Farmhouse memories
Got a call from a local resident who read our story on the historic farmhouse that's being dismantled and put into storage until someone comes along that wants to move it somewhere. You can see the house from Highway 101. It's just north of the Mendocino Brewing Company building. It looks pretty sad to tell the truth.
Anyway, the gentleman who called me is Eddie Vinson, who lived in that farmhouse as a kid. Born in 1929, Mr. Vinson's Dad worked the Dutton Ranch, which is what that parcel of land used to be before the highway. He says the Dutton Ranch used to range from the top of the Western Hills to the Russian River. Mr. Vinson's family moved into that farmhouse in November, 1942, just days before gas rationing went into effect. He says he remembers the adults around him were talking about the rationing program. He says the ranch had a 2,000 gallon gas tank on the property near the house so they didn't worry too much about gas.
His family stayed on at the farmhouse through about 1947. The old farmhouse you see now, he says, is just the home's four bedrooms, two downstairs and two upstairs. He doesn't know what happened to the rest of the farmhouse but it used to have a living room, dining room, kitchen and bathroom on the front, as well as a garage in the back. Part of the farm work was picking pears, which he helped with during the harvest season, and he recalls one year, as he and others were picking pears, an airplane was landing at the Ukiah airport and had some trouble. They all scattered as the plane came careening right toward them and stopped just before it crashed in the orchard where they were working. He also recalls that there was no Coyote Dam or Lake Mendocino flood control project at that time and in the winter, the Russian River came within 10 feet of that farmhouse each year- but luckily never flooded it.