Modesto walnut trees cut down, left in place — and no one knows why
Why would someone take out an entire row of walnut trees without the owners’ knowledge?
“It’s a big mystery,” said Modesto’s Bill Mussman. He can’t ask the orange-vested, professional-looking crew in large trucks who destroyed Mussman’s 10 best trees Tuesday morning, because they were gone before he arrived and he doesn’t know who they work for.
Perplexed — and more than a little put out, because the trees were loaded with walnuts ready to harvest — his sister, Ann Mussman, called Stanislaus County. Perhaps it had something to do with roadwork farther up McHenry Avenue near the bridge over the Stanislaus River. But the county didn’t know anything about removing part of the family orchard northeast of McHenry’s intersection with Claribel Road, Ann said.
A utility line runs overhead; maybe the Modesto Irrigation District did it? But that makes little sense, because the power line is twice the height of the tree tops, demanding no pruning. Besides, you don’t remove entire trees if they did need a trim.
Maybe it had something to do with plans for the North County Corridor, a future highway that someday will likely wipe out the Mussman’s property. That doesn’t make sense either, because that work is years away, and Caltrans told Ann it wasn’t them.
Perhaps someone wanted to steal the trees for firewood, or burls prized for attractive woodwork? No — the unidentified crew apparently chipped the branches, nuts and all, but left cut-up trunks, as well as all stumps and burls still in the ground.
“(Theft) doesn’t make sense from an economic standpoint,” Bill said. “This was not some little guy with a chainsaw going at it — they had big grinders and big trucks. Somebody thought they had authority to do it, but I’m scratching my head as to who or why.”
Bill filed a report with the Stanislaus Sheriff’s Department. Officers provided little hope of solving the mystery, and he expects no miracles.
“Miraculous” is one word to describe the property’s history. Five decades ago, the siblings’ parents, Bill and Janet, turned former vineyards into a venue for their popular Scotch Acres Horse Show, among the largest one-day equestrian events in California, drawing more than 300 horses and thousands of spectators in early June.
The big show — always free to spectators, with competitors’ entrance fees benefiting a local youth group — ran 19 years until outgrowing the Mussmans’ arena next to Claribel, then a two-lane country road, in 1992. My wife, born and raised in Modesto, remembers the hoopla when she was a girl.
“Those horse shows were a lot of fun,” said Bill, a local attorney. They were multibreed shows, with American Saddlebred, Missouri Fox Trotters, Tennessee Walkers and even antique carriages.
His father died not long after planting Chandler walnuts in 2000. A Claribel expansion a few years later took a portion of the orchard, leaving just four acres of walnuts which by now are aging and not worth hiring professional harvesters. But the siblings always gathered mounds of nuts for family and friends, and mourn the loss, even if its value was only a few thousand dollars.
“Even if it was a mistake, it was a huge and irreversible mistake,” Ann said.
I called an orchard removal service to ask their best guess on what might have happened.
Phil Lionudakis’ company yanks out trees by the roots before grinding the wood and spreading it to return nutrients to the soil, or hauling off tree carcasses to biomass plants where they’re burned to produce electricity. The scenario I described stumped him, too, and his best guess pointed back to MID simply because the utility’s power lines are directly overhead.
MID spokeswoman Melissa Williams had an answer in short order: “I confirmed with multiple departments and colleagues that this wasn’t MID,” she said.
Ann said, “We’re hoping if it’s publicized, maybe somebody would have seen a name on a truck. Maybe a company has no idea they were at the wrong place.”
Or maybe the company realized they were at the wrong place and quietly packed up and took off before anyone could call them on it. That seems to me the more logical explanation.
If you know something, send me a note at gstapley@modbee.com.
This story was originally published December 13, 2020 at 6:06 AM.
