Mrs. Brown and Red Bluff Part 4

Continued from Part 3

After leaving upstate New York with some of her 13 children, Mary Brown settled in Red Bluff in 1864. Faced with resentful transplanted Southerners and vicious attacks by one of three local newspapers, Mrs. Brown and her family managed to thrive. Helped by a generous fund raising campaign that snowballed across the northstate, she secured a home for herself and her children. Soon after settling in, though, trouble appeared.

On Valentine’s Day, 1866, barely a month after the Browns moved in, Mrs. Amanda Hoag filed a lawsuit, claiming the property where the house stood had been given to her as a gift. And who was her attorney? None other than her brother,
J. Granville Doll the real estate baron-turned-lawyer.

Now the plot thickens. When the judge began considering the lawsuit, he uncovered a question as to the ownership of the land where Red Bluff was standing! It all came back to 1850, when California became a state without the requisite land survey to determine boundaries. So, even though the townspeople had incorporated, they still could lose everything they thought they owned!

The judge in the case, Judge Warren Earl, then took an unusual step. To protect the town and land from any other claims, he bought the entire 297.38 acres of Red Bluff in the court’s name. The land was to be held in trust by the court until the legitimacy of the town’s existence was resolved.

Now Judge Earl was also the judge in the Mary Brown–Amanda Hoag lawsuit. As he now owned all the actual land in question, he then resolved the suit in Mrs. Brown’s favor!

But that’s not the end of the story. The U.S. Secretary of the Interior issued a ruling confirming Red Bluff’s legitimacy. Even the state legislature got into the act. More than two years after the original lawsuit against Mrs. Brown began, the California Legislature passed an act on March 6, 1868 authorizing the county judge, Judge Charles Brainard, to begin distributing titles to people that had already filed claims or were living on property in and around Red Bluff.

Mrs. Brown finally received the title to her house she’d moved into more than two years before, on July 6, 1868.

As a side note, the land bought by Judge Earl remained in the county court’s hands for years. Even today there are disputes as to where exact boundaries lay – be they alleyways, right-of-ways, etc. All this goes back to poor widow Brown.

Bowing to continued ill-will and threats, after only six years Mrs. Brown and her children moved on. But the small one-story house still stands. It’s almost been torn down twice, due to disrepair. It’s been occupied almost continuously since Mrs. Brown lived there. But the house has been moved south - one block west on Main, just south of Willow. It’s still on one of the original 4 lots, and rooms have been added on.

There’s still no plaque there to tell that the house holds a pivotal place in Red Bluff’s history. For if not for Mrs. Brown, the town just might not be here today!