Issei and Nisei Pea Farmers on Point Reyes
By Dewey Livingston
Following the First World War, many dairy ranchers at Point Reyes leased pastureland to immigrant Italian and Japanese farmers, who grew artichokes and peas. The foggy coast made ideal conditions for those crops, as well as having soils and topography beneficial to crop farming. Known as truck farms, these activities made use of the natural coastal moisture rather than irrigation, and trucks and roadways were improved specifically to bring farm products speedily to market in San Francisco.
These truck farms proliferated in the 1920s and 1930s around Limantour Bay and farther out on the Point in both directions. Leland Murphy, J. V. Mendoza, Joe Nunes and Joe Avila, George Molseed, and the O. L. Shafter Estate leased land to the farmers, many of whom were recent immigrants who spoke little or no English. Their children attended local schools, and many of the Italian families continue to be represented in the community today. The Japanese, however, were interned during the second war and did not return.
It appears that Japanese Issei (first generation) and Nisei farmers came to Point Reyes starting in 1931. Leland Murphy, the new owner of the 10,000-acre Home Ranch overlooking Drakes and Limantour esteros, had an interest in diversifying land uses on his property, no doubt influenced by the success of Italian-run artichoke farms on the ranch whose leases he inherited.
In March of 1932 the Petaluma Argus-Courier reported that Japanese farmers were preparing land for artichokes on the Murphy ranch, although the Italians had been the dominant force in that crop. The article claimed that 5,000 acres “are now ready for the planting of the vegetable, which thrives in the coast section.” Soon, the Japanese farmers would focus on peas, which also thrived in the foggy Point Reyes environs.
“By 1934, Murphy’s great tract had become the world’s foggiest pea patch,” wrote Marin historian Jack Mason. The new residents moved into abandoned tenant ranch houses and meager sheds and barns scattered across the ranch. Murphy hired John Hisao Kimura to manage the clearing, planting, cultivation, and sale of peas on the ranch. Murphy would get half the crop, and to strengthen his investment he bought Caterpillar tractors and built a barn-like pea warehouse in the rail yards at Point Reyes Station. Kimura’s Filipino and Mexican laborers cleared coyote brush by hand and planted 200 acres in peas in 1932.
“Nothing went according to plan,” wrote Mason. “The railroad pulled out, even before the first crop matured. The crop itself looked to be a beauty, only to wither within days — a 90 per cent loss.” In a footnote, Mason explained that an expert blamed the initial land clearing as the culprit: “hand stripping the brush had left air pockets which dried out the pea roots.” Murphy, with debt from his ranch purchase made worse by the farming investment, wangled a new loan and persevered, bringing new techniques such as ring rollers and thus allowing the pea industry to advance.
Not only the Kimura family — John, who was born in California, had children and his Issei parents in residence — but others from Japan, worked the pea farms. School records show that farming families in the Limantour and Drakes Estero areas included Yago, Takata, Hanaouchi, Takegi, Morimoto, Kimura, and Ban. There were likely other families with no children, like the Miyedas, and single men. These families worked side-by-side with the Italian artichoke farmers.
The Ban family arrived in 1934, and stayed until they were interned in 1942. Parents Joe and Sumyi had arrived in California from Japan by 1925; their children, Osamu, Ikuko, Yoneko, Toyoko, Kameoka, Sachiko, and Nasaharu, were all born in California. One wonders if these children got the same attention at the tiny one-room Shafter School as their Italian classmates: the teachers during those years were all of Italian descent, being Marie Leonardi, Josephine Mitti, and Mary Milani.
In an unfortunate turn of events, John Kimura died unexpectedly in early 1941. He lived with his wife and children on Berry Point, the western part of Drakes Head overlooking the estero. He was stricken with appendicitis at the farm, and on the way to Kimura’s house the doctor’s car got stuck in the mud. Kimura died before they could get him to a hospital. Murphy’s sharecropping experiment continued as a serious farming endeavor, but ended abruptly with the U. S. entry into World War II. “They were good farmers,” Murphy said later. “We had terrific peas.”
