THE GOOD OLD "DAZE" by Vivian Coats Edmonston A talk given before the Contra Costa Historical Society in Danville Calif. 14 May, 1970 in the Danville Hotel. Good evening to you all. I was asked to tell something of the early days in the area where I was born which is on Camino Tassajara, on the place I have named Tassamore Acres, as the land lies in both the old Sycamore and Tassajara school districts. We mostly think of our immediate and direct line of ancestors as being responsible for our being, which is of course true but others can enter into the events that bring us to where we were born. It was my mother's step-father who ended up getting my grandmother and my mother to California. To go back a bit, this step-father was Levi Augustus Maxcy, born in North Attleborough, Massachusettes, where the Maxcy family had settled, after coming from Scotland in 1669. In 1849, the California gold fever had spread clear back to good old Boston and Levi with some seventy other men formed the Narragannsett Trading and Mining Company. They bought a sloop or barque, the "Velasco" and stocked it with two years provisions, trade goods and their personal possessions. They cleared from Boston 6th February, 1849 for San Francisco where they arrived 7th October, of the same year. On the way the company was dissolved and the ship was sold to a group of Chilean merchants, to be turned over to them in San Francisco. A load of lumber was taken aboard to be sold in San Francisco. When they reached the golden land of opportunity the ship was abandoned and all hands took off for the mines. We never did find out how the Chilean owners fared in the deal. So much for one way to get to California, by coming around Cape Horn. Others came across the plains or by boat to the Isthmus of Panama, crossed it and caught another ship to their destination. Now to bring in other characters to this story. We have my great grand- father, Wilson Coats and his son, Felix, my grandfather, who left Missouri in the Spring of 1849 and came by covered wagons drawn by oxen across the plains and mountains. One California County History stated, "After a pleasant three months fourney, Mr. Coats landed in California." It was pleasant, in that they were not massacred by Indians and they had to cross the Truckee River twenty seven times in twenty-two miles. Then they went over the Donner Pass by taking their wagons apart and let the pieces down over cliffs along with a few other minor difficulties of a sililar kind. Neither the Coatses nor Levi Maxcy made any fabulous fortunes in the gold mines so they went looking for land. They were not acquainted with each other in the gold country but ended up settling on adjoining places which they were able to buy. Each family married and reared families. Levi had two sons and Felix Coats had three sons and three daughters. Mr. Maxcy kept going back to the mines trying to make a strike. His wife, Sarah McInturff got tired of it all and took the two boys to San Jose and divorced him in 1876. In 1880, he rented the farm in Tassajara to tenants and went to Aurora, Illinois to visit his sister, Rebecca Maxcy Messenger. it was there that he met my grandmother, Rhoda Hyde Williams, a widow with a farm and a daughter, Fanny Williams. Levi and Rhoda were married there in Illinois in 1881 and in 1889 he brought his new family to the Maxcy farm which adjoins the Coats lands on Tassajara Road. And so it was that after a while, James Longstreet Coats, son of Felix, was married to Fanny Williams, 11 August, 1895 in San Francisco. I arrived on the scene, January 9, 1901 at the Maxcy house which had been built in 1890. As a folk singer has it in his song, "Four rooms and a Path", we had eight rooms and a path which led past the woodpile. On the way back to the house it was the custom to bring an arm-load of wood for the wood-box. The very first houses built in the area were rough lumber. The pioneers went to Redwood Canyon near Moraga and camped while they cut redwood trees and split them into lumber for fences and houses. These first homes were on the property when Mr. Maxcy and the Coats men bought their land. My great-grandfather, Wilson Coats, built a two-story house in 1854 at what is now the entrance to the old Maxcy property. That house burned about 1916, long after he had sold his land to his son, Felix, and moved to Fresno where his death occurred 3 January, 1886. Those very first settlers in the area were veterans of Indian Campaigns and had received land script for services rendered. So far as I know all of these sold out to the disillusioned gold seekers such as Coats and Maxcy. Each in turn built houses with big high ceilinged rooms. The reason for the high ceilings, I found in an old medical book. It said, in part, "...it is obvious that night air is dangerous to breathe because of miasmas. In