We took a beautiful drive from my sister’s house down Highway 160 yesterday.
What a gorgeous September day for a Sunday drive.
We were headed here, to the Grand Island Mansion to celebrate our birthdays (one day and seven years apart).
Grand Island Mansion was built by an orchard man named Louis W. Myers and his wife Henrietta Myers. They shipped pears from the L.W. Myers Landing on Steamboat Slough right across the road from the mansion that they broke ground on in 1917. It must have been a lucrative business. The landing is still there. As are lots of pear orchards in the area.
These days the mansion is used for weddings and private events and luckily for us – brunch on select Sundays. We had a lovely buffet brunch in the room you can see pictured on this page of the mansion’s website. Next time I would ask to be seated in the yellow room to your left as you enter the mansion and face the stairway. I really liked that room. Too bad I didn’t get a photo of it.
But the grounds stole the show on such a beautiful day anyway.
The mansion is located on the outskirts of Walnut Grove in Sacramento County in an area known as the Delta. I only discovered it the last time we drove up to visit my sister in July when I pulled out my phone to look up Walnut Grove as we drove by. There are lots of trees in the area so that’s why I found it intriguing and wanted to know more about it. Isn’t it funny how we drive on the same streets and highways time after time (even in our own towns or cities) and have no idea what’s beyond our peripheral vision of the road? I’d never heard of Grand Island Mansion before; what a fun discovery. And what a perfect place for creating a special birthday memory.
Notes:
You see a bit of conflicting information when you look up the history of the mansion. The mansion’s own website has information that differs from its brochure and I’ve seen newspaper articles that don’t seem to quite add up either. I think part of the problem stems from the fact that one of L.W. Myers’ sons took over operation of the business when L.W. passed away in his early fifties. The son’s name was Louis too. I’m guessing there’s been a tendency to mix up both the men and their wives and even the spelling of their names. For my money I’m going with this historical record from Sacramento County from 1923. You can find the same information here, along with an image of L.W. Myers on page 319.
My husband gave me a bit of a hard time when I confessed before our trip that I didn’t know what exactly “the Delta” was – he having grown up near the area and having spent some time there during his youth. My only childhood experience of the Delta was an ill-fated family houseboat vacation that I’m amazed we survived. I kept looking for Mount Shasta; no one had bothered to tell me that we ended up on the Delta instead of Lake Shasta which was the original plan I think. Then when I found gold, they explained it wasn’t real gold, but fool’s gold. Stress and disappointment.
Anyway, finding an American Planning Association article called The Devil Is In The Delta (what a great title!) makes me feel vindicated for my delta confusion. It turns out this delta isn’t really a delta, nor are the levees I thought we were driving on yesterday really levees or the islands really islands! You can learn all about that and more by reading the article, but click here for a more simple explanation of what is meant by “The Delta”.
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