Neighbor Pia Lucchesi Davis recalled that the Japanese families would take a piece of property to farm on the large Home Ranch, stay “for quite a while” and then move to another location; this was apparently a form of crop rotation. Others farmed peas across Drakes Estero on Nunes & Avila’s C Ranch and George Molseed’s E Ranch.
The most complete record of pea farming on the Point Reyes Peninsula originates with the Kameoka family. Takeshi “Tak” Kameoka was a native of Watsonville, whose father and two siblings had perished in the 1918 flu epidemic when Tak was three years old. He and his Hawaiian-born mother moved to Japan, but returned to California a decade later and settled in the new farming district on the Murphy Ranch at Point Reyes. Tak attended a year at Shafter School, then commuted to Tomales High School, where he excelled as a regular on the Honor Roll for two years and competed on the track team. While a teenager, he signed a lease — only legal by a United States citizen — for a family friend on a 150-acre portion of Nunes & Avila’s C Ranch at Point Reyes.
“Henry Uchiyama wanted to farm on Point Reyes but was an alien,” said Kameoka in an oral history recorded in 2008. “He needed to be a citizen to rent the place to farm, so he chose me and I accepted to sign his lease for farming on Point Reyes.” Uchiyama started a pea farm and hired Tak after his graduation from Santa Rosa High School.
The hilly land was good to farm peas, and the weather was especially beneficial. Kameoka explained, “That area in Point Reyes is foggy, and the moisture on the ground is sufficient to grow peas for three months.” Without any irrigation, Uchiyama and Kameoka grew peas on the land with rotating harvests lasting from June through August.
Uchiyama, called “one of the successful pea growers of Point Reyes” by the Petaluma Argus-Courier, returned to Japan in October 1938. Kameoka had been accepted at the University of California but didn’t have the financial resources to attend, so he decided to go into the farming business for himself, taking Uchiyama’s place but in a different location at nearby E Ranch where he farmed 200 acres with the help of his mother, Ei Kameoka.
Kameoka had a Caterpillar tractor and plowed the farmland in March and April, then seeded it with a horse-drawn seeder. “The soil is very sandy; it breaks up very nicely so you don’t irrigate so when you plow early in the spring. Practically every day’s a foggy day, we don’t see the sun,” which is perfect for growing peas.
By June the first harvests were ready. From planting to harvest took two and a half months. “I have to plant in one section at a time so I can be harvesting continuously.” At harvest time Kameoka hired a large contingent of migrant pickers. “We were getting the same pickers every year, about 30, 35. They come in a family, you know, and even small kids, I don’t know how old are they, they pick. Amazing, father and mother picking, those kids carry that basket over [to the packing area].” The bushel baskets held about thirty pounds of peas off the vine, and the children sometimes had to carry the baskets a long distance. The pickers lived in tents at “a convenient place where there is a water supply. One place [on the farm] has spring waters and they use it for drinking and washing and everything.”
His mother helped Kameoka on the farm at the packing area. “The pickers pick the peas and we put them in the crates, we shake them up and make it full, the same weight of each crate. Each crate’s about 45 pounds.”
“We picked for five days a week, from morning until late in the afternoon, and about five o’clock we had a truckload,” Kameoka recalled. “In those three months we planted in succession so that we pick every day five days a week, a truckload of peas every day. I drove a truckload of the peas to San Francisco to the market there, and I come home and get ready for the next day’s shipment.”
“At that time the price for the peas was three cents, average, if you got three and a half, four cents why you’re making money.” This was during the Depression, and Kameoka was making a good living at the farm, able to hire laborers and make payments on his tractor and truck.
