The Beginning of Golden Feather Tea®

    One of John Henry Schnell’s most important plans for the newly established Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm was to grow and sell tea. Tea and silk production were to be the mainstays of the Colony’s success in America. He brought six million tea seeds aboard the SS China and in the following year had 140,000 living plants shipped from Japan.

     The colonists immediately planted about 400,000 seeds on their new land at the Farm.That same year, Schnell displayed tea along with silk cocoons and oil plants at the Sacramento State Fair. In 1870 he went to San Francisco’s Horticultural Fair and displayed 2-year-old tea shrubs, 1-year-old seedlings, oil plants and rice. Schnell was awarded $20 and a medal for the best specimen of tea. Also at the fair, he sold up to 10,000 tea plants that he had in excess. Sam Brannan and Anthony Chabot may have been among the purchasers. 

    The ultimate failure of the Wakamatsu endeavor is well known. The climate here was drier than that of Japan. Funding also ceased when their daimyo in Japan surrendered his power and wealth after being defeated in the Boshin War. When the Japanese moved away, the Veerkamp family, who bought the land, began to grow fruits and vegetables instead. However, some tea plants were still reported to be flourishing many years later in 1886.

    Tea has substantial cultural and religious significance in Japan. The Tea Ceremony harmonizes both aspects, and is a showcase of precision, elegance, and Zen discipline. High-grade matcha tea powder is used. Matcha is made from the youngest stems of the tea plant. As a green tea, it is dried and processed to allow little oxidation, leaving most of the anti-oxidant properties intact. Black tea is heavily oxidized to give it a rich dark color and flavor. White tea is the least oxidized of them all. 

    To obtain information for this article, I visited tea master Mike Fritts at his Golden Feather Tea® farm near Oroville. He had graciously given American River Conservancy ten tea plants to grow at Wakamatsu. According to Mike, his are not ordinary tea plants. They were purchased from Nuccio’s Nursery in Southern California in 2010. They had originated from Toichi Domoto’s Nursery in the East Bay hills. The Domoto Brothers had obtained their specimens from Anthony Chabot, who may have purchased his from John Henry Schnell himself. It is fascinating to realize that growing in the back of the Graner farmhouse today might be the descendants of Schnell’s own tea. Mike is planning DNA analysis to try to confirm this. He wants to see if, as he believes, his tea plants are descendants of the Shogun’s finest specimens that Schnell carried with him to America.

    Relaxing on his farm and sharing some well-steeped tea, Mike said that he practices an old-school approach to tea growing. His processing methods are old-world, hand picking and processing. He believes less modern intervention is best. He doesn’t use gas machinery because the petroleum vapors could be absorbed by the tea leaves. He limits his irrigation as much as possible, letting nature be the guide. The finest tea in the world, he said, is from ancient tea trees in Yunan, China, that are basically allowed to grow wild.

    Mike is dedicated to producing the finest tea for several upscale restaurants in the San Francisco area. His other passion is historical research to locate every pioneer tea-growing endeavor in California. As I was preparing to leave, he told me that he was off on one of his expeditions. He was planning to hike into the Feather River Canyon to find a lost Chinese gold mining camp that he had heard stories about. There were likely to be old tea plants still surviving there, and perhaps he could bring back some leaves to brew some wonderful and historic tea.