The Jack London Village Project
In 1839 Mariano Vallejo built a saw mill, where Asbury Creek empties into Sonoma Creek. The mill still stands today, a half mile south of Glen Ellen on Arnold Drive, and is perhaps the oldest building in the region.
Throughout the years the village that grew around Vallejo’s mill has remained an icon of the Valley of the Moon, always reflecting the changing world— from the conversion of the saw mill into Joshua Chauvet’s grist mill and stage coach stop (where Jack London later spent many evenings drinking and playing poker), through its years as the Pagani Winery (surviving phylloxera and prohibition with yankee ingenuity), to its rebirth during the second half of the 20th Century as an colorful art and music center, to the highly respected fine food and wine destination it has become today.
With funding from a generous grant by the Sonoma County Landmarks Commission, we have developed a self-guided tour using QR codes to tell the story of Jack London Village, and the story of the people who helped build it.
By clicking on the links below you may read and hear what smartphones or similar devices access when they scan QR codes posted throughout the village.
Please bear in mind that these pages are not currently formatted for larger screens. If viewing on a tablet or computer, please resize your viewing window to see how the pages appear on the device they are intended for. Let us know how these work for you; feedback at this point is very helpful.
The Old Mill
From what we understand today, the mill at Jack London Village is just about the oldest building in the region. General Mariano Vallejo built it himself as a saw mill in 1839, soon after his arrival in Sonoma. At the time there was a great stand of redwood and Douglas fir at the confluence of the Asbury and Sonoma Creeks, and so it was an ideal source for the lumber that would be needed. After ten or fifteen years most of the trees had been harvested, so in 1856 Vallejo sold the mill to Joshua Chauvet.
Chauvet converted the old saw mill into a grist mill, using the grind stones his father had brought around the Horn from France. The two grind stones can still be seen resting by the front door of the mill. Farmers had begun settling the region, building fences and growing grain to be ground into flour, so Chauvet did quite well.
However, Joshua was French, and recognized how well suited the region was to viticulture. In 1880 he ran an ad in the Sonoma Index announcing that no more grain would be ground until after the grape harvest was in. The grist mill closed down soon afterwards, and was replaced by Chauvet’s winery, one of the first in the new wine country.
Barn
This old wooden building appears on the oldest maps of the area, and was probably built by Joshua Chauvet soon after he purchased Vallejo’s mill in 1856. He began using it as his winery in 1874. When Charles Pagani built his cement block winery next to it in 1943, he retained as much of the building as he could.
History continued to be made here. In the 1970s a state-of-the-art recording studio was constructed inside this building that was used extensively by musicians busy making names for themselves for 25 years or so, from Janis Joplin and Van Morrison through the heavy metal productions of Kirk Hammett (of Metallica) to the laid back country sounds of Norton Buffalo.
Freight Wagon
This cart is typical of the hand-pulled industrial wagons used during the 19th Century for transporting heavy items from one place to another. Joshua Chauvet used this wagon to move supplies and equipment about his winery, and, after building a bridge across Sonoma Creek, he used it to transport barrels of wine across the creek to trains waiting on the spur built there for him.
Mill Stones
When young Joshua arrived in San Francisco in 1850, he had thirteen copper sous in his pocket and dreams of gold on his mind. It had been a difficult sea-voyage of seven months around the Horn from Le Havre, and he was eager to get on to the motherlode to try his hand at mining.
A tough, demanding childhood had accustomed him to hard work, but that first season was, as it was for most, a miserable disappointment. The bread Joshua baked for the other miners, on the other hand, proved a far better return for his efforts. His first bakery was in Mokelumne Hill, and was a great success.
But flour was quickly increasing in cost to as much as $120 a barrel, while his bread only sold for $1 a pound; so Joshua sent for his father, François, a millwright and miller still living in France, asking him to bring two grindstones.
The two men wandered around the towns and cities of the region with these stones for another year or so, looking for a good place to set up their grist mill. They finally found it here in 1856, at the confluence of Asbury and Sonoma Creeks. It took eighteen months after that to get fully into operation, but happily their hard work met with eventual success.
Vertical Pump
We believe this piece of equipment represents the significant transition from the pioneers of the wine industry in the 19th Century to the commercial enterprise of wine making developing at the outset of the 20th Century.
This gear-driven vertical pump was apparently originally powered by steam, probably by one of the duplex piston steam pumps found elsewhere here in the Village. However, the plate welded at the front of the chassis indicates a later conversion to electricity, probably when Felice Pagani purchased the winery from Henry Chauvet in 1913.
As the mechanism worked, wine was driven by the pistons, found at the foot of the pump on each side, by the armatures as they rotated on the shaft at the top.
