. He had been working atop a baler and his foot was pulled into the mechanism.

He lost the lower part of that leg. He wore a prosthesis and walked with a limp, but it never deterred him from his work. He farmed lima beans and had a walnut orchard. The walnuts were on the land below the house on both sides of the creek and probably up Aguajitos Canyon to the west, although I was never there. On the small flat on the west side of the creek, he built a large building in which to dry the nuts. I loved going in there when the large tumbler was rumbling as it turned and the walnuts were hitting the sides as they dried. I have no recollection of what supplied the heat.

Lida and my mother were friends, although they were very different. Aunty Lida created a lovely garden around their house—they had enough water to do that! She drove many places, which my mother did not, including Santa Barbara where she belonged to the Santa Barbara Woman’s Club. On those days and others, when she Elizabeth’s first try at fishing, 1939.

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Mike Erro farming at Refugio below the Rutherford Ranch, late 1930s.

was going shopping, she would stop at our house. She and my mother had plenty to talk about. She would tell us tales of the times she spent with Club women—foreign to anything that I knew. She and my mother exchanged magazines, so she would drop in regularly to do that.

The Rutherfords were one of the few neighbors who invited us over for meals. Aunty Lida was a good cook.

She loved to make waffles for dinner.

Unfortunately for me that wasn’t too pleasant because they made me slightly nauseated. I never told anyone that.

After dinner, Uncle George and my dad would let me go with them to a small, separate room behind the house to play pool. With many admonitions not to gouge the delicate felt, they would

sometimes let me use a cue. I liked being with them.

There was a very exciting thing that happened at their home. When I was about six, I stayed for a couple of days with them. (I think it was when Honey and Daddy had taken Gam’s body for burial in Vacaville.) One afternoon Aunty Lida and I were sitting in the living room. She had gone to sleep in a chair by the fireplace. I was sitting on their couch, looking out the window at the lawn, the hills, and the ocean. Suddenly I saw several yellow balls of light rolling across the lawn toward the window where I was sitting. They disappeared before they reached me. Shortly after that, three yellow balls of light rolled from the chimney onto the hearth, then disap-

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MÍ REFUGIO peared quickly. I do not remember any odor or sound accompanying them. I was very frightened and did not tell my hostess about them. I was not sure it had really happened, and I didn’t tell anyone until a few years ago after I read about similar occurrences called “ball lightning.”

In the 1970s Uncle George showed Eric where the adobe walls of the original Ortega hacienda had stood just north of his house. In September 2000, Arne, Eric, and I visited El Refugio Ranch and its manager, Alan Hove. It was a great day.

We were taken through the east canyon, Aguajitos, where I had never been before. And he also allowed us inside the home of which I have so many memories. It was thrilling to visit again the site where the first ranch in Santa Barbara County was established in the 1790s.

Aguajitos Aguajitos (Small Waters) is a small canyon that passes through Refugio Ranch. It was a claim taken out by Bruno F. Orella’s nephew, Julián Orella, after Bruno had paid the cost of his journey from Spain to California. In return, Julián took out the claim and deeded it to his uncle. The government allowed only one claim per person, and Bruno already had his. Bruno paid for two other nephews to come from Spain. They also took out claims a little farther up Refugio Canyon.

Aguajitos is now owned by Lanny Stableford, whose wife, Bernie, died in

2007. They had a large avocado orchard and cattle, which they took care of by themselves.

Bruno U. Orella’s Ranch The next ranch up Refugio Canyon was inherited by my great-uncle Bruno U. Orella; it had two houses. Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Mendez and their daughter and my friend, Mary Jane, lived in the first one, on the east side of the road, just after the creek crossing. I don’t know if Mr. Mendez farmed for himself or worked for the owner.

The other house was a bit farther up and on the west side of the road. It is the place where Bruno U. Orella and his family lived after he inherited it. In the 1930s Asa Brown lived there and often worked for George Rutherford on the ranch to the south. My mother told me that they “lived in the old house up Refugio.” That house was probably the one that replaced Uncle Bruno’s house, which had burned.

