On a recent Monday afternoon, I showed up at a local West County residence with a promising lead on a story.
Rumor had it that the barn contained antiquated, steampunk-ish machinery once used to run an apple-processing warehouse. On the phone, Jeff Hergenrather, 74, owner of the farmstead, had told me, “Well, you might not get what you’re expecting. You be the judge.” He was right. I got more than I anticipated. And no, this is not really a story about a vintage apple warehouse. It’s a story about a family and an old farm and how to live a full life.
The short of it is, Starr, 72, and Jeff Hergenrather’s life in Sebastopol began in 1985, when they bought 21 acres of legacy apple orchard off a woman named Doris Kennedy. Doris Kennedy was the second wife of George Kennedy, who had purchased the original 42 acres with his first wife in 1906 in order to flee the immediate aftermath of the Great San Francisco Earthquake. George Kennedy planted a Gravenstein apple orchard and built a house and packing warehouse on the land, and farmed the property, using horses, for many years.
By the time the Hergenrathers purchased their half of the original acreage, in 1985, the apple trees came right up to the wall of the house. The horses had long since been replaced by a tractor, the apple-packing warehouse was in a state of disuse and the orchard was in decline. There was much work to be done to repair and revitalize the property.
The Hergenrathers’ route to Sebastopol was more circuitous than that of the Kennedys, however. In the late ’60s, while an undergrad at Cal Berkeley, Jeff Hergenrather began attending Stephen Gaskin’s Monday Night Class in San Francisco. Gaskin, a writing teacher at San Francisco State College, was hosting popular open discussions in which he talked about his psychedelic experiences, philosophy and ecological awareness. He quickly became known as San Francisco’s “acid guru” and drew a following of approximately 1,500 hippies.
Jeff Hergenrather graduated Cal in 1970 and within a year began attending Brown University, where he received medical training. In the meantime, Gaskin led his flock of followers around the United States in a large caravan of converted school buses, searching for the Promised Land. They found it in Summertown, TN, where in 1971 they purchased 1,750 acres and founded an intentional community called the Farm.
Starr and Jeff Hergenrather were married in 1972, and Jeff Hergenrather finished medical school at Brown in 1975. “We lived on the Farm from March 1977 until June 1982,” Jeff Hergenrather said. “Starr and I arrived in our 1960, 60-passenger school bus with our three young children, Sam, Nell and Harry, pregnant with our fourth child. Oliver Milo was born on the Farm on Oct. 29, 1977.”
On the Farm, he became the in-house doctor, while she ran the arts program. The experience was instrumental in both of their later careers. “That’s where I really learned a lot about cannabis,” Jeff Hergenrather said. “Not that I wasn’t pro-cannabis before and recognized its uses, but as the Farm community came to me and said, ‘This is working for my seizures,’ ‘this is working for my auto-immune disease,’ ‘this is working for my pain, my depression, my anxiety,’ and on and on and on and on and on, all these things we’ve [now] come to understand about cannabis was in my training.”
By the time the Hergenrathers arrived in Sebastopol in ’85, he was a practicing doctor. Soon after, she began teaching locally. She ended up teaching theater at Brookhaven for 11 years and at Analy for 16. He is still a practicing physician, a specialist in cannabis for the past 22 years. “These days, with legal adult use, it’s the youth and the elderly who need guidance; everyone else goes to dispensaries and figures it out for themselves,” he said.
In spite of their professional lives and the needs of their farm, in 1988 the Hergenrathers found time to embark, with their children, upon an extensive, around-the-world travel adventure. They flew to Europe, where in Germany they purchased a converted camper van, which they then proceeded to drive around Western and Eastern Europe.
“It was quite an experience to travel in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries,” Jeff Hergenrather said. “We left the van with friends in Germany when we flew on to Egypt, Kenya and Tanzania. From there, we went on to Pakistan, India and China. We crossed the old Silk Route into Western China. After several weeks in China, we went on to Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong before making our way back home after 14 months of travel.”
One of the highlights of their trip was visiting the Dalai Lama at his home in the Namgyal Monastery, in Dharamsala, India, where the Hergenrathers presented His Holiness with a gift of a radiation detector that they had made themselves before leaving Sebastopol.
The Hergenrathers’ tenure in Sebastopol has been characterized by endless improvement of their property. Upon arriving, they promptly split the old apple-packing warehouse into a dance studio, for her, and a workshop and storage area, for him. Later, they added a back patio to the house and expanded the driveway into a wraparound with two entrances. At one point, they repaired a dilapidated horse barn with salvaged lumber. In addition, new water tanks were added and the pump upgraded.