The Stone Cellar
In 1880 Joshua Chauvet ran an ad in the Sonoma Index announcing that no more grain will be ground at his mill until after the annual grape harvest was in, and the grist mill was closed down completely soon afterwards as he shifted his attention to winemaking.
That year he sold 20,000 gallons of wine, but before he could sell the remaining 100,000 gallons the upper floor of the old mill collapsed and the rest of his wine was lost in Sonoma Creek. This is why Chauvet built a three-story stone cellar the following year, producing 130,000 gallons of wine.
The building was constructed of local stone by Chinese labor, and was considered to be an architectural marvel that indicated what could be expected of the Sonoma Valley’s developing wine industry. The building remained an icon of the wine country landscape until 1983, when it collapsed.
Old De-stemmer Crusher
In 1875 Joshua Chauvet began using this destemmer-crusher to separate grapes from their stems, crushing them into a pulp to be pressed for the juice that would eventually ferment into wine.
As the grapes were brought in from the vineyard they would be poured into the top, dropping down to where they were beaten by rotating paddles and pulled from their stems.
Because the paddles are arranged along their axis in a spiral, the stems would be combed to one side while the macerated grapes fell forward down the chute in front into a waiting barrel.
Crude as this machine appears, destemmer-crushers like this are still in use in many wineries to this day.
Concrete Building
The Pagani family is largely responsible for bringing the wine industry into the Twentieth Century. In 1943 Charles Pagani built this new winery as a companion to Chauvet’s old stone cellar.
The design of this building represented a major advance in the wine industry, and included large concrete fermentation vats to replace the redwood tanks commonly in use at that time. These great chambers can be seen along the hallway inside, with portholes for cleaning the vats between uses.
Norma Pagani still recalls crawling through them as a young woman, to scrub and wash down the interior walls, making sure a candle remained burning nearby to indicate there was no carbon dioxide building up to displace oxygen; she enjoyed the sound of her voice resonating as she sang while she worked.
Jacuzzi Pump
The seven Jacuzzi brothers came from Italy to California in the early 1900s. All engineers, they designed a unique propeller known as the “Jacuzzi toothpick”— which revolutionized the young aircraft industry— and created an aircraft manufacturing company in Berkeley called “Jacuzzi Brothers”, which remained in business until 1976—though their product line changed dramatically over the years.
When Giocondo Jacuzzi died in 1921 in an airplane accident between Yosemite and San Francisco, their mother told her sons to work on something more down to earth, and so the Jacuzzi Brothers family firm adapted their propeller design to hydraulic pumps, and they quickly became one of the world leaders in the engineering and production of agricultural pumps used for wells and irrigation, This original Jacuzzi pump, one of their first designs, was installed by Charles Pagani (during Prohibition), soon after the Jacuzzi Brothers established their family business designing agricultural hydraulic pumps.
In 1948, Candido Jacuzzi used the company’s expertise in pumps to develop a submersible bathtub pump for his son, Kenneth, who had developed rheumatoid arthritis and suffered from chronic pain. He realized that their agricultural water pumps could be adapted to give his son soothing whirlpool treatments in the tub at home. This was the origin of the celebrated “Jacuzzi”. which led to an invention that remains an iconic fixture in American homes today.
Pistons
Equipment from the entire industrial revolution can be found here in Jack London Village, from the water wheel of the mill to electricity. Chauvet introduced steam power during the 1880s, using these duplex piston steam pumps.
They were driven by steam that was generated in a boiler which may have been a retired railroad locomotive; it can still be found in the basement of the old mill. While the firebox shows that the boiler was first heated with wood or coal fires, it was converted to gas at a later date.
A contemporary writer described Chauvet’s operation this way: “The stemmer, crusher and press which are run by water-power drawn from a reservoir at an elevation of 150 feet above the building, can crush 60 tons of grapes a day. The elevators, pumps, distillery, etc., are run by steam.”
The stamping on these pumps read “Built by Henry Worthington/New York U.S.A.” Worthington was a mechanical engineer whose several inventions led to the perfection of the direct steam pump that was widely adopted. In the duplex system, one engine actuated the steam valves of the other, and a pause of the pistons at the end of the stroke permitted the water-valves to seat themselves quietly, preserving a uniform water pressure. This distinct improvement on the engines in use at the time embodied one of the most ingenious advances in engineering in the nineteenth century.
Railway Truck
This 19th Century handcart— the original station wagon— was used to move smaller merchandise around the Northwestern Pacific Railroad Station up in Glen Ellen.
The hand-forged chassis— wheels, tongue and undercarriage assembly— are original, but the wooden bed was reconstructed by Marge Everidge from timber recycled from the original footbridge that had spanned Asbury Creek here at Jack London Village, near the mill wheel. That old bridge was replaced in 1970 by another, and then another this past year.