The Alegria Place This ranch was the claim that one of Bruno Orella’s nephews, Patricio Alegria (“Old Man” Alegria) had taken out. Patricio and his wife Joaquina Erro, from Spain, lived and farmed there with their four children, Joe, Annie, Lawrence, and John. Annie later married an Arbelaitz and her descendants still live around the Santa Ynez Valley. Joe had two sons, Joe and Pat, who farmed together with John on the South Coast for sev-

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eral years. Then Joe farmed in the Santa Ynez Valley. Pat moved to Orosi in the San Joaquin Valley; he married my husband’s sister-in-law, Phoebe, after she became widowed. Lawrence moved to the Los Angeles area. John stayed on the ranch in Refugio Canyon as did his son, Frank. Today, Frank’s son, Frank Alegria Jr., and his family are still on his great-grandparents’ ranch, raising avocados.

The Saralegui Place Ramón Saralegui was the third nephew from Spain for whom Bruno F. Orella had paid passage to California. He and Patricio Alegria married

sisters. Ramón’s wife was Dolores.

Ramón took up a claim a bit farther up Refugio Canyon. He built a home there, which for a while served as a store. They had two children: Ann, whose married name was Hurst, and her brother, Bernardo. Bernardo married and had several children, some of whom continue to live on the property. They have built additional homes across Refugio Road. Theirs was the last farm in Refugio Canyon.

From there, the road starts its steep ascent several miles from the ridge. In recent years, several homes have been built up on the mountain side. Ronald Reagan bought the old Pico homestead on the top, which for many years the

The Alegria Ranch, c.1913. The white-walled adobe ranch house may be seen at left.

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Lillian Fox Orella, Ernesto Covarrubias, Elena Orella Covarrubias, and Dorothy Orella stand in front of the larger of the two Orella adobes in Cañada del Corral, sometime in the 1930s.

Cornelius family owned. They called it the Tip-Top Ranch.

Cañada del Corral In the 1960s my children and I visited with Vicente and Florence Ortega in Arroyo Hondo fairly often. He was born in 1885 in the adobe there, which his grandfather Pedro Ortega built in the 1840s. Having lived his entire life there on the coast, he knew much of its history. I took notes about what he told me about certain places in the area.

One of those was Corral Canyon. He would shake his head—No, he didn’t remember it. I drove him there one day and, as we turned into the canyon, his face lit up with a smile and he said, “Ah, Cañada del Corral!”

Covarrubias Ranch There are two adobes near the mouth of the Cañada del Corral, which were built by the Ortega family to whom the land was granted. When my great-grandfather bought the ranch, he moved his family into the larger house and used the smaller one as a schoolhouse.

The lower part of the canyon with the adobes was inherited by his daughter, Elena (Aunt Nellie) Orella.

She and her husband, Ernesto (Uncle Ernest) Covarrubias then lived in the larger adobe in the canyon. I assume that he farmed the land. He died before oil was discovered there. After the discovery, Aunt Nellie had lots of money. She bought an adobe in Santa

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and built three small white houses for employees on the extreme western end of the tongue of the Covarrubias Ranch. The Orella store—a gas station and a hamburger place—was located nearby. This ten acres was mostly flat and rose above the canyon directly below the southeastern part of Orella Ranch. This acreage was deeded to my mother in the 1970s by Humble/Exxon after that oil company bought Cañada del Corral. The ten-acre piece makes a great addition to Orella Ranch. Originally the Covarrubias land had gone down to the ocean’s mean high tide The Western Tongue of the line, as did the Orella and Erburu ranch holdings. Over the years, all of the Covarrubias Ranch oceanfront land was gobbled up by the Shell Oil leased land in Corral railroad, the highway, and the State Canyon from Aunt Nellie Covarrubias Park system.

Barbara and refurbished both houses on her ranch. She rented the larger one to the people who farmed there, the Laranjos family among others, and she stayed in the other one, Casa de los Amigos, when she wanted to be on the ranch. She later married one of the carpenters who worked on the houses and her last name became Clithero. After Aunt Nellie died in the late ‘30s, her lawyers appointed my dad as manager of the ranch.She and her first husband are buried at the Misión Santa Bárbara.

Elizabeth with her mother and father and her sister Zena’s son, Martin, at Refugio Beach 1946.

