PLACERVILLE, Calif. There is a relative calmness in these El Dorado
Hills. It is far removed from the pandemonium of the Gold Rush that swamped the
area a century and-a-half earlier, and a world away from the daily hustle and
bustle of San Francisco’s Japantown.
Yet don’t let the lush rural surroundings and lack of chain stores fool you. Nestled between Placerville and Coloma the latter town just two miles north where gold was discovered by John Marshall in 1849 is a plot of land that has been referred to as the Japanese American Plymouth Rock. A literal gold mine of Japanese American history.
Next to the Gold Trail Elementary School lies the former site of the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Colony, which although it lasted for only two years remains the first sizeable settlement of Japanese immigrants in the United States. For Japanese Americans, this is our Jamestown.
Not much is left to remind visitors of the nearly lost legacy of the colony, which arrived in the area in 1869. The only “living” remnant is a keaki tree planted during that era. The Graner home built in 1852 still stands in desperate need of restoration.
However, the most emotional and visible reminder of that bygone era is the grave of a young Japanese woman who embodies the immigrant spirit, who left her native land in Wakamatsu, in present-day Fukushima Prefecture, to follow her own dreams.
A public-private partnership has been launched to help preserve the history of the colony, as well as another local pioneer family, in the hopes to teach future generations about the immigrant legacy while highlighting Japanese contributions to agriculture.
On April 21, more than 100 people gathered at the site to officially launch the Gold Hill-Wakamatsu Project.
Forgotten History
Katamori Matsudaira, lord of Northern Japan’s Aizu domain, surrendered to imperial troops in late 1868 after a bloody battle.
John Henry Schnell, a weapons trader who had a relationship with Matsudaira, was granted permission by the fallen lord to take a group of 22 Japanese from Wakamatsu to Gold Hill in El Dorado County, Calif.
Schnell, who was allowed to marry a samurai’s daughter, left with the group aboard the Pacific Clipper China from Yokohama, arriving in San Francisco in May of 1869. The group traveled by boat to Sacramento, and then hired wagons to reach Placerville sometime between June 6 and 8, 1869.
Schnell purchased 160 acres of land in Gold Hill from Charles M. Graner for $5,000, with the hopes of setting up a farm producing tea and silk. The colonists brought with them mulberry trees, Japanese bamboo, wax trees and tea seeds, among other agricultural products from their native country.
The venture seemingly had initial success, as reported by an article in the San Francisco Call in 1870:
“Herr Schnell of the Japanese Colony in Gold Hill, El Dorado County, makes a fine display of Japanese plants, grown from imported shrubs and seeds. Amongst his articles are fine healthy tea plants, which were planted on March 14, 1870 last. These plants are about four inches high and are vigorous and healthy. He also exhibited samples of rice plants and a specimen of the Japanese pepper tree.”
The colony is said to have initially prospered with the planting of some 50,000 mulberry trees for silkworm farming, 140,000 tea plants and large quantities of bamboo roots for food, building and crafts.
Any fortunes that the colonists saw, however, was short-lived. California’s climate was very dry in comparison to Japan’s, and there was an 1871 drought that exacerbated the water shortage after miners dammed up a nearby creek.
Adding greatly to the demise of the colony was the fact that Schnell ran out of money.
Taking his wife and two children, Schnell left the colony in May of 1871 and never returned. The colony scattered, and only the fates of three colonists are known.
Upon the breakup of the colony, 20-year-old carpenter Kuninosuke Masumizu went to Sacramento and married the daughter of a Blackfoot Indian woman and her husband, a freed slave. He later worked as a fisherman and a farmer, and sometimes as a court interpreter because he spoke English, Spanish and Japanese.
Masumizu died in 1915 at the age of 65, and is buried in Colusa, Calif. The only known descendants of the Wakamatsu Colony are of Masumizu’s lineage, who live in the Sacramento area.
After the dissolution of the colony Matsunosuke Sakurai, believed to be a samurai in Wakamatsu, and a young girl named Okei lived with the family of Francis Veerkamp. Veerkamp acquired the property from El Dorado County after Schnell fled.
Sakurai worked for the Veerkamps, staying with them until his death in 1901. He is said to be buried at a cemetery in nearby Coloma.
Okei-san
No Wakamatsu-related story, perhaps, captures the imagination and spirit of the immigrant dream than that of Okei, who embarked from her home country at age 17 and became a nursemaid to Mrs. Schnell and the two Schnell children, Frances and Mary.
She died in 1871 at the age of 19, believed to be the first Japanese to die on American soil.
According to the late attorney and Sacramento Japanese American community leader Henry Taketa, the colony “passed into oblivion and its very existence was lost and forgotten until after World War I.” With rumors swirling about a Japanese girl who died during the Gold Rush period, a search was undertaken by some Sacramentans around 1924.
The first person they interviewed was 75-year-old Henry Veerkamp, son of the pioneer settlers who befriended and gave shelter and employment to Sakurai and Okei.
“He pointed out the site of the settlement and the location of Okei’s
grave,” wrote Taketa in the March 1992 edition of the California Historian.
“Thus the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony was rediscovered.”
Veerkamp, who was one year older than Okei, is said to have vividly recalled the struggles of the Wakamatsu Colony.
Since the grave’s discovery, Taketa wrote, “Okei has been spiritually enshrined in the hearts and minds of many Japanese who, like Okei, came to the new world in their youth with not much more than hopes and dreams but, unlike Okei, through sweat and toil saw their dreams come true.”
According to legend, Okei was buried on the knoll of a hill which she frequently climbed to watch the setting sun and gaze in the direction of her distant homeland. On a plateau of the mountain overlooking the city of Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, a memorial was dedicated in 1957 to Okei and the other Wakamatsu Colony pioneers including a replica of Okei’s gravestone at Gold Hill, Calif.
