Helen Smith Orange County Project Vol. II
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CENTER FOR ORAL AND PUBLIC HISTORY CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON Helen Smith Oral History Collection THE RANCH HOUSE ON SAN MIGUEL ISLAND The San Miguel island ranch house was built in 1906 for Captain W. G. Waters who had leased the island since the 1890s from the government for sheep raising, paying rent of $5.00 per year. In 1906 a large steamer was wrecked on San Miguel and its cargo of tongue and groove pine flooring provided the original building material. The house was built by John Russell who became caretaker of the island for Bob Brooks after Captain Waters’ death. The house itself was a single row of nine rooms, 120 feet long. Some rooms were connected with interior sliding doors and others only by hinged doors from the covered porch that ran the length of the building. The outside wall faced toward Bat Rock, at the west end of Cuyler’s Harbor, and indirectly toward Point Concepcion, “the cradle of the winds.” Because of the constant winds that blew sand against this outer wall, its only windows were fixed ships’ portholes and its only door was a four-vane revolving one at the west end which the wind turned without piling sand against the entry. From this door ingress was into a large utility area including a laundry, butcher shop, woodshed and storeroom where perishable food was spread on large tables to prevent its molding from dampness. In line east of this were, successively, the kitchen, dining room, two dormitory bedrooms used by the sheepshearers, another bedroom, the living room and the master bedroom. South of this bedroom was a small wing containing the house’s only clothes closet and bathroom; this was accessible both from the master bedroom and the porch Draft of an introduction written by Helen C. Smith for a proposed work on Mrs. Herbert Lester 1 IMAGE SOURCE PAGE: http://www.channel.islands.national-park IMAGE SOURCE PAGE: http://commons.wikimedia.org Figure 1 Channel Island maps 2 O.H. 3638.1 CENTER FOR ORAL AND PUBLIC HISTORY CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON Helen Smith Oral History Collection NARRATOR: MRS. HERBERT (ELIZABETH “ELISE”) LESTER INTERVIEWER: Helen Smith DATE: December 1, 1969 SUBJECT: House and life on San Miguel Island HS: I am Helen Smith. I am recording an interview with Mrs. Herbert Lester in her home at 1812 Loma St., Santa Barbara. Mrs. Lester will talk about the arrangements in her house, furnishings and so forth. Mrs. Lester, let’s discuss the dining room. EL: Fine. HS: You have a china closet against the east wall. EL: That’s right. HS: Inside the porthole. EL: That’s right. HS: And the other corner? EL: That has a little, that has the famous barrel. HS: Tell me about the barrel. Do you remember the date of it? EL: I don’t remember the date but it was pre-Prohibition. HS: It was then before 1933, I think. EL: Oh absolutely, and it was so weather beaten, you know. It was found on the beach. On the, go up the canyon road, you know. Cuyler’s Harbor is here, and just the other side of the trail, in that little hollow. That’s where Herbie found it one day in the summer. 3 LESTER O.H. 3638.1 HS: That would be south. Didn’t you say it was buried in the sand? EL: Oh, it was, and I think just a little bit of the barrel was exposed. He moved the sand and tried to push it, you know, and found it was heavy. So he came up to the ranch house for a brace and bit. And he went down to this thing and screwed it—you know how you use those things? HS: You bore a hole. EL: You bore a hole, well, that’s right—and out squirted this virgin whiskey, untrammeled by Prohibition days. HS: Did he have any idea where it had come from? EL: Oh yes, yes. Well, in John Russell’s day—he built the house and everything—there had been a flour, flour and whiskey steamer had been wrecked on the island. HS: Do you remember the name of it? EL: No, I don’t. I have a record somewhere but I couldn’t tell you offhand. And John Russell found the flour but he never found any whiskey. The house, Herbie said, they had piles of hundred-pound sacks of this flour. HS: It didn’t get wet? EL: No. Well, they put it out to dry but they used it at any rate. It was some ten or fifteen years later Herbie finds this barrel of whiskey. Fifty gallons, so it was very exciting, this little incident. He couldn’t move it so he drained off, siphoned off, I believe was the word and brought it up the house. We didn’t have containers to put it in, so the sheepshearers were due for shipping fairly soon, so he said, “I’ll write into Bob to bring out some containers to get it up.” So he wrote him and Bob arrived with the shearers for the shipping of the lambs. And he brought five-gallon tins, I think they were, or bottles. HS: Were they glass or metal? EL: Metal I think they were. Yes, because on account things are so easily broken on the island. That it was better although glass would probably would have been better for the whiskey. So he brought these up. Then it was a question—Of course, we had all these Indians and hands that arrived, too, and the question of getting this precious stuff up to the house undetected. The scheme was they decide to take these things down in a steamer trunk; they strapped the steamer trunk to the sled. While the men were unloading the supplies for the weeks— HS: This was on the beach of Cuyler’s Harbor? 4 LESTER O.H. 3638.1 EL: Yes, that’s right. Herbie and Bob went over with the sled and— HS: This was the sand sled pulled by the horse? EL: Yes, that’s right. They put the whiskey, they siphoned some off into these five-gallon tanks. They had to make several trips. But they took them up, you see, in this trunk so the shearers—we would have had a riot there, you know. HS: Not much shearing done. EL: No, they got them up the house. It was quite fun, quite exciting. They brought them up the house and stowed them away. Herbie gave Bob half of it, half of it. He took it in with him. HS: After the barrel was emptied, it was brought up and put in the corner of the dining room. EL: Yes, he thought it would be a nice souvenir. HS: Occasional table. EL: Which was used for the children’s (pause) record player, you know; it wasn’t a record player, it was a phonograph in those days. This was back in the days of the wind-up phonograph. Then do you remember the layout of the dining room? We called it more or less the ship room. We had ships, pictures of ships there. We had one of the Berengaria. HS: You know where that is? EL: Yes, I do. Do you know how we got it? Herbie had written to the Cunard Line. He wanted to get the Lusitania that went down during WWI. He wanted to get a picture of that. So he wrote them a very charming letter describing how he had travelled many times on their steamers and would they be willing to send him a picture of the Lusitania for the ranch house? He got a letter back from them saying they were sorry they didn’t have any copies of the Lusitania but they would send the Berengaria if that would suit. He said that would be fine. So presently Bob said that this picture had arrived from the east and it took the side of a house, he didn’t know how he was ever going to get up here. It was all crated and framed. Oh, it was framed in a beautiful frame. Bob was just furious. He said, “. .side of a house! What in the world are you sending for?” It arrived and we put it up in the living room. We finally got different pictures; we had those two famous French boats. What were the names of them? HS: Not the Île de France? 5 LESTER O.H. 3638.1 EL: I don’t think so. They were twin boats; they came out just before the war, during the war. HS: World War I? I don’t remember. What became of those pictures? Do you know? EL: No. I think Bob Brooks had those. Then we had Custer’s Last Stand—Do you remember, we had it on the side. It was back alongside— HS: In the living room? EL: No, it wasn’t in the living room. It was in the dining room. It was in the back of the barrel here. The barrel was here and here was the picture. HS: No, I don’t remember. EL: That was a large picture; he got that from Santa Barbara somewhere. Bob has that and he was going to bring it over here to me. I didn’t know where I’d put it. It’s an interesting thing. I ought to have a museum in order to keep all my things. Anyway we had Custer’s Last Stand.