Upon arriving at the farm in 1938, there was no building to operate out of. Kameoka built a rustic home that he remembered as “a little shack.” “I bought secondhand lumber and made a shack with small rooms, three rooms. Right next to camp there was a spring we used for drinking water.” Despite his very isolated life, Tak got married in 1940. “I didn’t meet her, [it was an] arranged marriage. I was here and she was in Japan and everything was taken care of, all I had to do was accept it.” Yukino Takaoka arrived in a strange country to live at the cold and foggy isolated farm with a “shack” as a home, and lived with her new mother-in-law. The couple soon had a daughter whom they named Martha. Tak Kameoka was the only one who spoke English.
“We ate everything, we raised our own vegetables, and chicken, mostly. Meat we had to buy at the store” in Inverness. The family prepared traditional Japanese food. “While we were there we were practicing Buddhist for ourselves, but we never had a chance to go attend the weekly service or anything because we had to travel to San Francisco.”
In the off season, between September and March, the Kameokas had enough money to live from the farm profits and do “nothing,” but still they stayed active. Kameoka went fishing in Tomales Bay: “We used to fish, a sack full of perch, bring ’em home and dry them to keep them to eat for winter time. Just open them up and take the guts out and hang them on a stick and that’s the way we dry them. You just hang them on the side of the house and dry them, it takes more than a couple of days.” The Kameokas also harvested clams and mussels on the coast.
Then came the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The Kameokas had been farming on E Ranch for more than three years. They had a radio, but saw nothing in the days after war was declared. “War broke out — why, we don’t know what we gonna do. I was ready to plant but we don’t know what will be in next week or so, so I was just holding back on it, we didn’t plant.” At one point the FBI interrogated Kameoka, and he had to continue farming to avoid accusations of sabotage, despite the reality that the farm would not continue.
In February 1942 the federal government banned all aliens from the coastal areas of Marin County, and Ei Kameoka was a Japanese citizen. “We were told to move out from Inverness to Point Reyes Station. A soldier was stationed here to monitor [the coast]. Then we had to evacuate.”
“We didn’t have much to take off, but we got our stuff out. The equipment, I left it to the Adolph Holm Company in Petaluma. I left the tractors and other things with them for sale.”
The Kameoka family first moved to Santa Rosa “where my friend had a little place to stay.” They were imprisoned for the duration of the war at Amache Relocation Camp in Granada, Colorado. Yukino raised their first two children — Mary was born in the camp — and became an accomplished seamstress. Tak worked as an electrician in and around the camp, and took historically significant photographs of life in internment.
Upon release in 1945, the family found a 14-acre farm for sale in west Petaluma and settled there. Takashi and his arranged bride, who had endured a challenging move from home in Japan to a harsh life Point Reyes, were lovingly married for 72 years, raising six children, until Kameoka died in 2012; he was 97 years old and still working.
While these farms on Point Reyes were thriving during the 1930s and early 1940s, the U. S. Army established an artillery training camp on Leland Murphy’s property in 1940. All was well and quiet as the Italian and Japanese farmers coexisted on Murphy’s ranch properties while soldiers performed drills and battle practice. “By December of 1941,” wrote Jack Mason, “GIs and Japanese had lived side-by-side on unsuspecting terms for a year and a half.” Not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, according to Mason, “Fresh-face GIs charged forth from Laguna Ranch to load their good neighbors into trucks and haul them off to standby centers.” Mason wrote of how some people on the Point suspected the Japanese farmers of spying or sending covert communications. “For the record,” he concluded, “no Japanese on Point Reyes was ever found to be traitorous.”
Pea farming returned on a small scale for a short time in the early 1950s — without involvement of Japanese families — but soon gave way to a return to cattle grazing. There are few, if any, physical reminders of this historic activity, but as a chapter in the cultural history of Marin County, with an unfair and sometimes tragic ending, the story should live on.
The author wishes to thank the late Takeshi Kameoka, his son-in-law Patrick Peebles, and the Kameoka family.
