Home on the Grange: In Anderson Valley, Hippies, Old-Timers Return to Farming Roots

For her series California Foodways, Lisa Morehouse is reporting a story about food and farming from each of California’s 58 counties.

Every month, the Anderson Valley Grange holds a pancake breakfast at their Grange hall in the town of Philo. A team of volunteers prepares pancakes, eggs and bacon for the 100 or so community members who show up.

In the kitchen during January’s breakfast, a man known as Captain Rainbow called out “Danger, danger!” as he pulled sizzling bacon out of the oven.

As a trio of local musicians played, Erich Jonas mixed a hyper-local pancake batter. It includes flour from the Mendocino Grain Project, which he called “absolutely perfect for this local feast,” and just about half a can of the best beer from the Anderson Valley Brewing Company.

“And so here we go. We’re going to add this magic ingredient, just enough to wet the batter down so it’s not sticky,” he said, while whisking.

Grange halls like this one have been around for more than 150 years — the Grange began as a fraternal organization for farmers. Even though farming — and Grange membership — are down to a fraction of what they were decades ago, many rural towns still rely on Grange halls as community centers.

“Whether it’s doing a holiday dinner or … hosting a local food bank, it’s a place where people can do what’s most natural to us, which is focus on our cooperative dynamics and community,” Jonas said.

In the Anderson Valley, many people credit this place for bringing together groups of people that were once really divided.

The Order of the Patrons of Husbandry, better known as the Grange, was founded in 1867 as a social and educational organization for farmers. It gained membership as Grangers banded together to fight the high prices that grain elevators and railroads were charging to store and transport their crops. Their non-partisan political advocacy began with issues like regulating the railroads and making sure mail was delivered to rural areas for free.

Captain Rainbow explained, “The farmers essentially created the Grange as like a co-op, and they had some power in numbers like a union.”

The Anderson Valley is an agricultural community. Dozens of vineyards line Highway 128, and they grow a lot of cannabis in this region, too. But wine and cannabis didn’t dominate the Valley when Captain Rainbow arrived here in the early 1970s.

“When I first came here, the economy of the valley was sheep farming, and apples, and logging, pretty much.”

He said he wore a loincloth, lived up in the woods with some other back-to-the-landers, and didn’t come into town too much.

“In those days, if you were a hippie, you weren’t particularly welcome here,” he said. “The nickname of the bar was ‘the Bucket of Blood,’ and it was pretty renowned for being a pretty rugged spot. I didn’t go in the bar for about 10 years because it was chainsaw haircut time if you did.”

Rainbow still has the long hair — now gray, pulled back in a neat ponytail.

Back then, the only affordable place in town to hold an event was at the old Grange hall, built in 1939.

“It had a really nice old fir dance floor, and a big barrel stove with a bunch of firewood to warm the place up, and a little tiny goofy stage,” Rainbow said. “That’s where we’d have our rock and roll parties and do our little plays and our clown shows.”

Rainbow said the Grange membership back then was made up of old-timers who were a little reluctant to rent out the hall to hippies.

“But they didn’t have any money either,” so they grudgingly relented. “And you know what?” Rainbow said, “We loved that building, too, so we did take care of it.”

But one morning in 1985, Rainbow heard some terrible news: the Grange hall burned down. News spread fast, and people from across the valley went to see the damage.

“There was nothing left,” Rainbow said. “I mean, it was just a pile of gray and black charred stuff. It was gone.”

As Anderson Valley’s Grangers planned to rebuild the hall, the hippies begged them to include a stage and a wooden floor for dancing. They even made a bargain with the Grangers, one they never thought they’d have to keep: if the insurance money ran out, they would help the Grangers rebuild the hall. The insurance money didn’t last, and so, working one day a week, it took this incongruous group of volunteers six years to build the new Grange hall.

“This was, to me, the nut of a coming together of different groups of people who needed each other,” Captain Rainbow said. “They needed us to do the work for free, and we needed them to provide this space and this place and the possibility that we could have a dance hall again.”

Even if a hippie had a bad encounter with an old timer at the Bucket of Blood saloon the night before, Rainbow said, “The next day, hungover, both of you would be hanging sheetrock together, and you’d find out that, hey, you’re all right.”

Instead of drinking or talking politics, they were building something together.

“I gained a lot of friends in the valley that way. I’m not sure this holds for everyone else in the valley, but for me, that was the time things opened up, because we were engaged in a common purpose. Rather than looking at our differences, we were looking at our samenesses,” Rainbow said.

As the Anderson Valley Grangers saw their peers getting older, they looked around at the younger volunteers who were showing up with skills and interest, and they saw something else: potential Grange members.

Captain Rainbow remembered, “One day, one of those guys came up to me and said, ‘Hey, you know, you want to join the grange?’ And my eyes got big, and I went, ‘Really?’ And they asked other people who had been volunteering, as well, to become members. We couldn’t believe it. We went, ‘What? You’re kidding. You really … you want us? You want us?’ And they did.”

Both sides had to compromise a bit. When they became members, the hippies had to go through some rituals, learn the secret handshake, and the password. This new contingent wasn’t going to go all in for the traditions of a fraternal organization, but Captain Rainbow and others learned the origins of many of these rituals and began to understand.

“The secret handshake and all that stuff came about because they would go to Washington D.C. and lobby for farmers’ rights,” Rainbow said, “and they had to know who was a Granger.”

Soon enough, Captain Rainbow found himself appointed Grange Master, and he’s been involved ever since.

These days, people know the Anderson Valley Grange Hall for its annual variety show and as a place to hold meetings, dances and quinceañeras, but it still has agricultural connections.

The reality of this was on full display in early March. The parking lot was packed before the official start of the event at the hall.

