Little-known artist colony helps redefine preservation
High above the entrance to Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve in Guerneville, off a twisting road and through a gate that’s usually locked, stand Pond Farm’s two old houses and a stark wooden barn.
Between the barn and one decrepit house, long empty, there’s also a moss-blotted boulder topped by a formal bronze plaque: a memorial that reads in part “Marguerite Wildenhain ... Artist, potter, friend.”
The plaque hints at a slice of Northern California cultural history, in which a shortlived artist colony left behind
Anthony Veerkamp, National Trust for Historic Preservation
a determined ceramicist who shaped a legacy of her own in the decades that followed.
It’s the sort of place that until recently would have been torn down, consigned to memories. Instead, it’s a freshly preserved marker of how our region has and hasn’t changed — and how preservation itself is being redefined.
Work is nearly complete on a state-funded effort to waterproof and structurally upgrade the barn, which in the 1940s was remade as a studio. Next year there will be a full renovation of the modest guesthouse built by Wildenhain, who died in 1985 at
“Pond Farm is part of an evolution in how we’re thinking about historic significance.”
the age of 89. Not because it’s an architectural jewel, but to have an accessible space where artists can live and work at Pond Farm for months at a time.
“Pond Farm is part of an evolution in how we’re thinking about historic significance,” said Anthony Veerkamp, who heads the San Francisco office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “It’s important to make room for untold stories, underrepresented aspects of our past.”
Veerkamp is one of the people who have worked in recent years on Pond Farm’s behalf. First, to defend it. Then, in 2014, to get it listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Now, to find the money to bring it back to life.
Even in its present state, Pond Farm evokes the spirit of a woman who fled Germany and then the Netherlands to escape the Nazis, but never left behind her passion for turning clay into something more.
The light within the barn glows, thanks to intricate slats on several windows. The wooden pottery wheels within the gabled central space are immaculate though unrestored, a tribute to the fastidiousness with which Wildenhain conducted workshops from 1949 until 1980. Outside, painted ceramic shards line a fire pit and are embedded in walkways.
Wildenhain was the first female student at the Bauhaus, Germany’s legendary art school that opened in 1919. She went on to teach, marrying one of her students, and sailed solo from the Netherlands to New York in 1940. Her husband, unable to leave, was inducted into the German army.
By 1942 she was living in a tent beyond Guerneville, on land owned by architect Gordon Herr and his wife, Jane. The latter came from a wealthy San Francisco family and had purchased the former ranch with artists like Wildenhain in mind, imagining a creative refuge when World War II came to an end.
Gordon designed a singleroom cabin for Wildenhain, who built out the interior. After that she did what she needed to do, planting row crops and fruit trees, learning to fix roofs or piping that leaked. She added a room to the cabin when her husband made it out of Germany in 1947, a reunion that ended when he left in 1950.
By then other artists had arrived, living downhill closer to town. The colony flourished briefly but frayed due to bickering egos, a situation exacerbated by Jane Herr’s death of cancer in 1952. The only one who stayed was Wildenhain.
This is where the tale gains depth, and why Pond Farm lives on.
For most of the year she worked on her own, or traveled for lectures and exhibitions. But every summer she’d conduct two-month workshops for two dozen or so artists. The students had to be as committed as Wildenhain, heading uphill each day from Guerneville to be at Pond Farm by 8 a.m.
Four days a week they were at the pottery wheels. On Wednesdays they practiced drawing. Some days Wildenhain would talk philosophy under a peach tree near the barn, or ask a few students to her cabin for wine and sherry when the day’s session ended at 4 p.m.
All this should have ended in 1963, when the state used eminent domain to take the property of Wildenhain and others to create the Austin Creek State Recreation Area above Armstrong Redwoods. But she fought back, students wrote letters, and state parks officials agreed to allow her to stay on the land, paying rent.
The sessions continued, and Wildenhain’s stature in the pottery world grew, until she slowed down in her mid-80s.
After her 1985 death, “Pond Farm went into arrested decay,” Veerkamp said. “State parks had this property it didn’t yet think of as historic.”
Her students believed otherwise. They gathered annually to clean the property and do what repairs they could, all the while making the case to preservationists and local parks advocates that this humble homestead had lessons to teach.
“They convinced me pretty quickly that this was someplace special,” said Michele Luna, executive director of Stewards of the Coast and Redwoods, which partners with the state parks department in Sonoma County. “The thing that’s most inspiring is sitting in a room and listening to her students, their heartfelt emotion about Marguerite herself and what she gave to them as people.”
One visit was all it took to bring Veerkamp around. State parks officials were more skeptical, but Veerkamp and Luna say that once they signed on, they were committed.
The buildings are modest, no question. Wildenhain was never a household name. Yet the historic value is real.
Our best-known landmarks will always be the ones of undeniable significance and curb appeal, such as San Francisco City Hall. When we preserve Pond Farm, by contrast, we hold onto something more subtle.
“Marguerite’s life is part of a larger pattern,” Veerkamp suggested. “This area attracted folks who were looking for different lifestyles, a chance to escape the ills of civilization.”
It’s unique the way this urge played out above Guerneville, through one woman who defied Nazis and bureaucrats and the expectations of her time. But the underlying saga has been part of America from the start. Honoring that truth, in all its varied forms, can only help inspire new and unpredictable stories to come.