After Henry Strain's death his widow deeded the residence portion of the 

 ranch in 1901 to her surviving children as a gift. All of the heirs except Ella 

 had moved off the ranch by that time: with their father's help Will and 

 Winfield had leased the Kellogg dairy ranch near Crescent City, to be joined 

 around 1890 by Everett; in 1883 Etta had married Matthias Pedrotti, a San 

 Rafael dairyman who became a prominent banker in that city; Lillian married 

 and lived in Bolinas; and Annie obtained an education and worked at a bank in 

 San Rafael. 37 



Everett Strain returned to the Bolinas ranch around 1901 and married 

 Mary McCurdy, a daughter of Samuel McCurdy from the ranch across the road. 

 The couple raised three boys in the house, Harold, Everett Jr. and Gordon. 

 Strain's mother and sister lived upstairs in the house. Everett took over the 

 dairy business, milking about 40 Jersey cows with the help of a hired hand. 

 The Strain dairy produced butter during these years, milking by hand and 

 making cream and butter with a separator and churn powered by water 

 pressure. 



After milking, the cans of fresh milk would be hand carried across the 

 foot bridge and poured into a hopper in the side of the creamery. The three- 

 room creamery was located at the site of the later Grade A milking barn, and 

 was apparently the original Strain home. A smaller adjacent building, also of 

 three rooms, housed the hired hand and had a storage room for grain. The 

 family sold much of the butter in San Rafael; Mary Strain took the butter boxes 

 to the head of Bolinas Lagoon where she met the Bolinas-to-San Rafael stage, 

 by 1911 a modified Stanley Steamer. The Strains raised hogs as well, feeding 

 them grains mixed with skim milk, and selling them at the Bolinas wharf. 

 Everett Strain also cleared land and planted extensive crops on the 

 ranch, including peas on the western side hill, and corn, potatoes, vegetables, 

 and hay in the bottom land. He planted an orchard south of the horse barn to 

 supplement his father's original orchard on the hillside west of the house. 

 Strain developed a water source upstream on Pine Gulch Creek (or a tributary) 



bricks for the foundation of the new house. 



37 A great deal of information about the Strain family originates from an interview in November 

 1994 with Gordon Strain, as well as notes taken from a family videotape interview with Mr. Strain 

 made in 1986 and notes provided by Mr. Strain to PRNS in 1976; a biography of Matthias Pedrotti 

 is found in Ira B. Cross, Financing an Empire: History of Banking in California (Chicago: The S. J. 

 Clarke Publishing Co., 1927), pp. 486-487. 



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