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MÍ REFUGIO The Shell Dump This dump was a small landfill created in a ravine by Shell Oil when they were drilling on the Covarrubias Ranch. It was on the ridge between Corral and Venadito Canyons. When our children were little, we would take Honey’s refuse there. Sometimes we found interesting things to “rescue” and take home—and we saw many rattlesnakes there! When my children were in high school and their friends from town wanted to see a rattlesnake, they’d take them to the Shell dump.

When I was quite young, Honey decided to get rid of the big old phonograph record player that she had. I remember it was about four feet tall with small curved legs. I guess she thought it was beyond repair. We took it to the dump and I nearly cried when they threw the cabinet onto the top of all that junk.

Every so often, Dan Giacoma, who worked for Shell, would set a fire in the dump to burn it, making room for more junk.

Frank Orella’s Ranch The northern part of Cañada del Corral was inherited by Bruno Orella’s son Frank Orella. He farmed it for a while, but then sold to the same Williams family who purchased the middle ranch in Venadito Canyon from Tony Orella. Uncle Frank moved to the Bay Area. There was at least one house and a barn there. Arne and I drove up there one day while we had our cattle on the

adjacent tongue of La Paloma Ranch.

We talked to a man who was living there in the house. He was a former German prisoner of war who had been in the camp on the Edwards Ranch. We heard that at least one other of the POWs came back to live in Goleta after World War II. Erburu Ranch This ranch is adjacent to and east of Cañada del Corral. It was inherited by Juana Orella de Erburu, Bruno Orella’s daughter. Her husband had come to California from the same town, Espinal, in Navarra, Spain, from which Miguel Erro had come. The Erburu family was already established in farming in Ventura County. Juana and her husband stayed there and never lived on their ranch in Santa Barbara County.

They leased it to sharecroppers, as was frequently done.

Oil was discovered on this property at the same time as the adjacent Covarrubias Ranch. It wasn’t as productive as the latter, but there were many oil wells on it. If I remember correctly, it was General Petroleum that leased it. A house was built for the superintendent, which is still on the property. There were several buildings built by the oil company. They are all gone except for one built of corrugated tin. Glenn Parks’ family uses it for storage; they raise cattle on the ranch now.

For a while, the Laranjo family farmed the land. They lived in a house that was a little north of the superintendent’s house. The farmhouse

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later burned. The Laranjos later moved down onto the Covarrubias Ranch and farmed there.

Also on this ranch there was a small house between the highway and the railroad track. I remember the Kohler family living there. Jean Kohler had a bicycle. She rode to our house one day and taught me to ride. I was so excited!

My parents wouldn’t let me have a bicycle because there was no good place to ride one on Orella Ranch, and they wouldn’t allow me to ride next to the highway.

Our cousins the Erburu family continue to own this land today.

Crops & Livestock Lima beans Before I was born and for some years after that, lima beans were the main field crop on the South Coast. My grandfather, my father, Uncle Mike, and the people on the Williams Ranch, all grew them. They are still grown in the fields of Buellton to Lompoc.

English walnuts Walnuts were an excellent crop in the area for many years. My grandfather planted a fairly large orchard below the house at La Paloma. And the Williams family had a large orchard on their flat-—there is still one of those trees left. There are also three walnut trees left next to the old buildings farther up the flat, which we now own. And there is a volunteer tree near the shop at La Paloma. Thirty years ago I planted two near the La Paloma house, but they

didn’t live long. I think we didn’t water them enough.

In the early days the English walnuts didn’t do well here, so farmers grafted them onto the native root stock. Three of the trees by the old Williams buildings have been overtaken by the root stock. The nuts look like black walnuts to me and there is never any good meat in them. I asked a botanist about the three walnut trees in the creek. Clif Smith, the foremost botanist of the Santa Barbara region, had said that they are native California walnuts, but it’s impossible to know for sure just by looking at them.

Tomatoes For a few years, my dad planted tomatoes in the fields around the house and barn on Orella Ranch. It still amazes me that they didn’t need irrigation to survive. The men made a small hole in the ground, placed the small plant into it, and then poured a bucket of water on it. That was it! The plants grew well and, my goodness, have you ever picked ripe tomatoes and eaten them immediately? They are delicious.

My dad often went into the field with a salt shaker.

