The Beginning, The Very Beginning
To tell our story, I must start at the beginning, the very beginning. This tale begins with a young school girl in the late 1800’s, when she planted a small home garden of violets to pay the ferry fees to attend school in the city. Annie Gooch Darbee was from a pre-Gold Rush Bay Area family that had a farm in San Leandro, CA where they fished oyster beds.
I began to read Annie’s letters to her son, Andrew Darbee sitting at my kitchen table looking up from time to time at our peony field, pondering her existence and what she had accomplished. Annie had grand ideas and with each paragraph I read, I felt a deeper kinship to her strength and independence, but mostly to the glimmer of romantic sentiment that filled her hopes and dreams for the property; “a row of little houses … that could sell all sorts of things to stop over travelers… bath houses, places for rest -someone would have a supply of vegetables, someone would have a supply of poultry and eggs… Baked bread, cakes + pies, some of the native fruits & berries made into jams & jellies… I believe some sort of thing like that would be different and popular.”
Annie’s small home garden of violets continued to grow until it became one of the largest violet gardens on the Pacific coast and she expanded her production to include lilies and other bulbs. At the turn of the century, before the age of 21, Annie developed a shipping method and successfully started shipping boxes of California violets across the country. Annie’s business of shipping cut flowers continued to expand and through World War I, Annie shipped 85% off all cut flowers sent out of California to florists in every city in the United States and even to some cities in Mexico and Canada.
After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Annie purchased land in the city and built apartment buildings on Hyde Street and a storefront where she opened Darbee Flowers. Eventually Annie purchased a farm in Tillamook, Oregon becoming a major grower of tulips and narcissus.
I remember hearing bits and pieces of the previous owners of this property when I was young -tales of a woman who collected Pomo, Yurok and Karuk baskets during her travels from San Francisco to her farm in Oregon. A collection that grew to over 350 baskets, most of which were accompanied by a handwritten note with the name of the weaver and a box full of correspondence from a few of the weavers that she had maintained a friendship with over the years. I hadn’t heard anything about her legacy in the flower industry.
Annie Gooch Darbee bought this property from her sister Miss May Kline. Annie’s sister had owned the property since the early 1920’s. A box that was left to us when we purchased the property from Annie’s son, Andrew Darbee contains old photographs, letters to and from family, deeds to mineral rights, water right dispute details and some county correspondence regarding tax collection and surveying. The tidbits I piece together illustrate a mountain retreat for two independent sisters that loved the freedom of expanses of land, explored wilderness roads over and through mountain passes, held permits to bring hides and heads of two legally killed deer from District 1½ to San Francisco by order of Fish and Game Commission in 1924, and enjoyed multi day campouts and meadow picnics.
