upstream from the dairy. Rapp also had cottages built for his milkers. 169 



On September 1, 1925, Rapp traded the ranch for valuable shares in 

 Dunham, Carrigan, and Hayden Company, a wholesale hardware business in 

 San Francisco, to Colonel Jesse Langdon, manager of the business whose wife 

 was a member of the Dunham family. Langdon continued Rapp's work in the 

 certified dairy, and further improved the Holstein herd. Langdon's milkers 

 were paid $90 per month, about three times the rate on other dairies. John 

 Watson was laid off by Langdon and replaced by Dong Sing Tong, who "presided 

 over [the dairy] with a firm hand," according to a local newspaper. Watson 

 eventually became president of the State Board of Agriculture and a University 

 of California regent. 170 



Jack Mason wrote about Langdon, long considered to be a part of the 

 local color at Point Reyes: 



Like Rapp, the Colonel was a perfectionist .... A 

 contemporary remembers him as a tall, ramrod 

 straight man with a thin, craggy, humorless face, a 

 spit-and-polish disciplinarian who wore khaki and a 

 stiff-rimmed World War I-style Army hat even into 

 the milking barn. Bill Christensen recalls "going over 

 to ask for work and the colonel looking me up and 

 down like a recruit standing inspection." 1 



Langdon closed the small dairies at U, Y, and Z Ranches and stocked the 

 ocean range with beef cattle. By 1927, the Holstein herd had increased to 500 

 and had been accredited as tuberculosis-free, making it one of the state's largest 

 disease-free herds. In 1928, Langdon's Bear Valley Dairy shipped 700 gallons of 

 milk daily to San Francisco on the ranch truck. 172 



When the depression struck in 1929, Langdon reportedly lost most if not 

 all of his capital, and soon lost his dairy certification and hospital contracts as 



169 Mason, Historian, p. 95; Claribel Rapp Berckmeyer to Jack Mason, August 29, 1971, Jack 

 Mason Museum Collection; interviews with Joan Rapp Mayhew and Lauren Cheda. Boissevain 

 left photographs of Rapp's improvements at Bear Valley Ranch, now in the Jack Mason Museum 

 Collection. 



170 Mason, Historian, pp. 8-9. 

 m lbid.. p. 792. 



172 Marin Journal. November 10, 1927, p. 5; Marin Herald. "Marvelous Marin Edition," August, 

 1928, p. 3; interview with Jim Colli. 



301 



