Disparate lives for two men who gave Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park its names

One was a peripatetic father of nine who often pulled up stakes to better his fortunes in 19th century California. The other was a feisty prune grower who set down roots here in World War II and in later years repeatedly refused to sell to “real estate sharkies,” even as Santa Rosa expanded to his doorstep.

The two men, Henry Coffey and Morrice Schaefer, lent their names to Coffey Park and the nearby Schaefer elementary school. Men of different eras, they each saw opportunity in the land when it lay far outside the city.

The two names have popped up in national news reports during the last three months since Coffey Park burned in the October wildfires. In the neighborhood the flames claimed four lives and destroyed more than ?1,300 homes - among ?24 people killed and 5,130 homes burned in Sonoma County.

Few people know much about the two men behind the names.

Katherine Rinehart, manager of the history and genealogy department at the Sonoma County Library, set out last fall to learn more about the namesake of Coffey Park. She teamed up with Mike Daniels, a retired Santa Rosa High School English teacher, who in November wrote an article about Coffey for the library’s blog.

The two found that Henry Coffey was the son of an Englishman who died not long after his son was born in New York in 1832. Coffey’s mother soon moved to Michigan and raised the boy there.

Married, widowed, and married again, Henry Coffey was 30 years old when he brought his family overland from the Midwest to California in 1862, seven years before the nation had a transcontinental railroad.

In his early years out West, Coffey farmed or raised livestock in Sacramento, Contra Costa and Mendocino counties, and later outside Prescott, Arizona.

In 1885 he moved to Santa Rosa and purchased 320 acres that lay more than 2 miles northwest of Santa Rosa. According to “An Illustrated History of Sonoma County” published in 1889, Coffey soon deeded to his nine children 20 acres each from his property, which was mostly hay and grain fields but included an orchard and a “family vineyard” of table grapes.

By 1900, Coffey had moved to the East Bay, where he engaged in real estate, Daniels said. The 1910 U.S. Census reports he was living on a fruit farm in Stanislaus County.

“He didn’t let any grass grow under his feet,” Rinehart observed.

The illustrated history describes Coffey as energetic and enterprising.

“I think that idea of being industrious is apparent in his whole life,” Daniels said. Coffey seems to have succeeded in most of his endeavors and to have profited enough from his earlier properties to purchase the farm in Santa Rosa.

Coffey died in 1916 in Oakland.

In contrast to Coffey, prune farmer Morrice Schaefer spent most of his adult life in Sonoma County.

For two decades he fought efforts to annex his 24-acre farm into Santa Rosa. Schaefer once lamented to a reporter about the encroaching development, saying “I’ve seen Santa Rosa ripped up all my life.”

Born in San Francisco, Schaefer farmed for more than a half-century in Sonoma and Napa counties. He harvested walnuts where the Montgomery Village neighborhood now stands and baled hay along Mendocino Avenue on land that is now covered by gas stations and apartment complexes.

In 1942, he paid $8,500 for his farm along Coffey Lane. In those years the area was a place of fields and orchards, including prunes and pear trees that would be close to a century old by the time they were removed in the 1980s to make room for housing subdivisions.

Schaefer liked to say he learned farming partly by watching “the bad farmers” go broke and then doing the opposite.

In 1987, at age 79 and with a wife in ill health, Schaefer reluctantly agreed to sell 22 acres of his land for development for $1.5 million. By then the 420-unit Coffey Park subdivision was well underway, and earlier housing tracts and small business parks virtually encircled Schaefer’s farm.

Ten acres of the farmer’s land at Coffey Lane and San Miguel Avenue were set aside for a school. In 1988, Piner-Olivet school district officials announced the campus would be named Morrice Schaefer Elementary.

The school opened in 1990, two years before Schaefer died at age 84.

You can reach Staff Writer Robert Digitale at 707-521-5285 or robert.digitale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @rdigit.