The Pear House

This little home, smack-dab in the middle of the orchard, has observed history intimately as it housed many planters, pruners, and fruit pickers over the last hundred and twenty years, maybe more. One of perhaps 3-6 labor camps on this property, this one still stands and was extended into the small house in the 1980’s.

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It was in 1905 when the Simoni family, from Italy, founded Simoni’s Landing, and for over thirty years, twenty to forty workers ate their lunch daily overlooking this little labor camp from the Simoni’s upper porch. During that time the land was worked by Chinese immigrants, and their expertise in planting pear trees, their grafting and growing methods can be seen in our 100+ year-old Bartlett trees which are still hardy producers. They reside alongside the trees one year old and all the way back to that time.

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The Simoni family immigrated during the time period when farmers of German, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek and South Asian descent were drawn to the rich peat soils of this area. Thanks to the hard-won reclamation of the levees by the Chinese workers, flooding could be better controlled, and farms took hold and spread up and down from Sacramento to the lower San Joaquin River.

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We, like so many farmers before us, are only stewards of land. Going further back in time, to 1492, a very large settlement of Native Americans in North America was right here.