Featured

Eggs and Petaluma’s 15-Minute City

Petaluma’s Main Street, ca. 1900 (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

In the 1920s, Petaluma found itself facing a housing shortage. The local egg industry was booming, drawing hundreds of new families to the area. Some came to purchase chicken ranches, others to work for hatcheries and other industries in the prosperous “Egg Basket of the World.” Dave Batchelor, a local realtor and developer, believed he had the solution: restricted residential neighborhoods. [1]

Since its incorporation in 1858, Petaluma had developed in a haphazard manner. Not only were residential neighborhoods dotted with corner groceries and taverns, many sat cheek-by-jowl with chicken hatcheries, foundries, hospitals, and factories for processing everything from incubators to silk and dairy products.

Petaluma Cooperative Creamery in residential area at Western Avenue and Baker Street, ca. 1920 (photo Sonoma County Library)

On the plus side, city residents—who numbered just under 4,000 between 1870 and 1900—were able to access all their needs by foot, bicycle, or the city’s horse-drawn streetcars.[2] For those wishing to travel outside the city, downtown stables provided rentals of horses and carriages. Messy as it might seem, Petaluma was the definition of what urban planners today call the “15-minute city.”

Then came the egg boom.

By 1920, Petaluma was one of the largest poultry-producing regions in the country. Its population had grown to more than 6,000. Automobiles now filled the streets. New home buyers came looking for safe and quiet residential neighborhoods with garages for their cars.[3]

David W. Batchelor (photo findagrave.com)

As Petaluma lacked zoning ordinances, local developers like Batchelor began creating their own , buying up small farms at the western edge of town and subdividing them into residential-only lots for cottages and bungalows.

A Scottish immigrant, Batchelor got in early on the egg boom, purchasing Penngrove’s second poultry ranch in 1903.[4] The boom originated in the 1880s with the local invention of an efficient egg incubator by Isaac Dias and Lyman Byce. It took off a decade later thanks to the innovations of Chris Nisson, a Danish immigrant, who industrialized egg production by developing America’s first commercial egg hatchery on his Two Rock ranch. After hatching baby chicks in the Dias and Byce incubators, Nisson placed them in a brooder house equipped with a stove to serve as a mother surrogate until they were old enough to sell as laying hens.[5]

Chris Nisson’s Pioneer Hatchery Ranch, Two Rock (photo Sonoma County Library)

Batchelor, the son of a realtor, saw the boom coming. He began buying up Penngrove farms and subdividing them into small tracts for aspiring chicken ranchers, offering them a fully equipped, five-acre chicken ranch for $2,500 ($85,000 in today’s currency).[6] His speculative tendencies caught the attention of the Page brothers, who were in the process of subdividing the 10,000-acre Rancho Cotati they inherited from their father, Thomas Page. Batchelor succeeded in selling more than 900 poultry ranches for the Pages in the Cotati district.[7]

Penngrove chicken ranch, 1914 (Sonoma County Library)

In 1909, Batchelor built the Hotel Penngrove across from the train depot in Penngrove, setting up his main office on the bottom floor, with branch offices in Petaluma and Cotati.

D. W. Batchelor’s Real Estate & Insurance office, bottom floor of the Hotel Penngrove, 1915 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Three years later, he moved his headquarters and family into Petaluma, purchasing a stately home on a large lot at the corner of Howard and Prospect streets. In typical fashion, he subdivided the lot for three new spec houses.[8]

D.W. Batchelor’s new office on the bottom floor of the Wickersham Building, 168 Main Street, 1920s (photo Sonoma County Library)

Hailed as one of Petaluma’s “red hot live wire businessmen,” Batchelor ventured south in 1913 to pursue a new development in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles County. Opening a branch office in Van Nuys, he began purchasing farmland and subdividing it into 400 hundred poultry ranches, creating what soon became known as “Southern Petaluma.”[9]

Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1913

It was in Los Angeles that Batchelor first encountered restricted residential districts. In 1908, the city became the birthplace of city zoning when it banned a wide range of businesses and industries from residential zones. The intention was to promote orderly development, controlling noise, traffic flow, and activity levels as a means of protecting property values.[10] 

Returning to Petaluma, Batchelor turned his focus to residential and commercial real estate as the city began to grow with the egg boom. In 1921, he was appointed to fill a seat on the city council after an elected member resigned.[11] The next year, he co-led a community fundraising drive to build the Hotel Petaluma, raising $258,000 ($3.5 million in today’s currency) from 855 local investors.[12]

Fundraising celebration for new Hotel Petaluma, 1922; Batchelor at far right under raised hat (photo Sonoma County Library)

At the time, Petaluma was undergoing a generational shift. To help address the housing crisis, Victorian mansions built by wealthy capitalists during the city’s river town era, were being carved up into apartments, and their large property estates sold off in subdivisions by their widows and descendants.

One such widow, Harriet Brown, whose estate extended along the south side of D Street from Eighth Street to Sunnyslope Avenue, engaged Batchelor to subdivide her property. Positioning the development as a showcase for the new egg boom elite, Batchelor marketed the subdivision as Petaluma’s first “restricted residence district,” anchoring it with a quiet cul-de-sac named Brown Court.[13]

Gallery of houses built on Brown Court in the 1920s (Sonoma County Library)

Two years later, he purchased an adjacent tract along Eighth Street between D and F streets from descendants of the Fairbanks family, who owned the mansion at the northeast corner of D and Eighth streets. After subdividing the tract into another restricted residence district, he carved out a cul-de-sac of tiny lots he called Batchelor Terrace, offering buyers a choice of modest four- and five-room modern cottages he built to order.[14] (An adjacent lot he sold off was later developed in a similar manner as Coady Court).[15]

In 1922, the National Association of Real Estate Boards advocated city zoning as a means of stabilizing property values. Three years later, Petaluma adopted its first residential and commercial zoning ordinances.[16] The National Association of Real Estate Boards also championed adding covenants to deeds that restricted certain neighborhoods exclusively to Caucasians. Those racial covenants were adopted in Petaluma, and remained in place until a Supreme Court ruling in 1967.[17]

1931 Petaluma Deed with restrictive residential and racial exclusionary covenants (Sonoma County Official Records, Liber 293, page 328)

In 1925, Batchelor declined to seek re-election to the city council, turning his attention instead to a new endeavor south of Santa Cruz. Leaving his partner to run the Petaluma realty office, he purchased a 290-acre retreat center from the Jesuit Fathers to develop a beachside town and resort he called Rob Roy, after the famous highlands chief, Rob Roy McGregor. He assigned Scottish names to all the streets, and moved his family into a new Mediterranean-style beachfront home.[18]

Batchelor’s promotion brochure for Rob Roy beachside town and resort (Santa Cruz Sentinel, February 8, 1976)

After investing a quarter of a million dollars in Rob Roy ($5 million in today’s currency), Batchelor found himself in a financial crisis as home sales in Rob Roy slowed during the Depression. In 1935, he sold the town to another developer who changed its name to LaSelva Beach and its street names from Scottish to Spanish. That same year, Batchelor shut down his office in Petaluma, new housing development having slowed there as well.[19]

The next Petaluma housing boom would not come until the end of World War II, when influx of discharged servicemen arrived with their families bearing low-interest VA loans. With subsidies provided by the government, developers began building a cascade of suburban tract homes, driving the city’s population up to 14,000 by 1960.

1950s Madison Square development at Madison & Payran streets, East Petaluma (photo Sonoma County Library)

Built in exclusionary and restricted residential districts, and designed around cars and shopping malls, the new developments scrambled what remained of Petaluma’s 15-minute city.[20]

Batchelor didn’t return to Petaluma to ride the new suburban housing boom. He chose instead to open a real estate office in LaSelva Beach, where he happily resided until his death in 1963 at the age of 90.[21]

LaSelva Beach (originally Rob Roy), California, 2024 (photo public domain)

******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier September 6, 2024.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Ad, for “Dave” Batchelor, Petaluma Courier, March 9, 1924.

[2] http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Petaluma50.htm#1940

[3] Thea Lowry, Empty Shells: The Story of Petaluma, America’s Chicken City (Novato, CA: Manifold Press, 2000), pp. 1-3; http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Petaluma50.htm#1940.

[4] Irene Hilsendager, “History-David William Batchelor,” The Community Voice, August 25, 2023.

[5] Lowry, pgs. 33-35, 49-53.

[6] Hilsendager; “Live Real Estate Firm at Penngrove,” Petaluma Courier, April 12, 1904; Ad for poultry ranch, San Francisco Call and Post, June 20, 1909.

[7] Hilsendager; “History of Cotati,”  Cotati Historical Society, cotatimuseum.com; “D.W. Batchelor Now Agent for Cotati Land Company,” Petaluma Argus, May 19, 1910.

[8] “Hotel for Penngrove,” Petaluma Courier, June 7, 1909; Ad for Batchelor & Rankin, Petaluma Argus, November 29, 1911; “Batchelor Buys Geo. Young Home,” Petaluma Argus, October 31, 1912; “D.W. Batchelor to Build Three Houses,” Petaluma Courier, February 3, 1922.

[9] More Activity in Poultry Business,” Van Nuys News and Valley Green Sheet, October 17, 1913; “Batchelor Goes South,” Petaluma Courier, October 12, 1913; “Chickens By Wholesale,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1913; “More Activity in Poultry Business,” Van Nuys News and Valley Green Sheet, October 17, 1913; “Hail to Van Nuys, the Southern Petaluma,” Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1913; Hilsendager.

[10] Jonathan Vankin, “Zoning Out: Why We Have Zoning Laws, and How They Shape California and Society (Not Always For the Best),” June 15, 2023, CaliforniaLocal.com; Jeremy Rosenberg, “The Roots of Sprawl: Why We Don’t Live Where We Work,” March 19, 2012, PBSSoCal.com, https://www.pbssocal.org/history-society/

[11] “The New Hotel Project is Being Well Received,” Petaluma Argus, December 27, 1912; “Chamber of Commerce in Annual Session,” Petaluma Courier, May 11, 1915; “Development Co. Officers,” Petaluma Courier, June 21, 1917; “White Leghorn Mining Co. Move Offices Here,” Petaluma Courier, March 11, 1924; “D.W. Batchelor Made Member of City Council Succeeds W. Stradling,” Petaluma Courier, October 4, 1921.

[12] “First Stock In Hotel is Sold,” Petaluma Argus, June 10, 1922; “Legal Notice for Petaluma Hotel Company,” Petaluma Courier, February 7, 1923; “E.J. Hockenbury Was Here,” Petaluma Argus, January 27, 1923; “Mrs. L.B. Hammell Has Resigned,” Petaluma Argus, February 23, 1923 “Unique Opening of Hotel Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, April 11, 1924; Hilsendager.

[13] “Death of Samuel Brown,” Petaluma Courier, December 17, 1902; “Brown Tract on D Street to be Sold by Batchelor,” Petaluma Courier, December 16, 1921; “New Home for Dr. F.W. Anderson,” Petaluma Argus, July 12, 1922; “Will Build Elegant Home,” Petaluma Argus, August 7, 1922; “Dr. Dreyer Will Build Fine Home,” Petaluma Argus, March 17, 1923.

[14] “A Chance to Own a Modern Home,” Petaluma Courier, September 20, 1919; “Will Build on Laurel Ave,” Petaluma Argus, December 8, 1921; “Splendid New Restricted District for Beautiful homes is Opened Up Today,” Petaluma Argus, August 12, 1924; “Batchelor Terrace is Accepted,” Petaluma Argus, December 2, 1924.

[15] Note on Coady Court: Batchelor originally sold the large lot to Leo Burke, owner of the Must Hatch Hatchery, to build a large estate. After Batchelor Terrace was developed next door, Bourke changed his mind and sold the lot to developer Frank Coady, who developed Coady Court. “Fine New Home for Leo Bourke,” Petaluma Argus, August 12, 1924; “Coady Apartments 11 Lots and A Fine Cottage Change Hands,” Petaluma Argus, June 5, 1925.

[16] “Zoning Plan Advocated in All Cities,” San Francisco Examiner, June 2, 1922; “Zoning Ordinance Introduced,” Petaluma Argus, October 24, 1925 “Ordinances No. 284, Charter Series,” Petaluma Argus, October 26, 1925; “City Zoning Ordinance Formally Adopted,” Petaluma Courier, November 3, 1925; “Zoning Protest Report,” Petaluma Argus, December 8, 1925.

[17] Vankin; “Is There Racism in the Deed to Your Home?” New York Times, August 17, 2021; Marisa Kendal, “For Whites Only: Shocking Language Found in Property Docs Throughout Bay Area,” Bay Area News Group, February 26, 2019. Bayareanewsgroup.com; sample Petaluma deed in Sonoma County Official Records, Liber 293, page 328, dated April 13, 1931, for sale of property on Western Avenue in Petaluma to Clifford B. Murphy and Minnie J. Murphy; Moore, Montojo, Mauri, “Roots, Race, and Place,” Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, University of California, Berkeley, October 2019, p. 22.

[18] Note: the property included almost a mile of black sand beach, four acres of which Batchelor set aside for a new plant by his development partner Triumph Steel, who extracted manganese from the sand to use as an alloy in the making of steel. “D.W. Batchelor Buys Tract of Land in South,” Petaluma Courier, February 8, 1925; “F.A. Allenberg Now Associated with D.W. Batchelor,” Petaluma Argus, July 13, 1925; “Sales Among Those Sure to Be Kept in Office,” Petaluma Courier, May 21, 1925; “D.W. Batchelor Is Home from Rob Roy,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 16, 1926; “Was Up From Rob Roy Townsite,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 14, 1931; “Rob Roy District Now Being Transformed into Modern Home Subdivision,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, November 4, 1932; “D.W. Batchelor Is Here on Business,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 9, 1934; “Let’s Go to Beautiful, Secluded La Selva,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, February 25, 1951.

[19] “David Batchelor, LaSelva Beach Founder, Dies,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, July 9, 1963; “The Sand Was Gold,” Santa Cruz Sentinel,” June 2, 1985.

[20] “$500,000 Housing Program Here,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 2, 1946; http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Petaluma50.htm#1960

[21] “David Batchelor, LaSelva Beach Founder, Dies,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, July 9, 1963; “The Sand Was Gold,” Santa Cruz Sentinel,” June 2, 1985.

Featured

Free Love in 1850s Petaluma

ONE WOMAN’S QUEST FOR LOVE ON HER OWN TERMS

Abigail Goodwin Haskell (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

In 1857, Abigail and Barnabus Haskell arrived in Petaluma pursuing a California dream of free love. It wasn’t quite the promiscuous Summer of Love that would inflame the Golden State a century later, but it did share with the era one irresistible attraction: a rebellion against authority. For the Haskells, the rebellion was over marriage.[1]

Under the yoke of traditional values and institutions back east, marriage was predominately a transactional affair. Traditionally arranged between families, there was little room for love or individual consent. Once married, a bride and her fortune became the property of her husband. Divorce was largely unheard of.[2]

Free lovers denounced it as “legitimized adultery.” They believed everyone should have the ability to choose a monogamous partner based solely on love, and to end the relationship once the love did.[3]

“Woman was not created to be the slave of man,” Abigail Haskell wrote. “She was to be his equal, to walk upright by his side in her native dignity and purity.”[4]

Barnabus and Abigail Haskell with son William, 1850 (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

Petaluma was still in early formation when the Haskells arrived. Founded during a potato boom in 1852 that quickly went bust, the local economy was rebounding thanks to California’s new wheat boom.[5] Abigail taught at private schools before being appointed principal of the town’s first public school. Barnabus, a hatter by trade, purchased a dry goods store on Main Street.[6]

The Brick School at 5th & B streets, build 1869 (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

Of Petaluma’s 1,300 residents at the time, 38% were women.[7] While women were largely relegated to the home back east—leaving men to engage in the public world of business and politics—California’s boom-and-bust cycles made such separate spheres challenging. Women burdened with dissolute or absent husbands found themselves having to work to support themselves and their children.

Recognizing their financial insecurity, state legislators passed legislation allowing women to independently own property, operate businesses, enter into contracts and lawsuits, and more easily file for divorce.[8] 

Those new rights coincided with advances in safer sex. Thanks to Charles Goodyear’s recent invention of vulcanized rubber, sales of condoms, douching syringes, and “womb veil” diaphragms were soaring. An array of “female medicines” for birth control, varying in effectiveness and safety, were also available from pharmacies, dry-goods stores, and mail-order catalogs.[9]

Female medicines in the mid-1800s (public domain)

As fertility rates began to plummet in the 1850s, divorce cases began to rise, with 70% of the plaintiffs being women.[10] Meanwhile, the women’s suffragist movement was gaining traction, having recently kicked off at the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York.

The movement evolved from an earlier 19th century evangelical crusade known as the Second Great Awakening.[11] Aimed at purifying society in preparation for Christ’s return, it was predominately composed of white, middle-class women. To exert their influence outside the home, they organized into socially acceptable prayer groups, and began calling for a range of social reforms, including temperance, abolition, children’s rights, and female emancipation.[12]

The Haskells converted to the crusade soon after their marriage in 1837, setting off from New York City with a small band of missionaries to establish a Baptist church in Galveston, Texas.[13] Returning to New York City a few years later, the couple joined the Swedenborgian Church, a Christian denomination inspired by the 18th century Swedish scientist, philosopher, and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.

Emanuel Swedenborg (public domain)

Swedenborgians believed in marriage equality. They also believed in a divine love that pervaded and moved the material world, leaving one to follow either the path of self-love, which led ultimately to the realms of hell, or the path of love for others, which led to the heavens.[14] The path to the heavens attracted reformists like the Haskells.

But it was Swedenborg’s revelatory claims—particularly, the immortality of the soul after death—that had the greatest impact on American culture. His belief in the existence of an immaterial reality beyond reach of the human senses was buttressed with visions, trances, and dreams. He claimed to have conversed with spirits and angels on a daily basis.[15]

Those claims gave rise in the 1850s to a countercultural movement known as Spiritualism.[16]

It began when Maggie and Kate Fox, two teenage sisters in upstate New York, claimed to have heard “rappings” from the dead. Joined by their older sister Leah, they began staging public performances as trance mediums communicating with souls of the deceased, setting off a new national sensation.[17]

The Fox sisters, Leah, Kate, and Maggie (courtesy of Association of Religious Data Archives)

Despite its questionable legitimacy, Spiritualism filled a void left by traditional religion, which placed death at the periphery. At a time  when one child in every three died before age ten, and many women did not survive childbirth, Spiritualism provided a sense of solace and closure to many struggling with grief.[18] That included the Haskells, whose oldest child died when she was eight years old.[19]

(illustration from Frank Leslies Illustrated Weekly, April 2, 1887)

In Petaluma, the Haskells devoted themselves to the Swedenborgian doctrine of service to others, leading local groups calling for children’s rights, abolition, and temperance (shorthand for husbands who beat their wives and children, and spent their wages on drink).[20]Every summer, Barnabus returned to the east coast to attend the national Swedenborg convention.[21]

The couple also sought fellowship with a local group of Spiritualists who met at the Liberty Street home of Chester Hatch, operator of the town’s first foundry, and his wife Lucretia, a hospice nurse. Chester represented Sonoma County in the Spiritualists’ state conventions. The couple’s home gatherings often featured seances with visiting mediums.[22]

Petaluma spiritualist Lucretia Hatch (San Francisco Call, March 6, 1901)

During the bloodshed of the Civil War, Spiritualism’s popularity grew by an estimated two million followers.[23] The only religious sect to recognize the equality of women, it produced the first large group of female spiritual leaders—typically young, white, single, and Protestant—to address large public gatherings, free from the patriarchal environment of churches. Following the war, female mediums began migrating to California, where they became founding members of the state’s women’s suffragist movement.[24]

In December of 1869, Abigail called a meeting at her home to launch the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association. A few weeks later, she traveled to San Francisco with Lucretia Hatch and another local Swedenborgian, Sarah Myers Latimer, to attend the inaugural convention of the California Woman Suffrage Association. A big part of Abigail’s quest was securing equal access to higher education for women.[25] 

National Woman’s Suffrage Convention, 1870 (public domain)

At the convention, Abigail was elected the association’s first president, and Latimer one of her vice presidents.[26] The group’s first order of business was organizing a petition drive for a state referendum granting women the vote. A forceful and persuasive writer, Abigail, took to the newspapers to make her case.

Sarah Myers Latimer, founding vice-president, California Woman Suffrage Association (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

“Woman is declared inferior to man,” she wrote. “She has no voice in politics, government or law, and we see the sad, lamentable consequences. Brute force is acknowledged as the only power in the universe. Love, that love which the Lord enjoined upon his disciples, is trampled underfoot under the ruthless, iron heel of man-made civilization.”[27]

In March 1870, Abigail led a female delegation to Sacramento to address a select committee of the state legislature—the first women in California history to do so. She presented the committee with the suffrage petition signed by more than three thousand supporters, calling for a referendum to amend the state constitution granting women the vote.[28]

“We claim to be recognized as citizens of this free Republic!” she told legislators.[29] She also asked legislators to open up the new state university in Berkeley to women (the campus began enrolling women six months later).[30]

The referendum proposal was overwhelmingly defeated in the state assembly. California women would not be granted the vote until 1911.[31]

There were further setbacks. In 1873, Congress sought to curb the free love movement by passing the Comstock Law, which banned sending contraceptives through the mail, along with sex education, including information about sexually transmitted diseases. By 1880, most states had outlawed abortion.[32]

Free love advocate Victoria Woodhull depicted as “Mrs. Satan in parody of conservative pushback (Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, February 17, 1872, Library of Congress)

“Woman suffrage in America is on the decline,” reported the Petaluma Courier in 1877, “and justly so. It has been agitated by a bad lot of harum-scarum women, who have mixed free-love, spiritualism, and all sorts of woman’s rights into a sort of political and social hotchpotch that has disgusted right-thinking people.”[33]

Abigail viewed such attacks as teaching moments, although she expressed disappointment that her opponents only had “trash and scurrility” to offer in their opposition. In 1879, she launched the Sonoma-Marin Women’s Christian Temperance Union as its founding president. It was to be her last reform effort. After a lingering illness, she died in 1884 at the age of 64. [34]

Abigail Goodwin Haskell (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Placed in a white casket, Abigail was drawn by a team of white horses to the Cypress Hill Cemetery in a white hearse of white plumes and drapings. The pallbearers were all former students of hers.[35]

“Following the doctrines of the illustrious Swedenborg,” wrote Philip Cowen, a close friend and local bookstore owner, “death had no terror for a mind like hers, who, no doubt, never wronged any living being, hence she had no fear of an angry God, for with her, “God was love.”[36]


A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier July 19, 2024.

******

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Ann Nisson, “Abby and Barney,” an unpublished biography of Abigail Haskell, Petaluma Historical Library & Museum.

[2] Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 1-3; Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Second Edition (Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 195.

[3] Faulkner, p. 1; Braude, p. 119.

[4] Nisson.

[5] Gaye LeBaron, “How Sonoma County Prized Potato Got its Start,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 17, 2013; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pgs.69, 156; Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pp. 24-25; James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-22532010000200002;.

[6] Ad announcing the Excelsior dry goods store now owned by Barnabus Haskell, Sonoma County Journal, December 25, 1857; Per Ann Nisson, from May 1856 or 1857 to April 1859, Abigail was employed at Miss Atkins Young Ladies Seminary in Benicia, teaching English, before beginning to teach in Petaluma; List of teachers, Sonoma County Journal, July 22, 1859; “The Closing of Our Public School,” Sonoma County Journal, December 28, 1860.

