Westward migration is an important part of the history of many American families. It wasn’t really so in my family. To my knowledge – and I can go back more than four centuries on some branches and to at least the 1830s on all branches – no direct ancestor of mine has ever lived either south or west of central New Jersey. Our “westward migration” was from Europe to the eastern seaboard of North America, between 1620 and 1911 depending on the branch, and we stopped there.
But siblings and cousins of my direct ancestors sure did move westward. Close relatives of my Irish and “Yankee” ancestors, and even the Ruthenians, pushed on to places like Ohio, Wisconsin, Montana, and all the way to the Pacific. This is the story of one of those families.
My 4x-great-grandfather was named Gaius Perkins. As I’ve related before, he was born in Middleborough, Massachusetts in 1777 after his father, John, came home from the Siege of Boston in the American Revolution. Gaius was still a boy when his family moved northward to the then-new town of Barnard, Vermont. Gaius’s sister Polly was born there in 1791, the year Vermont became our fourteenth state. She was the tenth Perkins child, and the sixth born in Vermont.
Polly married a local farmer named Abner Buckman (1792-1870) and lived to be 96, dying on December 27, 1887. She lived her whole life in Barnard; she and her husband are buried in the tiny Perkins family cemetery right there in town. They had nine children: two daughters and seven sons. The two daughters married and ultimately moved west (one to Massachusetts, then upstate New York, then Ohio, and finally Minnesota; the other moved to San Francisco in her 60s). In sharp contrast, six of the sons stayed in the Barnard area their whole lives. And then there was Amos.
Polly Perkins Buckman (1791-1887), a lifelong resident of Barnard, Vermont, and Amos Buckman's mother
Amos M. Buckman, the third child, was born in Barnard in 1821. As a young man he moved to Quincy, Massachusetts, right outside Boston. There he married a local girl, Frances “Fanny” Pratt, in 1846. They had three daughters in their first few years of marriage before Amos headed west, sailing to San Francisco via Panama in 1853. As a master carpenter, he found plenty of work building homes for that rapidly growing city. To my knowledge he was the first person on my family tree to settle in California, beating another New England Yankee and a bunch of Irish aunts and uncles by only a few years.
But Amos had bigger plans. Within two years he had purchased land in Calistoga, in the northern part of Napa County. The town is famous for its hot mineral water and geyser, and Amos dreamed of a hot springs resort similar to Saratoga Springs, New York, which by then was a summer playground for New York City’s wealthy. He then bought land (sort of, as we shall see) containing 27 separate hot springs ten miles to the south, just east of Yountville and north of the town of Napa. There he started a business called the “Napa Soda Springs” (click here for an ad from 1860) When it seemed things were going well, he sent for his wife and daughters, whom he hadn’t seen in several years, and they made the long trip from Massachusetts to Napa County.
The Napa Valley as it looks today
But all was not in fact going well in for Amos in Napa County. By 1860 he wound up in litigation, his title to the land on which the fledgling Napa Soda Springs resort sat having been challenged by early San Franciscans named George O. Whitney and John Henry Wood. Beautiful California, in the early years of its statehood, was very much the Wild West and things got ugly. In 1861, on the very day the Civil War began in South Carolina, Wood and a band of ruffians attacked Mrs. Buckman and the staff while Amos was away, burning their bottling plant to the ground. For this they received 35 days in jail or a $75 fine. It seems Wood paid the fine and left his henchmen to serve the 35 days. In 1862 another group chased Amos out of his own house. The violence went the other way, too; someone shot at Wood as he rode along a nearby road after dark.
Amos Buckman's house at Napa Soda Springs, which fell to John Henry Wood after litigation over the title, circa 1863
Amos lost in litigation, then was granted a new trial on procedural grounds. The California Supreme Court reversed that decision and the original finding stuck. Among the justices was Stephen J. Field, another New England-born transplant to California who would later do immeasurable mischief on the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1863 the case was resolved in Whitney and Wood’s favor. Amos Buckman pushed his claim all the way to the Interior Department in D.C., which had the power to overturn the state courts because title to land in the area had been under Mexican law until 1848, but the decision stuck; Amos’s business was lost.
Amos had not been wrong about the place’s potential: within ten years Wood sold the Napa springs to a Colonel John Putnam Jackson, originally from Ohio, under whom it became a fabulously profitable enterprise, the jewel of the Napa Valley. Jackson had the capital to do it right and built a luxury hotel featuring a Jefferson-inspired rotunda, stables, and a pagoda. By 1890 a book was published chronicling the "famous mountain resort." President Benjamin Harrison, Jackson's personal friend, even stayed there. Jackson built himself a mansion with a 150-foot swimming pool from the proceeds and his kids still were living large off the springs sixty years later, when one of them appeared on the local paper’s society pages for having decided to disinherit his daughter. Today the resort itself is just a fascinating ruin (more photos here), having fallen to fire in 1943, but old Jackson’s Napa Soda Water bottles sell quite well on eBay.
Col. John Putnam Jackson (1833-1900). An Ohio-born lawyer and businessman, he served with distinction in the Civil War before moving to California. Jackson was well-connected in the Republican Party and was collector of the Port of San Francisco at his death.