order to have a supply of air to last the night through the rooms must be large, with high ceilings". Now that you know how I became an old-timer on Tassajara Road, I will share with you the fun of the good old days complete with flies, fleas and mud. It was not until we had Mecadam roads that we had any that were not nearly axle deep in mud in winter. Two horses hitched in tandem to a cart made it to Danville or so my grandfather said. In summer we wore tightly woven linen dusters and viels tied down to our hats. Then the mud had dried and the road was filled with ruts and dust. I rode the two and a half miles to Sycamore, a one-room grammar school. Miss Charlotte Wood taught all eight grades to sixteen or eighteen of us pupils. In those days we took county examination for promotions from one grade to the next. One examination date remains in my memory, the twelfth day of the twelfth month in the twelfth year. It would be another hundred years before that could be said again. In 1914, I started High School in the Odd-Fellows Building that was on the corner of old Front Street and what is now Diablo Road. Again I rode horseback and raced Howard and George Wood in their Chalmers automobile; and at least one time I won the race. My cousin, Undine Horton, also rode and again we raced the horses expecially in wet weather when the roadside ditches were full of water and we would splash each other with mud. We wore divided riding skirts and changed to dresses left at the school. We had our horses trained so that when it rained we put up umbrellas and held them in front of us looking through the cloth to see where we were going though the horses really knew the way. These apparitions scared more than one team on the road. When the muddy days were over the locust trees made the air sweet and the bees and birds created a spring song, then there were picnics to the sulphur springs in a Tassajara canyon at the end of Finley Road. There were old coal mine entrances to explore, trees to climb and games to play and plenty of good food. There were also church socials, grange and Odd Fellows dinners, family gatherings and just visiting around among the neighbors. There were the McPhersons, Elliotts, Zabels, Russells, Goulds, Eddys, Johnsons, Harris and Wood families as well as sone in Alamo, Danville and San Ramon. Who said that country life was isolated and lonely. Once a year or so a dressmaker would come and stay a few days or a week and then is when the rustle of taffeta was a child's delight, fittings a bore and many ouches from sticking pins. From Danville the Lawrence butcher wagon supplied us with meat once a week. After a session of dressmaking when I learned about cutting cloth on the bias I asked Joe Lawrence if he cut the bologna that way to keep it from raveling. Another memory is of my mother's picture taking. She had a box camera that took 3 1/2 x 3 1/2 sized pictures. Some times I got to stay up and watch the film developing. Printing was done in the sun in printing frames and you could see the reddish color of the picture come out and soon learned when it was exposed long enough. It was then quickly slipped between the pages of a book or magazine. The prints were put through a fixing solution and well washed then rolled on a ferrotype plate and allowed to dry. This gave the gloss to the paper. Some solio prints made by my mother from 1904 to 1910 are on display in the back of the room. A startling experience has remained vivid in my mind. My grandmother awakened me and I was led to the kitchen. The house was shaking and as I looked out the window I saw that the two story tank house was swaying from side to side and the water was sloshing out of the tank. Chickens were squawking, cattle bawling and the neighbors' dogs were howling. That was on April the 18th, 1906. In the pantry the pans of milk, set to let the cream rise were on the floor along with broken glasses and some broken dishes. That was the extent of the damage except that the square brick chimney on the roof cracked around evenly and made a half-turn so there were eight corners and only one brick was lost out of it. As the day wore on the western sky was red and then black with smoke from burning San Francisco. Before the electric train came to Danville and Diablo Country Club, we would make a three hour drive to Hayward, put the horse in the livery stable and took the street car to Oakland then the ferry boat to San Francisco. Another high light was when I was allowed to drive a double team of horses to Pleasanton alone. My father, James Coats, had asthma quite severely and found he could not live with hay dust and the weed pollens of ranch life. He became a gauger for the Western Distilleries of Agnew, near Santa Clara. He came home to the ranch at about two week intervals. He had to be met at Pleasanton on Saturday and