[7] Thompson, p. 56.

[8] Bonnie L. Ford, “Women, Marriage, and Divorce in California, 1849–1872,”  California Legal History, Vol. 16, 2021, pgs. 6-7, 10, 34.

[9] Halle Lieberman, “A Short History of the Condom,” JSTOR Daily, https://daily.jstor.org/short-history-of-the-condom/; “19th Century Artifacts: History of Birth Control,” Dittrick Medical History Center, Case Western Reserve University, https://artsci.case.edu/dittrick/online-exhibits/history-of-birth-control/contraception-in-america-1800-1900/19th-century-artifacts/

[10] Ford, p.11; Janet Farrell Brody, Contraception and Fertility Rates in Nineteenth Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pgs. ix-x, 2-3.

[11] Faye E. Duden, “Women’s Rights, Abolitionism, and Reform in Antebellum and Gilded Age America,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, oxforedre.com. https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/americanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-20

[12] George M. Fredrickson, “The Coming of the Lord: The Northern Protestant Clergy and the Civil War Crisis,” in Miller, Randall M.; Stout, Harry S.; Wilson, Charles Reagan, eds. (1998). Religion and the American Civil War. Oxford University Press. pp. 110–30; Nancy Cott, “Young Women in the Second Great Awakening in New England,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 3 (1), 1975, pp. 15-16;Mary Ryan, “A Woman’s Awakening: Evangelical Religion and the Families of Utica, New York, 1800 to 1840,”American Quarterly, Vol. 30 (5), 1978, p. 619.

[13] Nisson; Benjamin Franklin Fuller, History of Texas Baptists (Louisville, KY: Baptist Book Company, 1900), p. 109.

[14] Emanuel Swedenborg, The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Marriage Love, 1768 (Rotch Edition. New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1907), in The Divine Revelation of the New Jerusalem (2012), n. 308; Olle Hjern, “The Influence of Emanuel Swedenborg in Scandinavia,” in Scribe of Heavenedited by Jonathan S. Rose, Stuart Shotwell, and Mary Lou Bertucci (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 2005), 157; “Swedenborg’s Cultural Influence,” Swedenborg Foundation, Swedenborg.com. https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/influence/

[15] Richard Lines, “Swedenborg and Spiritualism,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 69, 2005, 113–119; Richard Lines, Things Heard and Seen, the Newsletter of the Swedenborg Society, London, No. 1, (Spring 2000); “Swedenborg’s Cultural Influence,” Swedenborg Foundation, Swedenborg.com. https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/influence/

[16] “Swedenborg’s Cultural Influence,” Swedenborg Foundation, Swedenborg.com. https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/influence/

[17] Karen Abbott, “The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism,” Smithsonian magazine, October 30, 2012; Braude, p. 2; Daniel Bowlin, “The American Phantasmagoria: The Rise of Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century America,” Masters Thesis, Eastern Michigan University, 2019.

https://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2369&context=theses

[18] Bowlin; “Swedenborg’s Cultural Influence,” Swedenborg Foundation, Swedenborg.com. https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/influence/

[19] Nisson.

[20] Barnabus led the local Sons of Temperance, and Abigail their ladies auxiliary (Ad, Petaluma Argus, January 14, 1862; “Card of Thanks,” Sonoma County Journal, July 8, 1859); Abigail also served as Worthy Chief Templar of the local Independent Organization of the Good Templars (IOGT), and as a board member of the local California Youth Association 1861 (Ad for IOGT, “Youth’s Association,” Petaluma Argus, November 12, 1861).

[21] Barnabus’ attendance at the annual conventions is documented from 1851 to 1871 in the Journal of the 35th-36th General Conventions of the New Church in the U.S, Journal of the 37th-46th General Conventions of the New Church in the U.S.

[22] “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, November 14, 1883; “State Convention of Spiritualists,” Petaluma Argus, June 7, 1866; “Death of Col. C.P. Hatch, Petaluma Courier, March 19, 1893; “Mrs. Lucretia Hatch,” Petaluma Courier, March 14, 1901; “Noted Spiritualist Dies,” San Francisco Call, March 5, 1901.

[23] Abbott.

[24] Braude, pgs. 2, 195.

[25] Nisson.

[26] “Woman Suffrage,” Petaluma Argus, January 8, 1870; “Woman, State Convention of Female Suffragists,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 28, 1870; “Woman Suffrage, Third Day of the State Convention,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 1870;

[27] Nisson.

[28] The Suffrage Question,” Sacramento Bee, March 19, 1870; Theodore Henry Hittell, History of California, Volume 4 (San Francisco: N.J. Stone & Co., 1898), p. 435.

[29] Hittell, p. 435; “The Suffrage Question,” Sacramento Bee, March 19, 1870.

[30] Nisson; “They Have Done It,” Sacramento Bee, October 4, 1870.

[31] “Sacramento Correspondence,” San Francisco Examiner, March 23, 1870; “Woman Suffrage Carries by About 4,000,” San Francisco Call, October 12, 1911.

[32] “What to Know About the Comstock Act,” New York Times, May 16, 2023; “The History of Abortion Access in the U.S.,” Penn Today, University of Pennsylvania. https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-profs-weigh-history-abortion-access-us

[33] Petaluma Courier, September 13, 1877.

[34] Nisson; “Women’s Christian Union,” Petaluma Courier, November 12, 1879; “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, January 16, 1884.

[35] “Polly Larkin’s Pot-pourri,” Petaluma Courier, January 16, 1884.

[36] “In Memoriam,” Petaluma Argus, January 26, 1884.

Featured

Petaluma’s Deadly Steamboat Race

The steamboat James M. Donahue bound for the Petaluma Creek , ca. 1878 (Sonoma County Library)

On April 15, 1854, Tom Camron boarded the steamer Secretary in San Francisco to return home to Petaluma. He had come to the city to explore investing in the refurbished Secretary, which had begun plying its way to Petaluma just three weeks before.[1]

For “forty-niners” like Camron, the Gold Rush might have ended, but gold fever still ran high. With bays and rivers serving as early California’s main highways, steamboats were the new investment frenzy. Camron wanted in. So did many others.

Competition on the waters was so fierce that passenger fares and freight rates had dropped to unprofitable levels. Operators complained their only profits came from the liquor dispensed in the steamers’ saloons. On the wharves, ticket promoters tussled in shouting matches and fisticuffs, proclaiming to prospective passengers the superiority of their boats .[2]

Steamer Amelia at San Francisco wharf, 1860 (photo Golden Gate NRA, Park Archives)

The rivalries didn’t end there. Daredevil crews, hell-bent on proving their steamers the best, engaged in spontaneous races on the waterways, while on their decks, excited passengers made their bets on the match.[3]

Towns with navigable waterways like Petaluma flourished. Shortly after the town’s founding in 1852, the steamer Red Jacket began making trips three times a week to and from San Francisco on the tidal slough then known as the Petaluma Creek. By 1854, Petaluma had developed into a bustling agricultural river port of 400 residents with steamers and schooners navigating the creek’s 19 narrow, winding miles daily.[4]

That caught the attention of speculators, including Vulcan Iron Works, a San Francisco manufacturer of steam engines and boilers, who decided to get in the game by refurbishing an old tub called the Gabriel Winter.[5]

Vulcan Iron Works, 137 First St, San Francisco, ca. 1870 (photo California Historical Society)

Like many of California’s early steamboats, the Gabriel Winter was originally dismantled on the East Coast during the Gold Rush and shipped around the Horn to San Francisco, where it was reassembled and put into service on the Feather River between Sacramento and Marysville.[6]

The biggest danger facing steamboats was boiler explosion. If boilers were not carefully watched and maintained, pressure could build up in the boiler and cause a spectacular and deadly explosion. Racing only increased that danger. On its maiden run, the Gabriel Winter was challenged to a race by the steamer Fawn, whose boiler blew up during the race, killing a number of passengers on board.[7]

To purchase and overhaul the Gabriel Winter, Vulcan Iron Works raised $20,000 in capital ($785,000 in today’s currency). They spruced the boat up with a new coat of paint, a new boiler, and an engine scavenged from the remains of a recently exploded steamer. Rebranding it the Secretary, they dispatched it on runs up the Petaluma Creek.[8]

It is unknown what drew 41-year-old Camron to the Secretary as a potential investor. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he spent his younger years in Illinois, where he befriended a young Abe Lincoln, who boarded for a time with the Camron family. (Lincoln asked for the hand of one of Camron’s 11 sisters in marriage, but was rejected because he was too poor.) The family then moved to Iowa, where Camron and his father, the Rev. John Camron, operated a general store.[9]

Rev. John Miller Camron (photo public domain)

In 1849, members of the extended Camron family set out on a wagon train for California. Camron and his father spent the winter working the gold mines before settling in Sonoma County. His father purchased a farm near Sebastopol, where he also started the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Camron and his wife Cynthia settled with their four children on a farm in Two Rock along Spring Hill Road, near those of his sisters Nancy and Mary Jane and their respective husbands Silas Martin and Charles Purvine.[10]

Two Rock farms of Camron, Purvine, and Martin families highlighted in red (Thos. Thompson & Co., 1877, Sonoma County Library)

On the day Camron boarded the Secretary, he was returning home to a new daughter his wife had given birth to nine days before.[11] The Secretary disembarked that morning with 65 passengers aboard. Two hours into the five-hour cruise, another steamer, the Nevada, drew up beside them as they approached San Pablo Bay.[12]

The Nevada was making its second trip to Petaluma. A sternwheeler, it was narrower and more maneuverable than the Secretary, a sidewheeler, in the winding, shallow waters of the Petaluma Creek, which prior to any dredging had an average depth of only six feet at high tide.[13] In a race, the Secretary’s only chance of beating the Nevada to Petaluma was in reaching the creek first.

1860 Coast Survey Map of the Petaluma Creek (public domain)

As the Nevada began to overtake the Secretary, the captain in the pilot house shouted through a speaking tube down to the engineer, “Let her go!”

Instead, the engineer ordered the fireman to increase the steam pressure. “Shove her up, damn it,” he yelled, “shove her up!” He then lashed an oar over the lever of the safety valve to keep it from tripping.[14]

Realizing they were engaged in a precarious race, Camron reportedly went to the engine room to get the engineer to pull back.[15] He failed. As the two boats approached the Petaluma Creek entrance at Black Point, the Secretary began shaking and jerking. Within minutes the boiler exploded, ripping the boat apart. Bodies were blown into the air, heads flying in one direction and limbs and trunks in another. Sixteen passengers were killed, and 31 badly scaled.[16]

Illustration of the boiler on the steamboat Lucy Walker exploding, 1856 (public domain)

The tragedy of the Secretary led to calls for stronger steamboat regulations. Instead, market forces prevailed. A few weeks before the explosion, a group of the major steamboat operators formed a monopoly called the California Steam Navigation Company in an effort to end the profitless chaos on the waterways.[17]

They quickly cracked down on steamboat racing by eliminating independent operators, either through buyouts or other means. That included the Nevada, which they allegedly wrecked by paying its captain to run her aground.[18] Denounced as “a monster steamboat company conceived in sin and born in iniquity,” the group then imposed considerably higher rates and fares throughout California.[19]

Charles Minturn, a founding partner of the group, operated the monopoly on the Petaluma Creek, charging exorbitant fees for transportation on dilapidated and dangerous vessels. His monopoly ended in 1870, after the San Francisco & North Pacific Railroad laid down its tracks in Sonoma County, opening a new port on the Petaluma Creek below Lakeville called Donahue. Likewise, the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 broke the group’s broader monopoly in California.[20]

With the shift to rail transportation, Petaluma soon found itself replaced by Santa Rosa as the county’s main agricultural shipping hub. Steamboats continued to ply the Petaluma Creek, but the city’s population remained stagnate until the local invention of an efficient incubator set off an egg boom in the early 1900s.[21]

Some days after the explosion of the Secretary, Tom Camron’s body was found on the beach and buried in Petaluma.[22] His wife Cynthia remarried, but continued to live with her children on the farm in Two Rock, where along with the Purvine and Martin families, they gave rise to generations of local Camron descendants to come.[23]

Headstone of Thomas P. Camron, Cypress Hill Cemetery (photo John Sheehy)

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier April 12, 2024.

******

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Trial Trip of an Iron Steamer,” Sacramento Union, July 24, 1851; “Explosion of the Steamboat Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1854; Alice Purvine Murphy, The Rev. John M. Camron and Descendants 1790-1962 (A.P. Murphy,1962), FamilySearch.org; Casey Gauntt, “Thomas P. Camron,” Write Me Something Beautiful.com, January 19, 2022. https://www.writemesomethingbeautiful.com/2022/01/19/thomas-p-camron/

[2] Wilbur Hoffman, “When Steamers Sailed the Feather,” Sutter County Historical Society News Bulletin, Vol. XVIII, April 1979; Jerry McMullen, Paddle Wheel Days in California (Stanford University Press, 1944), pp. 17-19.

[3] Hoffman.

[4] Robert A. Thompson, Historical And Descriptive Sketch Of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pgs. 18, 24, 55, 56; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pp. 69-70.

[5] “Explosion of the Steamboat Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1854.

[6] “Trial Trip of an Iron Steamer,” Sacramento Union, July 24, 1851.

[7] “Steamboat Racing and Steamboat Explosion,” Sacramento Union, August 18, 1851; “Explosion of the Steamboat Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1854; Hubert Howe Bancroft, Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth (San Francisco: The History Company, 1891), pp. 133-134.

[8] “Explosion of the Steamboat Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1854.

[9] Gauntt.

[10] “Obituary,” Sonoma Democrat, March 16, 1878; Helen Purvine Kolb, One Hundred Years on the Ranch: A Study of the Purvine and Martin Family Efforts to Establish Part of the Community of Two Rock, 1969, Sonoma County Library; Gauntt.

[11] Gauntt.

[12] “Explosion of the Steamboat Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1854.

[13] “Old Steamboat Days,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1955.

[14] “Explosion of the Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 17, 1854.

[15] Gauntt.

[16] MacMullen, p. 26; “Explosion of the Steamboat Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1854; “The Grand Jury and the Steamer Secretary; Letter To The Public,” Daily Alta California, June 5, 1854.

[17]  Hoffman.

[18] MacMullen, pgs. 27, 61.

[19] Hoffman; MacMullen, p. 27; Bancroft, p. 137.

[20] Heig, pp. 73-75; Hoffman; Bancroft, pgs. 138, 142.

[21] “Completion of the Railroad,” Petaluma Argus, December 31, 1870; Gaye LeBaron, Dee Blackman, Joann Mitchell, Harvey Hansen, Santa Rosa: A Nineteenth Century Town (Historia, Ltd, 1985), pp. 42-43, 102; “City of Petaluma, Sonoma County,” Bay Area Census, http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Petaluma.htm.

[22] Gauntt.

[23] Kolb.

Featured

Chasing the Hobble Skirt Vote

FASHION MEETS POLITICS IN THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT

Hobble skirt race, 1912 (photo The Missouri History Museum)

On October 21, 1910, the musical comedy “The White Hen” opened at Petaluma’s Hill Opera House, setting off a new fashion craze in town. The fashion foray was led by the traveling theater company’s showgirls, who took the stage adorned in feathered plumes and the latest couture from Paris, an ankle-length skirt so narrow at the hem the women could only “hobble” around in short, pigeon-like steps.[1]  

“The hobble skirt,” the Petaluma Argus announced, “has invaded Petaluma with a vengeance.”[2]

When two women wearing the skirts attempted to board a train departing the Petaluma depot, they were unable to mount the steps. Clinging onto the handrail, they found themselves dragged down the platform as the train pulled out of the station.[3]

Hobble skirt illustrations, 1910s (public domain)

“Of course, women must wear what is ‘worn’ even at the risk of death,” observed the Petaluma Courier. “Shall railroad corporations now dictate fashions for women?”[4]

No, but the government appeared ready to. As reports of similar incidents surfaced, a California state legislator proposed subjecting hobble skirts to the same scale used by the Fish and Game Department to regulate fishing. Those with a bottom circumference of less than 35½ inches would be banned from the streets.[5]

A dentist located on the second floor of a building recommended installing new stairs with a rise of only five inches to accommodate women wearing hobble skirts.[6]

The hobble skirt, 1910 (photo public domain)

Petaluma’s reigning fashionista, Charles Kelly, aka “Kelly the Tailor,” pointed out that physical danger wasn’t the only thing preventing some women from climbing stairs in hobble skirts. There was also having to hike up their skirts and scandalously expose their ankles in doing so. Kelly noted that the excuse “Oh, I’ve got nothing to wear,” was becoming commonplace among women choosing instead to stay home.[7]

Woman in hobble skirt boarding New York City streetcar, 1910 (public domain)

The hobble skirt craze coincided with suffragist efforts to place a proposition on the California ballot giving women the right to vote. Some men cited the skirt as one of the reasons they were opposed to the proposition. “So long as a woman buttons her clothes up the back,” declared an Episcopal minister, “she certainly has not sense enough to vote.”[8]

With tongue-in-cheek, the editor of the Courier chided, “Any unregenerate man who has ever been called upon to button a woman’s dress with the usual hooks and eyes, and who is not permitted to swear, will certainly agree.”[9]

A year after the “White Hen” played Petaluma, the suffrage proposition passed by a narrow margin, making California the sixth state in the county in which women could vote. Male politicians chasing the votes of women found themselves baffled by the demographic labeled the “hobble skirt vote.”[10]

Transition from Victorian S-curve style to Poiret’s corset-free Empire line(photo public domain)

By 1911, women were increasingly entering the workforce, demanding more freedom, more rights, and more comfortable fashions. Gone were the suffocating corsets, bulky crinoline skirts, and voluminous gigot sleeves of the Victorian era. The high-waisted Empire line was back, only now with dresses that skimmed the body instead of billowing petticoats.[11]

Why then, some men wondered, had such a seemingly restrictive, masochistic style of wear suddenly come into vogue?

Ad for the hobble skirt, 1910 (photo public domain)

Paul Poiret, the Paris designer credited with creating the hobble skirt, reportedly took his inspiration from the famous pioneer aviator Wilbur Wright, of the Wright brothers.

French fashion designer, Paul Poiret, 1908 (photo public domain)

While on a visit in France, Wright took popular American actress named Edith Berg up for a joyride in his biplane. To prevent Berg’s large skirt from ballooning over her head or getting caught in the plane’s engines, Wright tied a rope around her skirt at the ankles. The flight lasted a mere two minutes, but distinguished Berg as the first American woman to fly.[12]   

Edith Berg in roped skirt with Wilbur Wright on historic 1908 flight (photo public domain)

Poiret found himself captivated by the contradictory image of Berg flying freely while being bound up. It was a puzzling fascination for a man previously dubbed “The King of Fashion” for his streamlined, corset-free dresses that liberated women from the Victorian confines of the S-curve silhouette. “It was,” he confessed in his autobiography, “in the name of Liberty that I proclaimed the fall of the corset and the adoption of the brassiere . . . . Yes, I freed the bust, but I shackled the legs.”[13]

Those fashion historians who view clothing styles as reflections of the zeitgeist, point out that while women may have been on the verge of emancipation, the tradition of being sheltered and in need of protection in a male-dominated society still lingered. Hence the hobble skirt. Others believe the skirt’s popularity was expressive of newly emancipated women confidently experimenting with fashion, no longer held to the suffocating standards of Victorian modesty.[14]

Actress Fannie Brice in hobble skirt, 1910 (public domain)

Whatever the skirt’s social or political implications, Poiret’s shackled design didn’t stop women from adopting subtle slits, hidden pleats, and buttons at the skirt’s hem for greater range of motion.[15]

Among those most perplexed by the new fashion was the Anti-Saloon League. A powerful group of conservative men, the League, along with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, were hellbent on banning the manufacturing and sale of alcohol. They viewed California’s newly enfranchised women as critical swing voters, calling upon their innate morality to cleanse the nation of its sins and provide “home protection” against the tyranny of drinking men.[16]

National officers of the Anti-Saloon League (photo Library of Congress)

Thanks to their influence, the rural districts west of Petaluma voted to go “dry” in 1912, banning the sale and possession of alcohol at country roadhouses. Petaluma, meanwhile, remained stubbornly “wet.”[17]

In 1914, the Anti-Saloon League succeeded in getting a prohibition proposition on the state ballot. To mobilize women voters, they dispatched a temperance campaigner to Petaluma. She made the hobble skirt into a wedge issue, denouncing it as indecent and vulgar, and proposing police stop women from wearing it on the streets. “The morality of men,” she declared, “cannot be improved as long as women wear such suggestive clothes.”[18]

The prohibition proposition was soundly defeated in 1914, and again when reintroduced in 1916, indicating California women were not single-issue voters. Some of that had to do with the underlying motives of the Anti-Saloon League and the WCTU.

Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Sonoma County, 1910s (photo Sonoma County Library)

For all their talk of saving people from the saloons’ cauldrons of sin and debauchery, their deeper concern was who the saloons catered to—European immigrants flooding into the country, threatening to change the America they knew.[19]

Petaluma remained stubbornly anti-prohibition, due in part to the city’s large number of first- and second-generation Irish, German, Danish, Italian, Portuguese, and Swiss citizens, who viewed their ethnic taverns as community hubs in keeping their traditions alive.[20]

America’s entry into World War One, followed by the terrifying influenza epidemic of 1918, put an end to idle indulgences like the hobble skirt. In 1919, the Anti-Saloon League succeeded in imposing a nationwide Prohibition. The following year, women secured the vote nationally.[21]

The paradoxical mix of restriction and liberation gave birth to unexpected new freedoms for women. Taking advantage of the underground culture and social chaos created by Prohibition, women began to indulge in the forbidden pleasure of drinking in speakeasies, which, unlike traditional American saloons, were coed, and out of the public eye.

Ladies night out in Speakeasy, 1920s (photo public domain)

Their new sense of independence was reflected in the loose flapper dresses of the Roaring Twenties, which, in a nod to the hobble skirt’s focus on women’s legs, were distinguished by rising hemlines.[22]

Flapper dress styles, 1920s (photo public domain)

The hobble skirt surfaced again in the 1950s as the inspiration for French designer Christian Dior’s slim-fitting pencil skirt, which quickly became a popular form of office wear. Like the hobble skirt, it required a very particular way of walking, famously epitomized by Marilyn Monroe’s wiggle along a train platform in the film Some Like It Hot.[23]

Marilyn Monroe wearing pencil skirt in Some Like it Hot (photo public domain)

A version of this story ran in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.

*****

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Max Dill Has ‘Come Back,’” Petaluma Argus, October 22, 1910.

[2] “Rare Comedy, Pretty Girls,” Petaluma Courier, October 22, 1910; “Local Notes,” Petaluma Argus, October 22, 1910.

[3] “A Dangerous Practice,” Petaluma Courier, February 20, 1911.

[4] “Shall a Railroad Dictate Women’s Fashions,” Petaluma Courier, September 28, 1911.

[5] “A Law to Regulate Hobble Skirts,” Petaluma Courier, January 11, 1911.

[6] “‘Hobble Stairway,’” Petaluma Argus, April 15, 1925.

[7] “Accident Cause by Hobble Skirt,” Petaluma Courier, January 16, 1911

[8] “The Temerity of Cyrus,” Petaluma Courier, May 10, 1911.