The 1877 rotunda at Napa Soda Springs. Built by Col. Jackson as an elegant stable, it soon was converted to be the centerpiece of his luxury hotel.
Jackson's Napa Soda Springs resort as it looked in 1909
A pair of Jackson's Napa Soda Springs bottles going for $50 on eBay
What's left of Jackson's luxury Napa Soda Springs resort
Amos Buckman never made the kind of fortune Col. Jackson made, but he did OK. He and Fanny had two more daughters (Mary and Winifred) in Napa County in the 1860s, then moved down to San Luis Obispo, a fast-growing town where Amos relied on his carpentry skills to make a living, once again building houses. In the meantime two of his Massachusetts-born daughters, Harriet and Emily, married two brothers, Robert Faires Grigsby (1839-1923) and Alphonso de la Fayette Grigsby (1844-1923) in Napa. They were sons of Terrell Lindsay (T.L.) Grigsby (1818-1892), a Napa County neighbor.
Many of you whose ancestors lived in the Midwest or West Coast can trace your families back both to New England and the old South. So it is with the descendants of Amos’s elder daughters. Although the Buckman and Perkins families went back to 17th-century Massachusetts, the Grigsbys were not New Englanders by any stretch. T.L. Grigsby’s had been born in Tennessee to parents from Virginia and North Carolina, his maternal grandmother being President William Henry Harrison’s sister. T.L.’s wife, Cynthia Faires, was born in North Carolina. They met in Missouri, married, and had several children before pushing farther west.
The Donner Party, snowbound in the Sierra Nevada, is probably the most famous pioneer caravan to leave Independence, Missouri for California in the 1840s. But the Grigbsy-Ide Party, which set out in May 1845, a year before the Donner Party, may have had the bigger historical impact. Led by John Grigsby, T.L.’s brother, and Mormon elder William B. Ide, who decided to move west after the death of Joseph Smith, about 100 people followed the Platte River toward Oregon. On the way Caleb Greenwood, who lived in the mountains of today’s Idaho, advised them to go to California instead. They arrived in Sutter’s Fort on October 25, 1845.
In 1845 California still belonged to Mexico, but Mexico had little military over government presence there. And many local families, called “Californos,” considered themselves distinct from Mexicans farther south. As a result there was only token resistance when Ide, John Grigsby, and about 30 others demanded the surrender of the Mexican garrison in Sonoma on June 14, 1846, and declared a new republic (California was ceded by Mexico to the United States in 1848). Under the supervision of William Todd, Mary Todd Lincoln’s cousin, they made a “California Republic” flag featuring the fierce, tenacious grizzly bear. If you’re from California, you may have seen one like it.
A replica of the Bear Flag made at Sonoma in June 1846. The original was destroyed in the great San Francisco Earthquake fire of 1906.
Authorities disagree on whether T.L. Grigsby came to California with his brother and participated in the Bear Flag revolt, or whether he only came later with his family. Still, by 1852, T.L., his wife and children, his two brothers, and his father all had settled in Napa County and were neighbors of Amos Buckman.
Napa pioneer, and pioneer winemaker, Terrell Lindsay Grigsby (1818-1892). He lived near the Napa Soda Springs and two of his sons married two of Amos Buckman's daughters.
In the 1870s T.L. Grigsby got into Napa County’s fledgling wine trade in the Vine Cliff vineyards, and soon leased some vineyards of his own. In 1878 he founded the Grigsby-Occidental winery, the sixth in Napa County and the first on Silverado Trail in what is now the Stags Leap district – very near the Napa Soda Springs. The winery survived the death of T.L. Grisgby himself in 1892, but succumbed to the 1890s depression and the phylloxera epidemic that wiped out many of Napa’s “ghost wineries” during that decade. There were periodic efforts to resume wine production there but they stopped cold with Prohibition.
In 1932 Gaetano Regusci bought the land. He made a small amount of wine but mostly supported himself with cattle and crops other than grapes. In the early 1960s, following the success of neighbor Nathan Fay, Gaetano’s son Angelo planted the vineyard’s first Bordeaux varietals. But it did not reopen as a commercial winery until the late 1990s, when Angelo and his son Jim opened the highly successful Regusci domain still there today.
T.L. Grigsby's 1878 stone winery, still standing on the Regusci Winery today
The original Grigsby winery, early in its existence, was the scene of considerable drama. The original wooden building burned to the ground soon after it was built, with many suspecting arson because of local opposition to T.L. Grigsby's use of Chinese labor. Grigsby then built the stone building still standing on the Regusci winery grounds today, with the words “T.L. Grigsby – Occidental – 1878” engraved on the façade. In 1881, only three years after the winery opened, 21-year-old Edward Butler died on Grigsby's domain of a gunshot wound to the temple. The coroner initially ruled the death a suicide, but the undertaker then discovered a second bullet hole in the back of the young man’s head, with no powder burns, suggesting the bullet was not fired from close range. Butler also had been struck with a hatchet.
