Pacific Valley School

Pacific Valley School opened in 1880 with Alan McLean as schoolmaster, and I wrote the whole history of the coast schools for the paper in 1962, so let me give you the short of it. Between Lucia and Gorda there were three schools in the early days. The Redwood School came first, in 1878, in a house Michael Dani notched together out of logs without a single nail, on the flat that is the Hermitage now.

Then this one, halfway between the Mansfield house and my grandfather Plaskett's, and the Mansfield School up in the Los Burros hills. Three families filled them. Laura Madera went to school here at four years old, to help the attendance, carried on Mr.

McLean's shoulders. The teachers were young women from town, sent by the county. They came by train to King City, by stage to Jolon, and over the mountains on horseback or muleback on trails they were afraid of, for sixty dollars a month and board with a family near the school.

And the valleys were full of Plaskett sons with nobody to marry for a hundred miles, so the county, without meaning to, ran the coast's marriage bureau. Jenny Bush taught here and married Dudley Plaskett. Lena Fuller taught here and married Marion.

Nina Berger married Allie. Edith Place, I wrote once, almost married Billy. Every term the community got a school, the school got a teacher, and the teacher got a husband, and the county sent another.

The school lapsed for a time and opened again in 1912, and it is still going, which on a coast that loses its road every other winter is its own kind of stubbornness. The schoolhouse you see is newer than my day, but the idea is the same one. The full history is at plaskett dot family, in two parts, with the story of the schoolteacher brides and the school built without nails; mark this stop as interesting and the links will be in your plan.