After the tomatoes were picked, the drying vines made good cattle feed. In the early fall of 1955, my dad had turned his cows into the tomato fields, which were on all sides of the farmstead except the south where the highway and railway were. One afternoon a fire started in the pumphouse at the La Chirpa (later La

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MÍ REFUGIO Elizabeth’s grandfather, Miguel Erro, tends to the hogs at La Paloma in the 1920s.

Scherpa) Ranch just east of Refugio Road on the mountain ridge. A north wind was howling. The fire burned from the top of the mountains to the ocean in just one hour, but partly because of the green tomato plants all the ranch buildings and the cattle were left unscathed! My dad set a backfire above the barn, which also helped divert this terrible fire, fanned by those awful winds, away from the house and barn. Soon afterward Vicente Ortega visited Helen Pedotti of Rancho Arbolado at Las Cruces. She had extra pasture land and let Mr. Ortega and my dad run their cattle there while the fences were being rebuilt.

Peas At least one year, Daddy raised bush peas on the flat. Funny, I don’t remember eating them right off the vine, but I must have. I believe that he raised the tomatoes and peas in partnership with Kenneth Lynch. Mr. Lynch raised and sold produce in Washington state. Later one of his daughters and family started a store on lower State Street in Santa Barbara, which is still selling produce.

Avocados When I was growing up, there were no avocados on Orella Ranch. There still are none. In 1971 we started plant-

118 ing Hass avocados in the field across the road from the La Paloma house.

One thing we did incorrectly was to plant the little trees before we put in an irrigation system. Sigrid remembers taking a hose and watering the trees by hand. At that point the entire family was involved in the orchard. In 1974, Charlie (who was on the ranch full time), Debbie’s brother Greg Kane and I planted the trees on the side hill behind the house on the Refugio ridge.

We were sure to install the irrigation system first!

Avocados did well in the really good soil north of the house and farther up the canyon. Mark, Debbie, Kimberly, and Guner Tautrim lived at La Paloma for a while and Mark put in the trees west of the creek and to the north.

In 1983 we put in a reservoir to hold enough to water for the entire orchard. We filled it starting with the well above the house next to where the barn had been before it burned.

In 1983 Glenn Parks took over the care of the avocados and water system.

Three of his men, each with a family, have lived on-site. Glenn and his men did a great job caring for the orchard and producing fruit. Because of inclement weather, the 2007 crop was very small. There was a week-long heat spell in April that caused much of the tiny fruit to fall. That was followed at Christmas by a heavy wind and freezing temperatures three nights in a row.

NOTICIAS There was almost no fruit left on the trees. Later I said to Glenn, “That was a bad year.” He replied, “There are no bad years or good years. There are only learning years.” After Glenn died in 2013 we hired our own ranch manager, John Kleinwachter.

Mussels Sometimes at low tide, and in season, Daddy would go down to the beach and collect mussels and bring them home in a bucket. He’d fill the bucket with water, put it on the stove, and boil them. My mother wouldn’t touch them. He ate them all by himself.

Horses, sheep, cattle, and hogs In 1866 when our ancestors moved onto the land, there were no motorized vehicles. They used horses for transportation and to pull whatever machinery they had. Bruno Orella raised cattle and sheep, probably at least a few of his own horses, and undoubtedly had a home garden near the adobes in Cañada del Corral. When his daughter (my grandmother) Josefa and her family moved to La Paloma Ranch in 1902, horses still were the only means of transportation. A roundtrip to Santa Barbara took two days on horseback or with a horse and wagon. I assume that my great-grandfather planted and raised hay for his cattle and drove horses to pull the machinery.

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M� REFUGIO I don’t believe that my grandfather continued raising sheep and I do know for certain that my father did not.

When I was very young, Daddy still had workhorses that pulled plows, discs, seeders, the lima bean planter, the threshing machine, and the baler.

For the cattle, my dad sowed barley hay and also Sudan grass, which was green in the summer after the other grasses had dried. The cattle, but not the horses, ate the baled bean straw.

The horse barn on the Williams Ranch still has the stalls and mangers.

—Elizabeth Erro Hvolboll La Paloma Ranch, Orella, California

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Santa Barbara Historical Museum 2016 – 2017 Board of Trustees

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