Butler’s father, a business associate of Grigsby’s, hired San Francisco detectives and two Chinese immigrant workers at the winery were arrested. One committed suicide in jail; the other tried but was saved by guards. He was convicted and sentenced to ten years in San Quentin, serving eight. The crime was motivated by a dispute over money the elder Butler owed the Chinese workers; the jury apparently divided over their story that the younger Butler pulled the gun first, finding that excessive force had been used even in self-defense. The case reflected all of the tensions between white and Chinese populations in the California of the 1880s.
The Daily Alta California of January 10, 1882, sure to stress the "cunning" of the Chinese-born suspects, reports on the killing of Edward Butler
T.L. and Cyntha Faires Grigsby’s eldest son, Robert Faires Grigsby, who married Harriet Buckman, was born in Missouri in 1839 and named for his paternal grandfather, Robert Faires, a prominent judge there. In 1859 his father sent him back east, via the ancestral lands in Tennessee, to study business. Robert kept a detailed diary of this two-year eastern sojourn, during which he gravitated into mining. He next traveled to the Sierra Madre, where he continued to keep a journal. His diaries of that trip – which appears to have kept him out of the U.S. Civil War – were published in 1864. The book still is
available on Amazon. Robert, in total, spent about 30 years in the mines of Mexico, frequently leaving his wife and children alone at home in Napa. He also speculated in local silver mines in Calistoga and across the American west.
Amos Buckman, meanwhile, moved south from San Luis Obispo to San Diego with his wife and two younger daughters in 1871. As the western terminus of the Texas-Pacific Railroad then under construction, San Diego was booming and Amos helped build many wood-frame houses in the Old Town area that still exist today (his grandson later donated his carpentry tools to the Junipero Serra history museum in San Diego). The family lived in a house that Amos built at the edge of today’s Gaslamp Quarter and the two young daughters went to the neighborhood school.
The man himself: California pioneer Amos M. Buckman (1821-1898), a first cousin of my 3x-great-grandfather. My ancestor never left Vermont.
But old habits die hard. In 1875 Robert Grigsby, visiting his mines in San Diego County, met a man who told him about hot springs available in the eastern part of the county, near the present-day town of Campo. He alerted Amos, his father-in-law, who quickly rode east to scope the possibilities. Within months Amos had set up camp there. Word spread in San Diego about the waters and people started to make the 60-mile journey east, which then took quite a couple of days. At first they stayed in tents, but Amos quickly built cabins and then a small hotel. In 1881 he received a homestead for 160 acres of land then in the “public domain,” a fact he may have shared in a letter to his 90-year-old mother back in Vermont. Buckman Springs was born.
Amos ran the resort and built a bottling plant. The business did well, if on a more modest scale than Jackson’s Napa Soda Springs. After Amos’s daughter Emily died in 1885, her husband, Robert Grigsby’s brother Alphonso, moved with their six children to a nearby farm. And Amos lived there happily, surrounded by wife, children, and grandchildren, for the rest of his life. When he died in 1898, he asked to be buried at his beloved springs for all time.
Amos Buckman's grave. Alone among his family, he is buried at Buckman Springs, where he finally realized his dream.
Amos's son-in-law Alphonso D. Grigsby, who returned to eastern San Diego County with his children in the 1880s, is in the center of this photo taken many years later. With him (l-r) are: San Diego mayor John F. Forward; railroad baron John D. Spreckels; fellow "old settler" "Uncle" Lee Morris; and Harry L. Titus, Spreckels' chief counsel. They are welcoming the first passenger train into Campo, California on Sept. 16, 1916.
After Amos's death his widow, Fanny, moved in with her daughter Mary in San Diego, then with her eldest daughter, Harriet Buckman Grigsby (wife of Robert) in Calistoga. She died in 1912 and is buried in Napa near many members of the Grigsby family. The modest Buckman Springs resort always had been too remote to draw many guests, but Amos’s daughter Winnie added a gas station, country, store and café. Buckman Springs became a popular stop for the growing number of travelers coming over the mountains from Arizona. The family continued to bottle and to sell the water in the San Diego area and beyond until the 1940s, even adding a variety of flavors, and a “Buckman Springs Lithia Water” bottle is a true rarity
sought by collectors today.
A rare sight: an intact Buckman Springs Lithia Water bottle
Soon the springs were dry, thanks to agricultural aquifiers sucking up all the water, and little was left but the ruins of the bottling plant and gas station, visible from “Buckman Springs Road” as it wound through the desert. Until construction of a new, modern-style “Buckman Springs Rest Area” along I-8 in 1979 (which, when open, remains hugely popular) unearthed Amos Buckman’s grave. To its credit the state of California re-routed its right-of-way fence around it. In 2008 Buckman descendants gathered for dedication of a plaque telling the story of the springs and the man who wouldn’t give up on a vision.
The Buckman Springs bottling plant in action, about 1909
What's left of the Buckman Springs bottling plant today
The remains of Amos's house at Buckman Springs
The story of Buckman Springs is told on this plaque at the rest area along I-8
History, including the history of our own families, is all around us, even if we’re just stopping to use the restroom on a long drive across the desert.