[9] “The Temerity of Cyrus,” Petaluma Courier, May 10, 1911.

[10] “Wise Talks by the Office Boy,” Petaluma Argus, November 14, 1911.

[11] Ann Beth Presley, “Fifty Years of Change: Societal Attitudes and Women’s Fashions, 1900-1950,” The Historian, Winter 1998, Vol. 60, No. 2, pp. 307-324.

[12] “Snapshot: A Hobble Skirt Race, a Century Ago,” St. Louis Magazine, August 25, 2017.

[13] Presley, p. 312; Harold Koda, Andrew Bolton, “Paul Poiret (1879–1944),”Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/poir/hd_poir.htm

[14] Presley, p. 312; Cecile Paul, “Before the Pencil Skirt there was the Hobble Skirt,” Messynessychic.com.

[15] Daniel Milford-Cottam, Edwardian Fashion (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014). P. 49.

[16] Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (NY: Scribner, 2011), pp. 65-66.

[17] “’Drys’ Win by Big Majority in Supervisor Green’s District,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 13, 1912.

[18]“Prohibition, Slavery and Woman’s Dress,” Petaluma Courier, May 15, 1914.

[19] “Vote in Doubt on Red Light Abatement,” San Francisco Examiner, November 6, 1914; “Petaluma Complete Returns,” Petaluma Argus, November 8, 1916; “110,000 and 40,000 Estimate on Nos. 1 and 2,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 10, 1916; Pietro Pinna, “Fresh Water Triumphs: The Italian American Wine Industry’s Struggle Against Prohibition in California,” Italian American Review, Vol. 8, Issue 8, Winter 2018, pp. 23-46; Okrent, pp. 85-87.

[20] Pietro Pinna, “Fresh Water Triumphs”: The Italian American Wine Industry’s Struggle Against Prohibition in California,” Italian America Review, 81., Winter 2018, pp. 23-25; ’Drys’ Win by Big Majority in Supervisor Green’s District,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 13, 1912; “Amendments in Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, November 6, 1914.

[21] Cecile Paul.

[22] Cecile Paul.

[23] Rosalind Jana, “Everything to Know About the History of the Pencil Skirt,” Vogue, June 27, 2023.

Featured

Dicky Jessup: White Man in a Black Man’s World

Illustration of Richard P. “Dicky” Jessup, 1892 (San Francisco Examiner)

Growing up in Tomales, Henry Kowalsky dreamed of a life grander than working in his father’s general store. For years, he burned the midnight oil studying the law, until finally, in 1883 at the age of 24, he passed the California bar. With the help of his father, he opened a legal office in San Francisco, furnishing it in Victorian gilt and plush more suggestive of a parlor than a place of business.[1]

Kowalsky’s flamboyant performances—pulling out a pistol to defend himself from opposing counsel, falling asleep during trial—made good tabloid fodder, as did his life outside the courtroom, where he cast himself as a bon vivant, raconteur, and connoisseur of the arts, nonchalantly racking up debts residing at the luxurious Baldwin Hotel on Market Street.[2]

Baldwin Hotel, Market and Powell streets, 1885 (photo Marilyn Blaisdell Collection)

In 1887, he was appointed advocate-general of the California National Guard with the honorary title of colonel. That same year, the Colonel—as he insisted on being called—took on the case of an illegitimate son of a wealthy bachelor challenging his father’s will. As probate cases go, it was fairly commonplace, except for one twist: the father, Gershom Jessup, had his white son raised by a Black family in Petaluma.[3]

The case became one of the most sensationalistic of San Francisco’s Gilded Age, casting a spotlight on an issue bedeviling the country since Reconstruction: race.

Colonel Henry Kowalsky, 1889 (illustration public domain)

Jessup was manager of a stage line company in Marysville in 1865 when he became romantically involved with an attractive 18-year-old named Josie Landis. She became pregnant with his child. That same year, Jessup inherited a small fortune from his deceased brother Richard, co-founder of the prosperous California Steam Navigation Company.[4]

Moving to San Francisco, Jessup arranged for Josie to spend the final stage of her pregnancy at the North Beach home of Mrs. Abigail Nugent. A Black widow from Philadelphia, Nugent served as a midwife and nurse to the city’s elite. Two months after giving birth to a boy, Josie returned to Marysville. Keeping her child a secret, she quickly married a local dentist.[5]

Jessup named the boy Richard, or “Dicky,” after his recently deceased brother. He paid Nugent to raise him, and to have him baptized by the bishop of San Francisco’s Bethel African Methodist Church, T.M.D. Ward, where Nugent was a prominent member.[6] It was at the church that Nugent’s 18-year-old daughter Maggie met 42-year-old George Miller, a recently widowed barber from Petaluma.

Born and educated a free man in New Jersey, Miller came to San Francisco in 1850 to open a barbershop. In 1855, he moved his business and young family to Petaluma. He continued to spend a good deal of time in San Francisco, where he was actively engaged with the A.M.E. Church, the Black Freemasons, and the California Colored Convention, a group of businessmen, clergy, and journalists working to rescind the state’s racial restriction laws.[7]

Illustration of a Colored Convention held in 1876 (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper)

Miller’s exclusive white clientele provided him with economic and social advantages that he put to use in Petaluma opening a state-supported “colored school” and the North Bay’s first A.M.E. Church. In 1868, two years after his wife’s death, Miller married Maggie Nugent, bringing her to town to live with him and his four children. Within a year, the couple had a child of their own.[8]  

Margaret Nugent Miller, 1886 (photo courtesy Sharon McGriff-Payne)

Soon afterward, Maggie’s mother brought Dicky, a sickly child, to reside with the Millers. She hoped the move would improve his health. Jessup continued to provide financially support the boy, occasionally visiting him at the Miller home, as did Dicky’s mother on one occasion. When Dicky came of school age, the Millers enrolled him with their own children in Petaluma’s “colored school” under the name Richard Miller.[9]

1870 Brooklyn Colored School in Oakland, Mary J. Sanderson, teacher (photo public domain)

At the time, George Miller and the Colored Convention were engaged in a case before the state Supreme Court to desegregate California schools. Although the court ultimately upheld the state’s “separate but equal” education law, a major economic recession led most California cities with “colored schools” to desegregate by 1875 as a cost-saving measure.[10]

Petaluma was the exception, maintaining its “colored school” until the state abolished them in 1880. As Dicky’s presence at the school violated Petaluma’s segregation adherence, he was forced to transfer to a white elementary school, where students bullied him so badly the Millers withdrew him for homeschooling.[11]

Washington College, Alameda County, 1878 (illustration David Rumsey’s Historical Map Collection)

In 1876, Jessup instructed Maggie—George Miller having unexpectedly died in 1873—to board 10-year-old Dicky in Washington College, a technical school in Alameda County under the name Richard Miller. He was afraid Josie’s family, having recently learned of the boy’s existence, would try to steal him away. Dicky lived with Maggie during school breaks.[12]

That same year, Maggie’s mother died, leaving her a sizable inheritance.[13] Her four stepchildren grown and gone, Maggie decided to move with her seven-year-old son Hoddie to Napa, where she eventually purchased a ranch, opened a restaurant, and married a Black barber named Ed Hatton.[14]

Ad for Maggie’s Arcade Restaurant (Napa Register, 1887).

In 1881, Dicky’s mother Josie died. Jessup had Maggie pull Dicky out of the Alameda technical school and send him to work on a friend’s ranch in San Diego, ending financial support for the boy. Within a year, Dicky returned to live with Maggie in Napa, working in a tannery and as a bootblack in her husband’s barbershop.[15]

Jessup died in 1886 at Harbin Springs in Lake County while seeking treatment for his rheumatism. In his will he named his brother and two sisters as sole beneficiaries of his estate. The estate was valued at $140,000, or $5 million in today’s currency.[16]

Maggie engaged Jerry Mahoney, a private detective, to determine if 20-year-old Dicky had a claim to the estate. Mahoney enlisted Colonel Kowalsky as legal counsel. Borrowing $20,000 ($600,000 in today’s currency) against a prospective settlement, Kowalsky filed a probate challenge and sent Mahoney scouring the state for witnesses to testify to Jessup’s fatherly relationship with Dicky.[17]

Senator Jeremiah H. Mahoney, 1896 (illustration public domain)

A media circus erupted around the trial, putting Dicky in the public spotlight. Mahoney took the young man under his wing, introducing him to the life of white luxury denied him by his father. To pay for his posh hotel, fancy meals, and tailored suits, Dicky borrowed against his prospective settlement at usury rates.[18]

In district court, Kowalsky was able to convince the judge that Jessup, through his actions and public acknowledgements, had legitimized Dicky as his offspring, entitling him to the entire estate. Jessup’s siblings filed an appeal with the state’s Supreme Court, who affirmed the lower court ruling. [19]  

Undeterred, the siblings filed a second appeal. A new presiding judge, Charles Fox, reversed the ruling. Although he cited insubstantial evidence, the main thrust of his decision was race.[20]  

California Supreme Court Justice Charles Fox (photo public domain)

Fox believed Jessup’s actions toward Dicky were not those of a loving father, but a punitive one. Why else would he have the boy brought up by a Black family, “considered inferior and by most white people as degrading,” having him take the family’s surname, attend a “colored school,” and work in a Black barber shop? Fox also speculated that Jessup’s cut off of funding for Dicky the same year the boy’s mother died, indicated he had agreed to provide support only during her lifetime, most likely out of fear she would expose their affair if he didn’t.[21]

Following the decision, Kowalsky incited a campaign among Black political leaders to oppose Fox’s reelection to the bench. It quickly escalated into death threats against the judge.[22] After Kowalsky filed for a new trial in district court, he discovered his key witness, Maggie Nugent Miller Hatton, refused to testify.

Maggie’s relationship with Dicky had apparently deteriorated during his time under Mahoney’s tutelage. To convince her to retestify, Kowalsky secured a $5,000 promissory note for her against the prospective settlement.[23]

The retrial once again ended in Kowalsky’s favor. Jessup’s siblings filed another appeal, but this time the two sides negotiated a settlement, granting one-third of the estate to the siblings. Dicky walked away with $90,000, or $3 million in today’s currency.[24]

Colonel Henry Kowalsky, 1899 (photo public domain)

Of that amount, Kowalsky took $40,000 for his fee. Another $20,000 went to paying off the loan he secured at the beginning of the trial. Mahoney, Kowalsky’s legal associate, and the court-appointed administrator of Jessup’s estate got $15,000. Dicky’s loan sharks got $10,000. That left Dicky with $5,000, which he legally owed to Maggie. She never received a penny.[25]

After the trial, Dicky moved to Sacramento to live with Mahoney, who had used his newfound fame to get elected to the state senate. Mahoney got him a job working as a senate page for $3 a day. After the senator’s death in 1897, Dicky vanished from sight.[26]

Maggie and her family moved to Oakland. She died there in 1928. Kowalsky went on to land a number of high-profile cases, including defending Belgium’s King Leopold II against charges of genocide in the Congo. He died in 1914, still living the high life at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel.[27]

******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 2, 2024


FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Col. Kowalsky was Reared at Tomales,” Petaluma Courier, December 9, 1914; “Aneurysm Cause of Kowalsky’s Sleeping Sickness,” Sacramento Bee, November 30, 1914.

[2] “Henry Kowalsky Called by Death,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 29, 1914.

[3] “Colonel Kowalsky is Dead,” San Francisco Bulletin, November 28, 1914.

[4] “Estate of Gershom P. Jessup, Deceased,” Decided March 29, 1891, by California Superior Court, Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2 (San Francisco Probate Department, James Vincent Coffey, Bancroft-Whitney, 1909), pp. 480-481; “First Boatbuilder on the Pacific Coast,” San Francisco Call and Port, March 9, 1902.

[5] Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, p. 481. “The Lost Heir,” San Francisco Examiner, September 8, 1887.

[6] Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, pp. 482-483; “Young Jessup Wins,” Napa Register Weekly, July 5, 1889; “Jessup Contest,” Napa Register Weekly, September 19, 1890.

[7] John Sheehy, “Black Sonoma County’s Birth,” PetalumaHistorian.com, https://petalumahistorian.com/black-sonoma-countys-political-birth/

[8] Sheehy, https://petalumahistorian.com/black-sonoma-countys-political-birth/

[9] Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, p. 482; “Jessup Contest,” Napa Register Weekly, September 19, 1890.

[10] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; Jo Ann Williamson, Lori Rhodes, Michael Dunson, “Chapter 7 A Selected History of Social Justice in Education,” Review of Research in Education, November 15, 2016, Vol. 31 (1), pp. 195–224; “1874 Ward V. Flood,” Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/.

[11] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 25; “Local Dots,” Petaluma Courier, July 21, 1880; “Jessup Contest,” Napa Register Weekly, September 19, 1890.

[12] Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, p. 484.

[13] “Died, The Elevator, October 25, 1873; Maggie inherited property valued at $8,000: “The Jessup Case,” Napa Register Weekly, September 19, 1890.

[14] “Dancing Party,” Napa Register Weekly, November 30, 1883; “Real Estate Transfers,” Napa Register Weekly, March 5, 1885; “Local Brevities,” Napa Register Weekly, April 1, 1886; “Local Brevities,” Napa Register Weekly, August 5, 1887; “Local Briefs,” Napa Valley Register, January 17, 1890; “Death of Edward Hatton,” Napa Register Weekly, May 11, 1897.

[15] Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, p. 485; “Gershom P. Jessup’s Estate,” Lawyers’ Reports Annotated, Book VI (The Lawyers’ Co-operative Publishing Company, 1890), p. 600.

[16] Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, p. 477; “Stripped of His Birthright,” San Francisco Examiner, April 9, 1893: The Jessup estate, initially valued at $93,000 at the time of Jessup’s death, rose in value to $140,000 by the time of the settlement in 1892.

[17] “Mahoney Did It,” San Francisco Call and Post, October 13, 1894.

[18] “Young Jessup’s Estate,” San Francisco Examiner, July 2, 1892; “Stripped of His Birthright,” San Francisco Examiner, April 9, 1893; “Mahoney Did It,” San Francisco Call and Post, October 13, 1894.

[19] Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, p. 476.

[20] Lawyers’ Reports Annotated, Book VI, pp. 594-601.

[21] Lawyers’ Reports Annotated, Book VI, pp. 600-601.

[22] “Offices Seeking Men,” San Francisco Examiner, August 6, 1890; Stockton Evening Mail, August 7, 1890; “The Fox Resolutions,” San Francisco Call and Post, August 7, 1890.

[23] “To Protect Her Claim,” San Francisco Examiner, September 8, 1894; Hatton’s promissory note was issued September 12, 1890, she testified September 19th.

[24] “Stripped of His Birthright,” San Francisco Examiner, April 9, 1893.

[25] In the Hotel Corridors,” Sacramento Bee, December 8, 1892; “Stripped of His Birthright,” San Francisco Examiner, April 9, 1893; “Made Certain of His Fees, San Francisco Examiner, May 15, 1893; “Young Jessup’s Note,” San Francisco Call and Post, September 8, 1894; “To Protect Her Claim,” San Francisco Examiner, September 8, 1894.

[26] “Stripped of His Birthright,” San Francisco Examiner, April 9, 1893; “Jessup is Penniless,” Pacific Bee, December 27, 1893; “State Senator Mahoney Dead,” Sacramento Bee, December 24, 1897; “List of Letters,” Sacramento Union, October 11, 1897: Jessup still in Sacramento.

[27] “Deaths,” San Francisco Examiner, December 28, 1928; “Aneurysm Cause of Kowalsky’s Sleeping Sickness,” Sacramento Bee, November 30, 1914.

Featured

In the Shadow of Gold Mountain

PETALUMA’S EARLY CHINATOWN

Chinese butcher and grocery, San Francisco, ca. 1885 (photo Universal Archives/Getty Images)

On January 17, 1866, John McNear’s wife Clara died from complications related to the birth of the couple’s fifth child.[1] Rather than bury her at Petaluma’s public graveyard in Oak Park, McNear developed his own cemetery on forty acres at the edge of town. He called it Cypress Hill. Reverend William C. Pond, the new Congregational minister in town, officiated over Clara’s burial. In gratitude, McNear gifted him Cypress Hill’s first commercial burial plot.[2]

But death wasn’t all the two men bonded over. There was also “the Chinese question.” 

For capitalists like McNear, the Chinese were quiet, diligent laborers, willing to work at wages below those of whites. For Protestant evangelists like Pond, they were prospective converts to send back to China as missionaries in spreading Christianity.

Two years after Clara’s death, lobbyists of commerce and conversion persuaded the U.S. to sign the Burlingame Treaty with China. In addition to opening up new trade opportunities, the treaty lifted restrictions on Chinese immigration, ensuring a steady flow of cheap labor to the U.S, and allowed Christian missionaries to practice in China.[3]

Chinese Bottling Wine at Buena Vista Winery, Sonoma (photo Eadweard Muybridge, California State Library)

By 1870, there were nearly 500 Chinese immigrants living in Sonoma County. Their numbers would double over the next decade.[4] They worked in vineyards, on creek rechanneling and levee crews along the Petaluma River, at wineries, as railroad workers, lumberjacks, quarry miners, farm laborers, and builders of stone fences before the arrival of barbed wire.[5] A quarter of them lived in Petaluma, primarily in Chinatown, an ethnic enclave extending along today’s Petaluma Boulevard from Western Avenue to D Street.[6]

Relegated to shanties as living quarters, they operated laundries, groceries, tobacco shops, boarding houses, and restaurants—including one specializing in abalone porterhouse steaks. Dr. Shing Kee operated an herbal medical practice at B and Main streets, that doubled as a laborer hiring company. A handful of Chinese also worked as servants and cooks for wealthy white households.[7]

Chung, house servant of T. B and Caroline Hood, Santa Rosa, 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Excluded from local fraternities, they formed their own Freemasons Lodge. For worship and meditation, they established a Joss House, or Taoist-Buddhist temple, which also served as a community center, especially during Chinese New Year.[8]

Joss House temple in San Francisco, 1887 (photo Bancroft Library)

The Chinese were almost exclusively men, women largely precluded by custom and immigration law. Of the 3,536 Chinese women living in California in 1870, 60% were victims of sex traffickers, smuggled into the country by a crime network known as the Tong, whose reach extended to Petaluma, where they operated brothels, gambling houses, and opium dens for Chinese and whites. [9]

Most Chinese emigrated to “Gold Mountain”—as they called California—from South China’s Guangtong Province, a region wracked by war, civil unrest, floods, famines, and drought. Petaluma’s other early immigrant groups—the Irish, Swiss Italians, and Germans—who made up a third of the city’s population, fled their own homelands under similar conditions. [10]

Like them, the Chinese had their own benevolent association, the Six Companies, which fronted their passage to California, aided them in sickness, and shipped their bones back to China for burial.[11]

Headquarters of the Chinese Six Companies in San Francisco (photo Bancroft Library)

As Sonoma County burst from encampments into a bustling economy, the Chinese proved indispensable in building railroads, reclaiming wetland areas, and developing agriculture. Most carved out meager livings, sending a share of their earnings back home to struggling family members.[12] But unlike European immigrants, who were able to gradually assimilate into Anglo-American culture, the Chinese found themselves perennially marked as foreign, set apart by their features, skin color, exotic dress, and customs.

Prohibited from owning property, denied naturalization and legal protections, they were mislabeled “coolies”—a Hindi term from the British empire for indentured or slave labor—and consigned to the shadow of Gold Mountain as second-class citizens.[13]

Rev. William C. Pond (photo public domain)
John A. McNear (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

McNear was one of the largest employers of Chinese in the area. Along with his banking and real estate concerns, his primary business was selling grain. He made a fortune during the state’s wheat boom, exporting grain overseas. He also employed hundreds of Chinese at San Pedro Point in Marin County, where he operated a 2,500-acre cattle ranch, brickyard, quarry, and shrimping business.[14]

Chinese shrimpers at San Pedro Point (photo Friends of China Camp)

McNear found a ready ally in Reverend Pond, a fellow New Englander, over the “Chinese question.” Pond left the Petaluma parish after three years to serve as pastor of San Francisco’s Third Congregational Church. Employing a Protestant strategy known as “baiting the Gospel hook with the English alphabet,” he started a night school for the “heathen” Chinese.

After conservative parishioners balked at admitting Chinese converts, Pond established his own parish, the Bethany Congregational Church. He also created the California Chinese Mission, which opened dozens of Chinese Mission Schools across California, including one in Petaluma’s Chinatown in 1876.[15]

Students at Congregational Chinese Mission School, Los Angeles, 1880s (photo Chinese Historical Society of Southern California)

That same year, California was hit with the full brunt of a national recession. Triggered in 1873 by overspeculation in railroads and a drop in European demand for U.S. farm goods, it brought with it farm foreclosures and high unemployment.[16]

In the fall of 1877, labor protestors in San Francisco formed the Workingmen’s Party. Led by a charismatic young Irish immigrant named Denis Kearney, they called for better pay, an eight-hour work day, regulation of banks and railroads, high taxation of the rich, and help for the poor. Denouncing the employment of low-paid Chinese immigrants by rich capitalists, they launched a Chinese labor boycott, adopting as their rallying cry “the Chinese must go.”[17]

Cover of the San Francisco Wasp magazine, December 8, 1877 (Bancroft Library)

Within weeks, Anti-Chinese Clubs sprang up throughout California, including in Petaluma, where membership quickly exceeded 300. In the spring of 1878, Kearney and his lieutenants staged a mass rally at Petaluma’s Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park) to address local party members and discontented members of the Petaluma Grange.[18]

Illustration of 1874 Grange meeting in a schoolhouse (Joseph E. Beale, Pixels.com)

Formed in 1873 to provide social and intellectual benefits to the local farming community, the Grange aligned with the Workingmen to protest “the wheat-bag trust” of exploitative middlemen—wheat brokers, shipping companies, and bankers—who forced them to dispose of their crops at little or no profit, while charging them interest rates of between 12% and 20%. They called out McNear to be “subjected to the inquisitorial thumbscrews.”[19]

In the fall of 1878, California voters approved a proposal to hold a convention to update California’s state constitution. After capturing a majority of the convention delegates, the Workingmen’s Party pushed for more stringent federal and state laws against the Chinese, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which placed a ten-year prohibition on the immigration of Chinese laborers.[20] 

Illustration in the San Francisco Wasp magazine, May 11, 1878, lampooning whites who claim to be anti-Chinese but use their services (Bancroft Library)

Far from appeasing the fanatics, the new restrictions prompted them to expel the remaining Chinese from the U.S., unleashing more hostilities against Chinese communities.[21] In 1883, an arsonist in Petaluma torched Wah Lee’s laundry at the corner of Western Avenue and Kentucky Street. Before it could be rebuilt, the city banned laundries—new and existing—from its “fire limits” downtown, a zone extending from the river to Kentucky and Fourth streets, and from B Street to Washington Street.[22]

1883 Sanborn map of Chinese businesses (in green) at Western Avenue and Petaluma Boulevard (then Main Street)

Tensions reached a fevered pitch in 1886, following the murder of a former Petaluma couple, Jesse and Sarah Wickersham, at their remote farm house west of Cloverdale. Married cousins, they were the nephew and niece of Petaluma banker Isaac Wickersham, who owned numerous properties in Chinatown. Unfounded accusations pinned the murder on the couple’s Chinese cook, who disappeared after the crime. [23]

With newspapers fanning the flames, “anti-coolie” meetings were held across Sonoma County, resulting in Chinese being attacked, beaten, and driven out. Some had their homes and shops burned to the ground, including in Petaluma.[24] Taking advantage of the exodus, McNear replaced a shanty-filled lot he owned in Chinatown with the 1886 McNear Building, launching a commercial gentrification of the block.[25]

John McNear before his the new 1886 McNear Building (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Within a year, labor shortages—largely in jobs whites refused to fill—led to the gradual return of the Chinese to Sonoma County. Exhibiting resilience in the face of hostilities, their numbers rebounded by 1890 to 1,145, of which 104 lived in Petaluma.[26] Looking to reduce tensions, McNear offered to build a segregated Chinese colony east of town, on the condition the Chinese be compelled to abandon Chinatown.[27] That never materialized.

