Dixon Then and Now: Maine Prairie, Slowly Abandoned

In my last column I talked about how the town of Maine Prairie came about because of its importance as a major grain-shipping port. Now I’ll describe how the town went downhill.

Boom-and-bust places that become ghost towns have a romantic draw. The buildings in many of them still survive and are nostalgic tourist attractions. For example, last year I visited the town of Austin, Nevada, a former silver-mining area. At its height it had 10,000 residents. Now it survives with around 300 people only because it’s along Hwy. 50. The final straw was when it lost its county-seat status to Battle Mountain, Nevada.

At its height in the early 1860s, Maine Prairie, 11 miles southeast of Dixon and toward the end of Cache Slough, was receiving an incredible tonnage of grain and hay from area farmers, shipping it via schooners to Sacramento and the Bay Area. The boom town had hotels, a school, a post office, stores, warehouses and homes. However, the coming of the California Pacific Railroad in 1869 up north through Dixon (which eventually connected with the transcontinental railroad) changed everything. Now farmers could ship their agricultural products via rail. The train line was also closer to their farms, meaning they didn’t have to pull wagons piled high with sacks of grain many extra miles on bad roads to Maine Prairie.

A stagecoach line was made available to take Maine Prairie residents to Dixon to catch the train.  

Even after the arrival of the train, however, many farmers continued to ship grain via Maine Prairie, because it may have been cheaper to ship by steamer or schooner, or the warehousing facilities were better, or they obtained higher prices. For example, in July of 1883 schooners left Maine Prairie with barley for San Francisco on the 16th and 17th.

Repeated flooding continued to be a problem for Maine Prairie, and when floods occurred, the community could be isolated for weeks, accessible only by boat or ship. Over time levees were built to protect agricultural lands – at first crude and temporary, but later permanent. Basically, sloughs and waterways were dredged and the dredged-up material was deposited on the banks to form levees. But they were built too late to help Maine Prairie survive.

As the years went on, and nearby communities such as Dixon and Rio Vista grew, and the shipping business at the Maine Prairie landing slowly dwindled, people began to leave. Naturally, they wanted to be where the action was, where there were good stores, a healthy population, jobs, active churches and things to do.

One of the foreboding notes of Maine Prairie was when one of the founders of Maine Prairie, Mr. Merrithew, who co-owned a store and warehouse business, went bankrupt in 1876. However, there were still a few schooners doing business with the port as late as 1895.

Eventually, just as with Silveyville, some homes were moved to Dixon. Several were moved in 1876 and ‘87 by Peter Timm. A hotel was moved to Dixon in 1920.  Imagine the cost of moving a building 11 miles today!   

Homes, warehouses and stores were gradually abandoned, went unpainted and unrepaired and began to fall apart. The beautiful two-story octagon house built by August Luttges near Maine Prairie in 1889 was abandoned, became weatherbeaten and rain-penetrated and was eventually razed. In 1891, a visitor reported there was no longer a store. An unused warehouse burned down in 1931. The last building on the site, a former hotel of 14 rooms, was torn down in 1933.

Some of the houses and other buildings were dismantled for their lumber or bricks, which were then used to build structures on nearby farms or in the nearby cities.

The old Maine Prairie school, which as far as I can tell was originally at the corner of Bartlett and Norton Roads, and which was later moved to the corner of Maine Prairie and Robben roads, was down to around five students when it closed in 1945. For years afterwards, in a decrepit and forlorn state it was the final reminder of Maine Prairie’s glory days. It was finally torn down in 1988, by then minus its surrounding porch. Now there is only pasture land.

A truly small post office in the area didn’t last as long. There was also a Blakemore Hotel just a half mile south of the schoolhouse along Robben Road, and only a small concrete foundation survives. It was near the Oakland, Antioch and Eastern electric railroad that started up in 1913 (and was routed just to the north of Maine Prairie) but it eventually went belly up too, and the rails were removed, but evidences of the line remain (you can see where the line went when you look at Google satellite imagery).

But where one economy and associated community fails, other economies and activities spring up. Today, where the homes and businesses of the northern end of Maine Prairie once existed, now the gated, 200-member Dixon Boat Club is located (built in 1949). At the entrance to the club along Bartlett Road, the slough has been blocked off, though it once continued further to the northwest. The location is primarily a boat-launching site for fishing enthusiasts, and there’s a clubhouse and bar for banquets. The port captain (or caretaker), Richard Statucki, lives onsite in a house on stilts, because the location isn’t levee-protected from flooding. Apparently the last floods to hit the site were in the mid-1990s, when the clubhouse was underwater.

The club has had problems with silt filling in the slough, and has had to pay expensive bills to have it removed to make the water deep enough for even small boats.

At one time the club and its dock were located further down the slough. Remnants of their old dock remain. Across the slough from the old dock, the city of Fairfield has a giant pumping station for obtaining delta water for drinking water. That operation contributes silt to the slough as well. The entire slough-and-delta area is endangered by too many cities and farming operations removing too much fresh water.  

The other (and more commercial) activity in the area, besides cattle and sheep grazing, is natural gas production. The Maine Prairie dry gas field lies just to the north of the disappeared town, covering 3.5 square miles, and the extracted gas is sold to PG&E.

As the curtain closes on the once-upon-a-time saga of Maine Prairie, I quote from an 1875 letter: “I wish I could remain here the balance of my days. But it is not to be. I am preparing to take my departure. Farewell thou beautiful Maine Prairie. With tearful eyes and heart I bid you (adieu). No longer will I be able to sail down the fair bosom of the peaceful water of Cache Slough, and buy fish from Chinese fishermen and on our return swear we (caught) every one of them. Never again will I be able to stand all day long in three feet of water in tule during hunting seasons.”

Ending with a little more detail, the 1910 Maine Prairie census listed the following family names: Zimmerman, Belew, Van Pelt, Peter and Peters, Allen, Parker, Cottrell, Brown, Rayns, Norton, Darby, Miles, Buekley, Hay, Edwards, Watson, McElwaine, Plummer, Luttges, Petrus, Wright, Fitzpatrick and Pedrick. The Triplett family also has a history in the immediate area.