As historian Dot Brovarney says, many people who’ve lived their entire lives in Ukiah have never heard of Lake Leonard, an 18-acre natural lake on the 4,000-acre privately owned Leonard Lake Reserve. To get to the reserve, which once shared a border with Willits’ Ridgewood Ranch of racehorse Seabiscuit fame, one needs to travel 45 minutes through rugged Reeves Canyon, west of U.S. Highway 101 and Redwood Valley.
The reserve rents a refurbished barn, historic house and several other buildings to groups, but that was not Brovarney’s interest. In researching the archives of the Grace Hudson Museum, she found a photograph that kickstarted a cascade of serendipitous events, culminating in her 2022 book “Mendocino Refuge: Lake Leonard & Reeves Canyon.”
“I was curator at the Mendocino County Museum in Willits from ‘88 to ‘91, and then I moved on to the Grace Hudson Museum,” Brovarney, a Fort Bragg resident, says. “The collections there are incredible, the family records and artifacts are interconnected in a way that isn’t always the case in museum collections. I was flipping through a binder when I saw a photograph of Grace Hudson canoeing on a gorgeous lake.”
Brovarney said to a colleague, “Oh, John must have brought Grace on a little vacation to the Sierras.” The colleague laughed and said, “No, that photo was taken just up the road.”
It turned out that Grace Hudson’s uncle owned the lake. “He had staked a claim there when homesteading gave the settlers an opportunity to steal the land from the natives,” Brovarney says.
In “Mendocino Refuge,” Brovarney journeys through the human inhabitants over time. “And the Pomo are where you want to start,” she says.
She also covers the geologic factors that created the lake. “That there is a natural lake in the North Coast range is highly unusual. It’s Franciscan melange or complex, very crumbly, so it doesn’t hold water. It isn’t known how it happened, likely a landslide but why is speculative.”
Brovarney got to see Lake Leonard for herself in 2011, as part of a group paying to stay there. It’s considered one of the most pristine in California, and the unspoiled property has old growth redwoods, oaks and madrones.
“I am conflicted about the private ownership,” Brovarney admits, “but then I realize that the only way those trees are there is a succession of private owners who refused to allow logging. In fact, some of the owners increased the acreage until it is the present 4,000 acres.”
At that point, Brovarney was conducting tours at Ridgewood Ranch, which, during the days when Charles Howard of Seabiscuit fame owned it, stretched down to the creek that courses through Reeves Canyon.
“I was very familiar with the social and natural history of the area,” she says. “I started writing a book that married those two subjects. I wrote a couple chapters. A publisher in New York wanted it but told me to drop the environmental stuff. I wouldn’t do that.”
In 2013, a friend texted Brovarney to say that one of her friends found a trunk she thought might contain important documents.
“I drove to Nancy Hensley’s place in Hopland, and the trunk was incredible,” she says.
The trunk contained diaries and letters of Hazel Putnam, whose family lived in Reeves Canyon. Hazel’s father was a doctor, and the family ended up moving to the Bay Area, but they kept the property in the family.
“Hazel was born in 1899,” Brovarney says. “And she was good friends with a girl whose family owned the lake from the 1880s until they sold it in 1952. Una Boyle was older, born in 1890, but the two became great friends who spent their summers at the lake. I got more and more fascinated with Una, because Hazel moved to the Bay Area, but Una, who by then was about 30, decided to move up there from her family home in Marin and live on her own.”
Una Boyle raised sheep, and when Hazel would visit, the two would mount the horses and ride over to the coast.
“It was a magnificent sort of time,” Brovarney says. “The property is pretty high up, and even now it’s pretty wild. I thought that was incredibly courageous of her to live there on her own.”
Brovarney learned that Una often corresponded with a friend. She tracked down the friend’s nephew, who lived in Washington. “I have all my aunt’s correspondence in a box downstairs,” he reported, which he agreed to photocopy and send to Brovarney.
The aunt, Bea Howitt, first visited Lake Leonard when she was 13. She got on the train in Marin, where her family lived, and arrived at the Redwood Valley train station, where Una was waiting with a buckboard. Brovarney realized that the reason Howitt had saved the letters was that she intended to write a book herself. Her recounting of her age 13 visit was meant to be the introduction.
Later, Brovarney, during a writer’s residency in Washington, realized that she was in the vicinity of Howett’s nephew, whom she had not met in person.
“I thought I would go thank him,” she said. “Then out of the blue, he said, `Oh, I have Aunt Bea’s photo albums in the basement. We’re going to Italy for a month, so you could housesit and go through the albums.’”
Those photos were priceless, shots of an unspoiled landscape that amazingly is much the same now.
“Mendocin0 Ridge” contains 200 historic and present images.
“This has been a blessed project,” Brovarney said. “The universe provided big-time.”
Recently, the International Firebird Book Awards chose “Mendocino Refuge” as the top book in the category of Western nonfiction. It also earned first place awards in two design categories, one for its cover and the other for its interior.
“History is thought of as past and gone, but this environmental and social story brings it right up to today,” Brovarney sai. “We can be informed into the future by the past.”
“Mendocino Refuge” is sold in most Mendocino County bookstores and museum shops. A complete list is available at www.mendocinorefuge.com.