Instead, an ongoing series of discriminatory legislative acts led to the steady reduction of California’s Chinese population. Among them was the Geary Act introduced in 1892 by Sonoma County congressman Thomas Geary, a former Petaluma lawyer. It extended the Chinese Exclusion Act another ten years. Once it expired, Congress extended the exclusion period indefinitely. It would not be lifted until 1943.[28]

Congressman Thomas J. Geary (photo public domain)

Reverend Pond continued his regular visits to town to preach at the Congregational Church, but closed down the Chinese Mission School in 1900, soon after celebrating its 25th anniversary.[29] In the years that followed, Petaluma’s Chinatown was reduced to the block of Petaluma Boulevard between C and D streets, as the Chinese population fell to below two dozen.[30]  

View of Chinatown on Petaluma Blvd (then Third Street) between C and D Streets, early 1900s (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

McNear designated a section at Cypress Hill for the Chinese, to be buried in their traditional Buddhist ceremonies.[31] In 1913, the Six Companies exhumed their remains and shipped them back to China.[32] McNear himself was laid to rest in Cypress Hill in 1918, beside his first wife Clara. He was joined there by Reverend Pond in 1925, in the plot McNear gifted him in 1866.[33]

A few weeks after Pond’s death, the last remaining vestige of Chinatown—a Chinese laundry and boarding house between C and D streets owned by the McNear family—was torn down.[34]


A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 3, 2023.

******

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Died,” Daily Alta California, January 18, 1866; the child, Herbert Lincoln McNear, died two months later: “Died,” Daily Alta California, March 16, 1866.

[2] “Dr. Pond Rests at Cypress Hill,” Petaluma Argus, November 18, 1925; “Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, November 16, 1877.

[3] “The Burlingame-Seward Treaty, 1868,” Office of the Historian, Department of State, United States website: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/burlingame-seward-treaty

[4] The 1870 U.S. census lists 473 Chinese in Sonoma County, 121 of them living in Petaluma; the 1880 U.S. census lists 904 Chinese living in the county, with no breakout for Petaluma as it was under a population of 4,000. The census groups them under the category “Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and all other,” but “Our Population,” Petaluma Argus, December 17, 1880, states there are 904 Chinese, two Japanese, and 339 Indians and half-breeds.

[5] Nancy Olmsted, “A History of Paving Blocks Along San Francisco’s South Beach Waterfront,” San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, July 1991, p. 17; Sue Doherty, “Sonoma Stories and the Song Wong Bourbeau Collection,” Masters Thesis, Sonoma State University, 2005, p. 34; “Notes from the White Family Collection,” Katherine Rinehart private archives: in 1880 ,Chinese crews worked on levees in Lakeville to reclaim marshland; “More Johns,” Petaluma Argus, May 6, 1869.

[6] Chinese stores and shanties are listed in the 1883 Sanborn map of Petaluma extending along Western Avenue from Kentucky to Main Street, and from there down Main and Third streets to D Street, as well as along B Street from Main Street to Fourth Street.

[7] “Chinese New Year,” Petaluma Argus, January 30, 1868: abalone porterhouse steak & tobacco factory; Ad for physician Dr. Shing Kee, Petaluma Argus, November 14, 1873; Ad for Chung Kee Chinese Grocery, Petaluma Argus, July 25, 1875; Ad for See Hop Chinese Grocery, Petaluma Argus, October 5, 1875; “Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, January 14, 1876: 6 Chinese wash houses, 3 Chinese drug stores; Ad for Wa Sing Wash House, Petaluma Courier, July 19, 1877; “After the Riot,” Petaluma Argus, August 2, 1877: Petaluma had 10 Chinese wash houses, 5 Chinese stores, and boarding houses; “Not Very Pretty,” Petaluma Argus, August 20, 1887: new Chinese wash house on North Main; “Our Fires,” Petaluma Courier, April 6, 1881: 5 Chinese wash houses listed; Ad for Wah Yene Employment Office and Chinese Goods store, Petaluma Argus, November 24, 1882; Ad for Wah Lee Wash House, Petaluma Argus, April 28, 1883; Ad for Jim Kee Laundry Petaluma Courier, January 14, 1891.

[8] “Chinese New Year,” Petaluma Argus, January 30, 1900; “Has His Say,” Petaluma Courier, October 11, 1901; “Explore California: Weaverville Joss House Park,” California State Parks Foundation, January 17, 2020. https://www.calparks.org/blog/explore-california-weaverville-joss-house-state-historic-park; Gordon C. Phillips, “The Chinese in Sonoma County, California, 1900-1930: The Aftermath of Exclusion,”Masters Thesis, Sonoma State University, 2015, pgs. 64, 74; http://sonoma-dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.3/153831/PhillipsG_Thesis.pdf;sequence=1

[9]Jean Pfaelzer, California a Slave State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), p. 252: more than 90% of the Chinese population in 1870 was male; Iris Chang, The Chinese in America (NY: Viking Books, 2003), pp. 80-86; Phillips, pp. 80-84; “Is There No Remedy?” Petaluma Argus, August 26, 1871; “Half Told,” Petaluma Argus, September 2, 1871; “Chinese Wedding,” Petaluma Argus, September 12, 1873: bride from local brothel; “Recorder’s Court,” Petaluma Argus, September 12, 1873: gambling house; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, March 14, 1879: Chinese gambling house; “Voice of the People,” Petaluma Argus, December 19, 1885: five alleged opium dens in town; “The Chinese,” Petaluma Argus, February 6, 1886: local brothels; “Police Notes,” Petaluma Argus, August 27, 1880: opium dens; “Caught in the Act,” Petaluma Courier, September 16, 1896: opium den; Phillips, pp. 7, 63-64.

[10] 6,093 of Sonoma County’s 19,833 were foreign born per the 1880 U.S. Census, “Population by Race, Sex, and Nativity,” p. 428.

[11] Chang, pp. 78-80.

[12] Thomas Chinn, A History of the Chinese in California (San Francisco, CA: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969), p. 22; Pfaelzer, p. 262.

[13] Pfaelzer, p. 147, pp. 247-250.

[14] Chinn, p. 21; “China Camp State Park,” Marin History Museum video, November 26, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8tZpz1YAlE.

[15] William C. Pond, Gospel Pioneering: Reminiscences of Early Congregationalism in California 1833-1920 (Oberlin, OH: The News Printing Company, 1921), pgs. 10, 17, 91-95, 130-135; Robert Segar II, “Some Denominational Reactions to Chinese Immigration to California, 1856-1892,” Pacific Historical Review , February, 1959, Vol. 28, No. 1, pgs. 51, 58; Wesley S. Woo, “Presbyterian Mission: Christianizing and Civilizing The Chinese in Nineteenth Century California,” American Presbyterians, Fall 1990, Vol. 68, No. 3, pgs. 68, 71, 167-172.

[16] Segar, pp. 52-53.

[17] Ralph Kauer, “The Workingmen’s Party of California,” Pacific Historical Review, 1944, 13 (3): 278–291.

[18] Kearney first held a meeting in Donahue, but was a no show at the Main Street Plaza rally, leaving his lieutenants Wellock and Knight to preside: “Anti-Coolie Meeting,” Petaluma Courier, December 27, 1877; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, February 15, 1878; “Kearney,” Petaluma Argus, March 15, 1878; “Kearney, Wellock, and Knight,” Petaluma Argus, March 22, 1878; “Workingmen’s Club at Donahue,” Petaluma Argus, March 29, 1878; “Workingmen’s Meeting Saturday,” Petaluma Argus, March 29, 1878; “The Workingmen’s Meeting,” Petaluma Courier, April 11, 1878; “Notice,” Petaluma Argus, May 3, 1878; “Workingmen’s Convention,” Petaluma Argus, May 31, 1878.

[19] “Farmers’ Club,” Petaluma Argus, June 2, 1873; “Organization of a Grange,” Petaluma Argus, June 16, 1873; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, February 4, 1876; “W.W. Chapman,” Petaluma Courier, June 5, 1878; “History,” Sebastopol Grange #306, http://sebastopolgrange.org/history/; W.L. Robinson, First Century of Service and Evolution – The Grange 1867 – 1967 (National Grange, 1967); Clarke Chambers, California Farm Organizations (University of California, 1952), p. 11; “Sonoma County National Bank, Petaluma, 50th Anniversary,” Coast Banker, Volume 16, Coast Banker Publishing Company, 1916; “The Boycott,” Petaluma Argus, March 13, 1886; Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “A History of California Agriculture,” University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (Giannini Foundation Publications, December, 2017). http://giannini.ucop.edu/publications.htm.

[20] Chang, pp. 124-128.

[21] Chang, p. 132.

[22] “Another Blaze,” Petaluma Courier, February 14, 1883; “Polly Larkin’s Pot-Pourri,” Petaluma Courier, October 1, 1884; “The Fire Limits,” Petaluma Argus, Aril 2, 1875; The laundry ban applied to the city’s fire limits: “Legal Notice: Ordinance No. 11,” Petaluma Courier, November 19, 1884; “Fire Friday Evening,” Petaluma Courier, August 15, 1894.

[23] “A Terrible Crime,” Petaluma Courier, January 27, 1886; “Ah Ti, the Murderer,” Petaluma Argus, January 30, 1886; Jeff Elliot examines holes in the accusations against the Wickersham’s cook: “The Wickersham Murders,” “Who Killed the Wickershams,” Santarosahistory.com, http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2017/05/the-wickersham-murders/.

[24] “Anti-Coolie Meeting,” Sonoma Democrat, February 6, 1886; “Going Below,” Petaluma Argus, February 13, 1866; “Sebastopol Anti-Chinese League,” Sonoma Democrat, February 27, 1886; “Blew Them Up,” Petaluma Argus, March 10, 1886; Chinatown fires (no headline) Petaluma Courier, September 21, 1887.

[25] “An Additional Story,” Petaluma Argus, April 3, 1886.

[26] Phillips, pp. 38-39; “Fruit Growers,” Petaluma Courier, march 13, 1886; “Potato Diggers,” Petaluma Argus, November 19, 1887; U.S. Census, 1890.

[27] “Polly Larkin’s Pot-Pourri,” Petaluma Courier, October 1, 1884: McNear first raised the idea of a colony in East Petaluma in 1884; “A Persistent Fire,” Petaluma Argus, September 3, 1887; “Locals,” Petaluma Argus, September 17, 1887; “Recent Burning,” Petaluma Courier, September 21, 1887; “That Citizens’ Meeting,” Petaluma Courier, September 21, 1887.

[28] Chang, pp. 125-141.

[29] Pond visits include: “Chinese Sunday School,” Petaluma Argus, July 23, 1875; “Items of Local Interest,” Petaluma Argus, August 10, 1877; Pond’s visits to Petaluma: “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, July 9, 1875; “Religious,” Petaluma Argus, July 21, 1876; “Items of Local Interest,” Petaluma Argus, August 10, 1877; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, August 8, 1879; “Local Brevities” Petaluma Argus, August 6, 1880; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, September 2, 1881; “Twenty-Fourth Anniversary,” Petaluma Argus, May, 8, 1899; “Congregational Church Dedicated Friday,” Petaluma Argus, June 28, 1901; “Dr. Pond Arrives from San Francisco,” Petaluma Argus, August 17, 1903; “Chinese School,” Petaluma Argus, August 15, 1885; “Chinese Mission Anniversary,” Petaluma Argus, June 11, 1900.

[30] U.S. Census; 1894 Sanborn Map.

[31] “Chinaman Gone,” Petaluma Argus, February 12, 1875.

[32] “Remains Will Be Shipped to Orient,” Petaluma Courier, May 2, 1913; “6,000 Will Sail Home to Final Rest in China,” Los Angeles Herald, April 23, 1913.

[33] “Dr. Pond Rests at Cypress Hill,” Petaluma Argus, November 18, 1925; “People Honor Memory of J.A. McNear,” Petaluma Courier, June 22, 1918.

[34] “Chinatown Building Being Razed,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1926.

Featured

The Shoe Factory Kidnapping

A PETALUMA SHOE SALESMAN’S TRIP TO CHINATOWN

San Francisco’s Chinatown, 1920s (photo Shop City Merch)

On March 12, 1925, Homer O. Webster abruptly left the shoe factory he operated in Petaluma to take an overnight trip to San Francisco. When he failed to return home two days later, his wife Mary, filed a missing persons report with San Francisco police.

That same morning, the police received another missing persons report from the wife of a San Francisco chemist named Fred Kormann. Officers located Kormann’s car in a city parking garage, where it had been sitting for days. By coincidence, the garage was near the hotel Webster had checked into. His bags were found in his room, unpacked.[1]

Later that day, a detective spotted a man matching Webster’s description wandering the streets of Chinatown in a daze. Webster told the detective he had been partying the night before in Chinatown with Kormann. He promised to find Kormann and see to it that he got home safely.[2]

He then disappeared without a trace.

Grant Street, Chinatown, San Francisco, 1920s (photo San Francisco Chamber of Commerce)

The next day, Kormann’s wife Ida called in an international private detective firm. Her husband—an internationally known inventor— had left the house with patent papers, planning to officially file them the following day. They were for a new secret formula he had developed for a deadly poison gas.[3]

Through tips, the private detectives were able to determine Kormann had been kidnapped by a band of international conspirators from China looking to gain possession of his new invention. Webster’s involvement in the abduction was unclear, which led the detectives to Petaluma.[4]

A descendant of Daniel Webster, Homer Webster grew up in Boston, where he followed in the footsteps of his father, who also ran a shoe factory. In 1922, he decided to team up with A.H. Crafts, a traveling shoe salesman from Boston, in leasing the Nolan-Earle Shoe Factory in Petaluma.[5]

Nolan-Earl Shoe Factory, Jefferson and Wilson streets (photo Sonoma County Library)

The factory opened its doors in 1898. Located beside the city’s silk mill, it was part of a campaign led by local capitalist John A. McNear to create a local Factory District on the east side of the city that would transform Petaluma into the manufacturing hub of the North Bay. Instead, after the turn of the century, McNear found his efforts overtaken by the local poultry industry, which transformed the city into the Egg Basket of the World.[6]

Webster and Crafts sold off most of the factory’s machinery to Petaluma’s former mayor William Keig, for his shoe factory in Napa. Keig also operated a shoe store on Petaluma’s Main Street.

After completely renovating the building, Webster and Crafts shipped in from the east coast all new, state-of-the-art machinery for manufacturing high-end work boots, their niche in the highly competitive shoe market, using tanned leather sourced largely from Sonoma County.[7]

The upfront investment and initial slow sales led Crafts to sell his interest within the first year to A.W. Green, a San Francisco investor. By 1924, factory production tripled to more than 600 pairs a day, with the boots selling all along the west coast and in Hawaii.

To keep up with demand, Webster and his new partner Green had to invest in frequent upgrades to the factory’s machinery. Cash-strapped, the 33-year old Webster was forced to declare personal bankruptcy in order to stave off creditors. That ultimately led him to Kormann.[8]

Workers inside the Petaluma shoe factory (photo Sonoma County Library)

Like Webster, the 43-year old Kormann was an entrepreneur in financial trouble.

He first made his mark as a young chemist in San Francisco during World War I, when he developed a chemical compound for increasing eight-fold the amount of gasoline that could be extracted from a barrel of crude oil. In a patriotic gesture, he donated his patent to the government, allowing them to meet their gasoline needs in the war effort.[9]

After working for a large oil company back east, Kormann returned to the Bay Area in 1923 to launch a company for manufacturing a new synthetic gasoline he developed. He capitalized the company on the promise that it would solve the country’s gasoline shortfalls which were being created by the increase in automobile sales during the Roaring Twenties. He continued selling shares to new investors after it became clear the company was financially underwater.[10]

Fred A. Kormann (illustration San Pedro News Pilot)

By early 1925, he was battling lawsuits from disgruntled investors who charged him with grand larceny. He was banking on restoring his finances with a new poisonous gas formula he had just invented. The day before he planned to file the patent for the gas formula, he got a call from a representative of the Chinese government expressing an interest in his earlier synthetic gas venture.[11]

Kormann contacted Webster, who he apparently knew from investing circles, asking him to come to the city that evening to serve as his witness in the meeting with the representative. He also dangled before him the possibility of providing him with a connection for exporting his work boots to China.[12]

Trade with China was tricky at the time. The country was undergoing a period of civil wars waged by regional warlords. Following World War I, China began flooding the U.S. with cheap exports, including eggs, which undermined Petaluma’s booming poultry industry.

1922 Petaluma Argus newspaper

Thanks to persistent campaigning by Petaluma poultry leaders and the city’s Chamber of Commerce, a tariff was imposed on Chinese eggs in late 1922,  reducing their importation from more than 3 million dozen a year to less than half a million, and ending their threat to Petaluma’s prosperity.[13]

After meeting up with Kormann in San Francisco, Webster accompanied him to a luxurious apartment in Chinatown. There, they were royally entertained, feted with an elaborate banquet, and served exotic drinks, which turned out to be spiked with drugs. Aside from Webster’s brief escape into Chinatown where he encountered the police detective, the two men were drugged and held as prisoners for a week, after which they were both discovered aimlessly wandering the side streets of Chinatown.[14]

Grant Avenue, San Francisco’s Chinatown, 1925 (photo San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Webster was able to return home, but Kormann was admitted to the hospital, suffering from side effects of the drugs. The patent papers were missing. From that point on, the investigation became a matter of national security, and was conducted covertly.[15]

A month after the incident, Webster sold his interest in the Petaluma shoe factory to his partner, A.W. Green, and moved to Los Angeles. A few months later, he and his wife divorced. Kormann also moved to Los Angeles, where he became the chief chemist of a lubricant company.[16]

In 1927, the Webster-Green Shoe Factory was purchased by Keig, who shut down the plant, consolidating operations at his Napa factory. The factory building was repurposed for other uses until 1957, when it was torn down.[17]

As for the secret poison gas formula, it was never heard of again.


A version of this story appeared in the Sonoma Historian, September 2023.

******

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Police Asked to Hunt Missing Inventor,” San Francisco Examiner, Saturday, March 14, 1925; “Police Solve Two Mysteries,” San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, March 15, 1925; “Plot Hinted as Two Men Disappear in S.F.,” Petaluma Courier, Tuesday, March 17, 1925.

[2] “Police Solve Two Mysteries,” San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, March 15, 1925.

[3] “Plot Hinted as Two Men Disappear in S.F.,” Petaluma Courier, Tuesday, March 17, 1925.

[4] “Plot Hinted as Two Men Disappear in S.F.,” Petaluma Courier, Tuesday, March 17, 1925.

[5] “H.O. Webster,” Honoria Tuomey, History of Sonoma County (S.J. Clarke Publications, 1926), pps. 807-808; “City Council Changes License Ordinance to One Dollar Per Quarter,” Petaluma Courier, February 25, 1922.

[6] “Shoe Factory to Pass into History,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 16, 1927.

[7] “Shoe Concern Leases Factory,” Petaluma Courier, December 30, 1921; “Machinery Expected from the East,” Petaluma Courier, March 11, 1922.

[8] “Shoe Company Has Organized,” Petaluma Courier, July 26, 1922; “Shoe Factory Enlarging and Installing Costly and Wonderful Machinery,” Petaluma Argus, April 1, 1924; “H.O. Webster,” Honoria Tuomey, History of Sonoma County (S.J. Clarke Publications, 1926), pps. 807-808; “In Bankruptcy,” The Recorder, February 10, 1923.

[9] “Believes it Will Settle the Gas Problem,” Santa Cruz Evening News, September 29, 1917; Discovery Ends Threatened Shortage of Gasoline,” Santa Ana Register, September 29, 1917.

[10] “Oil Company is Organized for Plant at Benicia,” Daily Gazette-Martinez, September 18, 1922; “San Francisco Rich Chemist in Mystery Disappearance,” Victor Valley News Herald, March 20, 1925.

[11] “Superior Court,” The Recorder, May 31, 1923; “Oil Company Head Held,” Fresno Bee, February 28, 1924; “Missing Petaluma Man Returns Home,” Santa Rosa Republican,” March 20, 1925.

[12] “H.O. Webster Home After Experience,” Petaluma Argus, March 19, 1925.

[13] Thea Lowry, Empty Shells, (Manifold Press, Novato, CA, 2000), pp. 124-125; John P. Dunn, Matthew R. Portwood, “A Tale of Two Warlords: Republican China During the 1920s,” Association for Asian Studies, Vol. 19:3, Winter 2014; “What the Tariff Had Done for the Poultrymen,” Petaluma Argus, July 24, 1924.

[14] “Missing Petaluma Man Returns Home,” Santa Rosa Republican,” March 20, 1925.

[15] “H.O. Webster Home After Experience,” Petaluma Argus, March 19, 1925.

[16] “Greens Now Control Webster and Greens,” Petaluma Courier, April 14, 1925; “New Civil Suits,” The Recorder, November 2, 1925; “Oil Lubricant Company Here Recapitalizes,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1931; “F.A. Kormann Services,” Valley Times, February 9, 1948.

[17] “Wm. C. Keig Buys Controlling Interest in Webster-Green Shoe Factory,” Petaluma Argus, October 11, 1926; “Monday’s Meeting of the City Council Brief, But Important,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 17, 1927; “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 23, 1963.

Featured

A Business of Her Own

PETALUMA’S EARLY WOMEN MERCHANTS

Women restaurant operators, Sonoma County, 1880s (photo Sonoma County Library)

As a founding merchant of Kent & Smith, Petaluma’s first general store, Cassie Miranda Kent was said to have few equals.[1] You wouldn’t know it from the history books. In their pages, Petaluma was created by men—rugged pioneers who, after venturing west for gold, stayed to build the river town. That is, until their luck ran out and the debt collectors came calling.

In such instances, men fortunate enough to be married triggered a fail-safe option: California’s Sole Trader Act. Passed by the state legislature in 1852, the act enabled a married woman to independently own and operate her own business. Its intention was to provide women burdened with dissolute or absent husbands a means of supporting themselves.[2] Husbands however had a different view, using the act as a legal equivalent of hiding behind a woman’s skirt.

