Pacific Valley

On a September day in 1869, William Lucas Plaskett brought his family down out of the Santa Lucias by ox team, looked over this shelf where the mountains meet the sea, and claimed some two thousand acres of it. He named it Pacific Valley. It is not really a valley, of course.

The geologists call it a wave-cut terrace, and the newspapers of the day called it the Marvelous Shut-In Valley. It was hard to reach and hard to live on, which was exactly what he wanted. I married into this valley, and I never wanted out.

It ended in 1922. Hearst was assembling his ranch along this coast, and his agent, Joseph Barbree, a Plaskett relation by marriage, took the family's fifteen hundred and twenty-three acres in Pacific Valley for a recorded ten dollars. Fifty-three years of Plasketts in the valley, over.

The families scattered, Byron's ten-room house was torn down for its lumber, and my husband and I went to Westlake and sold that to Hearst too. I watched it all with mixed feelings; the hard life was ending, and so was something that could not be replaced. I spent the rest of my life writing it down, so the deed would not have the last word.

The stories are at plaskett dot family. Before this valley there was another. In 1854 William Lucas Plaskett took his family to Anderson Valley in Mendocino County, about as far from settled California as a wagon could go, and farmed and raised stock; the family is in that valley's 1860 census.

High in what is now the Mendocino National Forest, at six thousand feet, Plaskett Meadows and Plaskett Lakes still carry the name. And in September 1856, in Anderson Valley, Sarah bore the family's first California daughter and named her for the place: Mendocina, who married Curnell Mansfield and lived out her life on this coast. Before us the valley had a name and a man.

The first white man to live on it was named Cox, and for a while the place was Cox's Hole. Frank Muma settled the north end in the early 1850s, when the lilac grew as tall as trees, and sold his squatter's right in 1864 to Jim Prewitt and Curnell Mansfield, whose family were our neighbors for the rest of the century.