Lesson for Future Generations
California State University, Sacramento ethnic studies Professor Wayne Maeda, who wrote a book on the history of Japanese Americans in the Sacramento region, notes the site is important “because it represents the adventurous spirit of the Issei generation...to risk all in a new and unknown land to seek their dreams...dreams of riches, dreams of a new place, dreams of starting anew.”
The site, Maeda adds, “represents the dreams that many others who followed later brought with them,” and also “the pioneering families like Veerkamps who had their own dreams of settling the land.”
“The third generation and fourth generation don’t understand was the Issei went through,” said Jean Yego, a Nisei whose father Soichi Nakatani made well over 100 visits to the Okei gravesite to clean the grave or introduce it to visitors from Japan likely beginning in the 1920s.
“My father used to come here all the time,” said Yego, who accompanied him on many such visits.
Part of her father’s prized possessions was the book “Meiji Kensetsu” (“Meiji Reconstruction”), a book written by Waseda University Professor Tsuyoshi Kimura in the 1930s. Kimura heard about the Wakamatsu Colony and Okei from the pages of the San Francisco-based Nichi Bei Shimbun, which was sent to Japan. Apparently fascinated by the story, Kimura’s volume was mostly written on Okei and the colony.
Beyond it representing the first sizeable settlement of Japanese in this country, there are a number of “firsts” associated with the Wakamatsu legacy, Maeda said. This included the first multi-racial Nisei born on the mainland the Schnell’s daughter Mary the first Issei woman to die in America and the first Japanese to marry an African American woman when Kuninosuke Masumizu wed Carrie Wilson.
“I think they were in general a metaphor for those who followed in greater numbers beginning in the late 1880s,” Maeda said.
Family Decides to Sell
After Henry Veerkamp died, his son Malcolm
(pictured left) became owner of the property. Over
the years the family let visitors have access to the grave. But after
Malcolm’s death in 1999, his widow Helen was less welcoming, locking the
entrance to the graveyard.
“Our mom had some issues,” admits son Gary Veerkamp. “The war was raw to her, so she took it personally. All Japanese were ‘bad.’”
When Helen Veerkamp passed away in 2004, siblings Evelyn, Phil and Gary started thinking of what to do with the property.
Selling the property in the hopes that it could be restored felt like “the right thing to do,” said Gary Veerkamp, 56. “I do think that mom and dad would be happy.
“We wanted to preserve the Japanese heritage and the agricultural heritage,” he added. “Deep down, none of us wanted to turn this into a housing development.”
“It’s especially hard for me to let go (of the land),” said Phil Veerkamp, 62. “But I’m getting around to it.”
He said the resurrection of the colony would give “a certain amount of redemption for past insults…and denied access.”
$4.6 Million Needed
A $4.6 million fundraising campaign is underway to acquire the Gold Hill Ranch and the site of the first Japanese colony in North America.
Titled “The Gold Hill Wakamatsu Project,” the effort hopes to raise enough funds to purchase the 303-acre site from the Veerkamp family in a “first step” in the restoration of the property.
The effort is a working partnership between the Florin and Placer chapters of the Japanese American Citizens League, the Fukushima Kenjin Kai, the California Department of Parks and Recreation, and the American River Conservancy.
The group applied to the California Cultural and Historical Endowment for a grant that, if awarded, could secure half of the funds.
“It is our vision to resurrect the Wakamatsu Colony as a State Historical Park and an interpretive facility that pays tribute to these first colonists and to the contributions that Japanese Americans have made to the State of California,” said a statement on the ARC Website.
Major components of the restoration efforts include the original farm structures, a small theater and museum to interpret the immigrant experience, and the recreation of the Wakamatsu farm as a “living history facility” featuring the historic introduction of silk making, tea products, rice culture, paper making and bamboo crafts by the Japanese to California.
It will also tell the story of the Veerkamp family, who are early pioneers in El Dorado County, and who befriended and assisted the Japanese colonists and farmed the same ground.
American River Conservancy Executive Director Alan Ehrgott said that for the project to succeed, there would have to be a “political will” at the state level.
Speaking in support of the project at the April 21 event was state Assemblyman Alan Nakanishi (R-Lodi), who recalled visiting the site as a little boy with his father.
“It’s a place that deserves to be preserved,” said Nakanishi, who said that he could write letters to key individuals, encouraging their support. “(The Issei) came because they wanted to find a better place for their children and grandchildren.”
Deputy Consul General of Japan in San Francisco Kazuyoshi Yamaguchi said the Japanese Consulate would “fully endorse” the project, encouraging support of the group’s preservation efforts.
“It’s a vision at this point,” said Ehrgott, “one we hope would get some traction.”
The Veerkamp family has given the ARC until Nov. 30, 2007 to close escrow.
“It’s going to require a lot of help,” said Ehrgott, who is co-chairing the project along with Fred Kochi of Sunnyvale, Calif.
Despite his optimism, Phil Veerkamp said there “are no guarantees” that in the end the project will be successful.
“I’m begging for the support of the community on the local, state and international level,” he said.
“I personally feel that it will happen,” said brother Gary.
###
(The following was a slightly modified story that originally appeared in the April 26 to May 2, 2007 edition of the Nichi Bei Times Weekly)
By KENJI G. TAGUMA
Nichi Bei Times
For more information about the Gold Hill Wakamatsu Project,
contact Rene Hamlin or Alan Ehrgott at (530) 621-1224 or e-mail wakamatsu -at-
arconservancy -dot- org. Contributions can be sent to: American River
Conservancy, P.O. Box 562, Coloma, California 95613. Donation checks should
reference “ARC Gold Hill Wakamatsu Project.” Donations can also be made on
the ARC Website, www.arconservancy.org .
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