The Italian Artichoke Farmers of Point Reyes
By: Anne T. Kent California Room
Tags: Point Reyes, Italian American, Marin County, Farming, Local History

By Dewey Livingston

Artichoke and vegetable farms at Drakes Head on Limantour Estero, Point Reyes. Courtesy Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS) Archives.

Following up on the recent article about Issei and Nisei pea farmers at Point Reyes, here we tell of another group of immigrants who farmed in the same areas of the Point. The sandy soils and foggy weather of Point Reyes proved to be ideal for artichoke farming, which grew into a robust industry for the two decades before World War II. These truck farms — so named because road improvements had switched transportation from boats and trains to motor trucks — made use of the natural coastal moisture rather than irrigation, and allowed shipment of fresh produce to the vegetable markets in San Francisco.

While the six decades prior to the First World War saw the arrival of thousands of Italian-speaking Swiss in California, it was mostly after that war that an influx of people from the Italian peninsula came to Marin County. These new residents found work in eastern Marin as gardeners, landscapers, and small-yield farmers. In western Marin, there were farming opportunities of many kinds: vegetables and inedible greens predominated, whereas dairy farming was a rare career choice for these newcomers.

Among the earliest of this migration were Peter Megra and Antonio Matteri, who came from Italy to rent the Laguna Ranch dairy from Julia Shafter Hamilton in 1917 (it is now the location of the Point Reyes Hostel). Nicholas Bettini, with wife Martina and daughters Lina and Genevieve, and baby son Norman who was born on the ranch, followed them and stayed for thirteen years. Other Italian dairymen included Julius Carminati at Muddy Hollow during the 1920s. Most of their neighbors were Irish and Portuguese.

Members of the Bettini family and friends gather at the Laguna Ranch, 1930s. Courtesy PRNS Archives.

Starting around 1920, “greenpickers” scoured the forested east slopes of Inverness Ridge between Inverness and Bolinas. Their crop was naturally occurring ferns, salal and other decorative greens, and also leaf mold from rat nests. The burgeoning cut-flower market in San Francisco provided a need for greens to accompany bouquets, and Inverness Ridge provided the ideal native habitat. Working through agreements with local landowners like the Shafter family and the Stewarts of the Olema Valley, greenpickers developed trails and harvesting grounds that would be maintained so the greens are available all year long. There is a Greenpicker Trail in Point Reyes National Seashore today.

The process for collecting leaf mold, used as a growing bed, was virtually unknown to outsiders. Joe Dellepere, from Genoa, moved to Olema in the 1920s. “My father worked for the florists in San Francisco,” recalled his daughter Edna Petroni. “He went out in the hills of Bear Valley where the rats would make a nest, and my father’s dog would chase the rats out of the nest. So they would crush that, sack it and sell it to the florists.”

“He also he made big bundles of big leaf ferns, and the florists used them to put in their arrangements.” Besides Bear Valley, where Mr. Dellepere had permission from owner Col. Jesse Langdon, he gathered ferns and leaf mold at other ranches on the Point. The brotherhood of greenpickers was small and close, often people with family ties.

The Point Reyes Peninsula proved to be a perfect growing ground for artichokes, beans and peas, and much of it was concentrated on the vast 10,000-acre Home Ranch around Drakes and Limantour esteros. In 1923, Julia Shafter Hamilton leased a thousand acres at Drakes Head Ranch on Limantour Estero to the Western Evergreen Company, which planted the first commercial crops of artichokes at Point Reyes. The ten-year lease called for the planting of artichokes: 200 acres the first year, 300 acres the next year, and 500 by the spring of 1926. Italian immigrant farmers Sisto Pedrini, Bert Filipelli, Angelo and Giuseppe Costa, and the brothers Mario, Steve and Luigi Crescio grew, packed and trucked their produce to the railroad in Point Reyes Station or directly to San Francisco. The new truck farms of Point Reyes had taken hold.

In the meantime, Leland Stanford Murphy bought the Home Ranch from Mrs. Hamilton and continued the leases for artichoke farming. The square-ish point at Drakes Head was crossed with the deep furrows of cultivation as acreage planted in artichokes expanded. A 1937 aerial photo shows fields fanning out from the pioneering 1850s dairy ranch complex, now a thriving crop farm. Rudolph “Red” Lavezzoli took over the lease in 1927 and continued to farm there for over a decade.

California’s supervising agriculture inspector, Harry Koster, said in 1934 that the artichokes grown at Point Reyes were the best in California, even better than those from the “artichoke capitol of the world,” Castroville. By that time, Murphy’s tenants had over 500 acres planted, and that number increased in the next few years. “Numerous farmers in the coast area are planting their land to the vegetable which brings good prices and proves profitable to the growers,” reported the Petaluma Argus-Courier.

The New Albion Ranch at the time the Lucchesi family farmed there. The Shafter School was located here until 1941. Only some trees remain, on the Estero Trail. Courtesy Jack Mason Museum of West Marin History.

Louis Castiglioni farmed artichokes on the Mendoza ranch at Point Reyes as of 1932. In 1934, Romolo Lucchesi and Angelo Lombardi leased the New Albion Ranch, across Limantour Estero from Drakes Head, to grow artichokes and peas, where Portuguese farmer Manuel Tacherra had started artichoke farming in the 1920s. It was the New Albion where a school was created to serve the many new families — Italian, Japanese and Anglo — on the farms. Artichokes were also grown in Bolinas.

