Tag Archives: farming

Cottle’s Cobble Stone

P1310192The Cottles were long time residents of Evergreen who lived in Silver Creek, creek adjacent along Dove Hill.  You can see them here, O. B. Cottle, directly on Silver Creek Road on the left side of this map.   Trusted historian, long time resident and valued Community member, Colleen Cortese, told me that I’d like pieces of Orval Cottle’s Cobble Stone fences along Silver Creek Road.  Try to say that 5 times past.  Cottles Cobble Stone, Cottles Cobble Stone…. I followed that lead and looked where she told me.

CAM11541In fact, I followed that path specifically along Silver Creek, the creek, that continues once the road ends.  This is a lovely little hike to commune with nature in a hurry.  I had my computer packed with historic maps with me, trying to feel my way across the land and features.  The Cottles lived around here somewhere.  This beginning to the path would’ve been the first place the road and creek crossed. Where this meets Yerba Buena Road in another crossing of the creek as Silver Creek Road once led up the hillside.   But… following the road didn’t do much for my hypothesis.

CAM11535Along my hike to the West of the trail, I found two giant stones out in the open that I could align visually to be fence, but no visible guts of a stone wall like I’d suspect.  I personally had zero desire to find out if there were rattle snakes certainly sunning on this gorgeous summer day.  This path was old Silver Creek Road that connected to San Felipe Road some time ago, so it could’ve been the most Southern point of the Cottle Ranch.

CAM11549CAM11556I veered for a hike up to the base of the electrical towers here, which appears to be a dog friendly path into Silver Creek.  Well, I found more giant stones like before, but there at the edge of the plateau was a great cobble stone barrier left in tact.  At the high elevation, I could see it all over the place.  I knew I had found it.

CAM11562I found my way back to my car and saw a pile of the same stones at the base of the pond there, across from Silver Creek Linear Park, as I was leaving.  I’ve been driving past here looking for Cottle’s Cobble stone a couple times and haven’t found it.  That’s what this was the whole time.  Not a decorative element by the home development company, but a genuine element.  Rusted barbed wire along the path would’ve been the genuine article too.  So I had to turn left off of Silver Creek Road and see if I could find anymore more of the cobble stone.


CAM11566CAM11564Jackpot.  In fact, totally cobble stone wall formations left behind in construction.  It’s apparent all over the place.  It was probably expensive to remove but considered quite charming.  This area, I suspect, was repurposed for the roadway here to the right.  This cobble stone barrier is relic of a forgotten time.  It’s beauty, however, never overlooked.

5985404833_eb2e904b36_bThe Cottles were married in Wisconsin in 1842 and came West to Nevada County in 1850, where he entered the mining boom.  Mr. Cottle did a little bouncing around as a kid.  In 1854, the couple relocated the family to Evergreen.  Orval had a hard time buying his property in Evergreen, Silver Creek adjacent specifically, and rumored to have paid for the same land 3 different times.

Thought the map above states 254 acres on Silver Creek Road, a contemporary 1860’s source describes the Cottle Estate as “Located seven miles south-east of San Jose, where the valley floor gives wasy to the low foothills of the Mt. Hamilton Range, was the Cottle Farm of some 320 acres.The little stream known as Silver Creek meandered through the Cottle acres at the foot of the hills and then some distance southward left the foothil area and ran through the valley lands.The home buildings of the Cottle Farm were located on the edge of the valley floor, as it broke into the wider expanse downward some ten or fifteen feet to the shallow bank of the creek.”

CAM11534Children playing with their neighbors and cousins, rolling rocks down the hill would knock out a portion of the stone wall.  That could be the reason these rocks have no noticeable debris between the giant rocks.  It’s actually something I thought about looking at the landscape.  The Cottles’ only daughter would end up marrying the neighbor boy, Frank McCray, who was present in the rocking and rolling that broke the cobble stone wall.

6254418671_24064aa570The Cottle Family cultivated orchards, vineyards, cattle, chicken and various other harvests.  They would have taken full advantage of Silver Creek running through their yard, using the natural irrigation and spring nearby.  It’s why the area is so grassy.  It was cleared for farming over a hundred years ago.  This is Mr. and Mrs. Cottle on their 50th wedding anniversary.  They were very well liked and their grandkids were born in Evergreen as well.

 

The Man with a Hoe

Charles Edward Anson P1310885Markham (1852-1940) is characterized as a minor American poet.  Since he has Evergreen roots, we’ll designate him a major Evergreen poet.  Edwin Markham was a teacher at the Evergreen Schoolhouse from 1869-1889.  During those twenty years, he would write from the East Foothills and inspire and educate students from the Chaboya family, Kettmann family, Smith Family, certainly one day principal and superintendent, Katie R. Smith, Aborn Family , Chew Family and others.  He was so cherished by the community, a redwood tree would be planted in his honor.
markhamThough not published until 1899, ten years after Edwin Markham left the employment of the Evergreen School, I like to speculate about his inspirations.  The Oregon native wrote poetry about the working class life in the late 1800’s.  He would’ve worked on the family farm as a child, like most children at the time, in the north bay area.  He would finish his teaching credential at San Jose State, then known as the Normal School, and fall in love with Evergreen.  From 1921-1931, Edwin Markham would be Poet Laureate of Oregon.
manhoe1Edwin Markham incites emotion through his metaphors and that familiar sense of earning.  It is often said that Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe” was inspired by Jean-Francios Millet’s painting of the same subject, shown here to the left.  That may have been a contemporary pop culture influence, however, Markham would get to see this activity quite regularly during his twenty year teaching stint in the town of Evergreen.
P1320557I have specific details about the farm adjacent to the schoolhouse using hoes, pitchforks and sickles, archaic equipment the immigrant family would’ve used in the old country.  The farmers in Evergreen during this time would have front row seats to the Industrial Revolution and watch their equipment mechanize before their own eyes.  Poorer farmers would have to work by hand until Evergreen’s labor force combined and circulated large rigs to harvest everyone’s fields.
Markham’s poetry would very much parallel the hardworking farmer’s plight during this time in history.  Evergreen was farm country, first appearing in the Altas in 1867.  Markham would move into Evergreen in 1869, as one time squatters became legal land owners and brand new farms were being raised all over town.  It would be harder to imagine Markham’s work not being inspired by his time in the little farming town 8 miles outside the City.
Here’s Markham’s poem.  If you enjoy this, read on.  His poetry is quite lovely.

The Man with the Hoe

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans 
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, 
The emptiness of ages in his face, 
And on his back the burden of the world. 
Who made him dead to rapture and despair, 
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes. 
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? 
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? 
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? 
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? 
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave 
To have dominion over sea and land; 
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power; 
To feel the passion of Eternity? 
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns 
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep? 
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf 
There is no shape more terrible than this — 
More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed — 
More filled with signs and portents for the soul — 
More fraught with menace to the universe. 
What gulfs between him and the seraphim! 
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him 
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? 
What the long reaches of the peaks of song, 
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? 
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; 
Time’s tragedy is in the aching stoop; 
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, 
Plundered, profaned, and disinherited, 
Cries protest to the Powers that made the world. 
A protest that is also a prophecy. 
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, 
Is this the handiwork you give to God, 
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched? 
How will you ever straighten up this shape; 
Touch it again with immortality; 
Give back the upward looking and the light; 
Rebuild in it the music and the dream, 
Make right the immemorial infamies, 
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes? 
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands 
How will the Future reckon with this Man? 
How answer his brute question in that hour 
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores? 
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings — 
With those who shaped him to the thing he is — 
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world. 
After the silence of the centuries?