Here is part of a letter I wrote a few years ago to a woman researching the old Dudley home at Union Mattole (presently the Fun Farm, just south of the Concrete Arch bridge near Squaw Creek). The house is one of the oldest in the Mattole Valley, and Kathy Dillon was writing an article about it for the Times-Standard. Maybe I will be able to scan the article when I am at the office, and put up its picture of the Dudley place here. But for now, just this letter and the beautiful photograph of Ida and Wesley Ernest (found in the stucco house at Upper Mattole, where they lived much of their married life) which prompted my posting it:
Ida and (Wesley) Ernest Roscoe, c. late 1930s. Unknown girl and cat. Photo courtesy Dave Sholes, who lived in the stucco house (behind Ida) for some years. Ida "built character" by caring for her tuberculosis-ridden mother, and assuming her staggering household duties, by the age of eleven.
Milton Rice Dudley and his wife Amanda lived in the house now owned by Mary and Larry Bacchetti. The Dudley brothers, James Newton Dudley, Milton Rice Dudley, Thomas, and William, came to California from Iowa (where they’d come from Illinois). They made it to Marysville in 1864 or 1865, and to Humboldt County by 1871. Milton Rice Dudley was married to Amanda Miner, whose sister, Lucinda, was married to his brother James Dudley. (The women’s brother, Henry Allen, was the grandfather of Allen, Buck, Ruth, Doris [Lindley] and Edith [Matthews] Miner, and their sister was Elizabeth Miner [Mrs. Lewis J.] Cummings.)
I don’t have as much on Milton (born December, 1841 in Illinois, and listed by occupation as a miller) as on his wife, Amanda. She was born in Wisconsin, November 16,1843, must have married at about the age of 19 (early 1863), and died at Mattole in 1905 of tuberculosis. She and Milton had 10 children, 4 who died at birth or in infancy. Here are the surviving six:
1. Ida Sophina Dudley, 1863 (Iowa) -1956, married Wesley Ernest Roscoe; this pair were the forebears of many of the Roscoes around the Valley in the 20th century and today.
2. William Allen, 1867-1913; never married.
3. Lena Elmina, born 1873, married a George L. Hill and had 2 children. (Not George R. Hill, who married Bertha Roscoe.)
4. Nettie, born 1875, married Ellis Hill and had 1 child.
5. Grace, born 1880, married Walter Lines, had 1 child.
6. Blanche, born 1882, married Robert Williams, had 2 children.
On an 1874 survey of the Mattole county road, Dudley’s stable is marked on the south side of the road near Bacchettis’, and a little further on to the east, Dudley’s mill is shown as a box on the south also, which would be on the banks on Squaw Creek. The house itself is not shown–it must have been just about to be built. However, T. Dudley (one of Milton’s brothers) is shown about a mile downstream.
According to Ken Roscoe in his book Heydays in Humboldt, “My maternal grandfather [Ken’s mother was Ida Sophina Dudley], Milton Rice Dudley, and his family had come to the Mattole Valley from Iowa in 1871 or 1872 to join his older brother, Jim Dudley, who had arrived in 1868 with the first and largest group of Marysville settlers. Jim had offered his younger brother a job as manager of his milling operation at the mouth of Upper Mill Creek southeast of Petrolia.
“Evidently my Great Uncle Jim was a bit of a bounder, and some said he spent a lot of time in Ferndale drinking and gambling away the profits Milton made on the lumber and flour the mills produced. Granddad didn’t like that too much, so he quit and moved up the river to Union Mattole where he built his own mills on Squaw Creek.
“My mother was the oldest of five sisters and a brother (four other children died at birth or in infancy). Her mother, Amanda Miner Dudley, had contracted tuberculosis, and Mom, being the oldest, did more and more of the housework and other chores as time went on…
“By the time Mom was eleven and in the seventh grade in 1874, her mother had become fully bedridden, and Mom had to quit school and assume full responsibility for the daytime care of her mother and the raising of her younger brother and sister. She prepared all the meals, including noontime dinners for the mill crew, and did all the washing and mending of clothes, even making the soap to wash the clothes and the dishes.
“Meanwhile, her mother Amanda continued having children. Nettie was born in 1875…” (Continues with list as above.)… “Amanda lived until 1905.”
“Grandfather Dudley’s sawmill and gristmill were near the mouth of Squaw Creek at Union Mattole [the old name for the area between and around Indian Creek and Squaw Creek, sometimes called New Jerusalem]. The sawmill was located on the south side of the creek and the gristmill on the north side. The mills were powered by water delivered from a lake behind a dam across the creek. The dam was about 25 feet high and backed water up Squaw Creek more than a mile. Until recently there was visible evidence of the location more than three quarters of a century after cessation of operation about 1911 or 1912.”
There is a page or two more on the construction and operation of the mills in Heydays in Humboldt. A little bit on Milton’s character: “Milton Dudley was of New England Yankee stock, and the family was originally from England. As some of these men did, Granddad had a genius for mechanics, as evidenced by the design of the dam and the mills, and could make about anything needed, including parts for my broken toys when I was a kid… Among his other skills, he was an excellent bee keeper, and I do not remember a bee ever stinging him…
“Grandfather Dudley was a man of strong convictions but did welcome a worthy challenge, particularly one that would give him an opportunity to quote the Bible to give force to his arguments. However, he also had a short fuse and would take immediate and forceful action if any man questioned his honesty…
“Granddad would sometimes mill other farmers’ oats, wheat, rye, or other grains for a share of the flour. He milled some grain for a neighbor, Fred Weinsdorfer, who then accused him of stealing some of the flour. Dudley responded by knocking Weinsdorfer down. Weinsdorfer filed a charge against him for assault and battery. On the day of the trial before the Justice of the Peace, Weinsdorfer did not apear, so the Justice dismissed the case.
“When questioned later as to the cause of his failure to appear, Weinsdorfer said, “My wife Clarissa, she not let me go. She say, ‘Fred, you not go. That red-faced Deadly, he will hit you again.’ ”
(Just threw that one in for a little bit of color from the period… Ken’s making fun of Fred Weinsdorfer’s Bavarian accent there.)
William W. Roscoe, a brother-in-law of Ida Sophina Dudley Roscoe, writes in his 1940 History of the Mattole Valley, “For a year or two [James N.] Dudley operated the sawmill [on east Mill Creek] in partnership with his younger brother, Milton R. Dudley. The latter soon decided to establish a saw and grist mill business of his own, free from partnership, so he settled on a timber claim on Squaw Creek, seven miles east of Petrolia [this would have been about 1873 or ’74]. Here for about twenty-five years he very successfully operated a saw and grist mill business… Milton R. Dudley’s mill furnished the lumber for the building in Upper Mattole.
“Milton R. Dudley continued in the grist mill and sawmill business on Squaw Creek until about the year 1900. When the decline in wheat-raising in the valley compelled him to abandon the mill, he set up in the spring bee and honey business and followed this vocation until 1908 when he sold his property to Calvin Stewart, a Mendocino County [and Mattole Valley] tan bark operator. Milton R. Dudley then spent the remainder of his days in Eureka, where he died in the summer of 1922.”
James Dudley, the brother from whom Milton split when he established his own mills, was the one who drowned in the Mattole River while trying to secure a log boom (story recounted in Now… and Then, no. 32).
Ida, Ken’s mother, had a long, industrious life, and was much beloved. Both Ken Roscoe’s Heydays in Humboldt and his nephew Stanley (Neb) Roscoe’s Heydays in Mattole tell stories revealing her wit, wisdom, and warmth.
West of the Redwoods 