Handcarts like this transported merchandise unloaded from the trains as they came into Glen Ellen, and eventually brought out the produce we sent back out into the world as our wines became known internationally.
The Tower
It’s not yet certain when this structure was first built, sometime during the early Twentieth Century. It was originally designed as a bin— set onto great 6 inch by 6 inch stilts— for holding the stems, leaves and pomace (or pulp) that necessarily accumulated throughout the winemaking crush— all bi-products in the production of wine.
If you stand to one side you can see the slanted floor of the bin overhead, and at the front two hatch doors can be seen. After the harvest is in and the crush is done, the hatch doors would be opened and the contents released into wagons waiting below, and they would then be carried back into the vineyard to be used as mulch.
After Charles Beardsley had purchased the Village from the Pagani family in 1969, a cabin was built into the base of this structure, with windows to provide a studio and gallery for a local stained glass artist. Over the half century since then it has been a studio for many creative people, including weavers, potters, sculptors, collage artists, writers, and scholars.
New De-stemmer Crusher
The destemmer-crusher is to this day an essential machine in winemaking. It separates the grapes from their stems while macerating them into a pulp that is then pressed and fermented into wine. This one was probably put to use by the Pagani family early in the 20th Century, replacing Chauvet’s original wooden destemmer-crusher which may be seen nearby.
As grapes were crushed in this machine for making wine, the stems and leaves would be combed aside by paddles arranged in a spiral along their axis, and out the end into small bins for removal. Meanwhile the broken grapes would fall through the holes of an interior colander into the two piston pump that can be seen underneath the main frame of the destemmer-crusher, which further macerated the grapes and sent the resulting pulp on towards fermenting vats.
The entire operation was driven by a series of gears from a belt-driven flywheel, probably powered by a large electric motor. Equipment much like this can still be found in use in wineries today.
Electric Motor
This industrial-strength motor was made by Sterling Electric Motors during the 1930s, and is wired for 440 as well as 220 volts. It was installed during the 1930s by Charles Pagani as part of the continued modernization of his winery. Inside the large housing is a complex gear drive that reduces the mechanical energy generated to an appropriate output for operating equipment. The gearbox is also known as an epicyclic gear train, one that consists of one or more outer gears rotating around a central gear, so it’s also known as a planetary gear train.
Layshaft
A layshaft like this in a waterwheel driven mill is the very important horizontal driveshaft that delivers the energy generated by the turning waterwheel. It gears up the velocity by means of a series of two variously sized flat belt pulleys, which can be seen towards the end of the shaft.
This shaft was probably the one used by Joshua Chauvet in his grist mill early on, later adapting it to drive his wooden destemmer-crusher and wine presses when he began producing wine in 1875.
In 1889 a contemporary writer described Chauvet’s operation in this way: “The stemmer, crusher and press which are run by water-power drawn from a reservoir at an elevation of 150 feet above the building, can crush 60 tons of grapes a day.”
Wine Pump
This portable electric pump dates from many decades ago, when the wine industry was becoming increasingly industrialized after the Volstead Act was repealed in 1933, bringing fifteen years of the Prohibition finally to an end.
Equipment was getting smaller and increasingly efficient at this point, and cellars were becoming more active as the blending of wines became more common. This required pumping them from barrel to barrel frequently.
The pump is mounted on a cart so it could be easily moved about the wine cellar, with an electric motor that drove the pump by means of a flat belt. Equipment like this is still in use in wineries today.
Still
After establishing his winery in 1875, Joshua Chauvet brought this state-of-the-art still around the Horn from his native France in 1885, and soon began producing prize-winning brandies and fortified wines. It remained in continuous use by the Pagani family after they purchased the winery in 1913 through the first half of the 20th Century— even through Prohibition, it seems, by special permission— until the old winery finally closed down upon Charles Pagani’s death in 1954. When Charles Beardsley purchased the property in 1969 the Feds immediately showed up to drill holes in the old still, ensuring that it did not go back into use.
The remarkable improvement of M. Egrot’s distilling apparatus over previous designs was described at length in the November 19th, 1892 edition of Scientific American. We are told “The Egrot distilling apparatus consists of an alembic, of a wine heater, and of a condenser. The alembic [at the foot of the apparatus] is of small dimension as compared with the column which it serves to support. The distilling column, which is five parts, supports another column of smaller diameter [at the top], which contains a certain number of rectifying shelves.”
From here a tube called a “worm” would lead from the top to another called a “swan’s neck”, which emptied in turn into a collector where the evaporated and refined alcohol would then be cooled in a collector as a distillate known as brandy.