Sale to Hearst — The End of an Era
Ten dollars on paper for 1,523 acres: the 1922 deed to Hearst's agent that scattered the families and ended 53 Plaskett years in Pacific Valley.
By the 1920s the old pioneer ways were fading, and William Randolph Hearst was assembling his vast ranch holdings along the California coast.
In 1922 the deed was signed: Joseph K. Barbree, agent for Hearst — and himself a Plaskett relation by marriage — purchased the family’s 1,523.30 acres in Pacific Valley (Township 21 South, Range 6 East) for the recorded sum of ten dollars. The land William Lucas Plaskett had claimed in 1869 — defended from bears and outlaws, where his children were born and his wife grew old — passed out of the family, ending fifty-three years of Plaskett life in the valley.
The families scattered. Byron’s sturdy two-story, ten-room house was torn down, its lumber reused near the forestry headquarters. Edward and Mabel moved to Westlake, sold that home to Hearst too in 1925, and went on to the King City country; the Westlake house itself later fell to the Hunter Liggett takeover.
Mabel Plaskett watched it all with mixed emotions. The hard frontier life was ending — but so was something irreplaceable. She spent the rest of her life writing the stories down, determined that the Plaskett legacy would outlive the deed.