Community Guide 2017
The Valley in the 1940s and 1950s: Grace Dickson Tolson’s Memories of the Valley
house was built in 1870. Today, that house has housed six gen- erations of the William Dickson family. The original Mailliard Ranch had a huge house (known as the Mailliard Mansion), three barns, a slaughter house, and bunkhouses as well as various dairy structures. Grace’s grand- father, Fred Dickson, inherited the ranch and dairy, which was known as the Woodacre Dairy.
As told to Carol Whitmire and Petra Toriumi and compiled by Carol Whitmire. (Photos courtesy of Dickson Ranch) In 1943, when Grace was born, Dickson Ranch was a 500+ acre working dairy ranch, with cows, chickens, and pigs to feed the family, and horses for the cowboys. The ranch, together with adjacent land, had been purchased in 1853 by Adolph Mailliard, who had bought it with some $50,000 of his wife’s money. (She was Annie Ward Mail- liard, sister of Julia Ward Howe who wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”) Most of the Valley settlers had come from back east, including William J. Dickson who, with two of his brothers, Calvin and George, came to the Valley and found work with Mailliard, running his dairy and raising cattle. “Mailliard borrowed money from everyone,” and ultimately had to settle his debts by sell- ing off parcels of his land holdings. William, Calvin and George each got ranches, and, in 1864, a deed to the 500+ acre parcel on which Grace was born almost 80 years later, was signed over to William, her great grand- father. William’s brother Calvin was an agent for a bank, and he bought what was known as the “upper ranch,” which now includes the Flanders Ranch. William had come to San Francisco from Vermont, leaving his wife, Jenny Barr, behind while he settled. Jen- ny told William that she wouldn’t move west until he had a “proper” house for her, and the original Dickson ranch
When Grace was a child, one of the original bunkhouses and one of the Mailliard barns remained on the family ranch, which by then was owned by her father (Bill, aka Mel) and his wife, Thelma. The home, now occupied by Thelma Dickson, and Grace and Chuck Tolson, was built in 1941. Grace now runs the horse boarding busi- ness from her kitchen there as well. One of the Mailliard bunkhouses, a portion of the slaughter house, and one of the old barns are still at the western end of the ranch. When Grace was growing up, she was only permitted to play in the front yard of their home. She found out why when she was 7 or 8 years old. One day she snuck over to the hay barn, crawled up on bales of hay, and watched one of the cowboys trying to break a horse. Unfortunately, the horse got the
better of the cowboy, who was thrown and badly hurt. Grace never told her parents what she saw when she broke their rule by going beyond the home yard, but ever after she felt that her transgression caused the cowboy’s injury. What is now Railroad Avenue had, at least as late as the 1920s, been railroad tracks. Many of the houses here were summer cabins, and fathers of the summer families travelled to and from the City (San Francisco) by train every day. At that time what is now Central was the main street, and the post office was located approxi- mately at its current location adjacent to the tracks facing Dickson Ranch. By the 1940s, when Grace was grow- ing up, the tracks had been replaced
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