Ranching History at Point Reyes

 

When you cross Inverness Ridge toward the Point Reyes headlands, you leave the pine/fir forest behind and enter the stark beauty of the coastal grasslands, dotted with cattle and scattered ranches.

This open, working landscape is known as the Pastoral Zone. At first glance, open pastures and rolling fencelines are punctuated by windbreaks, stockponds, and feedlots arrayed around a ranch core. There, the mix of redwood homes and barns from the 1800s with aluminum and steel utility buildings from the 1900s becomes evident, suggesting the evolution of the dairy industry. In fact, the National Seashore visitor has happened upon one of the earliest and largest examples of industrial-scale dairying in the state of California.

The Alchemy of Grass Turned to Gold

The 1849 California Gold Rush brought an influx of capitalists, merchants, professional practitioners, laborers, and agriculturists, among others seeking alternative wealth along the shores of San Francisco Bay. Some of those who vainly sought mineral gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills came further west, finding gold of another kind at Point Reyes. With their dairying skills honed in their previous homes, they could envision production of golden wheels of cheese and casks of butter to provision the growing population of nearby San Francisco. The treeless coastal plain beckoned with opportunity.

The early American settlers of the 1850s were impressed with the cool, moist climate of Point Reyes, providing near-ideal conditions for raising dairy cows. Abundant grass and forbs, a long growing season, and sufficient fresh water supplies promised productivity well in excess of domestic need. Unknown to the early ranchers, the expansive coastal prairie was most likely the byproduct of burning, weeding, pruning, and harvesting for at least two millennia by Coast Miwok and their antecedents.

The Franciscan missionaries set the stage for the explosion of dairy in west Marin with the introduction of feral cattle in 1817. They established the San Rafael Asistencia, near San Francisco Bay, as an annex to Mission Dolores in San Francisco, serving as a recuperative center for ailing Coast Miwok and Ohlone natives. Secularization of the missions following Mexican independence from Spain led to land grant subdivision and the expansion of cattle ranching on the peninsula.

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Creation of a Dairy Empire

The advancing front of Americano ranchers brought to light poor record keeping and the behavior of several Mexicano land grantees coveting and utilizing a neighbor's adjacent parcel. As land was sold to the new immigrants, the title to the land usually became ensnared in litigation.

Oscar Lovell Shafter and James McMillan Shafter separately came to California from Vermont in the mid-1850s. Within a couple years, they were both partners in the San Francisco law firm Shafter, Shafter, Park, and Heydenfeldt. One of the firm's first cases was a land dispute regarding who had title to various properties on the Point Reyes peninsula and in Olema Valley. During a five-year period ending in 1857, the disputes led to the firm's ownership of over 50,000 acres on Point Reyes—almost all the land on peninsula—encompassing the coastal plain and most of Inverness Ridge. The Shafter brothers shortly thereafter bought out Park's and Heydenfeldt's interest in the Point Reyes with the intent of creating their own dairy district.

As a region, Point Reyes played an instrumental part in the development of the dairy industry in California. Before 1857, dairy products for consumption in San Francisco were shipped from the East Coast or produced locally by very small dairy operations of questionable quality. Unlike the small dairy operations pre-existing on the peninsula, these Vermont-native lawyer/businessmen saw the opportunity to market large quantities of superior quality butter and some cheese under a Point Reyes brand to San Francisco. The remote location of Point Reyes would be overcome with the expeditious delivery of finished products and livestock to the foot of Market Street by way of small schooners, and eventually by rail and ferry. Vital dairy production equipment and methods were developed at Point Reyes dairies that would be adopted nationwide. Point Reyes dairies were among the first large-scale and high-quality dairies in the state, and at one time the Shafters' butter district was considered to be the largest in the world. Point Reyes dairies produced what was widely considered to be the highest quality butter in the state for the last half of the 1800s. Marin County, dominated by the Shafter family's Point Reyes dairies, led the state's counties in dairy production in volume into the 1890s.

Construction of the Shafters' first ranch began in 1857, when the house at Home Ranch near the geographic center of the peninsula was built. During the next two or three years, Home Ranch developed as an experimental ranch—a prototype of sorts for the mass-produced ranches to come. Shortly thereafter, the Shafters began leasing different sections of the peninsula to the occupants of existing dairy ranches. The singular exception was the sale of Tomales Point to an old friend from Vermont, Solomon Pierce. The Pierce family built a small town to support their isolated twin dairy ranches with the commanding views of the Pacific and Tomales Bay. In time, the Pierce Ranches out-competed the Shafter dairy collective in production and quality of finished product.

