Atchley Collection

My wife, Judith, and I own a five-acre vineyard near the summit of Spring Mountain road. When we purchased the 20-acre property in 1968 we were the only residents in the immediate area and wineries were just beginning their comeback in the Napa Valley.

Even though our property was the home grounds for a functioning farm and winery until the onset of Prohibition, there was almost no remnants of that period. The place had been stripped clean. Of all the rolling stock and winery equipment that was once here only a wagon tongue remained, along with a broken cast-iron cauldron for dipping prunes.

The old Napa County Assessor's Maps still hanging on the wall in the county courthouse show that the Theodore Moding family owned ours and a much larger parcel which now includes the Ritchie Creek, Sherwin, Smith-Madrone, 7 & 8, Behrens & Hitchcock, Barnett, and Crowley properties.

The original U.C. Agricultural Library was still located at Berkeley in the late 60s, and I found a book there that included a census of vineyards and wineries in the state that was commissioned to assess Phylloxera damage. On the Spring Mountain page, Moding winery was listed as producing 10,000 gallons of wine annually. I haven’t found any reference to them retailing wine, but it was common then for small producers to sell bulk wine to bottlers and resellers such as Grossinger's, now Vintage 1870, in Yountville.

The word also had it that the Modings later lived in San Francisco, owned a slaughterhouse, and were convicted of selling meat from hogs that had died of cholera. The barn and winery buildings are of 1880’s vintage. There was a house here in what is now our garden that burned around the turn of the last century, and after that whoever lived here did so in an apartment in the barn (carriage house). We cut a door through an interior wall in that apartment and found newspapers from 1894 inside.

The cave was also apparently built by Chinese laborers the 1880s. An 1891 date is scratched in a rock in the entrance. The Chinese were driven from the valley by the "yellow peril" hysteria in the late 1880s.

The Greenfield's bought the Moding property in 1938 for $8000. We bought our 20 acres in 1968 from a group of architects from Marin who had purchased the entire Greenfield property. The Drosihn group had drawn up elaborate plans to develop the original property, with home sites surrounding the Sherwin lake, our barn as a stable, and the winery building as a community center.

Fortunately, they ran out of money, and ended up dividing it into 20 acres or larger parcels and peddling it. Napa County instituted a 20 acre minimum parcel size sometime in the early sixties, which was later upgraded to 40 acres, and now 160. Sidney Drosihn, the wife of the lead partner of the architectural group, received the Barnett 40 acres as part of a divorce settlement a few years later. A former sorority girl from Texas, she became part of the back to the earth movement in the seventies and lived there with her five children in a series of small dwellings using water pumped from the creek below Sherwin's. A parade of would-be hippies lived with her, and somewhere in the world is a woman in her 30s who was born in a teepee in the middle of what is now our neighbor’s, Joan Crowley, vineyard.

The road through our front yard and down to Smith-Madrone once ran all the way to the valley floor. An old fellow once stopped in and told me he worked on it during the 30s as part of a WPA project. I rode a motorcycle all the way down it in 1969, but it is now blocked with a reservoir, among other things.

John Gantner of Schoolhouse Vineyard was a friend of the Greenfields, having played here as a child in the 40s with Glyde Greenfield, daughter of Charlie and Mary. They were later divorced and Charlie married Ada, a union which produced several children. John Gantner's family helped Charlie set up a law practice in Santa Rosa. He later ran for State Senate in Sonoma County, and one night after a campaign rally ran off the road and crashed into the creek off St. Helena road. He sustained brain damage and became unstable, spending his last years in a VA hospital and dying after we moved here.

Ed Wilkins mentioned that after his accident Charlie sometimes threatened to "burn down the mountain", and once went deer hunting on the property with a fine rifle which he came home without. His friends and family searched fruitlessly. Charlie was responsible for converting the winery building into a summer house after he returned from WWII. The Greenfields had the basic part of the house we now live in built in 1955.

The Drosihns rented this house to a succession of hippies in the 60s, and it became the scene of the Great Napa County Pot Bust of 1967. A fire inspector had just been to "how to recognize marijuana" class, and found some in the garden. A half-dozen sheriff's deputies pulled a raid. There were a dozen or so residents enjoying an idyllic life here, living in the house, barn, or winery. There was a potter, and also a weaver who often dyed wool and hung it on oak limbs to dry. The deputies couldn't figure out what these multi-colored strands hanging in the trees were, thinking they also might be some kind of drug. One of the residents was a professional astrologer who lived in the barn apartment after we became the owners, and recounted the raid. (I have a transcript of the court trial.) She told us to tell our children not to eat any strange pills they might find stashed under rocks…

The previous owner of Julie Aves property came by for a social call after we moved in. He was a friend of Ada Greenfield, who was living alone here after her husband was hospitalized, and recalled an afternoon when he got an uneasy feeling that Ada was in trouble, so drove over to see if she was OK. He found her in the winery where she had pinned down a large rattlesnake, and couldn't let go without it attacking her. Do Adventists have ESP?

Another nearby property was owned by a family whose Vietnam war veteran son built some shacks and lived there for years. He smoked a lot of marijuana, and occasionally shot a burst from his AR-16 to make himself feel better. He was busted for growing or selling marijuana a time or two, and served at least a year as a guest of the taxpayers.

Ed and Mona Wilkins were the closest neighbors to us physically when we moved in, and we saw them occasionally. Mona’s family had owned the property which included some walnut orchards. Ed was always bitching that city folk were coming up the roads to these properties and getting stuck. He would drive his Cat D2 over and charge $25 to pull 'em out. He was also a practitioner (as am I) of the pint of gasoline down a yellowjacket hole followed by a sealing shovelful of dirt extermination method. On one occasion a nest had a back door and the angry residents caught him from behind - he spent several days in bed recovering.

Jack Robinson was a helpful local - the day we moved in he came over with a five gallon jug of water saying "you'll need it", since he knew how little our shallow well produced in the summer. He said I could use water from his pumphouse whenever we needed it, and I often stopped to fill up a jug. Jack's wife Pearl had emphysema from a lifetime of smoking Camels. She even smoked while in an oxygen tent - I fully expected to drive by one day and see the roof blown off their house. (Now owned by Charles Howard.)

We joined the Farm Bureau when we moved here - there were no other young family members at that time. At one of the potluck dinners I talked to a person who remembered going to a barn dance held in the loft of our barn in the 40's. The only access to the loft was a skinny ladder nailed to the wall, and a rather rotund lady got so juiced that she had to be lowered down with block and tackle. Another older woman who grew up on a farm in the valley mentioned she commuted to school in Calistoga on the electric train, but didn't want to talk about it because it revealed how old she was..

Keenan bought his property from Art Martin, who moved here shortly before we did. He bought the Conradi property at a court estate sale, outbidding Herb McGrew who had sold out in New York and expected to purchase it. Art had made a pot of money in the stock market and planned to plant grapes and reopen the winery. His efforts were not focused well; he didn't clear and plant right away, and eventually ran out of cash. An older St. Helena resident, Charlie Volpe, told Art that he long ago went to dinner at the Conradi's in the middle of winter and enjoyed a tasty polenta with a meat sauce dish. It had snowed, and as he was leaving he noticed a couple of skinned cat carcasses lying in a snowbank. He realized he had just had pussy-cat polenta for dinner.