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SOUTH LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The Kelsey Creek Valley remains undisputedly the first area in Lake County to have been settled by those who were not the native Indians. Almost simultaneously, the first south county settlement by “gringos” was in Coyote Valley, now home to Hidden Valley Lake and, 10 miles or so southeast, Langtry (once Guenoc) Vineyards.
Salvador Vallejo, younger brother of General Mariano Vallejo, claimed the first Mexican land grant north of Mt. St. Helena in 1844.
Known as Rancho Lupyomi, it encompassed more than 70,000 acres that included all of Clear Lake and all of the fertile valleys on its shores – all that would become Upper Lake, Lakeport, Scotts Valley, Kelseyville, the Riviera, Nice, Lucerne, Glenhaven, Clearlake Oaks, Clearlake and Lower Lake. That claim was overruled in 1852.
About the same time, his brother-in-law, Jacob Primer Leese, was obtaining almost 30,000 acres and initiating a similar cattle-raising operation in the more southerly regions of Lake County, then still years away from being distinguished even as Napa County.
Gen. Vallejo was in charge of “el frontera del norte,” an area then stretching from San Jose to the border of the Oregon Territory and from the Pacific to the Mississippi.
In 1836, Vallejo was instructed to dismantle the missions and dispose of their holdings because the Mexican government could no longer afford to maintain them.
This meant that private ownership of land became possible. Huge tracts of land were granted to Mexican citizens essentially just for the asking. Vallejo himself claimed many thousands of acres, and was equally generous in obtaining land for his family and friends.
Leese obtained several grants, including 6,400 acres that years later would be home to San Bruno, Brisbane and Visitation Valley.
He traded that grant for Robert T. Ridley’s 8,242-acre Rancho Collayomi, home of Middletown, in 1845.
Weeks later he acquired the adjacent 21,200-acre Rancho Guenoc owned by George Roch.
Ridley – and probably Roch – had become a Mexican citizen, thus eligible for a land grant, by marrying into a Californio family.
Roch had promptly signed over a sizable grant in southern California the year before to the wealthy owner of adjacent property.
Leese sold both of his local ranchos to Capt. Archibald Alexander Ritchie for $14,000 in 1851.
A.A. Ritchie was an ambitious newcomer who arrived in Yerba Buena in mid-1848 after almost 30 years as a sea captain and as resident agent in Canton for a major shipping firm.
The legalities of property ownership had become remarkably muddled over the previous decade, as newcomers chose homesteads that were enclosed by huge land grants.
By 1851, so many fistfights, gunfights, lawsuits and killings had resulted that the U.S. Land Act decreed all titles must be validated in U.S. courts.
Ritchie claimed both grants in 1852, jointly with Paul S. Forbes.
Forbes may have never even visited California and is not apparently related to William Forbes, “father” of Lakeport. He was American Consul in Canton at the time Ritchie lived there.
There were a few squatters on the Lake County grants, who apparently created no trouble.
One was A.H. Butts, who later moved to Butts Canyon. Another was William H. Manlove, who became first sheriff of Lake County.
In the mountains west of the ranchos, John Cobb was setting up a homestead for his wife and children as early as 1853.
Until 1856, the only wagon trail into this area was the one carved by the military hauling their cannons toward the Bloody Island Massacre – over Howell Mountain, through Pope Valley and Butts Canyon, across the Rancho Guenoc and onto Lower Lake and Big Valley.
Only the hardiest made the trip; the earliest documented was the Hammack party who settled in Upper Lake in 1854.
In 1852, or perhaps earlier, Ritchie engaged young Robert Henry Sterling to settle on the Rancho Guenoc and act as manager of the two grants.
At 24, seaman Sterling had sailed around the world and taken part in numerous trips to China and throughout the West Indies.
He had just returned from a yearlong trip back home to Connecticut, where he had proposed to Lydia Jane Wheaton.
Sterling built an anomalous stone house, ready for his bride when she came ‘round The Horn and they were wed in May 1854.
She was accustomed to the security of large stone houses, the residences of prominent families, provisioned to serve as “safe houses” for everyone.
On July 9, 1856, Capt. A.A. Ritchie was found dead alongside his wagon. The probate dragged on into 1868.
A few parcels of Rancho Guenoc were leased to incoming settlers. The 1860 census tallied 131 residents in the village of Guenoc about a mile south of the stone house, where Hartmann Bridge today spans Putah Creek on Highway 29.
Finally, by 1870, the Ritchie family had started splitting the huge spreads into parcels for sale, and serious development of south Lake County got under way.
Meanwhile, around the lake, settlement had been increasing rapidly for 15 years.
Nina Bouska is a member of the Stone House Historical Society. Visit the group online at http://home.mchsi.com/~stonehouse/statement.htm .
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