Cigar Box Filled with Historic Poems Found in Clean-Up

After participating in the Coastal Clean-Up for years, the craziest thing Pam Gassman and her nine-year-old twins, Jake and Jesse, had found was a shopping cart.

But, the Mill Valley family topped that this year after digging up a cigar box stamped 1827 filled with early-20th Century poems, envelopes and keepsakes under a tree near the Corte Madera Creek.

“We’ve found all kinds of interesting things,” said Glassman.

The family had even found a clock hanging from a tree earlier in the morning, said Jake, who – with his brother – goes to Old Mill School, but it quickly became overshadowed by the historic box.

“We were tired and sitting on a bench,” said Jake, when their mom called for them to come dig a cardboard box out from under a tree, where it was buried in the marsh area off of the Corte Madera Creek bike path near Paradise Drive, on the Bay side of Highway 101.

That cardboard box turned out to be a well-preserved cigar box with “Larkspur Lumber Co, 1837” hand-written on the bottom and a government cigar seal stamped 1926.

Inside the cigar box was a collection of poems and notes from the late 1800s and early 1900s. A book, St. Patrick, with the hand-written note: “To Burt Wheeler, 1957” and signed by the author, Russell Bjorn, was filled with bugs when the boys picked it up.

But, everything else was exceptionally well-preserved. There’s no way it could have been there through the winter, said Glassman.

“I have no idea how it got there,” she said, though it may have fallen off a truck on the nearby road she guessed.

Among the other papers in the box and scattered around was an elegantly-addressed envelope to “Mr. A.C. Wheeler, Larkspur, California” – with no formal street address or zip code as would be needed now and a two-cent stamp. There were also a number of typed-out and hand-written poems, including “The Ballad of Yukon Jack” and other more humorous stanzas, like this one:

Please don’t ask me to marry you now,
My mother would just have a fit –
Remember, ‘twas only this morning we met,
Can’t you be patient a bit?

You know, my dear, how people would talk
They’d say it was not in good taste –
And besides, I don’t believe any girl, if she’s nice
Would marry a man in such haste.

To wed you tomorrow would be quite all right –
We’ll share the same toothbrush and comb,
But if you keep insisting upon it tonight –
I’LL GET UP, GET DRESSED, AND GO HOME.

After Jesse dug the box out, the family spent the rest of Saturday dreaming up ways it could have ended up there and researching online things the things they found.

It was only after an article appeared in The Marin Independent Journal early Sunday morning about the Glassmans’ box that a number of emails have poured in with more information about the history of the stuff in the box.

Burt Wheeler and Dolph Dougherty owned Larkspur Lumber Company on the corner of Magnolia Avenue and what is now Dougherty Drive in the 1950s. Fred Foster, a Larkspur resident since 1936, even remembered Burt and Dolph coming into his store and that the Wheelers lived across from the Baptist church in Larkspur.

Most importantly, though, Glassman was hoping to find the rightful owner of the historical box and she thinks she did.

David Wheeler, a Walnut Creek resident and nephew of Burt Wheeler (who never had kids), emailed and said the poem “The Saga of Yukon Jack” was something his father taught him as a kid and was a family thing that they memorized. He even quoted some lines of the obscure poem in his email to prove his identity.

“I think he should have the box,” said Glassman. She hopes to pass off her newfound treasure – and, if he doesn’t want, that it’ll end up at the library.

And, next year, Jesse and Jake will be back at Coastal Clean-Up with Practical Martial Arts in Corte Madera, where they take classes and who to helped organize that clean-up spot, clear the coastline. Who knows what else they’ll find?