Kastania Ranch is home to city kid Ellen Brians
Published: Wednesday, Aug 15, 2007
My earliest recollection of Kastania Ranch, with substantial help from my uncle’s old home movies, is of an afternoon gathering of members of the Methodist Church playing ball, and running through the trees in the late 1950s. We were guests of the Brians family, owners of the property since 1919.
Ellen Brians, 84, who was raised on the ranch, and who was my Sunday school teacher back then, recently invited me back to the bucolic rural setting just south of town, to discuss its history.
The 168-acre parcel was originally owned by Daniel G. Heald, a farmer and dairyman who acquired the land from a government grant in 1857. James Sorensen purchased it from Heald in 1886 and named it Kastania, using the Scandinavian spelling, after the Castanea, a large, spreading chestnut tree that’s abundant in Denmark.
Danish immigrants R.C. and Tillie Rasmussen bought the property, along with its 1890s farm house, from Sorensen in 1919 and started a poultry ranch which they later changed to a Jersey dairy farm. Their three children, Harry, Arnold, and Ellen were the first of four generations to be raised there.
Across the road from the ranch sits the picturesque Kastania Winery, owned by Hoot and Linda Smith, on property that’s been in the Smith family since the 1860s.
Rasmussen hauled his milk to the Petaluma Co-op twice a day and the kids were bused to school. “That’s where we met the country kids, we were city kids,” said Ellen, a self-described “spoiled kid” who attended Lincoln Primary, Philip Sweed and Washington Grammar School.
A graduate of the Petaluma High School Class of 1941, she attended business school in Santa Rosa before taking a job at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. That’s where she met serviceman Les Brians and they married in 1943. After the war, the couple returned to Kastania Ranch, where they operated the dairy and raised their kids, Keith, Kenneth and Kathleen.
They sold the dairy in 1964 and converted to beef stock. Through the church the family also raised goats for the Heifer Project. “That was really a good experience,” noted Ellen.
Brians Realty opened on East Washington Street in 1968 and became an overnight success. “We were the first ones to be open on Sunday and people would come in with newspaper ads in their hands wanting to see property. It was a bonanza,” recalled Ellen, who operated the business with her husband until they divorced in 1976.
In 1983 most of the original property was sold to Jay and Linda Walsh, who operate it as a horse ranch. “I could not have sold to better people. We’re very lucky to have them,” said Ellen, who retained enough acreage for several comfortable family parcels.
In 1945 R.C. Rasmussen donated two acres of Kastania Ranch to the Danish Soldiers Club, a group of Danish army veterans. The club meets at the private enclave once a month sharing Danish traditions like specially-made and specifically garnished open-faced sandwiches, delectable pastries, and ice-cold shots of akavit, a Danish liquor.
Ellen volunteers at the Aldersly Garden Retirement Home, a San Rafael assisted living facility originally established for Danish retirees in the 1920s, and she belongs to the Danish Sisterhood. Her ties with the Methodist Church go back 55 years to when she taught Sunday school and, along with her husband and longtime close friends June and Butch Burtner, counseled the Methodist youth groups. She keeps busy organizing and helping prepare the church’s annual fund-raisers, the Friendly Folks’ ham dinner and the Women’s Society tea.
A certain generation will remember the 1970s, when the ranch hosted an annual Bohemian-style masquerade festival that became known simply as the Fest. Its popularity eventually mushroomed into an event too large to manage and it was discontinued, its memories dissolved into hazy flashbacks.
(Harlan Osborne’s column, Toolin’ Around Town, appears every two weeks. Contact him at harlan@sonic.net)
