Seeing ghosts

Monticello lives on in spirit 50 years after being sent to a watery grave

It’s not your ordinary ghost town. There are no boarded-up saloons, no termite-infested hitching posts. There are no Gray Line tours through cemeteries marked by tilting gravestones from the 1800s hiding in the weeds. It is, instead, a ghost town in the real sense of the word. It lives on only in the memories of those who once lived there, in the few artifacts at the Vacaville Museum, and in the black-and-white photographs taken by two of the most important documentary photographers of the 20^th century, Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones. It was called Monticello.

What has replaced it is equally ghostly—a lake that looks eerily misplaced along the adjacent mountain slopes, an underwater bridge that crosses over remnants of Indian villages from thousands of years past, and, in the 1.6 million acre-feet of water, the Morning Glory spillway, a vortex like a huge bathtub drain, powerful enough to carry any boat to Hades. This is Lake Berryessa, formed by the control of water through the Monticello Dam, which spans the gorge at Devil’s Gate, the junction of Napa, Solano and Yolo counties.

That a dam would eventually be built here was inevitable. No place could have been ore perfect than this stream-fed canyon, with its steep rocky shoulders and narrow gorge opening. According to scientists at UC Davis, these features resulted from volcanic and metamorphic upheaval. Perhaps the same earthquake that Indians say opened the Golden Gate also created Devil’s Gate—described as “a narrow notch in the upturned strata of Blue Ridge, layered of Venado formation marine sandstone from the Cretaceous period, originally laid down in the Pacific Ocean far from shore.” (bioregion.ucdavis.edu) In non-technical terms, Devil’s Gate was perfect for damming the water of Putah Creek.

 And California needed water.

 The name game

Before Julius Caesar knew of Gaul, before Moses was found in the bulrushes, before Tutankhamen was buried with his treasures, even before the great flood that caused Noah, Shuruppak and other visionaries to build their arks, hundred of years before all those, Miwok and Patwin Indian tribes inhabited the Berryessa Valley. They lived for millennia—some scientists say 11,000 years—before smallpox hit the Bay Area in 1837, killing most of their population. Those who survived were driven into the hills when various pioneer ranchers moved in. In 1942, Gen. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo granted two brothers named Berryessa permission to occupy the area known as Rancho de las Putas.

Some say the name of this ranch derived from the putas, or suckerfish, in the creek. A report from the Vacaville Reporter claims that the name comes from the Patwin tribe. “In mission records of 1824, the natives are mentioned with various spellings from Putto to Puttato,” says the report, Echoes of Solano’s Past. “The name of the Patwin Indian village is assumed to have been Putato, the name containing the Patwin word for East, ‘Pu.’” Sources from UC Davis credit the name of las putas to the Miwoks from puta wuwwe, meaning grassy creek. But some say Rancho de las Putas received its name by well-deserved reputation. In the years after 1860, when the last of Rancho de las Putas was deeded over to pay off gambling debts, legend attributed the name to the scandalous behavior of the Berryessa brothers, for the Spanish word puta translates to whore or prostitute.

Later, one Stephen Powers added yet another version to the mix when he wrote, in 1877, that the name Puta derived from the Spaniards’ word for the Patwin—putas, “on account of their gross licentiousness.” However, the Indian derivation seems most likely, since all land grants, including the original 1843 grant-in-fee to the Berryessas, refer to the land as “Rancho de las Putas”. Whatever its etymology, the land eventually became known as Berryessa Valley.

 In the beginning is the end

 In 1867, the same year the California legislature passed the Reclamation District Act authorizing the formation of local water districts, the town of Monticello came into existence. Situated between the town of Napa and the silver mines of Knoxville, Monticello became a stopping point for the daily stagecoach after the Monticello Bridge was built across Putah Ceek in 1896. This stone masonry bridge, with three 70-foot arched spans, was said to be the largest of its kind in the West.

The year after the bridge was built, George Chapman Gosling was born. Almost 90 years later, he described the Monticello of his childhood in a letter to the Vacaville Museum. “Life in Berryessa Valley was unique because of its isolation from the outside, 27 miles over rough steep mountain roads,” he explained. “Nearly everything one needed was there in the valley. You lived more or less in a world of your own. The daily stage to Napa was the main connection with the outside.”

A big challenge for local farmers was getting their crops—mainly wheat—to market, which they did by mule teams to Napa. Gosling noted that although farms produced plenty of cream and eggs, “if you wanted ice cream, which we did, you had to get 100 pounds of ice from Napa on the stage.” The cost? Only 1 cent for the ice. To get the ice, however, was double the price—2 cents to haul it from Napa to Monticello.

