The Point Reyes National Seashore will tear down the buildings constructed by the late artist and fisherman Clayton Lewis at Lairds Landing—along with additions he made to Coast Miwok buildings—said the park’s cultural resources chief, Gordon White. The park will preserve three structures built by Coast Miwok over a century ago, two of which the park deemed historic this spring.
Lairds Landing, a small but storied site on the western shore of Tomales Bay, hosted Miwok settlements for over 2,000 years before Europeans arrived. Miwok people continued to live there, working on nearby ranches, until the last were evicted in 1955. Mr. Lewis moved to the site in 1964 to caretake the property that he transformed into a bohemian enclave.
After receiving funding for the project last year, the park evaluated the site with criteria from the National Register of Historic Places and consulted with the State Historic Preservation Office and four members of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria during a Laird’s site visit in April. “We looked at the history, the Coast Miwok and Clayton aspects,” said Paul Engel, the park’s archaeologist.
The Miwok buildings are over a century old and bear connections both to tribal and dairying history on the peninsula. “The problem with the Clayton aspects,” Mr. Engel went on, “is that if it’s not [at least] 50 years old, it has to be exceptional to be on register. It didn’t really meet that bar,” adding that the state office concurred with the park’s determination.
Dewey Livingston, who was a park historian for a decade in the 1990s, agreed that new buildings were a difficult case. “As much as I like Clayton, the buildings are newer and you do have to follow a certain criteria. And I’d doubt that they’d fit that criteria,” he said.
The decision comes after two of the buildings were approved for the National Register of Historic Places. The park determined that the site was significant “for its association with the development of California’s lucrative dairy industry during the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, specifically K Ranch, and for its association with the history of the tenants who worked on the Point Reyes ranches as laborers, specifically the Coast Miwok and their descendants,” according to an application filled out by the park. “The resource is also eligible…as a reflection of how native populations adapted to European cultural ideals and practices and for its association with the history of tenant laborers.”
The park is mandated to maintain buildings on the register; it is not required to raze buildings that are not historic. But the buildings at Lairds are in various states of disrepair, and upkeep is made difficult by their remote location and limited park funds. One of the buildings, which Mr. Lewis used as a boathouse, received a new roof in 2006, but others have rotting floorboards, rampant graffiti and vegetation and vines devouring them. Mr. White expects the buildings will be torn down this summer, but was unsure of the specific date.
Mr. White said the buildings help tell the “in between” story of the Coast Miwok on the bay—their history from initial European contact to their eviction. Victor Sousa, the last Miwok to live at the site, was kicked out of Lairds in 1955 by ranchers because he had no official documentation of his ancestors’ ties to the land.
The three buildings that will be saved include the main cottage and boathouse, both constructed some time between 1890 and 1910 by Joseph Felix, whose mother, Euphrasia, was Coast Miwok and father, Domingo Felix, Filipino. The boathouse was originally a cottage; during Mr. Lewis’s tenure at the site, it was used as a jewelry studio, shed and boathouse, and his old beach seine nets are still inside. Mr. Lewis altered both buildings: adding a deck and expanding the windows of the main house, and adding a window to the boathouse. All of Clayton’s alterations will be removed, according to Mr. White.
The road to Lairds—which dates to 1867 and is described as “one of the oldest continually utilized roads within Point Reyes”—is also considered historic.
A third building, another cottage, also built by Miwok, now sports Mr. Lewis’s most imaginative additions, like a tower accessed by a wooden ladder. The park wrote in the determination of historic status that the additions have too drastically compromised the “architectural integrity” of the cottage for it to be listed on the register. But Mr. Engel said the seashore still intends to preserve it, although Mr. Lewis’s modifications will go. “There are fascinating sculptural additions to these buildings and they’re visually compelling, but structurally they’re not so great. They’re sort of peeling off the main structures,” he said.
Mr. Lewis built the three other structures that remain at Lairds: a foundry built in 1972 and a chicken coop (which housed “exotic chickens”) and stable (which housed miniature Peruvian Pasos), built in 1980s or ‘90s. The application, though not bestowing those structures historic status, notes that “the cottages ultimately became an expression of his art—almost sculptures in themselves.”
In April, the park brought four members of the Rancheria, all descendants of Coast Miwok who lived at the site, to discuss Lairds. “We wanted to get in touch with the tribe and get a sense of the importance of this place,” Mr. White said. (Emails and calls to the Rancheria for comment were not returned on Wednesday.)
The park hopes to collaborate with the tribe on interpreting the site’s history. “The vision now is to do what we can to restore this site,” Mr. White said.
Though the park has no funding to do so at the moment, he said the seashore is committed to a more active presence at Lairds—both cultural resources staffers and park rangers—in part to discourage further vandalism.
This article was corrected on July 14 to reflect the year Clayton Lewis moved to Lairds Landing: 1964, not the 1970s, as previously reported.