The Immigrant Years of the Smeds Family

Most of the photographs on this website are portrait-type images of the individuals who make up the family. This page is dedicated to a different sort of picture. Here you will get to see what sort of venues and workplaces members of the Smeds clan were immersed in during the period when the six children of Herman Smeds were sequentially departing Finland, and the ten or so years afterward as they struggled to become established as Americans. At the moment there are only a few pictures here. Consider these to be placeholders. Eventually this page will consist of a gallery of at least twenty images. When completed, the gallery will provide glimpses of three milieus that played essential roles in the history of the family. These three places are 1) San Francisco California, where Jack Smeds, the pioneer of the six children, worked as a silversmith at Shreve and Company, 2) the redwood timber country near Eureka, CA, where five of the six children initially settled, and 3) the farms north of Reedley, CA where Billy Smeds, along with his father Herman, began living in 1907, and where Billy, Jack, and their sister Amanda Strom would permanently settle by 1915.

Having trained with a goldsmith in Jakobstad, Finland as a teenager, Jack Smeds was able to parlay his knowlege of the trade into a job at Shreve and Company Jewellers. Shreve and Company was a large, well-established firm. It had been founded during the Gold Rush and it still exists today in its building at Union Square in downtown San Francisco. It is not entirely clear what year Jack came to work there, but it was no later than 1904. During some of his tenure his main job was making silverware, but he had the chance to produce a wide variety of items. A grandson still owns a pendant he made. Another item preserved over the years was a spoon that was nearly the only intact (if somewhat charred) possession pulled from the wreckage of the family home after the 1906 earthquake and Great San Francisco Fire destroyed the dwelling. Shown here is a room full of Shreve and Company employees in 1904. Jack is on the right, fourth person up from the bottom of the image.

A major employer of immigrant labor in northern California at the time of their arrival of the Smeds clan was the timber industry of the redwood forests of Humboldt County. Jack Smeds came to the Eureka and/or Eel River area at about age twenty. It was a number of years before his trade skills allowed him to escape to a better-paying situation as a San Francisco jeweller. Other men of the family also worked the redwoods, including Billy Smeds and Axel Smeds, and especially Charles Strom, husband of Amanda Smeds. Charlie kept a number of photos from that era of his life. All of them appear to have been professionally done, probably by photographers hired by his employer or who otherwise had a reason to be documenting the life of the men in the Humboldt County timber industry. At some point in the mid-20th Century, Charlie gave this image to his daughter Karin, who in the 1960s gave it to Roger Smeds, son of her cousin Lawrence Smeds. Roger at that time was working for the U.S. Forest Service and was based in Humboldt County, and Karin felt that Roger would be the individual who would best appreciate owning it after both Charlie and Karin were deceased. In particular, she was thinking of Roger because this view reflects the sort of work his grandfather Jack Smeds is known to have done. The mechanical device you see was known as a “Steam Donkey,” an engine used to pull logs out of the forest. The first job Jack Smeds had after he arrived in California was hauling water to supply Steam Donkies such as this. (As far as can be determined, the view does not show any family members.)

This image may seem unusually small given the way it is displayed on this webpage. The original print from which the scan was made is in fact by far the largest in the whole collection -- eight inches by thirty-four inches. It is the work of Schuyler U. Bunnell (1868-1935), a photographer famous for his panoramic photos of scenes of California. Though mainly a resident of the San Diego area over the course of his adult life, Bunnell committed himself to documenting the scenery and people of extreme northwestern California, and based himself in Eureka from the summer of 1911 to the summer of 1913. This shot, probably taken in 1912, was a particularly ambitious example of his efforts during that career phase. He posed the entire logging crew of Woods Camp, a station and cookhouse just east of Fortuna owned by the Eel River Lumber Company, and succeeded in capturing not only all of the men (and a few women, whose faces can be seen in the windows of the cookhouse if you have a high-resolution version to inspect), but the flume, water tower, and other infrastructure, plus the locomotive that transported crews, logs, and supplies. Bunnell used a special wide-angle lens. The tracks you see actually ran in a straight line, and the buildings were likewise arranged in a straight fashion parallel to those tracks. Prints of the photo were made available to those whose who posed, and Charlie Strom made sure to obtain one. Like the image shown above, Karin Strom Nelson gifted this to Roger Smeds in the 1960s.

This is a close-up cropped from the above image. Charlie Strom is the man highlighted by the blue circle. He was standing first in line at the cookhouse door! Charlie was a tall, slim man with a robust appetite, and those who knew him can easily imagine he was first in line to eat on more than one occasion.

This is a logging image that may or may not have belonged to Charlie Strom. It was not among those given to Roger Smeds but was instead found among the mementoes kept by Maria Rautiainen Smeds. It may therefore have originally been a souvenir saved by Billy Smeds. Billy himself is the the third man from the right in the line of men leaning on the log (the one positioned right in front of the man sitting on the log).

Here are Jack and Annie Smeds in the vineyard of their first farm. Jack purchased this property north of Reedley, Fresno County, CA some time between 1904 and 1907. He and his wife and kids did not reside upon it year-round until 1915, but paid working visits from time to time. By 1912, a raisin contract had been signed with Sun-Maid, and the couple made a special effort to come down every September to help get the grapes onto the trays. This photograph, taken in the harvest season of 1912, 1913, or 1914, captures such a moment. They are in the midst of a coffee break. On the left is Annie. On the right (reclining) is Jack. In the center is good friend and neighbor Gus Laine and his young son Ruuno. (Ruuno, also known as Roy, would go on to perish at only thirteen years of age.) If you look closely at the background visible below Gus’s elbow, you can make out grapes on trays filled earlier that morning. Having coffee out in the field, as opposed to going back to the house, was a tradition in the family that was copied by the next generation of Smedses, particularly on frigid mornings during the winter pruning season.

In late 1941, this property became the home of Alfred Smeds and his young family. It would be Al’s home for the rest of his long life. The house was built in 1915 as the residence of Ward Lester Jones, who had just moved down from Stockton, CA to become Reedley’s new postmaster. Jones had money and a secure job and chose to erect a residence in keeping with his upper-class status, clearly with the idea that the farm would be the family’s long-term “legacy” estate -- though as it happened, he and his wife and kids would stay for only two to three years before returning to Stockton. After they left, they rented the place for a number of years. The Bosse family was the first household of tenants. In approximately 1970, a Mr. Bosse and his wife stopped by the house bearing the print from which this scan was made, showing the house and its outbuildings as they were in the late 1910s or early 1920s. Mr. Bosse had been born in the house and had multiple pictures of the farm. He correctly guessed the current residents would like to have this one, and made a gift of the item to Al and Jo Smeds. Note the oak tree on the western bank of Wahtoke Creek. It was a sad day when the branches of this massive specimen grew so heavy after the plentiful rains in the spring of 1962 that the tree split apart at the main crotch, among other things ruining the tree house in which the Smeds children sometimes played.

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