the hilltop ranch formerly occupied by Jewell. By 1870 Longley raised wheat, 

 oats, barley, hay and potatoes on sixty acres of land, no doubt including the 47- 

 acre parcel and other land rented from Daniel Olds. 92 



Longley lived in the two-story house in a protected cove on the ridge 

 sheltered by five eucalyptus trees in a line to the east of the house. The 

 ridgetop road from Samuel P. Taylor's paper mill to Bolinas passed by the 

 house. Travelers of this route reportedly used Longley's house as a watering 

 point. Longley was listed in the 1870 census as a farmer, with real estate 

 valued at $800 and personal property of $400. Longley's son Charles, born in 

 1852 in Michigan, worked on the farm. Upon Thomas Longley's death in July 

 of 1870, Charles took over the small ranch until selling it to Minerva Parsons 

 on October 6, 1888. Charles Longley then operated a dairy a number of miles 

 up Bolinas Ridge for a few years before settling in Inverness where he was a 

 founding member of the school board there. Charles Longley died in 1944. 



According to a number of sources, the Longley house on the ridgetop was 

 moved down to the Parsons Ranch soon after the 1888 sale, where it has stood 

 since. An existing one-story board and batten house was connected to the two- 

 story house, producing a home of comfortable size. On the ridgetop, only the 

 trees planted by Olds or Longley, known to locals as the Five Sisters, remain. 93 



Charles Parsons bought 86 acres of land in Santa Cruz near his brother- 

 in-law's dairy in 1879, but then decided not to move there. In 1881 he and his 

 wife moved to Petaluma and continued leasing out their dairy ranch. John 

 Fuller and Christopher Blasdell rented the dairy in 1880, while William Dunn 

 rented the Parsons home on the county road. Parsons' widow tried 

 unsuccessfully to sell the ranch in 1895. Near the end of 1890, Olema Valley 

 pioneer Daniel Olds, Jr. and his daughter Annie Baily rented the Parsons home, 

 where Olds had lived when he first came to the valley in 1856. The newspaper 

 noted the next year that "Olema ranch life agrees with him." Olds died in 1896. 

 Angelo Pedranti, a Swiss dairyman who had previously worked on a Bolinas 

 dairy and then the Bloom Ranch north of Parsons, rented the Parsons dairy 



92 Deeds Book I, p. 195, MCRO; Guinn, Coast Counties, p. 984; Population and Agriculture 

 Schedules, 8th and 9th U. S. Censuses, 1860 and 1870. 



93 Population and Agriculture Schedules, 9th U. S. Census, 1870; Marin County Journal. July 

 23, 1870; Marin Journal. October 11, 1888; interviews with Earl Lupton, Boyd Stewart and 

 Dorothy Meloney, granddaughter of Charles Longley. 



199 