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The Partition of 1869–70 and the Origin of the Alphabet Ranches

In 1865, Charles Webb Howard (Oscar's son-in-law and also from Vermont) became a full partner of the Shafters' project, moved to Point Reyes, and managed the creation of the large dairy district. In 1869 and 1870, the three partners divided up the peninsula into six parcels, leaving each to own and manage a collection of coastal plain and ridgeline ranches. Some historians refer to this event as the "Partition of 1869–70."

In all, the Shafters and Howard dairy ranches numbered 31. Oscar Shafter and Howard utilized the letters of the alphabet to name their individual ranches. "A" Ranch was located closest to the headlands; "Z" Ranch was located at the summit of Mt. Wittenberg, while a few letters were left unused. James Shafter bequeathed more poetic names like Drakes Head, Muddy Hollow, Oporto, and Sunnyside. (Download the "Historic Alphabet Designations of Point Reyes Ranches, 1860–present" map. - 275 KB PDF)

Oscar Shafter's portions took up the northernmost and southernmost parcels on the peninsula, including ranches H through N in the north section of 11,135 acres and the Lake and South End Ranches near Bolinas. The 6,712-acre southern section contained large fir forests and brushy areas, leaving only two locations on the coast suitable for dairying.

James Shafter took two parcels central to the peninsula: a 13,660-acre parcel overlooking Limantour Bay and including the headquarters, or Home Ranch, with its surrounding dairies O through T (usually referred to by names such as New Albion or Muddy Hollow Ranches), and a 5,257-acre wooded parcel south of Bear Valley containing Wildcat and Glen Ranches near the coast and extending eastward to the village of Olema.

Perhaps Charles Webb Howard ended up owning the best portion of the peninsula: the rich pastures of Point Reyes itself—9,647 acres containing ranches A through G—and the spectacular 7,739-acre Bear Valley Ranch stretching from Drakes Bay to Olema, containing U, W, Y, and Z Ranches. Howard took the lead in improving his section, hiring a Swedish immigrant carpenter/dairyman, Hinrik Claussen, to oversee the completion of his dairies. In addition, Howard took charge of Oscar Shafter's dairy ranches under an agreement with his ill father-in-law.

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The "Butter Rancho"

The Shafters and Howard employed family members, local residents, or recruited European dairymen as superintendents to construct new dairies, refurbish existing ranches, recruit immigrant ranch hands, and aid selection of the tenant ranchers. The tenant ranches were rented by Irish, Swedish, Italian-speaking Swiss, and Azore Islands-Portuguese families. Surviving Coast Miwok families displaced by the Spanish missions also found work on the dairies situated above their Tomales Bay homes. The Shafters envisioned creating a more civil society for the Bay Area in the 1800s, refining bachelor ranch hands and educating ranch family children. Chinese, Canadian, Filipino, Mexican, and German immigrants all found their chance to get started in America through dairying at Point Reyes.

The ultimate success of the Shafter/Howard dairy enterprise rested on their ability to market and negotiate contracts with high-end hoteliers and fine food purveyors. The Point Reyes brand of butter conveyed a high level of quality, attested in articles in local contemporary newspapers. "The grass growing in the fields on Monday is butter on the city tables the following Sunday," as the 1880 History of Marin County reported. The brand with letters "PR" inside a star was stamped into cheesecloth-wrapped rolls or casks of butter. This familiar symbol was actually forged by other dairy farmers of the time.

Record yields of butter and cheese came from the dairy farms at Point Reyes throughout the late 1800s. Herds of Devons, Jerseys, Guernseys, and later on Holsteins, numbering from 100 to 250 cows per ranch, catapulted the Point Reyes enterprise as perhaps the largest operation in the early years of the state. In 1867, Marin County produced 932,429 pounds of butter, the largest yield of butter in California. These huge amounts of butter were produced in an era when the finest restaurants served every good steak with a melting slab of butter on top.

The distance to San Francisco and east Marin communities precluded the ability to ship milk for domestic consumption. In the absence of refrigeration, the raw milk was briefly useable by the ranch families and employees. Collected by milkers either outdoors or inside large milking barns, raw milk sat in pans inside dairy houses to allow for cream separation. The surplus skim milk was dumped into a drain leading to an open trench, finding its way to penned, thirsty hogs. It was not unusual to see swine and casks of butter shipped off together on the decks of schooners headed for the city.