taken back for the train on Sunday. This was about a two hour drive each way. We would stop at Santa Rita vegetable gardens for a sack of vegetables. By a sack I mean a grain sack of cabbage, beets, carrots, turnips, onions and lettuce. We had a home made cooler, a large square frame covered with screen and over that was sacking. This was hung on the porch in the shade. A large milk pan filled with water sat on top with wicks leading over the sides of the cooler. The evaporation kept things surprisingly cold and we never had soupy butter. We baked our own bread which was kept in large stone crocks. We had a wood burning range in the kitchen but in 1917, a three burner coal oil stove that was not quite so hot for our summer cooking. We had an old stove outside on the porch, used for canning peaches, pears, cherries, plums, apricots and apple sauce. The first world war rationing taught us new cooking skills. I'll never forget how indignant our hired man was at being served rice with gravy on it. Rice had always been for pudding, with raisins in it. We used three kinds of flour to make a cake; rice, oat and some wheat flour, Caro syrup and honey were used instead of sugar. Chicken raising was a hazardous venture. We had an incubator that took six dozen eggs. This was warmed by a coal oil lamp. The eggs had to be turned once or twice a day, all six dozen. The lamp had to be tended, filled, the wick trimmed. Once it got turned up too high and cooked all the eggs. Another batch was incubated and the baby chicks were transferred to a brooder which was a low box with fuzzy cotton flannel hanging down to substitute for the mama hen. Again, the brooder was warmed with a coal oil lamp. Sometimes it went out, the chicks huddled together for warmth and smothered. As they grew bigger, they were transferred to small roosting coops. A chicken raised without a mama hen has to be taught to roost. The first coop had slats close together so they did not fall through. A slanting board led up to the roosts and by scattering grain along this board the chickens were enticed into the coop. They soon got the idea and then went in by themselves. The coops were moved day by day closer to a big chicken house and one day they were let out into this and kept there a day or so. By that time they had thier flying wings and could make it up to the high roosts. We never allowed them to sleep in the trees. The weasels, skunks, coyotes and hawks left us enough to enjoy many a good fried chicken dinner. When your only transportation is by the use of horses, there is the care, feeding, watering, currying, brushing and cleaning the barns. My mother made horse blankets out of gunny sacks and by putting this horse night gown on the horses, they were kept cleaner so with a good brushing, they were sleek and shining. We had them shod at Groom's livery stable in Danville. In winter, cows and horses would get stuck in the mud of the adobe slides. Cows were pulled out by their horns and horses, by their tails. When I started to High School, it fell to me to do most of the errands and shopping. One of these errands was to get an occasional bottle of toddy mix for Grandpa Maxcy's morning hot lemonade. By riding up on the sidewalk, I could knock on the front door of a certain establishment and for only a dollar a full quart was slipped into my saddlebag. I cashed the monthly budget check of twenty-five dollars and jingled real gold coins in my pocket until the charge accounts were paid. The Good Old Days were not all hard nor bad. We were spared the joys of TV commercials and we were never conscious of all the things we were missing in personal charm. A good scrubbing in the wash-tub in front of the kitchen stove on Saturday night with yellow laundry soap made us smell clean, if not like a rose. We didn't worry about bussing to school, we rode or walked. We didn't know about smog and no one had gotten after us for dumping things in the creeks. Hard work let up for parties and dances which lasted till early morning. There was no sleeping in afterward either, as the chores of caring for the cows, horses, chickens and pigs had to be done wheither we had been up all night or not. For dances we drove to Tassajara, Danville, San Ramon and sometimes to the Railroad Ranch or Cook Ranch as the Diablo Country Club area was then called. Harness racing and barn dances were held there also. Now and then there was a horseback ride to the top of Mount Diablo. Before I ramble on too long, I had better stop regaling you with the good old days but they were just that, the time between the ox-team travel and the jet planes, when big hats, bustles and bloomers covered all that the minis now show. When horses and the early Fords took us where we wanted to go at a more leisurely pace and we didn't know that the moon just wasn't made of green cheese.