That was keeping in step with the spirit of the Gold Rush, best described by railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington as “whatever is not nailed down is mine, and whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”[3]

Petaluma was founded on the same ethos. In 1852, a failed gold miner named George H. Keller made an illegal squatter’s claim to 158 acres of a Mexican land grant. He then mapped out the town of Petaluma and began selling fraudulent lots to fellow disappointed miners looking to stake a claim in the next gold rush—land speculation.[4]

Illustrated map of Petaluma with Kent & Smith General Store and adjacent warehouse highlighted in red, 1855 (Sonoma County Library)

Cassie Kent—one of only three women in town at the time—and her husband Walter were among the first to buy in. With a partner named H.H. Smith, they purchased a lot from Keller on Main Street, where they built the town’s first general store, Kent & Smith, across from today’s Putnam Plaza. [5] Walter also served as the town’s second postmaster after the first, Keller’s 21-year old son Garrett, fled town with his father and the money he made in real estate.[6]

Kent & Smith opened its doors just as Petaluma was evolving from a village of meat hunters supplying wild game to San Francisco, into a bustling shipping port for potatoes, Sonoma County’s first boom crop. Within a couple years, overproduction and soil exhaustion led to a potato bust, after which Petaluma’s economy experienced a brief downturn during the national 1854 recession, before rebounding with the California wheat boom in the late 1850s. In the midst of that lull, Kent & Smith went belly up, and was  sold at public auction to pay off creditors.[7]

The Kents also owned a 160-acre farm south of town. To shield it from the money hounds, 26-year-old Cassie filed as a sole trader, claiming she alone was in charge of raising stock and poultry on the farm.[8]

Sole trader legal notice posted by Cassie Kent (Sonoma County Journal, December 8, 1855)

The Kents weren’t alone in exploiting the act to evade debt collectors. More than three dozen married women filed as sole traders in Petaluma between 1852 and 1862. The majority registered their business as operating farms and raising livestock. Others listed wheelwright, saloon keeper, liquor seller, hotel keeper, store merchant, and lumber dealer.[9] In many cases, they designated their husbands as working agents, at least on paper.[10]

Not all sole trader filings were fraudulent. The state constitution allowed married women to personally retain assets they brought to a marriage, providing some with capital to invest. As Petaluma’s female population grew, comprising 38% of the town’s 1,338 residents by 1857, three married women—Mary Ann Trevor, Susan Cowles, and Hannah Davis—filed as sole traders to open their own millinery and dress shops.[11] Mrs. Fanny Ver Mehr filed to create a boarding school for girls.[12]

19th century woman-owned millinery shop (photo public domain)

Then there was Cassie Kent.

In the “separate spheres” of the Victorian era, women were relegated to the home while men engaged in the public world of business and politics. However, in California’s boom and bust cycles, many women unable to rely upon a breadwinning man were forced to work outside the home. Working class women were largely limited to domestic occupations—cooking, baking, house cleaning, washing clothes—or else working on the factory floors of Petaluma’s woolen and silk mills.[13] Among the middle-class, some women pursued careers as school teachers while others partnered silently in merchant enterprises with their husbands.[14]

A handful of women, however, challenged the notion that characteristics necessary to succeed in small business— ambition, assertiveness, and competition—were quintessentially masculine traits. Among them was Cassie Kent.

In 1857, she went into business on her own, leasing the Central Hotel on the southwest corner of Kentucky Street and Western Avenue, a site occupied today by the Chase Bank.[15]

Ad for Cassie Kent’s Central Hotel, 1857 (Sonoma County Journal, June 5, 1857)

It wasn’t the first hotel in Petaluma operated by a woman. That honor belonged to Rosanna Loftus, who in 1853 opened the Farmers Hotel (later renamed the Union Hotel) at the corner of Main Street and Western Avenue, where the Masonic Lodge stands today.[16]

Cassie’s Central Hotel was originally constructed in Valparaiso, Chile, and shipped to California in 1851 by a speculator named Charles H. Veeder. Veeder initially erected it in the newly established town of Vallejo, slated at the time to become the state capital. In 1853, state legislators, disenchanted with Vallejo’s sluggish development, voted to move the capital to Benicia, leaving Veeder $18,000 in debt ($700,000 in today’s currency).[17]

Veeder promptly dismantled the hotel and shipped it to Petaluma, reopening it as the Central Hotel, just before the potato boom went bust. Forced to declare bankruptcy, he leased the hotel to Cassie before moving on to his next gamble, developing the town of Calpella in Mendocino County.[18]

Hospitality proved a volatile industry in the new town. Cassie operated the Central Hotel for less than a year before turning it over to two other women, Mrs. Finchley and Mrs. Goodrich, who renamed it the Clinton House. A year later, two brothers named Schreck assumed the lease, changing the name to the City Hotel. The hotel was later rebuilt and renamed the Continental Hotel before being consumed by fire in 1968.[19]

The City Hotel, c. 1875, after extensions in 1868 and 1875 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1862, debt collectors convinced state legislators to close the loopholes in the Sole Trader Act. Going forward, women filing fraudulent claims were charged with felonies and husbands were prohibited from acting as working agents. But fraud wasn’t the only thing legislators were looking to clamp down on.[20]

Under the revised act a woman was required to testify before a judge as to why she desired to operate a business independent of her husband.[21] Women protested the change, arguing it forced a woman to air her dirty laundry in public by disclosing as much against her husband as she would in securing a divorce from him, and then explaining to a judge why she wasn’t simply divorcing him.[22]

Up through the 1890s, the majority of women-owned businesses in Petaluma were millineries and dress shops—an 1877 directory listed 12 in town—along with a few restaurants, boarding houses, and hair salons.[23]

Ad for bonnets in Petersen’s Magazine, 1880s (illustration courtesy of Princeton University)

By the turn of the century, progressivism, feminism, and immigration were opening the door to more women operating hotels, bakeries, restaurants, houseware stores, art supply shops, music schools, medical practices, newspapers, brothels, ice cream stands, and horse-drawn hacks, or taxi, services.[24] Among those who were married, some utilized the Sole Trader Act, while most did not.[25]

Fannie Brown’s brothel at 1st and C streets, early 1900s (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

In 1905, 24-year-old Miss Frances Hardy opened the Bon Ton Millinery Shop in the Towne Building, which in 1867 replaced the building Walter and Cassie Kent constructed for their general store in 1852.[26]

Bon Ton Millinery in the Towne Building, Main Street, 1931 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Hardy operated Bon Ton at that location for fifty years, until the Petaluma City Council condemned the building in 1956 and converted the site into a parking lot, which it remains today, directly across from Putnam Plaza.[27]

Parking lot that replaced the Towne Building on Petaluma Boulevard North in 1956 (photo John Sheehy)

As for Cassie Kent, she eventually divorced Walter, opened her own sewing business and remarried, settling with her second husband in a cozy cottage on Post Street, where she died in 1902 at the age of 72.[28]


******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 25, 2023.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Entered into Eternal Rest,” Petaluma Courier, July 5, 1902.

[2] “The Sole Trader Act,” Sonoma County Journal, January 16, 1857; Bonnie L. Ford, “Women, Marriage, and Divorce in California, 1849–1872,”  California Legal History, Vol. 16, 2021, p. 34.

[3] David Wagner, “How California’s Gold Rush Forged the Path for Today’s Tech Innovators,”KQED. https://www.kqed.org/news/11655090/how-californias-gold-rush-forged-the-path-for-todays-tech-innovators; Quote attributed to Collis Huntington, “Whatever is Not Nailed Down is Mine and Whatever I Can Pry Loose is Not Nailed Down,” Quote Investigator, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/26/not-nailed-down.

[4] John Sheehy, “The Story of the True Founder of Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 11, 2021.

[5] David Wharff wrote in a letter to A.B. Behrens, April 26, 1918, that there were only three women in Petaluma— Mrs. Horton, Mrs. Kent, and Mrs. Douglass—when he arrived in the fall of 1852, Sonoma County Library; Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (L.H. Everts, 1877), p. 55; “Worked on Original Building,” Petaluma Courier, April 15, 1902; “Fire Bell,” Sonoma County Journal, December 25, 1857; “Real Estate Petaluma,” Sonoma County Journal, January 28, 1859;  “Death of Major Hewlett,” Petaluma Courier, January 8, 1896; Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (Allen, Bowen & Co, 1880), pp. 260-261.

[6] A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United States, 1853, United States, Department of State.

[7]“Fire Bell,” Sonoma County Journal, December 25, 1857; “Real Estate Petaluma,” Sonoma County Journal, January 28, 1859;  “Death of Major Hewlett,” Petaluma Courier, January 8, 1896; “Worked on Original Building,” Petaluma Courier, April 15, 1902; Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (Allen, Bowen & Co, 1880), pp. 260-261; Victor Zarnowitz, Business Cycles: Theory, History, Indicators, and Forecasting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 221-226.

[8] Ad, Sonoma County Journal, December 8, 1855.

[9] Sole Trader Notices, Sonoma County Journal: December 8, December 22, December 29, 1855; June 7, June 21, August 22, August 29, October 10, October 31, December 5, 1856; January 15, May 8, October 23, 1857; April 15, May 28, June 18, July 28, November 30, December 10, 1858; March 18, April29, September 16, September 20, December 2, 1859; January 20, December 21, 1860; January 4, February 15, April 19, July 9, August 23, November 30, 1861; January 4, February 14, March 7, March 14, April 11, 1862.

[10] “The Sole Trader Act,” Sonoma County Journal, January 16, 1857.

[11] Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (University of Wisconsin, 1877) p. 56; Ad, Petaluma Journal, August 22, 1856; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, October 23, 1857; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, April 15, 1859.

[12] Ad, Petaluma Journal, June 21, 1856.

[13] Bonnie L. Ford, “Women, Marriage, and Divorce in California, 1849–1872,”  California Legal History, Vol. 16, 2021, pp. 33-34; Sixty girls working at Carlson-Currier Silk  Mills, “Odds and Ends,” Petaluma Courier, January 22, 1893; Women comprise a third of 36 mill workers, soon to increase to 100, “Petaluma Woolen Mill,” Petaluma Courier, November 18, 1891.

[14] Ford, pp. 33-34.

[15] Ad, Sonoma County Journal, June 5, 1857.

[16] Ad, Petaluma Journal, November 20, 1855; Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County, California (San Francisco, CA: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 263: The Union Hotel, listed as having opened in 1853, was most likely was the Farmers Hotel in 1853–August Starke assumed ownership of the Farmers Hotel in 1858, initially renaming it the Petaluma Lager Beer Saloon, and then in 1859 the Union Hotel (Ads, Sonoma County Journal: February 12, 1858; February 11, 1859; October 12, 1860; October 22, 1861).

[17] Munro-Fraser, History of Solano County…and Histories of Its Cities, Towns, etc. (Wood, Alley & Co), 1879, p. 193; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma (Scottwall Publishing, 1982), p.30; “Personal,” Petaluma Journal, March 15, 1856.

[18] Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County, California (San Francisco, CA: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 263; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, June 12, 1857; “The Legislature,” Nevada Journal, January 24, 1852; “Assignee’s Sale in Bankruptcy,” Alta California, January 18, 1856; “Petaluma,” Sacramento Bee, December 15, 1857; “Letter from Col. Veeder, Calpella,” Sonoma Democrat, August 26, 1858; “Items of Local Interest,” Petaluma Argus, September 24, 1875.

[19] Ad, Sonoma County Journal, November 27, 1857; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, January 28, 1859; “Hotel Will Be Called The Continental,” Petaluma Argus, June 9, 1905; “Fire Destroys Hotel,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 6, 1968.

[20] “Sole Traders,” Sacramento Bee, October 6, 1862.

[21] “The Collection of Debts,” Sonoma County Journal, March 14, 1862; “Women Sole Traders,” Marysville Daily Appeal, March 23, 1862; “Sole Traders,” Sonoma County Journal, July 25, 1862; Ford, pp. 26-27.

[22] “Woman in California,” Petaluma Courier, December 21, 1893.

[23] Business types determined by a review of business ads and listings in the Petaluma Argus and Petaluma Courier newspapers 1855 to 1900 indicate 85 millineries and dress shops during that period ; 12 millineries and dressmaking shops were listed in “Our Industries,” Petaluma Argus, August 10, 1877; Ad for Mrs. E. Bradbury’s Tremont Bakery & Restaurant, Petaluma Argus, April 30, 1870; Ad for Madame Carter French hairdresser, Petaluma Argus, July 20, 1877; Ad for Mrs. Wilsey & Mrs. Avlesworth’s restaurant “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, October 24, 1888; Ad for Mrs. Lambert’s boarding house, Petaluma Courier, February 18, 1882; Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982).

[24] “Women Entrepreneurs: History of Women in Business,” Home Business, September 18, 2017; J.H. Starke and Mrs. G.W. Badger, furniture and housewares store, 19 Main, Ad, Petaluma Argus, June 4, 1884; “Mrs. Sarah Baruh operates a hack business (horse drawn taxi), “Hack Business,” Petaluma Argus, May 24, 1884; Mrs. Baruh also operates Baruh’s Store adjoining the American Hotel, Ad for J. Snow, Petaluma Argus, December 31, 1880; Mrs. Rowlston’s ice cream stand, “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, July 24, 1889; Ad for Dr. Ruth A. French, Case Block, corner of Kentucky Street and Western Avenue, Petaluma Courier, December 31, 1890; Ad for Christine E. Remarque, physician and surgeon, Petaluma Courier, August 15, 1894; Ad for Mrs. L. Lewis, proprietor of the Petaluma Hotel, Petaluma Courier, December 4, 1894; Ad for Mrs. F. White, proprietor of the Western Hotel, Petaluma Courier, December 22, 1894; Rena Shattuck’s launch of the Petalumian newspaper, “Petaluma’s New Paper,” San Francisco Call, June 7, 1895; Ad, Ad for Dr. Ruth P. Huffmann, physician, Petaluma Courier, November 2, 1896; Ads for Mrs. Cronk’s signs and art materials, Miss Maud S. Brainerd, teacher of piano and voice culture, and Miss L. Tourny, voice development and dramatic, Petaluma Courier, February 22, 1897; Madams Frankie Duval and Georgie Herbert applied for liquor licenses at their female boarding houses, which Sanborn maps used to designate brothels, “Board of Trustees,” Petaluma Courier, October 4, 1897.

[25] A search of legal notices for sole trader applications in the Petaluma Courier and Petaluma Argus newspapers identified only 15 sole trader applications made between 1862 and 1900.

[26] “Bon Ton Millinery Store is Opened,” Petaluma Argus, June 10, 1905; The site of the Kent & Smith general store was located most likely at 122-130 Petaluma Boulevard North, which is today a parking lot. John Lockwood described the town’s first 4th of July celebration in 1852 as being held in the Kent & Smith warehouse (“The Late J. E. Lockwood,” Petaluma Argus, December 13, 1904). That warehouse was replaced in 1856 by Capt. Palmer Hewlett with what is known today as the Steiger Building, and was initially occupied in the 1850s by Elder & Hinman Dry Goods Store. The building that originally housed Kent & Smith is cited in 1858 as still standing beside it to the south in ads, among them for the physician T.A. Hylton, “with office in old Kent & Smith Building one door below Messrs. Elder & Hinman” (Sonoma County Journal, March 26, 1858). S.D. Towne apparently replaced the Kent & Smith building with the Towne Building in 1867 (First ad mentioning the new Towne Building appears in the Petaluma Argus on September 5, 1867, for Frank Miller’s Crystal Baths and Shaving and Hair Dressing.

[27] “Memorial Won’t Go on May Ballot,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 20, 1956; Ad for Bon Ton, Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 11, 1956; Frances Hardy became Frances Studdert after marrying local merchant John W. Studdert in 1926, “The Studdert-Hardy Wedding,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 28, 1926.

[28] Ad, Petaluma Argus, November 16, 1877; “Divorce,” Petaluma Argus, December 12, 1879; “Married,” Petaluma Courier, July 8, 1885; “Entered Eternal Rest,” Petaluma Courier, July 5, 1902

Featured

Who Was Marshall Lafferty?

The Historical Prequel to Petaluma’s Longest Running Land-War Drama

Jerry or Isaac Lafferty, son of Marshall Lafferty, 1872 (photo courtesy of Pete Vilmur Collection at PetalumaPioneers.org)

Kevin Costner is dressed in a tux, carrying a rifle.

Playing the role of land baron John Dutton in the TV series “Yellowstone,” he confronts a group of Chinese tourists on his property. One of them scolds him, calling it obscene that one man should own so much of the earth. He runs them off with a gunshot to the air.

“This is America,” he shouts. “We don’t share land.”

For the past 30 years, Petaluma has endured its own version of “Yellowstone” over Lafferty Ranch on Sonoma Mountain. It began when the city decided to shut down its century-old water works on the property and convert the 270 acres into a public park. Peter Pfendler, the millionaire owner of 800 acres abutting Lafferty, responded by firing off a shotgun brief to City Hall. Local officials naively brushed it off.[1]

“I think this could be a little war up there in the hills,” said one city council member. “Mr. Pfendler has threatened to call in his posse of lawyers, but you can’t keep 45,000 people off their property.”[2]

Police cars and protesters outside entrance to Lafferty Ranch, 2002 (photo North Bay Bohemian)

This is America. With enough lawyers, guns, and money, one can certainly try.

Faced with a costly lawsuit, the city quickly backed down. Years of plot twists followed—public protests, proposed land swaps, property access battles, backroom deals, ballot fraud, polarized elections, rifle shots, environmental damage suits, Pfendler’s death—making “Lafferty” the city’s longest running class-war series drama.[3]

As with “Yellowstone,” the series came with historical prequels featuring two of Petaluma’s early land barons, General Mariano Vallejo and banker William Hill. Land for these men, as for Pfendler, was not only an object of lust but a source of legitimacy, power, and identity. The more they owned, the more they mattered. 

View of Petaluma Valley from Lafferty Ranch (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

It wasn’t always so. Prior to being “discovered” by Europeans, Sonoma Mountain was inhabited for millennia by the Coast Miwok. In their origin myth, it was an island in a primordial ocean at the beginning of time, a place where the world began. They called it Oona-pa’is. [4]

For tribal members, the mountain was a cultivated garden they carefully nurtured and co-existed with. During hunting and gathering seasons, they dispersed from villages on the valley floor to small encampments on the mountain near fresh water sources, including presumably the two springs comprising the Adobe Creek headwaters on today’s Lafferty Ranch.

Illustration of California natives fishing by John Russell Bartlett (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Then came the colonizers. To their eyes, the land appeared as an uncivilized wilderness upon which to project their dreams, aspirations, and greed. First, the Franciscan padres claimed it for their Sacred Expedition, driving the Coast Miwok into mission servitude and conversion, then the Mexican government secularized the mission lands, carving them up for private ranchos.[5]

Vallejo laid claim to the 66,000-acre Rancho Petaluma, stocking it with imported sheep and longhorn cattle. He shipped their hides, tallow, and wool to Europe and New England, where they fetched good prices for making leather goods, blankets, candles, and soap. After the livestock decimated the perennial native fescue, or bunch grass, it was replaced by Mediterranean annual grasses. Better suited for heavy grazing, they turned the hills golden in summer.[6]

Mariano Vallejo, 1875 (photo Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Vallejo lost his herd to American cattle rustlers during the Mexican-American War. To fill his coffers, he ventured into real estate, selling off subdivisions of Rancho Petaluma to land-hungry Americans, many of them disappointed lost boys from the Gold Rush. In 1859, Marshall Lafferty purchased 270 acres on Sonoma Mountain from Vallejo for $52,500 in today’s currency.[7] 

Born in North Carolina in 1808 and raised in Kentucky, Lafferty descended from early colonial stock. At 17, he married Elizabeth Criss from Pennsylvania. The couple had 13 children, eventually settling in Illinois. There, Lafferty served in the U.S. Army during the Black Hawk War, putting down a revolt by Native Americans evicted from tribal land they had secured in a treaty.[8]

In 1850, Lafferty headed west for the Gold Rush, returning home four years later. In 1857, he took his wife and children out to California via covered wagon, initially settling in the city of Vallejo before purchasing property on Sonoma Mountain.[9]

Entrance to Lafferty Ranch Sonoma Mountain (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

Like other “pioneers,” he looked upon the land with the boom-and-bust mentality of a gold miner.[10] The cycle began in the 1850s with a potato boom, which quickly faded because of overproduction and soil depletion. A cattle boom followed, fizzling out in the early 1860s due to overbreeding and competition. Then came the California wheat boom. Accelerating during the Civil War, which cut off Midwest wheat exports to Europe, it went bust in the 1880s due to soil erosion and competition.[11]

The steep terrain of Lafferty’s ranch lent itself more to cattle grazing than farming. Its elevation above the fog line and year-round water supply from Adobe Creek also made it feasible for growing imported fruit trees. The orchard had plenty of sunlight as most of the mountain’s native oaks had been logged out. Cut and piled into large mounds, they were covered with dirt and slowly burned to charcoal, which was shipped to San Francisco as a coal substitute for heating homes, businesses, and steam engines.[12]

In 1867, Marshall Lafferty sold his ranch to his two youngest sons, Isaac Newton Lafferty and Jeremiah Henry Clay Lafferty. Isaac left to pursue a teaching career, eventually becoming a school superintendent in Washington Territory. Jerry maintained the ranch, adding a large vineyard to the fruit orchard, and hosting deer hunting parties as well as social dances, where he played the violin. He eventually married and started a family, while continuing to care for his aging parents.[13]

Illustration of Petaluma, 1857 (Sonoma County Library)

Meanwhile, the thriving river port of Petaluma found itself hindered by water restrictions. Early residents near the river drew their water from wells and natural springs, but those buying into the new hillside developments were dependent upon water cart deliveries. The scarcity created a need for careful planning that clashed with the pioneering spirit of the times.Water became money.[14]

In the early 1870s, two groups of venture capitalists launched competing initiatives to pipe water into town from three creeks on Sonoma Mountain, Copeland, Lynch, and Adobe. By 1877, the two consolidated into the privately-owned Sonoma County Water Company.[15]

Adobe Creek near headwaters on Lafferty Ranch (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

In 1888, the Lafferty brothers sold their ranch for $170,000 in today’s currency, purchasing a new ranch in Glen Ellen, where Marshall Lafferty spent his final years until his death in 1892 at the age of 87.[16]

The Lafferty Ranch was purchased by William Hill, president of the Bank of Sonoma County, one of four locally financed banks in Petaluma. The other three controlled by John McNear, Isaac Wickersham, and Hiram Fairbanks. Together with Hill, they were the wealthiest men in Petaluma and also its largest landowners. Hill’s holdings alone comprised 6,000 acres.[17]

Hill was also president of the Sonoma County Water Company. He first purchased the water rights to Lafferty Ranch in 1887, before purchasing the ranch itself the following year in order to secure the headwaters of Adobe Creek for the water company, which he quickly flipped the property to for a nominal $10. For income, the company leased the ranch out for livestock grazing.[18]

William Hill residence, D & 8th streets, Petaluma (photo Sonoma County Library)

Changing hands a few times, the Sonoma County Water Company served as Petaluma’s main water source until 1959, when it was purchased, along with Lafferty Ranch, by the city. The voter-approved bond used to acquire the waterworks also funded an underground aqueduct for transporting water from a new dam on the Russian River to Petaluma, facilitating the city’s suburban housing boom.[19]

Proposals to convert Lafferty Ranch into a community park began with Petaluma’s 1962 general plan. In the early 1970s, Petaluma schools were allowed to use the ranch for limited educational and environmental purposes. Meanwhile, the city continued leasing out grazing rights to the property.[20]

In 1992, the Sonoma Mountain waterworks were shut down after Lawler Reservoir, which Adobe Creek fed into, was declared vulnerable to earthquakes. The City of Petaluma then decided to convert Lafferty Ranch into a public park, launching the longest running political drama in Petaluma history.[21]

A group of hikers touring Lafferty Ranch (photo by Kent Porter / The Press Democrat)

After Lafferty’s adjacent neighbors sought to block public access to the ranch by claiming ownership of a small strip of land between the ranch and the public road, in 2013 the City filed a lawsuit against them, claiming a historic public easement to the land. In 2019, the City dismissed the lawsuit after Pfendler’s widow, Kimberley Pfendler, agreed to no longer finance the opposition to developing Lafferty as a public park. [22]

In 2022, the city began piloting guided hikes on the property through a partnership with the non-profit LandPaths. Many people on a recent hike said they were seeking an experience of the land before European contact. . [23]

Lafferty Ranch is sadly far from that. It remains scarred from two centuries of being logged out, worked, and grazed upon since the Coast Miwok were driven from the area. The upcoming new season of “Lafferty” will hopefully be a quiet drama, one of gradual restoration and renewed stewardship of the land.

