18 North Bay Business Journal MONDAY, AUGUST 21, 2023

Right: Janet Angell

and her family are
selling the Petrified
Forest, a 500-acre
property with the
world’s largest
petrified trees, for
$12 million. Angell
holds a photo July
25 showing the
first car to visit the
Petrified Forest,
in 1911, located
between Santa
Rosa and Calistoga.
JOHN BURGESS
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Below: Cousins
Lewise Salvadori,
60, left, and Chris
Conway, 72, two of
the six surviving
co-owners of the
Petrified Forest,
reminisce Aug. 8
at Salvadori’s real
estate office in Glen
Ellen, about their
childhoods spent at
the forest.
ERIK CASTRO
FOR THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Family tree complicates Roadside

attraction’s
multiple heirs

sale of Petrified Forest

By PHIL BARBER
The Press Democrat
Selling a property is always complicated.
When that property has been in the fam-
ily for more than a century and is both a
world-renowned tourist attraction and a
rare piece of Wine Country open space,
things are bound to get tangled.
“There’s not one controlling party,”
said Lewise Salvadori, one of six current
co-owners of the Petrified Forest, a road-
side curiosity that has been welcoming
visitors to the Mayacamas Mountains
for more than a century. “There’s six
owners, with different opinions and dif-
ferent visions. And completely different
personalities.”
It was Salvadori’s great-aunt, Ollie
Bockee (she pronounced it like “bouquet”),
who purchased the property in 1914 and
turned it into a destination for vacationing
families and intrigued researchers before
her death in 1950.
Bockee added substantially to the
property and charged people a dime each
to look at the petrified trees on her land.
Most of them were redwoods, downed by
a volcanic eruption 3.4 million years ago.
Covered in ash, not exposed to the bacteria
that usually decompose organic matter,
all have different
visions for site
the trees slowly had the water in their cells
replaced by minerals.
They literally turned to stone, becoming
the world’s largest petrified trees. And
Bockee recognized a lure when she saw
one.
Her sister, Jeanette Hawthorne, took
over when Bockee died and ran it for more
See FOREST page 19