The estates of the three Shafter/Howard families declined shortly after 1900. Following the 1906 earthquake, several dairies located on Inverness Ridge shuttered their doors. Although building damage contributed to their demise, these ranches failed due to the absence of Coast Miwok burning and the rapid expansion of native coyotebrush and poison oak thickets, leading to dramatic reductions in grazeable pastures for cows. By 1933, all ridgeline dairies were gone.

The demand for Shafter/Howard ranch produce waned, particularly as transportation throughout the Bay Area improved. Other regional dairies were improving their quality, quantity, and distribution of produce, while the cumulative impacts of overgrazing on Point Reyes had caused a significant decline in pasture quality. The accumulation of massive debt, the 1929 stock market crash, and the close of the Depression ultimately brought an end to the three estates, and the "butter rancho." Land speculators picked up the pieces, and in most instances resold the ranches to the contemporary tenants.

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The Fall of the Shafter's Dairy Empire

Members of the Shafter family owned major portions of Point Reyes for 82 years, from 1857 to 1939.

The first of the Point Reyes property to leave the Shafter family included the estate of Charles Webb Howard, administered until her death by his widow, Emma Shafter Howard. After her death in 1916, the couple's four children disagreed on how to share the estate. After months of hearings in San Rafael, the land was partitioned, then each part was sold separately to John G. Rapp of San Francisco in 1919.

On his death in 1892, James McMillan Shafter left a shocking amount of debt for his heirs to clear. Shafter's daughter Julia Shafter Hamilton served as administrator of the estate and spent the rest of her life settling the debts in a fair and proud manner. The burden of the ranches finally overtook Mrs. Hamilton in the days following the stock market crash in 1929 when, after defaulting on a large bank loan, she sold the Point Reyes tract to real estate specialist Leland S. Murphy.

The last lands to leave the Shafter family were those of Oscar L. Shafter's estate, Ranches H through N, and the South End and Lake Ranches near Bolinas. After Shafter' s death in 1873 these lands had been administered by the O. L. Shafter Estate Company, under the control of Charles Webb Howard until his death after the turn of the century. The holding company decided to sell in 1939, first selling the I Ranch to Jim McClure and the J Ranch to Jim Kehoe in April of that year. In August, real estate promoter Leonard David of San Francisco bought the rest of the ranches for $300,000 and immediately resold them to the tenants and others at great profit.

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The Transitional Years

The Shafter/Howard enterprise "corresponded to the feudal system of England," according to the San Rafael Independent in 1939. The new owners had chafed at the terms of their leases and the increasing inability of their landlords to make capital improvements to their dairy infrastructure. The timing of the demise of the Shafter family estates coincided with Federal and state regulation of milk production for consumer health. Butter production shifted from the individual ranches to cooperative creameries located on the "F" Ranch and in the railroad town of Point Reyes Station. The most important improvements, in the form of more profitable Grade A dairy operations, began to appear in 1935, though most were constructed after the conclusion of World War II. Ranch homes and bunkhouses built in the 1870s were found to be too small and difficult to maintain, and began to be replaced with stucco-covered, single story residences.

During the Great Depression, ranchers struggled to make ends meet. It was not uncommon for ranchers to augment their incomes with expanded livestock production, such as beef cattle, chickens, and eggs. Several ranches invited Japanese immigrants to raise peas, and Italian immigrants to cultivate artichokes on more remote parcels. These ventures were usually successful. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the subsequent internment of the Japanese-Americans and relocation of Italian-Americans, the fields went fallow for lack of labor and mounting soil erosion problems. During Prohibition, whiskey and rum smuggling at Home Ranch on Limantour Estero replaced dairy operations as their sole source of income.

Others changes were coming. The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, expediting movement of produce from the North Bay region into San Francisco. During World War II, the ranches became connected to the regional electric power grid, replacing gas-powered generators to run milking and refrigeration equipment. The cooperative creameries closed, allowing for ranchers to sell raw milk as commodity to regional creameries. After the war, some dairies ceased operation, converting to far less labor-intensive beef cattle operations. Probably most important, fresh war veterans who had transited through San Francisco enroute to the Pacific theatre decided to relocate their families to the Bay Area, swelling the tide of suburbanization into Marin County.