“The Gravenstein apples are still being farmed into an organic program, even as the orchard has dwindled to just a few hundred trees,” Jeff Hergenrather told me. In addition, a robust olive grove produces organic olive oil that is processed at a local press. Ten years ago, he planted a row of redwoods along one edge of the farm. They now stand 30 feet tall. The farmstead also now boasts an extensive solar array.
“Our PV solar power system was initially installed in the fall of 2004,” Jeff Hergenrather said. “We’ve been ‘grid-tied’ to PG&E since then. The array now has 72 PV panels. I’m not sure about the total energy production, but it is somewhere near an 8 KW system. The solar array covers all of our needs at this time. We have two homes, shops and a well, and two all-electric cars. Some months, we get a check from the power company when we produce more than our needs.”
The next stop for the Hergenrathers? Hawaii, of course. Twenty-five years ago, they purchased four raw acres on Maui. Five years later, they salvaged the gymnasium floor from Brookhaven Junior High, which is now sorted and packed into a 40-foot shipping container along with windows, doors and sheetrock salvaged from Jeff Hergenrather’s parents’ house during a remodel. He has collected additional recycled lumber and plans to procure more wood from Sebastopol local Marc Lepp, who runs his own mill.
“I’m going to drive around and look at the logs he’s pointed out to me, and try to load them and get them to [the] mill, and then we’ll start milling up the [Douglas] fir for the first and second floor,” Jeff Hergenrather said. Soon his home-in-a-box kit will be complete, and he’ll ship it to Maui, where he and his wife will build it on site.
And what about that vintage, steampunk-esque machinery in the Hergenrathers’ old packing shed that initially drew me into writing this article? It’s there, and I saw it. Beautiful, belt-powered, hand-crank machines like those aren’t made anymore, and never will be again. No matter, though, because the 100-plus-year-old drill presses and mills are sure to last a thousand more. But take it from me, no matter how cool they seem, they’re only part of the mosaic of interesting things to be found at the Hergenrather Farmstead.
www.drjeffhergenrather.com
On a recent Monday afternoon, I showed up at a local West County residence with a promising lead on a story.
Rumor had it that the barn contained antiquated, steampunk-ish machinery once used to run an apple-processing warehouse. On the phone, Jeff Hergenrather, 74, owner of the farmstead, had told me, “Well, you might not get what you’re expecting. You be the judge.” He was right. I got more than I anticipated. And no, this is not really a story about a vintage apple warehouse. It’s a story about a family and an old farm and how to live a full life.
The short of it is, Starr, 72, and Jeff Hergenrather’s life in Sebastopol began in 1985, when they bought 21 acres of legacy apple orchard off a woman named Doris Kennedy. Doris Kennedy was the second wife of George Kennedy, who had purchased the original 42 acres with his first wife in 1906 in order to flee the immediate aftermath of the Great San Francisco Earthquake. George Kennedy planted a Gravenstein apple orchard and built a house and packing warehouse on the land, and farmed the property, using horses, for many years.
By the time the Hergenrathers purchased their half of the original acreage, in 1985, the apple trees came right up to the wall of the house. The horses had long since been replaced by a tractor, the apple-packing warehouse was in a state of disuse and the orchard was in decline. There was much work to be done to repair and revitalize the property.
The Hergenrathers’ route to Sebastopol was more circuitous than that of the Kennedys, however. In the late ’60s, while an undergrad at Cal Berkeley, Jeff Hergenrather began attending Stephen Gaskin’s Monday Night Class in San Francisco. Gaskin, a writing teacher at San Francisco State College, was hosting popular open discussions in which he talked about his psychedelic experiences, philosophy and ecological awareness. He quickly became known as San Francisco’s “acid guru” and drew a following of approximately 1,500 hippies.
Jeff Hergenrather graduated Cal in 1970 and within a year began attending Brown University, where he received medical training. In the meantime, Gaskin led his flock of followers around the United States in a large caravan of converted school buses, searching for the Promised Land. They found it in Summertown, TN, where in 1971 they purchased 1,750 acres and founded an intentional community called the Farm.