Matt McGuire and John Sheehy on Lafferty Ranch (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier July 7, 2023.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] “City Opts to Keep Ranch Land,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 17, 1992; “Ranch Access May Be Stalled,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 7, 1992; “Petaluma Land Swap Foes Won’t Give Up,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 11, 1995.

[2] “This is Your Land­—Mostly,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 23, 1992.

[3] M.V. Wood, “Lafferty,” North Bay Bohemian, October 3-9, 2002; “Chronology of the Lafferty Ranch Controversy,” Laffertyranch.org/timeline

[4] M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pgs. 1, 135; Merriam, C. Hart Merriam, editor, The Dawn of the World, Myths and Weird Tales Told by the Mewan (Miwok) Indians of California (Cleveland ,Ohio: Arthur H. Clarke Co, 1910). p. 203.

[5] Anderson, pp. 2-3; Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, “We Feel the Want of Protection: the Politics of Law and Race in California, 1848-1878,” Taming the Elephant: Politics, Government, and Law in Pioneer California, Burns and Orsi, editors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) pp. 96-120.

[6]Alan Rosenus, General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americas (Berkeley: Heyday Press, 1995); Anderson, pp. 76-77; Michael Ellis, “How Our Hills Got Golden,” KQED, July 9, 2010. www.kqed.org/perspectives.

[7] Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 12, page 185, August 1, 1859: sale by Mariano G. Vallejo to Marshall Lafferty for $1,348.75 lot 361 of Rancho Petaluma consisting of 169.75 acres.

[8] Sonoma Index-Tribune, February 20, 1892, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/217655953/marshall-lafferty.

[9] “Prof. I.N. Lafferty,”  An Illustrated History of the State of Washington, by Rev. H.K. Hines, D.D. (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, IL., 1893), pages 473-474.

[10] “Opening Address,” Petaluma Argus, October 8, 1870.

[11] James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-22532010000200002

[12] Arthur Dawson, “The History of Sonoma County’s Woodlands,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 26, 2017;  J. Charles Watford, “Charcoal Making In Sonoma County,” Society for California Archaeology, https://www.scahome.org/publications/proceedings/Proceedings.13Whatford.pdf

[13] Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 21 of Deeds, page 321, June 29, 1867, and Liber 79 of Deeds, page 603, July 3, 1872; “School Statistics,” Marin County Journal, September 24, 1870; “Prof. I.N. Lafferty,” An Illustrated History of the State of Washington, by Rev. H.K. Hines, D.D. (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, IL., 1893), pages 473-474; “Jottings,” Petaluma Courier, February 25, 1880; Jottings,” Petaluma Courier, September 1, 1880; “Agricultural Outlook,” Petaluma Courier, April 13, 1881; “H.C. Lafferty of Glen Ellen Dead,” Sonoma Press Democrat, May 9, 1914.

[14] Alexandra Wormley, Michael Varnum, “Nearly 20% of the Cultural Differences Between Societies Boil Down to Ecological Factors,” The Conversation, June 6, 2023. Theconversation.com.

[15] “Prospect Ahead for Good Water,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1871.

[16] Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 113, pp. 279-81 (pg. 787 in online deeds site), January 11, 1888: deed of I.N. Lafferty of Washington Territory and William Hill for $2,400, for half his interest in lot 361 of 269.75 acres of the Rancho Petaluma; Liber 109, pp.634-635, January 11, 1888, deed of J.H.C. Lafferty to William Hill, for $2,400 half his interest in lot 361 of 269.75 acres of the Petaluma Rancho; Liber 113, pp.184-186, April 29, 1887, sale of water rights lot 361 to on Petaluma Rancho by I. N. Lafferty and J. H.C. Lafferty to William Hill for $500 gold coin. (total sale for land and water rights $5,300).

[17] “Sonoma County National Bank, Petaluma, 50th Anniversary,” Coast Banker, Volume 16, Coast Banker Publishing Company, 1916; “William Hill,” Petaluma Courier, July 31, 1902.

[18] “William Hill,” Petaluma Courier, July 31, 1902; Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 113, page 282, January 25, 1888: deed of William Hill selling Lafferty Ranch to the Sonoma County Water Company: $10 sale for 169.75 acres, Lot 361 of the Rancho Petaluma.

[19] “Petaluma Aqueduct Contract Signed,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, May 10, 1960.

[20] “Petaluma’s New General Plan Aired April 25,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 5, 1961; “Commission Approves Ranch Use,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 1, 1970; “Study Trails Agreement Approved,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 9, 1970.

[21] “Petaluma May Mothball ‘Unsafe’ Lawler Dam,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 22, 1992.

[22] “City Joins Lafferty Ranch Lawsuit,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 19, 2013; “Lafferty Proponents Claim New Evidence in Access Fight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 17, 2013; “Petaluma Forging Ahead with Lafferty Ranch Plans after Dropping Lawsuit,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 6, 2019; Email from attorneys Mike Healy and Lawrence King to John Sheehy.

[23] Sheri Cardo, “Exciting Changes at Petaluma’s Lafferty Ranch on Sonoma Mountain,” Sonoma County Gazette, September 21, 2022.

Featured

The Birth of Petaluma’s Revival

Downtown Petaluma’s Turning Basin (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

When it came to business opportunities, Skip Sommer was superstitious. If a new venture didn’t include the number six, he approached it warily. If it referenced both six and an eagle, he doubled down.[1]

On May 11, 1975, Sommer drove his tan diesel Cadillac—license plate “Eagle 66”—into downtown Petaluma and pulled up beside the dilapidated Golden Eagle Mill at 6 Petaluma Boulevard North.[2]

Bingo!

Up the street, Petaluma’s statuesque mayor, Helen Putnam, was leading a group of 200 preservationists on a tour of the city’s historic downtown. As the group emerged from the new Lan Mart gallery of shops—Petaluma’s first adaptive reuse of a historical structure—Putnam steered them across the street to the Golden Eagle Mill.[3]

Golden Eagle Mill (former G.P. McNear Mill), 1973 (photo Sonoma County Library)

There, to the fanfare of popping champagne corks, she introduced Sommer, who emerged from a curtain of dusty cobwebs to announce his plan to save the river city. “In the old days,” he told the crowd, “schooners would tie up to the docks of this mill to pick up feed for the horses of San Francisco. Soon, it will be yachts tying up here to visit the new Great Petaluma Mill.”[4]

Skip Sommer inside the Great Petaluma Mill, 1976 (photo by Morrie Camhi, courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

He proceeded to unveil his vision: transforming the old granary into a Victorian-themed arcade of specialty shops patterned after San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square.

As crazy as it might have sounded, Putnam let it be known that Sommer’s scheme had her full support. The stakes were simply too high to fail.

Sprawling housing developments were overwhelming Petaluma’s infrastructure. The city’s attempt to pump the brakes—capping new housing units at 500 per year and imposing a greenbelt around the city—was met with a lawsuit from developers. After losing the first round in court, the city was granted an appeals hearing.[5] Optimistic about a favorable outcome, Putnam unleashed her side maneuver: revitalizing the downtown.

“The type of growth I’m interested in,” she declared, “is growth that retains Petaluma’s rank as a first-class city, not as a bedroom community.”[6]

For Putnam, that meant staging a comeback of the Petaluma River.[7]

Mayor Helen Putnam beside the Turning Basin (photo Sonoma County Library)

For more than a century, the river served as the lifeblood of the city, its downtown banks dotted with grain mills and warehouses. Following World War II, the rise of large factory farms in Central California and elsewhere decimated the local poultry and dairy industries, leading to a sharp decline in commercial river traffic. Then came the opening of the freeway in 1956, placing Petaluma within easy commuting distance of San Francisco.[8]

Tract homes quickly sprang up across the flats east of town, accompanied by shopping centers, restaurants, and motels, all draining foot traffic from the downtown. No longer able to command premium rents, commercial landlords let their timeworn buildings slowly deteriorate, leaving the town pockmarked with boarded-up eyesores.

The Wickersham Building, 170 Petlauma Boulevard North, 1973 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In the mid-sixties, the city began tagging old buildings as safety hazards. In most cases, demolishing them was cheaper than bringing them up to code for earthquake and fire risks. That opened the door to urban renewal, the federally funded movement sweeping America.

The wrecking ball began swinging in 1965, its first victim the original Golden Eagle Mill built in 1888 along the east side of the Turning Basin. Before the mill’s destruction, Golden Eagle moved its operations into the former G.P. McNear Feed Mill at Petaluma Boulevard and B Street, which it purchased in 1958.[9]

The original Golden Eagle Mill, East Washington Street, 1954 (Sonoma County Library)

Once the mill was razed, Novato developer Walter Kieckhefer began planning construction of the Golden Eagle Shopping Center (today’s River Plaza Shopping Center) in its place.[10]

Putnam, first elected mayor in 1965, supported urban renewal, overseeing the expansion of Washington Street, the sole traffic artery to the burgeoning eastside, into a four-lane thoroughfare. That began with the demolition of three blocks of historic buildings at the intersection of Washington Street and Petaluma Boulevard.[11]

In the late sixties she backed the Core Area Plan, a federally funded redesign of the downtown that called for converting Kentucky Street between Western Avenue and Washington Street into a closed-off mall, and demolishing all the buildings along the east side of Petaluma Boulevard from D to Oak streets to install a six-lane thoroughfare along the river.[12]

Mayor Helen Putnam (center) displaying illustration of proposed Core Plan on the Washington Street Bridge, 1969 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Two months before the Core Area Plan was put before voters, Petaluma’s urban renewal bulldozer hit a speed bump. The Healey Mansion, a stately Queen Anne Victorian at the corner of Washington and Keokuk streets, utilized for half a century as a funeral parlor, was torn down for a new gas station. Its leveling became the rallying cry of a local historic preservation movement.[13]

In June, voters rejected the Core Plan bond issue while reelecting Putnam to a second mayoral term by a slim margin. Deftly, she pivoted her downtown stance afterward from destruction to restoration, and began chasing federal tax credits for adaptive reuse—retrofitting old buildings for new uses.[14]

The trend began in 1964 with the transformation of San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory into a historically themed center of shops and eateries.[15] Two years later, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, giving communities some means of protecting their historic fabrics from the slash-and-burn of urban renewal. Grants and tax credits followed.[16]

National Ice & Cold Storage Building, E. Washington & Lakeville streets, c. 1950. (photo Sonoma County Library)

Lakeville Shopping Center at E. Washington & Lakeville streets (photo public domain)

Petaluma’s first attempts at adaptive reuse began in 1972. Developer Kieckhefer set out to convert the National Ice and Cold Storage Building, built in 1908 at the corner of East Washington and Lakeville streets, into a local Ghirardelli Square. Once he saw the price tag for seismic upgrading, he changed his mind, and instead tore the building down to erect the Lakeville Shopping Center in its place.[17]

That same year, Victor and Marisa DeCarli recombined the two Gross Buildings, extending from Petaluma Boulevard to Kentucky Street, to create the Lan Mart Center of boutique shops.[18] Their initiative inspired Putnam to marshal a crusade to revive Petaluma’s historic downtown waterfront, using the old Golden Eagle Mill as her cornerstone.

Lan Mart Building, 35 Petlauma Blvd North, 1977 (photo Sonoma County Library)

What she needed was someone to lead the charge, not just a developer, but a charismatic ringmaster like Bert Kerrigan. Hired as a front man for the Chamber of Commerce in 1918, Kerrigan unleashed upon the town an energetic, three ring circus atmosphere that boosted Petaluma’s prosperity and fame as the “Egg Basket of the World.”

For help, Putnam reached out to an old friend, Bill Murray, chairman of the Bank of Marin, who had started his banking career in Petaluma during the 1950s. He had just the man for the job: Ralph “Skip” Sommer, a former stage actor and IBM salesman turned theme developer. Growing up in Michigan, Sommer spent his summers driving horse-drawn carriages of tourists around Mackinac Island, a Victorian-era resort that still bans automobiles. He understood history as an economic engine. [19]

Skip Sommer aboard horse and buggy, Mackinac Island, 1950 (photo courtesy of Skip Sommer)

Murray, whose bank had financed two of Sommer’s conversions of historic buildings into shops and restaurants in Marin, drove him up to Petaluma for his first visit.[20] Lured by federal tax credits and Murray’s financial backing, Sommer jumped at the opportunity. With Putnam’s assistance, the proposal was fast-tracked through the city planning commission, bypassing the need for an environment impact report.

Then came the deal killer: $275,000 for seismic upgrading ($1.4 million in today’s currency). Sommer blinked, until Murray told him the bank would finance it.[21]

Sommer staged the grand opening of the Great Petaluma Mill in October 1976 with the razzle dazzle of Harold Hill in “The Music Man.” Soon, he was piloting his yacht, The Great Eagle II, up the Petaluma River to proclaim the Turning Basin the new port of call for recreational boating. The press ate it up, dubbing him the “new business czar of the downtown waterfront area.”[22]

Great Petaluma Mill, 1980s (photo Sonoma County Library)

That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand the ruling of a lower appeals court which had granted Petaluma the right to preserve the city’s character and open spaces “by growing at an orderly and deliberate pace.”[23] Putnam’s two pronged approach—sustainable growth paired with a revitalized downtown—­­­had worked.

In the first year of the Great Petaluma Mill’s operation, downtown sales taxes increased by 30% thanks to increased foot traffic. A restoration fever soon overtook the downtown with developers of adaptive reuse flocking to town.[24]

But Putnam wasn’t finished. She wanted to anchor the new recreational Turning Basin with the warmth of Victorian homes.

In 1976, the Wendy’s hamburger chain purchased the Burns-Farrell house at East Washington and Wilson streets with plans to demolish it for a burger joint. Putnam negotiated a deal to have Sommer buy the house for $1, and then move it to an empty lot on the Turning Basin, where he converted it into a restaurant called the Farrell House (today’s River House).[25]

Burns-Farrell House being moved from E. Washington Street to the Turning Basin, 1979 (photo courtesy of Skip Sommer)

Burns-Farrell House (today’s River House) on Turning Basin (photo Scott Hess)

The next year, she did the same with the Pometta House, a Victorian on Petaluma Boulevard South between C and D streets, slated for destruction for a new bank parking lot. Sommer moved it to 1 C Street, beside today’s Petaluma’s Yacht Club, converting it into an office building.[26]

Pometta House, Petaluma Blvd South, between C & D streets, 1977 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Pometta House in foreground at C & 1st streets on the Turning Basin, 2023 (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

In 1979, Sommer sold the Great Petaluma Mill in order to help fund his next adaptive reuse performance out on the coast and his producer, Mayor Putnam, began her newly elected term as a Sonoma County supervisor. Petaluma would never be the same.[27]

Petaluma Turning Basin (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

*******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 12, 2023.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] “He’s Not Your Typical Developer,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 28, 1975; Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives.

[2] Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives.

[3] “Unique Development Announced,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 12, 1975.

[4] “Unique Development Announced,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 12, 1975.

[5] “Design Plan Passes; Is Effective at Once,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 28, 1972; “Good Case for Housing Limit,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 26, 1973; “City Growth Ordinance Outlawed,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 29, 1974; Growth Suit Decision Not Expected for Some Time,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 15, 1975.

[6] “Helen Putnam, First Woman Ever to Seek Office of Mayor,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 25, 1965.

[7] “River May Be Making a Comeback,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 28, 1975.

[8] “Cotati Man is First Fatality on Freeway,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 17, 1856.

[9] “Golden Eagle Completes McNear Deal,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 17, 1958; “Mayor Discusses Golden Eagle’s Present Property,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 24, 1964 “Golden Eagle’s Century Old Mill Site,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 13, 1965.

[10] “Golden Eagle, Once Towering Over Petaluma, Like a Phoenix Reborn,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 26, 1975.

[11] “Rezoning Aids Expansion Central Business District,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 17, 1967; “Our Most Important Need,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 11, 1967.

[12] “More Parking Would Boost Downtown Area,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 3, 1968.

[13] “Money to Decide Mansion’s Fate,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 1, 1969; “Thanks for the Effort,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 13, 1969.

[14] “Putnam Wins, Bonds Lose,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 11, 1969.

[15] “Old, Familiar Glow,” San Francisco Examiner, November 30, 1964.

[16] Historic Preservation & Development, September 20, 2006, U.S. Department of  the Interior.

https://www.doi.gov/ocl/hearings/109/historicpreservationdevelopment_092006

[17] “Center Project Proceeds,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 14, 1972; “New Building to Follow Razing,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 17, 1973.

[18] “Lan Mart Stores are Commercial Experiment,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 15, 1973; “Lan Mart Center Has Grand Opening,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 6, 1973.

[19] Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives; “He’s Not Your Typical Developer,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 28, 1975.

[20] “Skip Sommer’s Ideas Pay Off Very Well at Lark Creek Inn,” San Rafael Daily Independent, October 13, 1972; “Old Western Look,” San Rafael Daily Independent, October 30, 1974.

[21] “Great Petaluma Mill Needed Quake-proofing,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 1, 1976; Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives.

[22] “Reviving a Turn of the Century Town Center,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1977; Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 25 1977.

[23] “Growth Review Denied,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 23, 1976.

[24] “Ambitious New Business Owners See Potential in Old Buildings,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1977; “Mill Played a Key Role in Downtown Revitalization,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 9, 1980.

[25] “Historic Home to Become Restaurant at New Site,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 6, 1976.

[26] “House on Wheels,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 5, 1978.

[27] “Putnam Elected Supervisor,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1978: “Marin Investors Buy Great Petaluma Mill,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 19, 1979.

Featured

The Petaluma Dime Museum’s Lost Treasure

THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF NATIVE AMERICAN ARTIFACTS

Johnny B. Lewis displaying his mortars & pestles collection , 1890s (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

In January 1849, a young merchant named Johnny B. Lewis set off for the California gold mines, only to discover he had failed to book advance reservations.

Having boarded a ship in New York City with a “stock company” of other aspiring miners funded by investors, Lewis sailed with his company to the Isthmus of Panama. After making their way overland to the Pacific Coast, the group found a line of 4,000 other treasure hunters waiting for a ship to San Francisco.[1] 

Stuck in port for four months, Lewis obtained a large tent and earned money by renting it out as a restaurant and lodging house. When he finally secured passage to California, it was aboard the Humboldt, a refitted coal ship packed with 400 other passengers, for $200 per ticket ($7,500 in today’s currency).[2]

Yerba Beuna Cove, San Francisco, 1851 (public domain)

When Lewis finally disembarked in San Francisco after 102 grueling days at sea, he found himself cured of gold fever. Purchasing a horse and cart, he became a teamster, making a small fortune hauling freight around town for $25 a day ($1,000 in today’s currency) to help pay back the stock company that funded him. Expenses in the Gold Rush city ran equally high. In his spare time he channeled his lust for buried treasure into digging for “Indian curios.”[3]

Over the next half century, Lewis assembled one of the largest collections of Native American artifacts in California, all proudly displayed at his Dime Museum in Petaluma.[4]

Street parade outside Lewis’s Dime Museum, East Washington Street (Sonoma County Library)

While looting archaeological sites had been popular since antiquity, it became something of an American pastime in the 19th century, after the British Empire began ransacking countries for trophies of its colonial triumph. Private museums of exotic artifacts proliferated as wealthy men turned collecting a competitive sport and middle class hobbyists began assembling collections to enhance their social status.[5]

In California, relic hunters found Native American villages and burial grounds easy pickings, as the state’s indigenous population had been reduced an estimated 150,000, or half of what it had been at first European contact 80 years earlier. Driven first by the Spanish and Mexicans into mission servitude, and then labor camps like Fort Ross and the Petaluma Adobe, many Natives were worked to death, infected by European-transmitted diseases like syphilis, measles, and smallpox, or else killed outright by soldiers.[6]

Petaluma Adobe, 1902 (Sonoma County Library)

After the U.S. claimed California as a spoil of the Mexican-American War in 1848, Americans began streaming into the state under the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny,” believing they were divinely ordained to settle the West and remake it in their own image. For some, that meant first eradicating what remained of the indigenous population.[7]

“That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected,” California’s first governor Peter Burnett explained to state legislators in 1851.[8]

California’s first governor, Peter Burnett (public domain)

To expedite his belief, he signed an act facilitating the removal and displacement of Natives from their traditional lands and indenturing Native adults and children to White settlers. He also set aside state money to arm local militias for undertake killing expeditions as needed. As a result, by 1870 California’s Native population had been reduced to an estimated 30,000.[9]

Against this backdrop, in 1856 Lewis purchased a 300-acre cattle and dairy ranch in Lakeville, seven miles downriver from Petaluma.[10] As luck would have it, the ranch was near Lakeville’s namesake—Tolay Lake. (Full disclosure: In 1863, my great-grandfather John Casey and his brother Jeremiah purchased a ranch bordering the north end of Tolay Lake; John Casey later leased farm land in Lakeville from Lewis).

Tolay Lake, 2023 (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

No more than 20 feet in depth, the lake was actually a sag pond encompassing 300 acres. The Alaguali, a Coast Miwok tribe whose main village bordered San Pablo Bay, made use of it for drinking, bathing, and cooking. They also cultivated roots of the lake’s sedge beds for basketmaking and hunted migrating fowl drawn to its waters. But the lake’s most significant use for Natives was as a sacred spiritual center and medical depository for charmstones.[11]

Mostly two to three inches long, the stones varied in shape from oblong to round and squat. Natives believed they carried mystical power, allowing doctors to extract illness from the sick and injured, after which the stones were drowned in the lake to fully eradicate the illness. Some of the charmstones found in the lake were later determined to be more than 4,000 years old, originating from as far away as Mexico and Washington state.[12]

Native American charmstones from coastal California (public domain)

Such archaeological knowledge was largely lost on relic hunters like Lewis, who mistook the stones for “sinkers” used in weighing down fishing nets.[13] That wasn’t unusual. Most hobbyists operated within an informational vacuum, their fixation on collecting overriding both curiosity and concern for the sites they excavated.[14]

In 1859, Tolay Lake was purchased by a wealthy German immigrant named William Bihler. In 1870, he dynamited the natural dam at the lake’s southern end, allowing the water to drain out into San Pablo Bay. He then planted potatoes in the lakebed. Each year’s plowing of the field brought new charmstones to the surface.[15]

Johnny B. Lewis, c. 1900 (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

By the turn of the century, Lewis claimed to have secured half of the thousands of charmstones gathered at Tolay. He also noticed the Natives stopped coming around after Bihler drained the lake.