These farm operators hired migrant labor at harvest time. On the Murphy Ranch, Pia Lucchesi Davis remembered families of Filipino origin living in sheds on the ranches; some lived in a former chicken shed at the Home Ranch. Mrs. Davis, whose father was an artichoke farmer, recalled the Filipino families and their traditional instrumental bands playing music almost every day. People would come and listen as a way of relaxing after a long day working in the fields. A photograph taken in the late 1930s depicts Italian and Japanese families gathering together for a picnic on the beach. Both nationalities were new people in a new land, and neither were always treated well by earlier generations of immigrants.

Italian artichoke growers picnicked with Japanese pea farmers at Limantour Beach in the 1930s. Jim and Mary Colli are in the rear at center. Courtesy PRNS Archives.

Two of the longest-lasting west Marin artichoke farmers were Jim Colli and Allesondro Simondi. The two started out working their own farms but eventually partnered in two farms. Allesondro Simondi came to Marin County from Italy In 1921. He worked on the Murphy ranch during the 1930s as a tenant farmer, and in 1937 moved north to the O. L. Shafter Estate’s H Ranch overlooking Abbott’s Lagoon. On the northern part of the dairy ranch, Simondi planted 300 acres of former cow pasture in artichokes and peas, built a six-room house for his family “with all modern conveniences,” and erected a six-foot fence surrounding the whole farm.

The late Ronald McClure, a neighboring dairyman, remembered the farm. “Simondi was on his own, and my uncle used to drive a truck for him,” he recalled. “He’d leave in the evening about 5:00, 6:00 to go to the city with a load of peas and artichokes.”

The children attended one-room Pierce School up the hill from the farm. “The Simondi kids didn’t speak any English,” recalled their teacher, Theresa Parella, “so it was a good thing I could understand the Italian and respond. It was not long before they were speaking English, when they mingled with the other children.” Mrs. Simondi “would bring me artichokes” as a regular gift.

Unfortunately for Simondi, all this investment lasted a short time. Two years later, the Shafter Estate sold the ranch, and soon after that the new owners asked the family to leave. Simondi knocked down the new house and went back to the Murphy ranch where he grew peas during the war. The 300 acres of artichokes at H Ranch were plowed up and the land used again for pasture.

Map of artichoke farms on Point Reyes. Graphic by Dewey Livingston.

Jim Colli arrived in America in 1922 and worked on dairy ranches for a decade until his fellow countrymen called him into farming. Dairy ranching was hard work, and sometimes the conditions were challenging. On one ranch, Colli described how fellow workers who were Irish did not like Italians and treated him badly — giving him the rowdy cows to milk, etc. — so he quit.

Colli married a Portuguese girl, Mary Andre of Sausalito, and the two worked side by side for their lifetimes while raising a family. They went to the South End ranch near Bolinas with Colli’s cousin Andrea Spondrio, running a small dairy and growing artichokes. They went to work on the Murphy ranch vegetable farms, tending about 60 acres on Berry Point adjacent to Drakes Head until the war came.

Colli described his process of growing artichokes: with a tractor, plow deep furrows and prepare planting beds, then put the artichoke shoots in the ground. Irrigation was not necessary — “the breeze from the ocean” took care of it, he said in an interview in 1989 — and it took a while to produce marketable artichokes. Harvest season was February to May, and he hired men to help at that time. The artichokes were boxed and taken to San Francisco on trucks, first by ferry from Sausalito and then over the new Golden Gate bridge. “The commission men, they make all the money,” he recalled. After five or six years of harvest, the land would need a fallow period to allow it to recuperate, Colli explained.

The Italian farmers and their Japanese neighbors found themselves in very awkward positions at the outbreak of the United States’ involvement in World War II. On February 13, 1942, placards were posted barring aliens — almost entirely Japanese, Germans and Italians — from the Marin County coastline including Tomales Bay and Point Reyes Peninsula. The next month county agricultural advisors were instructed to encourage the Italians and Japanese to continue farming in good faith and spoke of federal custodianships that might save the farms. Nothing came of that, and the Italians, because the U. S. was at war with Italy in Europe, and also German aliens, were banned from crossing west of Highway 1 for “security” reasons.

Unfortunately, the Italians’ farms and best foraging sites were located west of the highway. Sis Arndt recalled how she and her husband Lefty, and other sympathetic neighbors, trudged out to the Point and harvested the results of their Italian friends’ hard work, turning the full boxes of excellent produce to the farmers who could then discreetly market them. The Point Reyes Italians also lost their rented homes on the Point and had to relocate. The greenpickers found themselves out of work, locating new harvesting grounds farther from the coast; this was not ideal because the areas east of Highway 1 were drier. For the most part, both Italian-led industries collapsed during the war.

Aerial view of Jim Colli’s artichoke and cabbage farm in Olema in the 1960s. The property is now the Olema Campground. U. S. Geological Survey.

For a few years after World War II, Simondi and Colli grew 150 acres of artichokes, peas and Italian beans at an old creamery site on Bull Point above Creamery Bay, employing Mexican laborers. They also had a 20-acre property in Olema, where they grew beans, Swiss chard, mustard greens and lettuce; soon they would concentrate on artichokes. In 1949, reporter Al Milgrom of the Independent Journal called Simondi “the county’s leading farmer” saying he “pioneered in lettuce in the county, lost his shirt on mustard greens, and built a home on artichokes.” “He came to America from Italy in 1921 to live like a king, he said, but his hands have become those of a peasant, worn deep crevices on a padded paw, powerful like a bear’s, from work.”

By 1952, the 20 acres in Olema produced 1,500 40-pound boxes of artichokes annually. Simondi left the partnership and by the 1960s Colli was growing artichokes and cabbages, by himself, in Olema. He was the last artichoke grower in Marin County, and by the end of the decade his Olema farm had been turned into a commercial RV campground.