All the while this idyllic lifestyle was attracting more residents to Monticello, outsiders were eying the valley for their own needs. In 1907, three engineers hired by cities south of San Francisco—including the famous William Mulholland of Owens Valley Aqueduct fame—suggested a dam at Devil’s Gorge. The idea was shelved, as were subsequent proposals, but the demand for water was increasing. Spearheaded by William Pierce of Suisun Valley, who had been pushing for the idea of a dam for water to irrigate Solano County since 1916, the board of supervisors formed the Solano Water Council in 1939—the same year the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers proposed to dam Putah Creek at Devil’s Gorge and create a reservoir in the Berryessa Valley in an engineering feat named the Solano Project.

That year, too, Jessie Bosworth Carlton became the teacher for the Oak Grove School in Berryessa Valley. Years late, in an unpublished memoir, she described her journey along the Napa road that would lead to her new job and the town that would be her home for the next year. “Berryessa Valley was 10 miles long with the little farming community of Monticello lining around two miles of the road. It consisted of a store that housed the post office, its curbside gas pump, a few homes scattered about, and a two-or three-room school. I found the valley hot with fields of brown stubble after the wheat harvest, contrasting sharply with the lush green I had seen in June.”

Eventually, the contrast would grow even greater. It took nine years for the Department of the Interior to approve the Solano Project, but in 1948, Monticello’s fate was sealed.

The last year

The controversy surrounding the Monticello Dam accelerated after its approval. Valley farmers wanted no part of a project that would flood their orchards and fields. Napa and Yolo counties wanted no part of a project that would benefit only Solano. And Solano cities wanted no part of the cost, or even of the water, deeming it too expensive. But the postwar population explosion—the “baby boom”—and renewed prosperity created increased demands for food, jobs, housing and water. “Every month 30,000 people are coming to California,” said then-Gov. Earl Warren. “And not one of them brings a gallon of water.” With that, groundbreaking for construction of Monticello Dam commenced on Sept. 25, 1953.

To protect its $38-million project, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation ordered that every moveable object in the bowl of the reservoir that could possibly damage the dam or interfere with operations be relocated or destroyed. “Normally, you remove anything that can cause constrictions of a back-up of mud, anything that can get in the way of managing the water,” says Jeff McCracken, public affairs chief of the bureau’s mid-Pacific region, explaining the order to destroy Monticello. “People who build reservoirs want it as restriction-free as possible.”

In 1956, the fames photo-news magazine Life commissioned Pirkle Jones and the late Dorothea Lange, two of the best photographers in the nation, to document the last year of Monticello as the town prepared for its demise. “These photos were not for [the townsfolk],” says Jones, who lives in Mill Valley. “This was purely an art form. Fifty years later it’s become very important as a record of the times. [Then] I had no comprehension of the importance of this set of film.” But the few remaining residents of Monticelli—about 125 in that last yea—appreciated what the photographers were doing. “We worked there many times during 1956, and the people became very used to us photographing,” he says. Part of the photographer’s success could be attributed to Lange’s unobtrusiveness, he adds. “She didn’t come in brandishing her camera like a gun. (Rights to the photos reverted to the photographers when the magazine chose not to publish them, and they were subsequently collected into a book called Death of a Valley.)

Although he was young at the time, Jones, who was Ansel Adams’ student and assistant, became Lange’s collaborator because Adams was unavailable. “It was a privilege,” he says. Jones’ photos were eventually collected into a 1994 Vacaville Museum exhibit and companion catalogue titled Berryessa Valley: The Last Year. In the first photo, the sunlit town of Monticello is seen nestling between Cedar Roughs and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dark clouds cast shadows on all but the town, evoking an ominous foreboding. Subsequent pictures show that the two photographers filmed everything from the first accounting to the last round-up.

Jones even photographed the graveyard, abounding in summer with California poppies. But everything that could come loose and float toward the dam had to go. So day laborers were hired from San Francisco to dig up the graves of Monticello’s ancestry and remove caskets, coffins and headstones to Spanish Flat. “After they were gone one day,” Jones says, “I climbed a water tower and looked down on the graves.” From his perch, Jones caught the empty burial sites on film in an eerie photo of rectangles so black they seem to stretch into the next world.

By the end of harvest season, every piece of Monticello larger than 2 inches wide and 5 feet tall has been removed or burned to make way for the oncoming water. Everything except the stone masonry of Monticello Bridge, which still crosses Putah Creek at the bottom of Lake Berryessa. During the winter drought of 1990, the lake receded and the bridge rose like the Lady of the Lake to remind visitors of the lost town of Monticello.

Now, 50 years after water first backed up in the reservoir, all that remains of the town in the fecund valley of Rancho de las Putas is the submerged bridge, the famous photographs by Lange and Jones and the ghosts that haunt the memories of the living. “I’m still afraid of water,” Phyllis Yates Wilson told researchers from the Vacaville Museum in 1994. “I grew up thinking that they could flood the valley overnight. No one told me what would happen …

“When I was a tiny girl, I would sit in the corner listening for the water to come.”

 And once in a blue moon, it does—rising to spill into the Glory Hole when a gurgling like ghosts echoes through the hills.

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