“When I came here in the early fifties,” he wrote, “there used (to be) large numbers of Indians go by my ranch in the fall, down the Petaluma creek to catch sturgeon and dry them, and they always went back by the way of the lagoon and stayed a day or two and had some kind of pow-wow.”[16]

Anthropologist Peter Nelson notes that they were most likely concerned with the dangers of being exposed to charmstones exposed in the dry lakebed.[17]

Along with charmstones, Lewis also gathered from the area stone axes, hatchets, chisels, spear- and arrowheads, string beads made from shells and teeth, and human skulls found near the Petaluma Adobe.[18] But the bulk of his collection consisted of mortars and pestles used by Natives for milling acorns, an essential food source, into flour.[19]

Coast Miwok basalt mortar & pestle found near Petaluma (photo Worthpoint.com)

In his digs, Lewis discovered different types of mortars confined to certain areas. Those with straight sides and flat bottoms he found near Sonoma Mountain, where boulders of basalt were common. But in the sandy hills in the west side of Petaluma, the mortars were  pointed or urn-shaped.

Lewis with his mortars and pestles display at his Lakeville ranch, 1890s (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

To display his artifacts, Lewis built a museum on his ranch. It became a regular attraction, drawing people out to Lakeville on weekend carriage rides, as well as serving during the 1890s bicycling craze as the finish line for races from Petaluma.[20]

In 1900, “Uncle Johnny,” as he was fondly known, leased out the ranch and moved into Petaluma to live with his son, Charles, who operated a bicycle and general repair shop on East Washington Street (across from today’s River Plaza Shopping Center). In the storefront beside Charles’ shop, Lewis opened the Dime Museum for his collection. A 19th century phenomenon, dime museums showcased collections of artifacts and oddities for the entrance fee of a dime.[21]

Site of Dime Museum and C.W. Lewis’ Repair Shop (left), East Washington Street, 1912 (Sonoma County Library)

In 1907, an ailing Lewis decided to close the museum and sell off his collection. A private collector in Missouri purchased his charmstones, while Charles H. Culp, a friend and fellow relic hunter in Pacific Grove, acquired his 227 mortars and pestles. Added to the 250 mortars Culp had already amassed from Central California, it reportedly made for the largest collection of Native mortars in the country.[22]

Charles Culp’s collection of mortars and pestles, Pacific Grove Museum (photo courtesy of Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History)

Lewis died in January 1909 at the age of 84. A few months later, Culp shipped his expanded collection to Seattle for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, where he opened a “California Indian Museum” along the exposition’s “Pay Streak Amusements” midway. Similar to a world’s fair, the exposition featured romanticized exhibits of Native Americans, Alaska and Yukon Natives, and Pacific Islanders. Running from June through October, it drew more than 4 million visitors, including collectors and museum directors. [23]

Charles Culp’s California Indian Museum, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle, 1909 (photo University of Washington Libraries)

Among them was George G. Heye, a New York banker in the process of assembling the world’s largest private collection of Native American artifacts. In 1917, Heye opened the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City to showcase his collection.[24]

George G. Heye outside the National Museum of the American Indian, New York City, 1917 (public domain)

It’s unclear whether Heye purchased any of Culp’s collection at the Seattle exposition. The Smithsonian, which assumed ownership of Heye’s museum in 1990, has record of only a dozen mortars attributed to Culp, all of them originating from Central California.[25]

The last reported sighting of Culp’s mortars collection after the exposition was in 1911, when it was on loan to the Pacific Grove Museum. The museum has no record of the collection after that date. It most likely ended up in the hands of private collectors.[26]

J.B. Lewis, Dime Museum card (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Archaeologists often refer to pillaged archaeological sites as “pages torn from our history book.”[27] In an attempt to return some of those missing pages, in 1990 Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It required that Native American cultural items found on federal or tribal lands or in museums receiving federal funding be returned to federally recognized tribes upon request. California enacted a similar law a decade later.[28]  

Some public collections, notably those of the University of California, have subjected repatriation requests to a slow-moving and wildly obtuse process. Private collectors are another matter. Many of them have adopted a position of free enterprise, claiming such artifacts belonged not to the people they came from, but to the relic hunters who moved them.[29]

As long as such lingering attitudes of Manifest Destiny remain, characterizing Native people and culture as though they are in the past tense, the artifacts collected by relic hunters like Johnny B. Lewis remain pages torn from history.[30]

******


FOOTNOTES:

[1] “J.B. Lewis is Dead,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1909.

[2] “J.B. Lewis is Dead,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1909. “Uncle Johnny Lewis,” Petaluma Argus, June 17, 1901; “84 Years Sunday,” Petaluma Courier, March 16, 1908; Lewis A. McArthur “The Pacific Coast Survey of 1849 and 1850,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sep., 1915), pp. 246-274.

[3] “J.B. Lewis is Called Home,” Petaluma Argus, January 7, 1909; Robert M. Robinson, “San Francisco Teamsters at the Turn of the Century,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 35.1, March 1956: Letters from J.B. Lewis to his wife Elizabeth, October 30, 1850, and November 30, 1850, Petlauma Historical Library & Museum.

[4] “Uncle Johnny Lewis,” Petaluma Argus, June 17, 1901; “84 Years Sunday,” Petaluma Courier, March 16, 1908;

[5] Michael W. Hancock, “Boffin’s Books and Darwin’s Finches: Victorian Cultures of Collecting,” master’s dissertation, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, 2006. DigitalCommons@IMSA, digitalcommons.imsa.edu/engpr/5/; Robert J. Mallouf, “An Unraveling Rope: The Looting of America’s Past,” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2, (Spring, 1996), pp. 197-208. https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/mallouf.pdf

[6] George E. Tinke, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 5; Benjamin Madley, American Genocide (Yale University press, 2017), p. 3.

[7] “Manifest Destiny and Indian Removal,” Smithsonian Institute, https://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Manifest-Destiny-and-Indian-Removal.pdf.

[8] Peter H. Burnett, “Governor’s Annual Message to the Legislature, January 7, 1851, Journals of the Senate and Assembly of the State of California, at the Second Session of the Legislature, 1851-1852, p.15. ; Journals of the Legislature of the State of California 1851.

[9] Madley, p. 3; Kimberly Johnston-Dodds, “Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians,” California State Library, September 2002. https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/IB.pdf

[10] “84 Years Sunday,” Petaluma Courier, March 16, 1908; “J.B. Lewis is Called Home,” Petaluma Argus, January 7, 1909.

[11] Peter Nelson, “Indigenous Archaeology at Tolay Lake,” graduate dissertation, UC Berkeley, p. 6; Warren K. Moorehead, The Stone Age of North America, Vol. II (The Riverside press, Cambridge, MA, 1910), p. 106-112.

[12] Greg Sarris, “The Charms of Tolay Lake Regional Park,” Bay Nature Magazine, July-September, 2017; Interview with Steve Estes and Claudia Luke, February 23, 2016, Osborn Oral History Project, Center for Environmental Inquiry, Sonoma State University; “Tolay Lake Regional Park: Cultural and Natural History,” www.sonoma-county. Org/park/pk_history.html, County of Sonoma Regional Parks Department; Nelson, p.1.

[13] Moorehead; John Sharp, “Charmstones: A Summary of the Ethnographic Record,” Sonoma State University, 1994, Society for California Archaeology, https://www.scahome.org/publications/proceedings/Proceedings.13Sharp.pdf

[14] Mallouf, p. 199.

[15] “Bihler’s Lake Farm,” Petaluma Argus, June 13, 1873; Nelson, p. 1.

[16] Moorehead; Nelson, p. 6.

[17] Nelson, p. 8.

[18] “J.B. Lewis’ Museum,” Petaluma Courier, February 24, 1902; “Dime Museum,” Petaluma Argus, September 5, 1902; Petaluma Courier, July 12, 1902; “J.B. Lewis,” Petaluma Argus, October 5, 1903.

[19] Michael A. Glassow, “The Significance to California Prehistory of the Earliest Mortars and Pestles,” Pacific Coast Archaeology Society Quarterly, No. 32(4), Fall 1996. https://pcas.org/Vol32N4/324Gla.pdf

[20] “The Road Race,” Petaluma Courier, April 20, 1896; “Watermelon Run,” Petaluma Courier, August 22, 1899.

[21] “Uncle Johnnie Coming to Town,” Petaluma Argus, July 6, 1900; 1907 Sanborn map of Petaluma; “J.B. Lewis is Dead,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1909; “Dime Museum,” Showhistory.com, https://showhistory.com/show-type/dime-museum.

[22] “Purchased Indian Mortars,” Petaluma Courier, April 29, 1907; “Sold His Curios,” Petaluma Courier, January 8, 1908; “For Sale,” Petaluma Courier, December 21, 1908.

[23] “J.B. Lewis is Called Home,” Petaluma Argus, January 7, 1909; “Collection of Mortars,” Monterey Daily Express, April 30, 1907; “Indian Collection for Seattle,” Monterey Daily Express, January 10, 1909; Kate C. Duncan, 1001 Curious Things (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), p. 78; “The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition,” University of Washington Special Collections, https://www.lib.washington.edu/specialcollections/collections/exhibits/ayp

[24] Rita Cipalla, “Ye Olde Curiosity Shop (Seattle),” History Link.org, August 26, 2022. https://www.historylink.org/File/22526

[25] History of the Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation, Smithsonian Institution,

https://sova.si.edu/record/NMAI.AC.001; “Charles Culp: Mortars and Pestles, 1917, Box 212, Folder 15,” Archives of the Museum of the American Indian.

[26] “Museum Contains World of Knowledge for Visitors,” Monterey Daily Cypress, February 19, 1915; Email from Nate King, Collections and Research Manager, Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, February 2, 2023.

[27] Mallouf, p. 200.

[28] CalNAGPRA, https://nahc.ca.gov/calnagpra/

[29] “UC Inexcusably Drags Its Feet Returning Native American Remains and Artifacts,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 26, 2022; Audit Report of Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,https://www.auditor.ca.gov/reports/2019-047/summary.html; Tarisai Ngangura, “The Colonized World Wants Its Artifacts Back,” Vice. com.

[30] “To Share Native American Culture and History the Right Way, Artifacts Should Always be Returned to Tribes,” San Diego Union Tribune, November 27, 2022.

Featured

Petaluma’s Real Main Street Video Presentation, Part II

In Part II of this video presentation sponsored by the Petaluma Historical Museum and the Sonoma County Library, historian John Sheehy explores how a diverse community of Irish, Black, and German merchants in the 19th century made Petaluma’s Main Street such a bustling melting pot.

Real Main Street Video Presentation, Part I

Part I of this video presentation series explores Petaluma’s early Jewish, Chinese, and Swiss Italian communities.

Featured

Petaluma’s Land of the Dead

HOW DEATH DEFINED THE BIRTH OF A COMMUNITY

Cypress Hill Cemetery (photo Gail Sickler, Petlauma Argus-Courier)

Petaluma’s first death was by potatoes. In the fall of 1851, a farmer named Shirley was thrown from a wagon of potatoes and crushed beneath its wheels.[i]

Petaluma was just coming into being. The year before, a meat hunter named Tom Lockwood set up camp at an abandoned Coast Miwok trading village along the Petaluma Creek to ship wild game to hungry gold seekers in San Francisco.[ii]

By the time of Mr. Shirley’s death, a local potato boom, launched by the Irishman John Keyes, made a squatters hamlet of the encampment. Along with a couple of trading posts, a potato warehouse and a handful of rustic cabins, the hamlet featured a makeshift general store, hostel, and eating house erected by George H. Keller, a disappointed gold miner from Missouri.[iii]

Keller, Lockwood and a young man named Columbus Tustin buried Shirley’s body on the hillside across from Keller’s store, where Penry Park sits today. Keller read the service while the other men laid Shirley to rest in a coffin fashioned from redwood. A few months later, on January 3, 1852, Keller decided to turn the hamlet into an actual town.[iv]

Making an illegal claim to 158 acres of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio—a privately-owned, 13,000-acre Mexican land grant extending east of the Petaluma Creek into Marin County—Keller hired a surveyor named J.A. Brewster. With Lockwood’s help, Brewster platted a town on 40 acres running from the creek west to Liberty Street, and from Oak Street south to A Street.

At the center of town, on the hillside where Shirley was buried, Keller set aside land for Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park).[v]

Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry park), 1900 (Sonoma County Library)

Opening a real estate office at his store, he began selling lots in California’s new gold rush: land speculation. Among those buying was Tustin, who developed the town’s first subdivision, Tustin’s Addition, extending from First to Eighth streets, and A to F streets.[vi] After selling his bogus landholdings, Keller returned to his farm in Missouri.[vii]

1855 map of Petaluma (Sonoma County Library)

His founding of Petaluma wasn’t as much a land scam as a collective agreement among frustrated settlers. Prevented from homesteading on the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio—whose legal ownership was in dispute—they willingly engaged in Keller’s charade in hopes of benefitting from a mutually profitable enterprise.

That Keller’s property sales were recorded by Sonoma County’s first recorder of deeds, William Boggs—the son of Sonoma County state assemblyman Lilburn Boggs—spoke to the extent of complicity in the charade, as did the federal appointment of Keller’s son Garret as Petaluma’s first postmaster.[viii]

The pursuit of gold, which drew most early settlers to California, was no different. Gold itself has no intrinsic value. It is a lie agreed upon. Its true value resides in the enthusiasm it ignites among people who believe in it.[ix] As David Starr Jordan noted, that enthusiasm ignited an ethos of “whatever is not nailed down is mine, and whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”[x]

The final nailing came, as with most things, in death and the courts.

In the spring of 1854, a young woman known only as Miss Smith—daughter of a popular Petaluma settler named John Smith—died unexpectedly. Her death prompted townspeople to create a cemetery where Oak Hill Park resides today. In doing so, they expressed their shared desire to put down roots of generational continuity in the town.[xi]

At the time, Petaluma had grown to a population of 400 residents. Within three years, that figure would more than triple to 1,338 residents, 38% of whom were women.[xii] Their influence, along with the creation of five churches and two fraternal lodges—the Odd Fellows and Masons—helped to domesticate and civilize what had been a rough-and-tumble town. That included showing proper respect for the dead.[xiii]

Although the average life expectancy at the time was only 38, much of that was due to childhood mortality. Those who lived to the age of 20, had a life expectancy of 60.[xiv]

Oak Hill (photo Victoria Webb, Petaluma Argus-Courier)

The eight acres for Oak Hill Cemetery were donated to the town by James and Mary Thompson, owners of Thompson Bakery on Main Street. Their daughter Josephine was the first settler’s child born in town on August 25, 1852.[xv]

The Thompsons purchased the Oak Hill property from Keller. A year after Miss Smith was buried, ownership of the cemetery reverted, along with the rest of Petaluma, to James Stuart, a San Francisco land speculator deemed the legal owner of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio by the California Land Commission. A legal challenge to the commission’s decision was dismissed in court.[xvi]

J.S. Stuart’s office of Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, Main Street, 1855 (Sonoma County Library)

Stuart promptly opened a real estate office in town—Office of Arroyo de San Antonio—for residents to purchase a legal property deed from him, regardless of whatever bogus deeds they held from Keller, Tustin, or other squatters.[xvii] More than 200 residents shelled out a total of $70,000 ($2 million in today’s currency) to repurchase their lots from Stuart.[xviii]

After overproduction put an end to the potato boom, Petaluma’s economy began to grow in the mid-1850s with the new California wheat boom. By 1858, the townspeople decided it was time to incorporate as a city, allowing for taxation of its citizens for things like schools, roads, and cemeteries.[xix]

Oak Hill Cemetery by that time was something of a mess, neither ornamented nor enclosed, the dead buried without any apparent order. The newly elected city trustees, or city council, set out to change that. They began by asking Stuart to donate the existing eight acres of the cemetery to the city, along with 20 additional acres for future expansion. Stuart agreed to the existing eight acres, but balked at surrendering more of his prime real estate.[xx]

In 1866, local grain merchant John A. McNear, who had made a fortune on the California wheat boom, lost his wife Clara to an early death. She died during an exceptionally rainy January, and McNear, worried about her grave flooding, set off to find high ground upon which to bury her.[xxi]

John A. McNear (photo Petaluma
Historical Library & Museum)
Clara McNear (photo Petaluma
Historical Library & Museum)

Or so the story goes.

As Oak Hill Cemetery sat atop a hill, it seems more likely McNear recognized an opportunity at hand. For Clara’s final resting place, he purchased 40 hilly acres along Magnolia Avenue. Beyond the city limits at the time, it was not hindered by residential development like Oak Hill. After burying Clara on the hilltop, he laid out the rest of the grounds as Cypress Hill Cemetery and began selling plots. Ownership of the cemetery would remain in the McNear family until 1957.[xxii]

McNear Family plot, Cypress Hill (photo public domain)

Two local religious communities followed his lead, establishing their own cemeteries along Magnolia Avenue. The Salem Cemetery Association, established in 1857 by German Jewish merchants, purchased 8 acres from McNear at the south end of Cypress Hill Cemetery in 1870 (today’s B’nai Israel Cemetery).

Entrance to B’nai Israel Cemetery (photo public domain)

The next year, St. Vincent’s Catholic Church purchased 12 adjacent acres for Calvary Cemetery.[xxiii]

Calvary Cemetery (photo John Sheehy)

In 1879, city trustees voted to close Oak Hill Cemetery to further burials, citing a problem with rainwater draining into the downtown, creating a health hazard. They directed new burials of non-Jews and non-Catholics to Cypress Hill.[xxiv] City Hall watchdogs pointed out the rainwater from the cemetery flowed north, away from the downtown, running down Howard Street to West Street, and eventually emptying into the same seasonal creek as rainwater from the cemeteries along Magnolia Avenue.[xxv]

The trustees stood by their decision, pressing residents to move family members buried in Oak Hill to Cypress Hill, with financial incentives from McNear. Those unwilling or unable to afford doing so, were forced to leave their family members at Oak Hill, alongside the bodies of those buried far from home or whose families had left the area.[xxvi]

In 1900, the city decided to convert Oak Hill Cemetery into a park. By that time, thieves were stealing the marble tombstones and selling them to fish markets for counters. The city gave families six months to remove bodies still buried at Oak Hill before they leveled the grounds.

Oak Hill Park, 1905 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The Odd Fellows paid to move former members to their plot at Cypress Hill, including Thomas Baylis, who opened one of the town’s first trading posts in 1851.[xxvii]

A number of bodies remained behind. That became evident in 1947, when the city designated Oak Hill Park for the site of a new hospital. First, they were required to remove of all human remains from the grounds.[xxviii] Before excavations could begin, the city killed the project after failing to secure the necessary government funding. A decade later, Hillcrest Hospital was built at the top of B Street instead of Oak Hill Park.[xxix]

In 1876, a group of workmen leveling part of Main Street Plaza discovered the redwood casket of Mr. Shirley buried there by Keller, Lockwood, and Tustin. Shirley’s decaying bones were transferred to a new coffin, and reverently laid to rest in Cypress Hill Cemetery, where they remain today.[xxx]

******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 13, 2023.


SOURCES:

[i] “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876; Our Oldest Pioneer,” Petaluma Argus, November 28, 1901; Note: J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 261 (Note: Munro-Fraser identifies the farmer as a Mr. Fraser, not Mr. Shirley).

[ii] Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), p. 54.

[iii] Robert A. Thompson, pgs. 24, 55; “History Mystery Solved,” Petaluma Argus Courier, February 11, 2021.

[iv] “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Argus, March 31, 1876; “Territorial Legislature of 1857-58,” Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, edited by George W. Martin, p. 211; Robert A. Thompson, p. 55.

[v] David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (October., 1979), p. 439; Thompson, p. 55; Munro-Fraser, p. 186.

[vi] Thos. H. Thompson, Map of Sonoma County, 1877; Sonoma County Deed Records, show two grants in 1853 from Columbus Tustin, one to Edward S. Jones, May 16, 1853, and the other to Fred Starkey, August 12, 1853, indicating that he was selling lots by that time. 

[vii] Henry Miles Moore, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the City and County of Leavenworth,” Western Life (Leavenworth, KS), August 3, 1900; “History Mystery Solved,” Petaluma Argus Courier, February 11, 2021.

[viii] A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United States, 1853: Petaluma Postmasters,” p. 510, United States, Department of State; “Deeds of Sonoma County, 1847-1901,” film #008117705, LDS FamilySearch database. familysearch.org. (Note: Garret V. Keller is mistakenly identified by both Munro-Fraser and Robert A. Thompson in their books as Petaluma’s founder; he was only 21 years of age in 1852).

[ix] David Milch, A Life’s Work (New York: Random House, 2022) p. 154.

[x] The quote is attributed to Stanford University’s founding president David Starr Jordan, quoteinvestigator.com.

[xi] “The First,” Petaluma Argus, July 20, 1877; “Our Oldest Pioneer,” Petaluma Argus, November 28, 1901; Munro-Fraser, p. 262. (Note: the deceased is identified as “Miss Smith” in Munro-Fraser’s book and likewise Tom Lockwood’s recollections, but as Mrs. Stuart, the daughter of John Smith in the Argus’ 1877 article. Neither is listed in the 1854 death records of Sonoma County).

[xii] Robert A. Thompson, p. 56.

[xiii] Faiths Represented in Petaluma Churches,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1956 (Note: the five churches were the Baptist Church founded 1854, Methodist Church, 1856, Episcopal Church, 1856, St. Vincent’s Catholic Church, 1857, and Congregation Church, 1857); “Organizations-Clubs-Lodges,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1955 (Note: the Odd Fellows Lodge was established 1854, and the Masonic Lodge established in 1855).

[xiv]https://www.infoplease.com/us/health-statistics/life-expectancy-age-1850-2011; https://priceonomics.com/why-life-expectancy-is-misleading/.

[xv] “Our Oldest Pioneer,” Petaluma Argus, November 28, 1901; “Celebrated Birthday,” Petaluma Courier, August 27, 1921; “Death Claims Josephine Polk,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 16, 1940. (Note: Munro-Fraser states in his book on p. 251 that Robert Douglas, Jr. and his new bride Hannah Hathaway had the town’s first-born child, who only lived 12 days; however Douglas also states they weren’t wed until December 31, 1852, which was after Josephine Thompson’s birth in Petaluma on August 25, 1852).

[xvi] “The Cemetery,” Sonoma County Journal, December 24, 1858; “After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863.

[xvii] Ad for “Office Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio,” Sonoma County Journal, October 27, 1855.

[xviii] “The First Fight of the Lobby,” Petaluma Argus, February 25, 1863.

[xix] Thos. Thompson, p.20.

[xx] “The Cemetery,” Sonoma County Journal, December 24, 1858.

[xxi] “Died: Clarinda ‘Clara’ Damen Williams McNear,” Sacramento Bee, January 19, 1866; “High Water,” Petaluma Argus, January 25, 1866; Matriarchs of Local History, Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 26, 1997; “Get to Know Some of Petaluma’s Legendary People,” Butter & Eggs Day Special Section, Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 25, 2013, p.27.

[xxii] “Our Real Estate Transactions,” Petaluma Argus, April 27, June 8, July 20, 1872; “Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, November 16, 1877; “Cypress Hill Sold to Locals By McNears,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 27, 1957

[xxiii] “Salem Cemetery Association,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1932; “Organizations-Clubs-Lodges,” Petaluma Argus Courier, August 18, 1955; “Catholic Cemetery,” Petaluma Argus, February 18, 1871; “Consecrated,” Petaluma Argus, April 29, 1873.