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Advent of a New Landlord

Marin County had embraced a growth plan in the 1950s and 60s that would greatly benefit real estate developers and speculators, with assistance from the state department of transportation. With the influx of new residents, many of them affluent, property taxes for the county as a whole dramatically increased. At the same time, dairy operators nationally saw prices for the products drop considerably. Dairies regionally had been closing or consolidating for sometime, but the combination of economics, competition, labor costs, taxes, environmental regulation, and land values accelerated the pace. Point Reyes dairies feared the loss of the quality of life as much as declining profitability. If more dairies closed their doors, the fear rose that the supporting dairy industry infrastructure might collapse. Most important, the ranchers valued the pastoral landscape that their parents and grandparents had set roots in, often back to the 1800s.

In order to secure their place at Point Reyes, the dairy and cattle ranchers formed an uneasy alliance with the Sierra Club in hopes of preserving their ranches and west Marin open space. The National Park Service (NPS) had actively sought to establish a national park on the California coast, and Point Reyes in particular, as early as 1936. Washington was approached to help solve the pressing needs of many local and national constituencies. The compromise hammered out by Congress and signed by President Kennedy in 1962 explicitly provided for the retention of the ranches in a designated pastoral zone, with ranchers signing 25–30 year reservations of use and occupancy leases, and special use permits for cattle grazing. Over the ensuing ten years, the NPS acquired the 17 remaining operating ranches and the property of the abandoned ranches.

As of 2023, five historic Shafter/Howard era dairies are operating in the park. An additional nine occupied historic ranches and former ranch sites run beef cattle. The Pierce Ranch on Tomales Point ceased operations in 1973. Three years later, Congress authorized creation of the wilderness area incorporating that ranch as habitat for the reintroduction of tule elk. Beginning in 1980, NPS invested in the rehabilitation of the ranch core, citing it as the best example of an 1800s west Marin dairy ranch. Pierce Ranch was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, and was subsequently opened to the public as an interpretive site.

The former "W" or Bear Valley Ranch was early on designated as the new National Seashore’s headquarters. Visitors to the Bear Valley Visitor Center pass through the former ranch core, adaptively reused for park administration and support services. The visitor center itself, which opened was constructed and opened in 1983, is a relatively new addition, designed to echo the surrounding agricultural landscape and local history. In 2018, 17 ranches on Point Reyes were included on the National Register as a historic landscape district.

Imagine what this windswept, fog-enshrouded landscape may have looked like almost 200 years ago, before the first cattle made their way here. Imagine Coast Miwok coexisting with tule elk, grizzly bear, mountain lion, whales, dolphins, countless birds, and their innumerable prey species. Then imagine the early beginnings of these formerly remote ranches as you drive by enroute to the lighthouse or the tule elk reserve. Perhaps you can imagine in 1916, Pierce Ranch school teacher Helen Smith walking into the creamery to scoop a small cup of cream from the cooling pans to pour over her breakfast pancakes. Her experience is a far cry from our contemporary neatly wrapped packages of butter and milk purchased at the local supermarket. If, on your way home from Point Reyes, you should stop to treat yourself with ice cream, don’t be surprised if several days ago it started as grass and a cow you just passed.

For more information, refer to Ranching on the Point Reyes Peninsula: A History of the Dairy and Beef Ranches within Point Reyes National Seashore, 1834–1992. By D. S. (Dewey) Livingston, National Park Service, 1993, revised 1994. It is also available at reference desks of local libraries, museums, and university libraries. Tours of selected West Marin ranches are offered periodically by Marin Agricultural Land Trust.

Point Reyes Record: Then & Now

Check out our Point Reyes Record: Then & Now: Point Reyes Ranches photo gallery to compare historic photos with photos taken in 2019 from the same locations.

Historic Resource Studies

• Borges, R.A. and G. Chappell. 1986. "There Is No More Extensive Dairy in the Township" - The History and Architecture of the Upper Pierce Ranch. 1856–1986. By Richard A. Borges and Gordon Chappell. Point Reyes National Seashore. Marin County, California, USA. Available at https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/Reference/Profile/2202925 (accessed 16 October 2022).
• Livingston, D.S. 1993. Ranching on the Point Reyes Peninsula - A History of the Dairy and Beef Ranches within Point Reyes National Seashore, 1834-1992. Point Reyes National Seashore. Marin County, California, USA. Available at https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/Reference/Profile/2202921 (accessed 16 October 2022).
• Livingston, D.S. 1995. A Good Life: Dairy Farming in the Olema Valley - A History of the Dairy and Beef Ranches of the Olema Valley and Lagunitas Canyon. Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore. Marin County, California, USA. Available at https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/Reference/Profile/2175701 (accessed 16 October 2022).

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