LeBaron: Quake memories only one chapter in story of homesteading Sonoma County family

Ruth Newman was just two weeks short of turning 114 years old when she died at her home in Pebble Beach in July.

You probably know this because her story has been in the papers, on the radio and on most network news broadcasts within the past week or so.

Newman's death got all this attention because she was the oldest living survivor of the 1906 earthquake. And the last one with memories of that morning. There is just one more known survivor left. And he was only 3 months old.

Ruth was 4 years old at the time of the quake but never forgot that morning at their house on a ranch that was described as 'near Healdsburg.'

Now, that locating phrase may be just fine for Associated Press, but we need to move in a little closer. And, because Ruth came from a family of storytellers, we can get a glimpse of Sonoma County in the early 20th century.

They were the Barnards — father Ben, mother Maggie, four daughters and a son. Ruth was the second daughter. Her brother, Clarence, known as Barney, was two years older and her childhood playmate.

The family lived in a two-story log cabin home Ben Barnard built on a sheep ranch he ran for the Healdsburg owner. It was in the Flat Ridge area off Skaggs Spring Road, west of the Dry Creek Valley.

'The country was full of homesteaders in those days,' Barney explained in a late-life interview. 'My dad built the cabin above Buckeye Creek, which has headwaters on Mount Tom.'

(I've always thought that the conversation of old-timers like Barney is a lot like poetry. The names on the land — Buckeye Creek and Flat Ridge and Bee Springs, Rockpile Ranch and Mount Tom. There is a cadence from the early years that has been lost in the tweet and Twitter of the new age.)

The Flat Ridge Ranch was remote. Still is, by North Coast standards. In the early years it was reached by way of Skaggs Springs and extensions of Rockpile Road, trails really, that meandered through the hills all the way to Mendocino County and beyond.

Today, the private Kelly Road, built for logging from Cloverdale almost to Annapolis, is a far more direct route. But only if you have the key that opens the gate.

Both Ruth and Barney were around to tell their stories at the 100th anniversary of the quake. Ruth, born in August 1901, recalled her father scooping her up and carrying outside to safety.

Barney, born in September 1899, was sleeping in a little room downstairs. Mostly, he remembered the noise.

'My God, the noise that log cabin made!' he told me in 2006. 'It was put together with pins and there were all different noises, groans and rumbles and squeaks.

'My dad came across the front room and opened the door. The dresser had rolled in front of the door and he pushed it away. You remember these things because you're so frightened.

'The cabin had 40-foot logs as the foundation. It moved like waves. I could see the floor in the front room rose up about six inches or a foot and go down, moving … .'

For both Ruth and Barney, the most lasting memory of the earthquake was of spilled milk.

Ruth's daughter, Beverley Dodds of Fair Oaks, said her mother, as a 4-year-old, had a vivid memory of how upset her mother was by the loss of the morning's milk, while Barney, at 6, remembered mostly the noise, the motion AND the milk — because of the smell.

If you know anything about the process of getting milk from cow to kitchen, you know that in pre-automation days, when the cows were milked, the milk was stored in shallow pans and set aside until the cream rose to the top to be skimmed. In most ranch families, this was woman's work. (Even after milking machines and separators, 'washing up' the milk room to health standards was the farm wife's early morning chore.)

Sister and brother remembered that mother Maggie had just put the fresh milk on shelves in the basement-to-roof cooler that was used for food storage.

'The milk ran down into the basement,' Barney said, still wrinkling his nose a century later, 'and mixed up with redwood shavings and sawdust and there was no way to clean it. It soured and smelled. Oh, did it smell!'

The Barnard cabin escaped damage. It is, in fact, still standing, converted to a barn. 'My old room is the tack room now,' Barney told me. He had visited the old ranch often.

Dave Lewers has videos of Barney walking the barnyard and pointing out remembered sites.

Dave manages Flat Ridge Ranch, as did his father, Jerry, before him.

Ownership of that land has passed from descendants of Col. L.A. Norton (Norton being a Civil War hero and a Healdsburg pioneer) to timber 'barons' Paul and Lucile Kelly, who built the logging road, to the Trione family, who maintain a lodge on the property. Lewers still runs sheep and cattle on the land.

Readers who savor grimmer tales of the real 'Wild West' may remember Barney. He's the guy who came to my office in 1985 to tell me about Santa Rosa's 1920 lynching and admit — the first ever to do so publicly — that he was the youngest among the group of self-styled vigilantes who hanged three men from a tree in the Rural Cemetery. You can hear Barney tell the whole story, at 90, in an audiotape digitized in the Special Collections archive at Sonoma State University's Schulz Library. But this isn't about the lynching. That's an oft-told tale. (Too 'oft,' perhaps. I had an assistant, a darn good one, who used to say that she never wanted to hear of the lynching again.)

This is about stories of ranch life, long ago and far away. Far, certainly, from stores and doctors and most social life apart from family and the closest neighbors — not close at all by today's standards.

We have Marge Barnard, Barney's daughter, to thank for these. Marge, now 90, has traveled the world in her working life but has come home to Healdsburg to put the family stories into a book that includes a section she calls 'Barney's Stories' to give us a vivid picture of that life.

Titled 'The Barnard Journals,' and published last year, it has delivered its promise of 'History, Humor and Healdsburg.' Marge's memoir of growing up in 'the buckle of the prune belt, ' is fun and provides a nostalgia opportunity for those of a certain age. But Barney's stories of childhood on the ranch are epic, often with sister Ruth involved.

A sampler: Sent into the pasture to 'salt the bucks' — that is, to tote a bucketful of salt crystals so heavy it took both of them to carry it for the male sheep — they were accompanied by their little dog, Pat, who stood at alert when they heard a rustling in the leaves. Thinking it was a squirrel, they told Pat to 'sic 'em.' Pat obeyed, let out a yelp and headed for the house. He had tackled a rattlesnake and been bitten in the jaw. The good news is that Pat didn't die, but his face swelled to twice its size and it took many days of Maggie's tender mothering, including feeding him egg whites (who knew?), for Pat to regain his joyful outlook.

Or: The two of them played cowboy on stick horses, herding young turkeys their mother had raised from chicks to sell in the holiday season, chasing them around and around the yard, whooping and hollering, until several of the terrified birds collapsed and could not be revived.

Because he was a boy, Barney grew quickly into a ranch hand. He tells of a two-day drive, herding sheep to sell at the railhead in Cloverdale — just Ben and 7-year-old Barney as the 'tail driver,' and two sheep dogs. He remembered going off, waving his hat to his sister, 'like a real cowboy.'

There were frightening times, like holding a lantern as high as his 6-year-old arm would reach so his father could shoot and kill a charging wild boar.

And good times, like being sent to school at age 4 to make up the quota to keep a teacher — for just half a school year, split with another rural district. Presumed too young to learn, he was given crayons and paper and told to amuse himself. And mind the teacher. That lesson came in handy later when, at a bigger school closer to town, a new teacher sat down at her desk, opened the drawer, took out a pistol and banged it down on the desktop, saying, 'There will be good behavior in the classroom and on the playground.'

I'm no scientist. Far from it. Like Barney and Ruth, I know more about one-room schools than I do about genetics. But I do know that there must be something special about the Barnard DNA.

Ruth Newman knitted, baked and gardened, drove her car and played golf well into her 90s. She was nearly 114 when she passed. Barney, who hunted and fished all over Northern California and killed his last buck in Modoc County when he was past 90, lived to be 108. Younger sister Genevieve Gully, the 'baby of the family,' died at 103.

It's hard to dismiss such statistical data.