Martha Corrine Bennett Plaskett

Martha Coreen Bennett was born February 1, 1852, in Jackson, Mississippi, and came to California as a girl by the Isthmus of Panama — carried across on a porter’s back at fifteen, with her parents and sister, to a San Francisco still half a boom town.

She married Byron Gianavil Plaskett, eldest son of the valley’s founder, and came to Pacific Valley — a beautiful, empty place a very long way from Mississippi. She was eighteen. She told friends afterward that she cried every day for the family she had left, through those first months on the coast, with the fog coming in and no road out.

She stayed sixty years. She raised eleven children in the valley — Edward Abbott, Dudley, Wesley and the rest — in the sturdy two-story house Byron built to hold the coastal weather, and outlived him by decades. The homesick girl of 1870 became one of the mothers of the coast; her descendants number in the hundreds, and this site is largely their inheritance.