History For Sale TIME TO EXPLORE RARE PIECE OF OLD POCKET
O
ne of the last undeveloped properties in Pocket is for sale. Asking price is $2.8 million. The four-acre parcel at 7150 Pocket Road includes a home built in 1881 and a horse barn. The parcel runs from Pocket Road (once Riverside Road) to the banks of the Sacramento River.
CM By Corky Mau Pocket Life
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POC OCT n 21
The land’s modern history begins with the Albert Mendes Rodgers family. Like many local pioneers, Rodgers arrived from the Azores. Born in 1849 on the island of Pico, he came to Sacramento around 1865. He married Rose Gear and raised a family on an 18-acre ranch near where Park Riviera Way intersects with Pocket Road. By the late 1860s, many Portuguese families lived in the area. They turned swamps into farms, dairies and ranches. They built and maintained the levees and established ferries to cross the river. They constructed businesses, churches, social halls and schools. Portuguese was spoken at home and in the streets. Nicknamed
“little Portugal,” this was a close-knit community. After Albert Rodgers’ death in 1923, 11 acres of his ranch were sold to Manuel “Parola” Perry. The Rodgers’ children divided the remaining seven acres. Daughter Margaret Lee Machado got four acres, including her parents’ home. Originally constructed in 1881, more rooms were added in the early 1900s. Machado raised her own family of four children in the home. In 1971, Machado sold her property to Robert Thomas Dias and his wife, Betty Lorbeer Dias. As part of the sale, Machado could live in her family home until her death (she died in 1978). The Diases never lived on the property they called “the Ranch.”
Grandson Matt Dias told me, “My grandmother drove her yellow pickup truck from their home in Greenhaven to the Ranch every day. She worked well into her 90s, tending to the numerous fruit trees, vegetable gardens and her animals. My cousins and I worked at the Ranch from the time we were young. We mended fences, repaired chicken coops and cleaned the horse barn.” Pocket-Greenhaven was a farming community for more than 100 years. In the 1960s, real estate developers started buying the “swamp land” to build homes. A new community, Greenhaven 70, was developed first, followed by Greenhaven Lake homes in the 1970s. The major building boom came to Pocket in the 1980s.