Starr and Jeff Hergenrather were married in 1972, and Jeff Hergenrather finished medical school at Brown in 1975. “We lived on the Farm from March 1977 until June 1982,” Jeff Hergenrather said. “Starr and I arrived in our 1960, 60-passenger school bus with our three young children, Sam, Nell and Harry, pregnant with our fourth child. Oliver Milo was born on the Farm on Oct. 29, 1977.”
On the Farm, he became the in-house doctor, while she ran the arts program. The experience was instrumental in both of their later careers. “That’s where I really learned a lot about cannabis,” Jeff Hergenrather said. “Not that I wasn’t pro-cannabis before and recognized its uses, but as the Farm community came to me and said, ‘This is working for my seizures,’ ‘this is working for my auto-immune disease,’ ‘this is working for my pain, my depression, my anxiety,’ and on and on and on and on and on, all these things we’ve [now] come to understand about cannabis was in my training.”
By the time the Hergenrathers arrived in Sebastopol in ’85, he was a practicing doctor. Soon after, she began teaching locally. She ended up teaching theater at Brookhaven for 11 years and at Analy for 16. He is still a practicing physician, a specialist in cannabis for the past 22 years. “These days, with legal adult use, it’s the youth and the elderly who need guidance; everyone else goes to dispensaries and figures it out for themselves,” he said.
In spite of their professional lives and the needs of their farm, in 1988 the Hergenrathers found time to embark, with their children, upon an extensive, around-the-world travel adventure. They flew to Europe, where in Germany they purchased a converted camper van, which they then proceeded to drive around Western and Eastern Europe.
“It was quite an experience to travel in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries,” Jeff Hergenrather said. “We left the van with friends in Germany when we flew on to Egypt, Kenya and Tanzania. From there, we went on to Pakistan, India and China. We crossed the old Silk Route into Western China. After several weeks in China, we went on to Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong before making our way back home after 14 months of travel.”
One of the highlights of their trip was visiting the Dalai Lama at his home in the Namgyal Monastery, in Dharamsala, India, where the Hergenrathers presented His Holiness with a gift of a radiation detector that they had made themselves before leaving Sebastopol.
The Hergenrathers’ tenure in Sebastopol has been characterized by endless improvement of their property. Upon arriving, they promptly split the old apple-packing warehouse into a dance studio, for her, and a workshop and storage area, for him. Later, they added a back patio to the house and expanded the driveway into a wraparound with two entrances. At one point, they repaired a dilapidated horse barn with salvaged lumber. In addition, new water tanks were added and the pump upgraded.
“The Gravenstein apples are still being farmed into an organic program, even as the orchard has dwindled to just a few hundred trees,” Jeff Hergenrather told me. In addition, a robust olive grove produces organic olive oil that is processed at a local press. Ten years ago, he planted a row of redwoods along one edge of the farm. They now stand 30 feet tall. The farmstead also now boasts an extensive solar array.
“Our PV solar power system was initially installed in the fall of 2004,” Jeff Hergenrather said. “We’ve been ‘grid-tied’ to PG&E since then. The array now has 72 PV panels. I’m not sure about the total energy production, but it is somewhere near an 8 KW system. The solar array covers all of our needs at this time. We have two homes, shops and a well, and two all-electric cars. Some months, we get a check from the power company when we produce more than our needs.”
The next stop for the Hergenrathers? Hawaii, of course. Twenty-five years ago, they purchased four raw acres on Maui. Five years later, they salvaged the gymnasium floor from Brookhaven Junior High, which is now sorted and packed into a 40-foot shipping container along with windows, doors and sheetrock salvaged from Jeff Hergenrather’s parents’ house during a remodel. He has collected additional recycled lumber and plans to procure more wood from Sebastopol local Marc Lepp, who runs his own mill.
“I’m going to drive around and look at the logs he’s pointed out to me, and try to load them and get them to [the] mill, and then we’ll start milling up the [Douglas] fir for the first and second floor,” Jeff Hergenrather said. Soon his home-in-a-box kit will be complete, and he’ll ship it to Maui, where he and his wife will build it on site.
And what about that vintage, steampunk-esque machinery in the Hergenrathers’ old packing shed that initially drew me into writing this article? It’s there, and I saw it. Beautiful, belt-powered, hand-crank machines like those aren’t made anymore, and never will be again. No matter, though, because the 100-plus-year-old drill presses and mills are sure to last a thousand more. But take it from me, no matter how cool they seem, they’re only part of the mosaic of interesting things to be found at the Hergenrather Farmstead.
www.drjeffhergenrather.com
