Remember When: March 25, 2009

Some of the earliest pioneers to arrive in Shasta County were George Wright and William Lansdale.

George Wright came to the Viola-Shingletown area in the mid-1870s and moved to the Balls Ferry area a few years later. George built a home on the hill above the present Balls Ferry Bridge and behind what was Balls Ferry Park.

His daughter Josephine taught school at the Parkville school. She married William Lansdale who worked for an Englishman by the name of Goodwin who had a hotel at Balls Ferry across from the store. William also became the postmaster in Balls Ferry. His mother worked summers for the Eldridges who owned another hotel there.

The Lansdales moved to a farm in Anderson that they purchased along Balls Ferry Road when their daughter Virginia was about four years old. Lansdale worked nights in Anderson and walked to work unless the weather was real disagreeable; then he would ride a horse.

In 1913, Lansdale built a house on East Center Street so that he would not have so far to walk to work and so Virginia could also walk to school.

The house is across the street from the Ferry Pharmacy building and is still quite attractive, especially with the special, large evergreen tree in the front yard. This is another of Anderson's grand old homes that has been lovingly preserved. Virginia married Joe Speer and together they resided in the home until their deaths.

When the Lansdales moved into the house, the town's streets were still unpaved, very dusty, and the horse-drawn water wagons would go up and down East Street trying to settle the dust. The streets were very wide as there were many ruts in the wintertime and the wagons tried to miss the worst ruts.

To add to the dust problems, large bands of sheep would come right down through the middle of town as they were taken to and from the mountains to their ranges in the Red Bluff area.

If there had not been a fence around the Lansdale's house, the sheep would have been right in the yard.