# Adobe Days/Chapter 6

Chapter VI
Rancho San Justo
With the purchase of the first land, the Rancho San Justo, Flint, Bixby & Co., were definitely located, and for forty years San Juan Bautista was their headquarters. After father’s death the firm was dissolved and the properties separated, the Flints retaining the lands in the north and the Bixby heirs those in Southern California.
As time went on the flocks increased beyond the capacity of the original ranch to support them, and since the wool business was profitable, other land was bought. As a little girl at San Justo I used to hear my father tell of necessary trips over to the “Worry-Worry” ranch. In later years I discovered that he was speaking of the Huero-Huero. Another of the ranches in Central California was the San Joaquin.
In 1866 the firm bought in Los Angeles county the Ranchos Los Cerritos, and a little later took a part interest in the adjoining Los Alamitos. They held a half interest in the western part of the Palos Verdes, the seventeen thousand acres, which since its sale has figured so prominently in real estate literature. Flint, Bixby & Co. were also half owners of the great San Joaquin Ranch in Orange Co. with James Irvine, to whom they sold their interest in the late seventies. ​They owned these great tracts of land when there were so few people in Southern California, that it was possible to utilize them for grazing purposes. When settlers came in the lands were sold in comparatively large parcels to men who had sufficient capital to subdivide and retail them as small farms or town lots.
Flint, Bixby & Co. were primarily stock raisers, but they branched out into a number of other lines.
Beginning in 1869 they operated the Coast Line Stage Co., which carried passengers, Wells Fargo express and mails between San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, until 1877, when the Southern Pacific completed a line between the first two cities. The stage time between San Francisco and Los Angeles was sixty-six hours.
The making of beet sugar interested them and they, with others, organized and built at Alvarado, Alameda Co., the first successful sugar factory not only in California but in the United States. The initial run was in 1870. Flint, Bixby & Co. transferred their interest to a second factory in Soquel, Santa Cruz Co. This new industry suffered from drought, insect pests, price cutting by competing cane sugar interests and the fact that at that time the process of making sugar from beets had not been developed to the point it now is, and the product was not popular. In 1880 the Soquel factory was closed. Father, however, retained a belief in the ultimate practicability of sugar-making in California, and his last business undertaking was an attempt to re-establish it on the Cerritos, near Long Beach. It was in 1896, the year of the free-silver agi ​tation, and he was unable to finance a sugar factory himself, but he induced the Clark interests to put one up on adjoining territory at Los Alamitos, thus obtaining a market for future beet crops.
It is hard now-a-days to visualize conditions in California during the fifties outside of San Francisco or the mining camps. The vast stretches of open valley and hill land were practically uninhabited, and were infested with wild beasts, and sometimes, wilder men. A very vivid impression of this may be obtained by anyone fortunate enough to read an account of “A Dangerous Journey From San Francisco to San Luis Obispo” given by J. Ross Browne in his book called Crusoe’s Island. We spent one of his nights in the old inn at San Juan, where the young Maine stockmen were so soon to settle.
The venture of bringing the sheep across the plains having proved good and a wide estate having been acquired the young men turned their thoughts to home-building, which is in a primary way, state building. Not content with the women the west at that time afforded, each in his turn, like Jacob of old, made a pilgrimage back to the land from which he came in search of a wife of his own people; but, unlike the old patriarch, it did not take long to find the bride willing to return to that far-off, glamorous California. Benjamin Flint’s wife was Caroline Getchell and Dr. Flint’s was Mary Mitchell, both girls from their home town of Anson. Father married Sarah Hathaway of Bloomfield, now a part of Skowhegan.
The way of it was this. Soon after his return to ​Norridgewock, he, with many others, was a guest at the annual church party at the home of Mr. Hathaway, the minister of the parish at Bloomfield. He had been told that he would find “a passel” of pretty girls there, and was advised that Margaret, the second, was especially beautiful. That was a fateful party! Out of it came the destiny of all the five daughters, for four of them married Bixbys and the fifth became foster mother to three of us children.
It was not the recommended, witty, black-eyed Margaret, however, who won the love of Llewellyn, but the oldest girl, tall, blue-eyed Sarah, whose name I bear. She captured his heart, and soon left Maine to go with him the long way, by Panama, to the distant ranch of San Juan.
What more natural than when, after a time, brother Jotham returned to his home, he should go over to the neighboring parsonage to bear the greetings of his sister-in-law, Sarah, to her family? It is told that, when upon this errand he met at the gate the lovely Margaret, he lost his heart completely. He never regained it. When he was eighty he told me emphatically that his wife not only had been the most beautiful woman in California, but that she still was.
A few months after this meeting Margaret traveled with friends across the Isthmus, and up the coast to San Francisco, there to be met by her sister and taken to San Justo to await her marriage day, which came shortly. She was married in her new home in old San Juan by the minister, Dr. Edwards, who had recently been a missionary among the Choctaw Indians. A ​letter describing the ceremony tells of the usual preparations, the making of bride’s cake and wedding cake, of putting the finishing touches on the little house, of the arranging of the wedding veil and the gathering in the early evening of the group of friends and relatives, including three little folks that had already come into the different families.
The home began immediately, and a few days later a call at the house discovered the bride happy in her house work and doing the first family washing.
This wedding ceremony was the first that Dr. Edwards had ever performed for white people, but it is reported to have been so well done that no one would have guessed inexperience. It is to be hoped that his later services in this line were as successful as this one. He was still the minister in San Juan when I was a child and he was wont to entertain me by repeating the Lord’s prayer in Choctaw.
The same letter which reports the marriage speaks of the new ranch house that was building and of the hope that it would be ready for occupancy in about two months, which dates the building for me,—early in 1863.
Each of the cousins when he married had brought his wife back to the San Justo, where they occupied in common a comparatively small house, which in my childhood was used for the hired men. But children were coming and a larger home was necessary. The men were intimate and congenial, and dreamed of an enlargement and continuation of their associated lives; the income was ample so they proceeded to build ​them a great house, a communal house, a staunch Maine house, white-painted and green-shuttered, as solid and true today as sixty years ago,—but, alas, now idle. This was the house in which I was born.
They planted the garden about it and the orchard, and made below it the pond where the hills could look to see if their trees were on straight. In winter time those hills were as green as any of Maine in June, but in our rainless summer they were soft tan or gold against the cobalt sky.
To accommodate three families there were three apartments, each with sitting-room, bedroom and bath, and in addition, for the use of the whole group, a common parlor, large office, dining room and kitchen, together with numerous guest rooms in the upper story. Every convenience of the period was included,—ample closets, modern plumbing, sufficient fire-places.
The plan for housekeeping in this large establishment was for each wife in turn to take charge for a month. It was no small undertaking to provide for the household, with the growing flocks of children and the frequent addition of visiting sisters, cousins, or aunts. The women involved, being individuals, had differing capacities and ideas, and each had the desire for a home managed according to her own idea. Imagine sitting down to every meal with six parents, twelve children and half a dozen guests! Inevitably the communal plan could not but fail to be altogether ideal. For a wonder it held together in a fashion for fifteen years, but there were many trips to San Fran ​cisco to relieve the strain, or long visits of mothers and children in Maine, that I guess might not have been so frequent or of so long duration if there had been individual homes for the cousin-partners. Ultimately the Ben Flints took up a permanent residence in Oakland and we moved to Los Angeles, leaving the Dr. Flints on the ranch.