Reading about Church Creek Ranch history
at the Ventana Wild
site the other day came upon this bit of fire history and added it to the Tassajara Fire History page :
In June of 1902 The Caves ranch house was
destroyed by fire. The following report about the particulars of the event is
from Eleanor Chew's "Jamesburg Gleanings" column in the June 19th edition of
the Salinas Weekly
Index:
The home of Andrew
Church at the Caves was totally destroyed by fire last Thursday morning about
four o'clock. Mr. Church arose early, built a fire in the kitchen stove and
without awakening the other inmate of the house, went to the dairy to skim milk;
in a few minutes he observed smoke and rushed to the house calling to his family
to get up; the flames spread so rapidly that they could not dress themselves but
were obliged to run out in their night clothes to save themselves. It was
impossible to save anything from the burning building and their entire supply of
provisions, clothing and household goods was destroyed. There was no insurance.
Mrs. Church, who has a young babe only two weeks old, was compelled to ride on
horseback to the home of her brother Frank Bruce. The fire is supposed to have
caught from the stove-pipe.
In the
same edition of the Index there
was another account of the fire, which differed in some of the particulars of
the event. According to this report (which was in error its statement that the
ranch was located in Miller Canyon):
Church had retired
early and was awakened about midnight by the smell of smoke. He arose and
discovered that the whole upper portion of the residence was aflame and that the
fire was spreading rapidly. He called his wife and children, who rushed forth,
clad only in their night garments, just in time to prevent being cremated. The
fire fortunately spread no further. It is supposed the cause of the
conflagration was a defective flue. The loss will be about $1200, on which there
was no insurance.
In any case, the
Church family lived in a tent while the house was being rebuilt (Chew v/d). In
the following year (1903) the Church homestead was again threatened with
destruction, this time by a forest fire. According to Sterling (1904), the fire
started in July in the vicinity of Chew's Ridge and burned for three months,
consuming an area about a township (6 miles) wide that extended about 15 to 16
miles to the coast, where it widened out. There may have been more than one
fire, for on July 21st Eleanor Chew reported that "a fire has been raging on the
Carmel for some time past and the air is filled with smoke…," while on September
22nd she reported that "the mountain fire which has given the people of this
vicinity so much trouble for the past month has again broke out... The coast
fire has also come over the divide and crossed the Carmel river and threatens
Andrew Church's place with destruction."
There's some good early Tassajara history also at the Ventana Wild site.
