Searching for the lost Chateau in Burgandy

My Great-Grandma Tonsie told stories about how her grandparents were the gardeners/caretakers of a mansion in France in the 1860’s. We are traveling through Burgundy so we had to try and find it! Before I tell you about our searching, I have a LOT of interesting background story info that might be more interesting than what we found.

“Grandma Tonsie”, Hortonse Marie (nee Achey) Allen, was born in 1897 in a cabin on a homestead on the Wishkah River near Aberdeen, Washington State. She eventually got married (Harry Allen), moved to Centralia, Washington and by the time I knew her in the 1970’s, she had retired to Sacramento, California. She had a lot of stories about growing up in logging country and I remember talking to her about all the changes she had seen during her lifetime. Getting electricity, water, radios, TV’s, cars, and airplanes seemed amazing to me. Even though my family lived in Washington state, we visited her in California quite a few times, and we were regular penpals. She sent me homemade toys and stuffed animals, wrote me letters and postcards, and regularly sent me comics out of the Sacramento newspaper. She was a fantastic Grandma and one of the role models that made my Mom such a fantastic Grandma. A year before she died in 1983, I tagged along on a trip to find the old homestead on the Wishkah river. Her cabin was long gone, but we were able to get close to the old homestead which was now a fish hatchery. I heard a lot of great stories and my mother wrote a lot of it down so we have a pretty good history of her life. We also heard some stories about Tonsie’s mother from France which is even more interesting than Tonsie’s life.

Tonsie’s mother was Marie Hortonse (nee Tuaillon) Achey and was born in the Burgundy region of France. Marie grew up in luxury in a 25 room Chateau in the mid 1800’s, as her parents were the overseer and house caretaker for a Baron. I will talk more about this Chateau later. France was going through a tough time after the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870’s and Marie had an opportunity to move to America in 1876 when she was around 18 years old. She was only 4’8″ and 79 pounds. The ship landed in Philadelphia and she was able to see the fireworks from the 1876 American Centennial celebration which looked like a war to her. She then traveled 18 days by train to San Francisco to be a servant for her Aunt for a year in exchange for her traveling costs. Marie did not get along with her aunt and met a family in the Golden Gate park that eventually offered her a job as their French governess for their children. She was able to pay her Aunt back using this job.

This story keeps getting more interesting. Later… in Golden Gate Park, Marie meets her future husband Walter Achey. He had a splinter in his hand from fixing his buggy and Marie was able to take it out and they fall in love (so meet cute!). They end up getting married, and Walter hears from his brother about free land available on the Wishkah river in a very rainy part of Washington State. Somehow he convinces Marie, who grew up in a Chateau in France, to move to a shack to start their new life. The first year their home was just a quickly built structure covered by tree bark that can’t really be called a cabin. The property is 20 miles up the river without a road so supplies must be transported by canoe every few months and can take as long as 3 days because of the canoe portaging. Eventually, they build a real house and roads are built to support the logging industry. Marie spends the rest of her life living on the Wishkah. We do have pictures of a trip that Marie and Tonsie took to Seattle in 1930 including a shot of them in front of the Old Curiosity Shop. Marie died in 1933 without ever making a trip back to France.

I have got more stories about surviving small pox, the fire of 1903, fights over stolen wood stoves, and getting run over by a team of horses…. but that isn’t the point of this blog post. M and I are in Burgundy France and I really want to find out where my family is from. We know that Marie’s parents (Claude Joseph Tuaillon and Marie Josephine Desiree Charton) started their life together in the town of Chaux Les Port and then died in the town of Port-sur-Saone which is just a couple of miles away. I also found a record of a street called Cuclos that they lived on at one time. Marie’s stories (told by Tonsie) talked a lot about her life growing up in the Chateau during the 1850’s and 1860’s. This was the goal and biggest clue about where my family came from. It had 25 rooms so we figured someone had to know about it. So we rented a car in Dijon and set off to see the towns with the hope of finding our lost Chateau.

The first stop was the town of Port-Sur-Soane. The small town has just a few restaurants and one church that we parked by. It had a tourist info place that had one lonely guy working at that didn’t speak much English. In our fractured communication with him, it was apparent that he didn’t know of any big chateaus still around Chaux Les Port or Port-Sur Soane. OK… I guess we will walk around…. The Soane River and associated canals is big enough for boat traffic and it eventually combines with the Rhone River and empties into the Mediterranean Sea. There is a canal and lock system in Port-Sur-Soane that is big enough for a small marina to be developed. We were surprised to see the canal boats, houseboats and yachts this far inland. We visited the church, took a walk along the canal, saw the marina but really didn’t know what to do next. We were hungry, so we found the one restaurant open for lunch. Fantastic lunch, but nobody there was speaking any English. We weren’t going to be able to “ask around” for our Chateau very easily.

We got back into the car and drove the couple of miles into Chaux Les Port. I parked at the church where my great great great grandparents probably got married at in 1855. It was locked but I looked at the graves and monuments marked with dates from the 1800’s. We checked out the nearby cemetery but most of those graves were recent and we didn’t see any Tuaillon’s. We drove the entire town and saw lots of buildings that were from the 1700’s or older but didn’t see anything that could be a “chateau”. We then drove to the Cuclos street on the other side of river on the outskirts Port-Sur-Soane. Nothing chateau-like here either. After driving around the towns a bit more we were ready to give up. I was hoping to find a store with some art or anything that I could take back to my Mom. But it really was not a town that sold anything like that.

So… it was cool walking around the same streets, paths and churches that my ancestors walked but we were a bit disappointed not finding any concrete evidence of a chateau. If my Grandma Tonsie visited in the 1970’s, I don’t think she would be able to find anything either. Sometimes you just need the past to live in the past. We have a lot of cool stories from this side of the family and I am happy to just let those live on without the physical proof.

Many of these stories and pics come from Ancestry.com where my Mom and other relatives have collected a lot of information. Many thanks to them.