Bradley
Trying to track down what your ancestors were doing a hundred years ago is no easy task. We learned from long lost family member Renea Covill that John Hames built a house in Bradley, California, which still stands. Its located at the intersection of Highway 101 and the southern entrance into Mission San Antonio de Padua.
Here John bought about 10,000 acres and took up sheep ranching. Eventually the land was bought by the Porter-Sesnon family, as they had also done with his land in Soquel.
My sister, Janis, and I visited the house John built. One of the local historians in the town of Bradley, a woman in her 80s who we talked to indirectly with through a phone conversation, knew the house was old, but didn't know that John Hames built it. When we visited in the winter of 2002, the Porter family still owned it, and allowed their ranch caretakers to live in it. The ranch caretakers were kind and gracious enough to let us come in and have a look at it.
We were also directed to a small family cemetery on the ranch, where we went looking for headstones, but couldn't find any with the name Hames on it.
Anyhow, here are a few photos of the house John Hames built in Hames Valley, near Bradley, California, and the ranch now owned by the Porter-Sesnons.
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The pink farm house to the left is the one John Hames built in the 1880s. Highway 101 runs behind it. |
Janis (McCubbin) Schneider, sitting next to the hearth in John Hames' house. December, 2002. The home was occupied by ranch caretakers. |
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Janis and I spent some time looking through the headstones in the private cemetery. We never found uncle John. We think he's buried at Peachtree, in Monterey County. |