Local food groups rented out the Grange hall for a day of education and seed and scion exchanges.

Amid grafting workshops, people walked in carrying containers full of seeds and grocery bags with cuttings from trees — young shoots, called scions.

On one side of the Grange hall, tables were covered with scion wood. Barbara Goodell, one of the event’s organizers, pointed out many of the varieties she saw:

“Nuts, grapes, figs on this table. There’s apples, peaches, persimmons, plums, all kinds of things. Anything that you can graft, it’s here.”

Grafting lets growers join two different plants together into one — like a hearty rootstock with a scion of a really delicious apple variety.

“It’s not rocket science, necessarily,” Goodell said. “It’s putting two sticks together in the right way.”

The other side of the hall was all about seeds, including seed libraries for each of Mendocino County’s library branches.

Kat Wu and Sab Mai came up from San Jose. They chatted with Jini Reynolds, a Grange advocate and leader, about how to save seeds from their small home garden.

“The important thing about saving seeds is to mark down what kind of climate you grew it in, the things that made you successful, like the soils or did you have a raised bed, so that other people in your community can then understand how they can grow,” Reynolds said.

She encouraged Wu and Mai to look for resources in their own region, too.

“I’m with the Grange, and we’re a national organization. So you have Granges down in your area, too. Maybe put together some kind of seed exchange so that you can all share information,” she told them.

Reynolds is a member of another Grange in Mendocino County, about an hour away from the Anderson Valley hall. There are seven community Granges in Mendocino County.

When Reynolds moved to a one-acre farm in Mendocino County 50 years ago, she’d attend parties and PTA meetings at the local grange hall, but had no idea what “Grange” meant. As she learned more about the organization, she got more committed.

Starting about 15 years ago, there was a lot of tension within California Granges. Rifts widened over values, leadership and property. Many groups in California broke away from the national Grange.

During this time, Reynolds said, she studied Grange history and bylaws. She decided to help the organization grow and change it from within.

“I’m now kind of like a cheerleader for the Grange,” Reynolds said. “Because I see that — even clear across the nation, not just California —all of us are looking at, ‘How do we live sustainably? How do we keep our community centers? Where do we get the support?’”

Now, she’s president of what’s called the “Pomona” — the regional Grange serving Mendocino and Lake Counties, and she’s helping state granges rebuild their membership. She’s also on the diversity team of the national Grange.

In the early days, the Grange helped farmers organize and fight railroad moguls. The needs for today’s rural communities are different. Many Granges are modernizing their halls to be emergency shelters. Reynolds pointed out that members can get discounts on propane and can attend practical workshops.

“Come on down and learn how to do CPR. Come on down and learn how to handle that ham radio. Come on down and learn this skill on how to put new gravel in your driveway,” she said.

Mendocino County Grangers even started a retirement facility that houses 170 people.

In rural California, one concern comes up again and again: fire. One that stays with Reynolds is 2017’s Redwood Complex fire. The disaster killed nine people. It destroyed 350 homes and 36,000 acres, and required thousands of people to evacuate. When roads opened back up, Reynolds said she was the one with the key to the Redwood Valley Grange, which was still standing. She let PG&E in to get the propane turned back on, she said.

“I told my husband, ‘I can’t close the door to the Grange,’” she said, with emotion creeping into her voice. “All of my neighbors were going back to see if they had a house or not, or whether their farms were there anymore, whether they had anything left at all, and they were driving right past the Grange.”

Reynolds said that she, her husband, and other volunteers made brownies and coffee, and put out a sandwich board, saying, “Come on in.”

“And all of a sudden, people were bringing food down there,” she said. “Red Cross was outside, FEMA was in the room and they started answering people’s questions.”

Families were able to reconnect and find each other after the fire.

“This is all because of a Grange hall. If we didn’t have the Grange hall, none of this would have happened.”

Nationally, the Grange was at its peak in the 1950s, with over 850,000 members. That dropped a lot over the decades, as farmland was paved over for suburbs, and membership in civic organizations declined.

But the last few years have seen membership grow incrementally.

California has 120 Granges, and in the last year alone, seven Granges opened — some brand new, some brought back to life or reorganized, since the state-wide rift. Reynolds said, revitalizing the Grange is her calling. She’s working to reestablish Granges in Fort Bragg and Upper Lake — communities in Mendocino and Lake Counties — in the coming months.

She said she knows that the Grange needs to be truly inclusive to keep growing and represent all the people living in rural areas. As someone with Paiute ancestry, that’s dear to her heart. She pointed out that the National organization has changed language, like “Grange Master,” to “President.” A number of Granges — including in California — have a majority Latino population. And California’s state Grange is translating all documents into Spanish.

“It’s going to be a while, but we’re working on that. And as far as the indigenous people,” she said, getting emotional, “we’re working on that.”

Thinking about the future of the Anderson Valley Grange, Captain Rainbow gets a little nostalgic. “When my generation came in and became part of the Grange, the old-timers, they needed us. And now, I’m a geezer now!” He called his peer group new old-timers.

Though the Anderson Valley Grange Hall fills up for dances, pancake breakfasts and seed exchanges, the chapter hovers between 40 and 50 members, and many of them are from Rainbow’s generation.

“We need some fresh blood,” Rainbow said. Although, he said, “there’s still some folks who are coming and want to do small-time agricultural farming,” he worries there won’t be enough, or that they won’t have the same spirit.

“But who knows, things evolve. They change. And who am I to claim that I know what’s going to happen or what’s right,” he said.

“Why I came here was a sense of place,” he said.

Hopefully, he said, the Grange can remain “a focal point for this sense of place,” and continue to be a space that brings people together in the Anderson Valley.

This story was produced with support from the Food and Environment Reporting Network. It’s part of Lisa’s series California Foodways.