[xxiv] “Board of Trustees,” Petaluma Courier, May 29, 1878.

[xxv] “Re-Burial of the Dead,” Petaluma Argus, June 14, 1878; “A Protest,” Petaluma Argus, June 28, 1878; “Ordinance No. 122,” Petaluma Courier, June 13, 1879.

[xxvi] “Board of Trustees,” Petaluma Courier, May 29, 1878.

[xxvii] “Desecrating the Graves,” Petaluma Courier, December 27, 1895; “Swiped Tombstones,” Petaluma Courier, November 7, 1899; Petaluma Courier, March 21, 1900; “Depopulating Oak Hill,” Petaluma Courier, May 18, 1900; “Oak Hill Park,” Petaluma Courier, October 3, 1901.

[xxviii] “Council Takes Steps to Make Oak Hill Available for Hospital,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 22, 1947; “A History of Petaluma Medical Facilities,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 30, 2015.

[xxix] “Petaluma Hospital District First to Organize, Dropped to 26th Place for State, Federal Aid,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 8, 1950; “Hillcrest Dedication End of Long Labors,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 29, 1956; Jim Johnson, who participated in creating a stone labyrinth in Oak Hill Park in 1999, noted that they used a number of granite stones they found on the site, which they believed was from stores stones at the cemetery to be made into tombstones;”Labyrinth Gets Finishing Touches,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 16, 1999.

[xxx] “Centennial resurrection,” Petaluma Argus, March 31, 1876; there is no record of Shirley’s burial in either 1851 or reburial in 1876 in Sonoma County Cemetery Records, 1846-1921 (published by the Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 1999); Lucy Kortum notes Shirley was buried at the northwest corner of the Calvary Hill Cemetery set aside as a potter’s field, an that any markers that might have once existed are gone and the land is overgrown with trees and brush: Lucy Kortum, “Petaluma Cemeteries,” Petaluma Historical Museum, Update, v. 12 no. 1, p. 4.

Featured

Who Planted Petaluma’s Bunya-Bunya?

Bunya-Bunya Tree in front of Petaluma Carnegie Library, 1940 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In the fall of 1961, I gathered with a group of other kids across the street from Petaluma’s Carnegie Library, to watch a man standing atop a long ladder extending up from a fire truck. He was knocking seed cones the size of pineapples from the Bunya-Bunya tree outside the library. In a normal year the tree generated only a handful of cones. That year it produced 50.[1]

A few months later, Elizabeth Burbank had the 100-foot Bunya-Bunya beside her house cut down. She had grown tired of its cones crashing through the roof, breaking telephone lines and threatening visitors.[2] Her late husband, Santa Rosa horticulturist Luther Burbank, planted the tree in the 1880s, when wealthy estate owners came to his nursery shopping for exotic trees to showcase in their gardens.

Bunya-Bunya Tree beside Burbank home in Santa Rosa, 1930s (photos Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego)

A majestic, dome-topped evergreen conifer from Australia, the Bunya-Bunya, or Araucaria bidwillii, fit the bill. The tree was a living fossil, its roots extending back to the Jurassic era. Along with its genetic cousin, the Monkey Puzzle Tree, the Bunya-Bunya became all the rage among Victorian tree connoisseurs, including Addie Atwater, wife of a Petaluma banker.[3]

Atwater planted a Bunya-Bunya in front of her house on the northwest corner of Fourth and E streets, across from Walnut Park, where it still stands today. An early advocate of city beautification, in 1896 she and Petaluma journalist Rena Shattuck co-founded the Petaluma Ladies Improvement Club.

Atwater home at 222 Fourth Street, 1910; partial view of Bunya-Bunya tree at far right (photo Sonoma County Library)

The club’s initial impetus was cleaning up Petaluma’s two public parks—Walnut Park and Hill Plaza Park (today’s Penry Park)—which were being used at the time for trash and livestock grazing. After transforming them into inviting public spaces, the club ventured forth as “municipal housekeepers” in planting trees and installing walking sidewalks throughout town.[4]

In 1904, Atwater, then a wealthy widow, sold a deeply discounted parcel of land at Fourth and B streets to the city for the new Carnegie Library.[5] The Ladies Improvement Club assumed responsibility for landscaping the grounds. In the winter of 1906, they solicited local nurseryman William Stratton, known as California’s “Eucalyptus King” for his early cultivation of the eucalyptus tree from Australia, to donate 11 ornamental trees to their library plantings, one of which is believed to have been the Bunya-Bunya.[6]

New planting of small Bunya-Bunya tree at the Petlauma Carnegie Library, left of palm tree, circa 1907 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The long-term manifestations of the Bunya-Bunya were relatively unknown to the Victorians. Mature trees grow to between 100 and 150 feet tall, with trunks measuring as much as five feet wide. Its timber is highly valued as “tonewood” in making musical stringed instruments such as guitars and ukuleles.

 It takes up to 14 years before the trees begin to generate seed cones weighing between 10 and 20 pounds, each of which contains between 50 and 100 edible nuts ranging up to 2 1/2 inches long. [7] Aboriginal peoples relied upon them for sustenance, eating them raw or roasted, or else storing them underground in wet mud, which is believed to have improved the flavor as well as extended their shelf life.  

Europeans found their flavor similar to chestnuts. They liked to boil them with their corned beef. Boiling remains a favorite means of preparing them today, for use in stews, salads or stir-fried dishes.[8]

Bunya-bunya seed cones (photo by John Sheehy)

But not everyone is a fan of the Bunya Bunya. That became clear in 1977, when the city of Petaluma opened a new public library on East Washington Street, and converted the former library into the Petaluma Historical Library and Museum.

The architect in charge of the conversion flagged the 80-foot tall Bunya Bunya for removal, noting the severe drought that year had caused it to precariously lean forward. Bunya-Bunya critics agreed, citing not only the inherent danger of its diving bomb cones, but the sharp, serrated leaves of its shedded branches, which made for formidable weapons in the hands of children playing war.

Leaning Bunya-Bunya outside new Petaluma Historical Library & Museum, 1978 (photo Sonoma County Library)

After tree-lovers rallied in protest, the city conducted a thorough arboreal examination of the tree, finding it to be healthier than assumed, and sparing it from the axe.[9]

In 1991, Ross Parkerson, a board member of the Petaluma Historical Museum Association and a former city planner, led a group of fellow tree advocates in convincing the Petaluma city council to protect the city’s oldest trees by passing the Heritage Tree Ordinance. The museum’s Bunya-Bunya was among the first to fall under its protection, along with the large oak and giant Sequoia behind the museum.[10]

The next year, the city created a Tree Advisory Committee, appointing Parkerson as its founding chairman. Thirty years later, it continues to consult with the city on tree management and preservation.[11]

Bunya-Bunya seed cone removal outside Petaluma Carnegie Library, 1961 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

While I could find no record of anyone having ever been clobbered by a falling seed cone from the museum’s Bunya-Bunya, since that day in 1961, when as a young boy I witnessed the tree’s big cones being knocked to the ground, I always look up when I pass the museum. It’s partly out of respect for the 116-year-old heritage tree, and partly out of personal caution.

******

A version of this article appears in the Fall/Winter 2022 newsletter of the Petaluma Museum Association.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Real Monkey Would Have Helped,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 23, 1961.

[2] “Burbank ‘Monkey’ Tree Coming Down,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 6, 1961.

[3] “The Trees in California’s Cityscapes,” California Garden and Landscape History Society, Vol. 16, No. 2, Spring 2013; “August Tree of the Month: Bunya Bunya,” edhat, Santa Barbara.

https://www.edhat.com/news/august-tree-of-the-month-bunya-bunya

[4] “The Splendid Work of the Ladies Improvement Club,” Petaluma Argus, June 11, 1907.

[5] “Carnegie Library Cornerstone Laid,” Petaluma Argus, June 10, 1904.

[6] “Ladies Improvement Club,” Petaluma Courier, December 30, 1905; “Improvement Club Meeting,” Petaluma Courier, October 3, 1906; “Made Donation of Trees,” Petaluma Courier, March 16, 1907; “W.A.T. Stratton’s Book on the Eucalyptus,” Petaluma Argus, November 15, 1907.

[7] Alistair Watt, “Tree of the Year: Araucaria bidwillii,” International Dendrology Society, 2018.

http://www.dendrology.org/publications/tree-of-the-year/araucaria-bidwillii/; “The Bunya-Bunya Pine (Araucaria bidwillii),” Permaculture News, November 27, 2013.https://www.permaculturenews.org/2013/11/27/the-bunya-bunya-pine-araucaria-bidwillii/

[8] The Bunya-Bunya Pine (Araucaria bidwillii),” Permaculture News, November 27, 2013; Ian Wright, “Bunya Pines are Ancient, Delicious, and Possibly Deadly,” The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/bunya-pines-are-ancient-delicious-and-possibly-deadly-96003

[9] “Monkey Puzzle Tree Wins Life,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 7, 1978.

[10] “Three Trees Look to be First Protected Under Heritage Law,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 25, 1991; “E. Ross Parkerson: Artist, Planner,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 18, 1991; “City Tree Panel in Full Bloom,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 7, 1992; “The Group Offers Neighborhoods Re-Leaf,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 24, 1993.

[11] “City Tree Panel in Full Bloom,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 7, 1992; “The Group Offers Neighborhoods Re-Leaf,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 24, 1993.

Featured

Petaluma’s Real Main Street Video Presentation, Part I

In this video presentation sponsored by the Petaluma Historical Museum and the Sonoma County Library, historian John Sheehy explores how a diverse community of Jewish, Chinese, and Swiss Italian immigrant merchants made Petaluma’s Main Street such a bustling melting pot in the 19th century.

Real Main Street Video Presentation, Part II

Part II of the series explores the early Irish, Black, and German communities.

Featured

Petaluma’s Most Dangerous Mayoral Candidate

Bob Brunner, left, with “Diamond Mike” Gilardi, owner of Gilardi’s Corner, 1949 (photo Sonoma County Library)

On election night, June 12, 1951, the Western Avenue Rover Boys gathered in the smoke-filled back room of Bob Brunner’s insurance office in the Mutual Relief Building. Brunner, the group’s charismatic political leader, was hoping to unseat the Petaluma’s mayor in a write-in campaign. His call for eliminating the city manager’s position and returning government to the people resonated with longtime residents concerned with the city’s sudden growth.[1]

A group of merry pranksters, the Rover Boys usually met at Andresen’s Tavern next door, but state law shuttered bars on election day, a pre-Prohibition hangover when bars served as polling stations, trading drinks for votes.[2] Awaiting election results, the Rover Boys were joined in Brunner’s backroom by their political opponents, the Kentucky Street Commandos, to bury hatchets over cocktails.

Andresen’s Tavern, left at 19 Western Avenue, with Robert E. Brunner insurance beside it at 21 Western Avenue, under the sign for John Keller Real Estate, 1951 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Given the divisiveness of the mayor’s race, no one expected the hatchets to be buried for long—Petaluma’s future hung in the balance.[3]

Developers, armed with government subsidies for returning servicemen, had descended upon the area, buying up cheap farmland east of town and building tract homes. The city’s population, which had stood at 8,000 since 1930, jumped 20% to 10,000 within four years. Plans for a new freeway east of town attracted a swarm of speculators looking to build motels, restaurants, malls and car dealerships along its exit ramps. But shadows loomed in Petaluma’s post-war progress.

City resources were being overwhelmed, with roads in disrepair, schools in double session, water and sewage plants nearing capacity.[4] Downtown merchants reliant upon through traffic on Main Street, viewed the freeway as a death knell. Likewise, Petaluma’s two economic cornerstones, the poultry and dairy industries, were beginning to be displaced by more efficient factory farms springing up around the county.

In an effort to get ahead of the curve, the city council asked voters in 1947 to adopt a city manager form of government, pointing out Petaluma was becoming too big to be managed by part-time, elected officials with their own businesses to attend to.[5] Not everyone on the council agreed.

Petaluma Mayor Jasper Woodson, manager of the Sunset Line & Twine Company, 1947 (Sonoma County Library)

Mayor Jasper Woodson, manager of the Sunset Line and Twine Company, argued the change would undermine Petaluma’s democratic form of government. City officials traditionally elected by voters—the city clerk, tax collector, treasurer, chief of police, superintendent of streets, etc.—would be hired and fired by the city manager, placing too much power in the hands of one person which was an invitation for corruption.[6]

Petaluma City hall at 4th and A streets, 1951 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Proponents of the city manager model pointed out many communities adopted it for precisely the opposite reason—to thwart the practices of dishonest politicians.[7] Petaluma citizens first attempted to do so in 1934, after the mayor and four officials were found profiting from city contracts.

The officials—Mayor Will Farrell, councilmen Ludwig Schluckebier, George Van Bebber, Chris Riewerts, and City Attorney Lewis Cromwell—admitted to committing “technical violations of the law,” but denied any criminal intent, arguing they were merely following the customary practices of past officials.[8]

Mayor Will Farrell (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

The citizens’ committee exposing their actions argued there was nothing “technical” about them. The men billed the city for goods and services under the names of their employees so as to conceal the true identities of their companies, and then approved the bills for payment as members of the city’s finance committee. The committee launched its investigation only after being stymied by the same officials in bringing charges of price gouging, sanitary violations and kickbacks against the salvage company contracted to collect the city’s garbage.[9]

The five officials quickly agreed to resign in exchange for avoiding a Sonoma County Grand Jury inquiry. A week after their resignations, they were feted at a retirement party by the “Old Guard” of businessmen who ran the city, including Woodson, then one of the remaining city councilmen.[10]

The citizens’ committee promptly petitioned the city to adopt a city manager form of government. That led to the election of a 15-member Board of Freeholders to draft a new city charter. The Old Guard succeeded in filling half of the seats on the board with allies opposed to a city manager, burying the proposal.[11]

When the referendum for a city manager resurfaced in 1947, the Rover Boys rallied to oppose it. The group initially formed in Hans Andresen’s Continental Hotel Tavern during World War II to write letters to local servicemen overseas, signing them “The Western Avenue Rover Boys.”[12] After the war, when Andresen moved his tavern to its current location at 19 Western Avenue, the Rover Boys followed, regrouping as watchdogs of city hall.

Hans Andresen behind bar at Andresen’s Tavern, 19 Western Avenue, 1958

Advocates of limited government, they worshiped former president Herbert Hoover, annually celebrating his birthday with a cake party at Andresen’s. Hoover exemplified their political philosophy by vetoing several bills providing relief to struggling Americans during the Depression, in the belief that such assistance was better handled on a local, voluntary basis.[13]

Despite the efforts of the Rover Boys, the 1947 referendum to adopt a city manager form of government narrowly passed. Going forward, Petaluma’s mayor and the city council were relegated to setting city policies and the city manager to implementing them. Recruiting qualified city managers, however, proved a challenge.[14]

The first two hires quickly departed after hitting a wall of internal resistance. By the 1951 election, the office had been vacant for eight months. Taking advantage of the vacancy, the Rover Boys succeeded in placing three referendums on the ballot designed to curb the powers of the city manager.[15] The city council, however, rejected their fourth petition calling for a vote on the city manager position itself.

To keep the issue alive, Brunner picked a proxy battle with Lee Myers, owner of the L&M Drug Store in the Masonic Building, who was running unopposed for reelection as mayor.The candidate filing deadline having passed, Brunner resorted to a write-in campaign, handing out pencils inscribed with his campaign slogan: “Use this to bring the government back to the people.”[16] For Brunner, that meant eliminating the city manager position and establishing a “strong mayor” model of governance.[17]

Mayor Lee Myers wiht Egg Queen Marilyn Coleman at Egg Bowl, 1951 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The campaign wasn’t personal—Brunner and Myers had grown up together—but it created a schism among the Old Guard, giving rise to the Kentucky Street Commandos.[18] The mild-mannered Myers struggled to compete against Brunner’s ability to command the electorate’s attention, a talent he honed as a sleight-of-hand magician with the Egg City Minstrels, a vaudeville troupe of Petaluma business owners who performed at charity benefits throughout California.[19]

On election eve, Myers was announced as the winner by 28 votes. Brunner demanded a recount, citing fraud and vote counting irregularities. After an investigation, Myers’ winning margin was increased to 32 votes. Brunner refused to accept the final count.[20]

As a consolation, the city council offered him a seat on the planning commission. Brunner declined. “That’s a political graveyard to keep me quiet and cool me down,” he told them. “It’s like making a guy vice president.”[21]

Instead, he adopted the moniker “Petaluma’s Minority Leader,” and made himself a regular disruptive figure at city council meetings, speaking out against anything he considered government intrusion. [22] He also took up black magic, holding a solo séance each Halloween to summon the spirit of Harry Houdini for support.[23]

Despite Brunner’s loss, the three amendments restricting the powers of the city manager passed. They restored management duties to the mayor and city council, including final say in all hiring and firing decisions, and demoted the city manager to chief administrator.[24]

In the fall of 1951, Ed Frank was hired as city manager. He helped to guide Petaluma through its growing pains over the next decade, making friends with Brunner along the way.[25] That didn’t stop Brunner from trying to abolish his job.

Mayor Vincent Schoeningh and City Manager Ed Frank at opening of the 1010 Freeway, 1957 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1953, he made another run for mayor, this time against Vincent Schoeningh, a downtown merchant backed by the Kentucky Street Commandos. Brunner accused the city manager’s office of being a money pit, despite an audit showing the office generated ten times its annual cost in savings and new revenues. Brunner lost the race by 223 votes.[26]

In 1955, he ran for a seat on the city council, again seeking to eliminate the city manager’s position. This time he lost by only 10 votes.[27] Unable to get off his maverick soapbox, he ran again for mayor in 1957 and 1961. Despite pulling as many votes as he had in previous elections, he lost both times by substantial margins, a sign new residents weren’t joining his base.[28]

In 1959, Rover Boys founder Hans Andresen died. His son Hank assumed ownership of the tavern and shifted the Rover Boys away from politics to social activities, adopting a women’s auxiliary known as the Rover Girls.[29]

Continuing his annual séances to conjure the spirit of Houdini, Brunner blamed his failure on political interference.[30] He died after a battle with cancer in 1965, leaving his insurance business to his son, Robert A. Brunner, who in 1969 fulfilled his father’s dream of being elected to the Petaluma City Council.[31]  

1969 Petaluma City Council, Councilman Robert A. Brunner seated far left, Mayor Helen Putnam at center (photo Sonoma County Library)

***************

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 21, 2022.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 30, 1960.

[2]Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 20, 1958; Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 30, 1971; “Lifting of Election Day Liquor Sales Ban Didn’t Include Bars as Polling Places,” San Pedro News-Pilot, August 27, 1969; Nichol Saraniero, “The Boozy History of Voting in Bars on Election Day,” Untapped New York, November 3, 2020. https://untappedcities.com/2020/11/03/boozy-history-voting-bars-election-day/

[3] Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 6, 1982.

[4] “The Cost of Local Government,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 19, 1949; “Double Sessions? An Empty School?” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 18, 1950; “Measures on City Ballot,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 21, 1951; “Census Up in Sonoma County,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 30, 1951; “Sewage Line Expansion is Up to Council,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 5, 1951.

[5] “New Charter Ordinance Passed to Print; Mayor Expresses Opposition,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 21, 1946.

[6] For and Against the New Charter,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 2, 1947.

[7] “Antiquated,” Deas Calls Petaluma’s Charter, and Urges City Manager,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 12, 1946.

[8] “Irregularities Charged to City Heads,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 23, 1934.

[9] “Resignation of Mayor Farrell and Two Aides is Demanded,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 24, 1934.

[10] “Mayor Farrell, Four Aides, Quit Office,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 27, 1934; “Petaluma Citizens Honor Retiring City Officials,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 3, 1934.

[11] “Citizens’ Group to Petition City Council for New City Charter,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 13, 1934; “Ad Opposing Approving City Manager Charter,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 14, 1934; “Some Election Reflections,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 19, 1934.

[12] “So They Tell Me,” Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 31, 1962; Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 21, 1975.

[13] “Hans C. Andresen, Wife Purchase Business Building,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 18, 1946; “So They Tell Me,” Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 31, 1962; “Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 21, 1975; Bill Soberanes, “Camel Enters, Spices Up Local Tavern,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 29, 1988; Bill Soberanes, “Birthday Cake for Ex-President,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 10, 1970.

[14] “New Charter Carries,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 11, 1947; “Third City Manager Will be Hired by City Council,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 25, 1951.

[15] “Charter Amendments Go To Sacramento for Ratification,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 21, 1951;

[16] “City Manager Type of Government Here Will Be Tested in Petition,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 24, 1951; “Candidates for Mayor,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 1, 1951; “The Election Results,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 13, 1951.

[17] Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 30, 1971.

[18] “Brunner and Myers Trade Sentiments,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 1, 1953; Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 6, 1982.

[19] “Esther B. Wengren to Wed Robt. Brunner at Quiet Service,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 8, 1933; “So They Tell Me,” Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 30, 1960; March 5, 1965.

[20] “Myers Leads by 28 votes; Brunner to Contest Election,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 13, 1951; “Mayor Wins Over Brunner by 32 votes, Check Says,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 20, 1951; “Guftason Quits Council,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 5, 1963.

[21] “Brunner Doesn’t Choose to Accept,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 17, 1954.

[22] “Myers Leads by 28 votes; Brunner to Contest Election,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 13, 1951; “Mayor Wins Over Brunner by 32 votes, Check Says,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 20, 1951; “Guftason Quits Council,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 5, 1963.

[23] “So They Tell Me,” Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 30, 1960, March 5, 1965.

[24] “Charter Amendments Go To Sacramento for Ratification,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 21, 1951.

[25] “New City Manager,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 20, 1951; “So They Tell Me,” Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus Courier, March 7, 1960; Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 30, 1971.

[26] Mayor Candidate Levels Criticism,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 25, 1953; “The Real Facts and Figures,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 6, 1953; “Schoeningh is Elected Mayor,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 10, 1953.

[27] “King Wins Council Seat by 10 Votes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 21, 1955.

[28] “Brunner Files for Mayor,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 19, 1961. “June 13 Candidates Tell Their Views,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 2, 1961; “Sixteen Candidates to Choose From,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 10, 1961.

[29] “So They Tell Me,” Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 24, 1957, June 24, 1959, June 19, 1960; Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier February 21, 1975.

[30] “Esther B. Wengren to Wed Robt. Brunner at Quiet Service,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 8, 1933; “So They Tell Me,” Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 30, 1960; March 5, 1965.

[31]“So They Tell Me,” Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 10, 1965; “Putnam Wins, Bonds Lose,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 11, 1969.

Featured

The Man Who Dredged the World

Alphonzo B. Bowers, painting by H. Raschen, Overland Monthly, Vol. 44, December 1904, p. 587 (public domain)

In 1853, Alphonzo Bowers boarded a steamer bound for California in hopes of restoring his health. Plagued by obsessive tendencies, the 23-year old was mentally overworked. Three days shy of his destination, he was robbed of all his money while asleep in his berth. Upon disembarking in San Francisco, he discovered a dime in his vest pocket. In a gesture of his go-for-broke nature, he flipped it into the bay, and set off for the gold mines. Two months later, he returned with a bad case of sunstroke, still penniless.1

The scenario repeated itself over the coming decades. Compulsively drawn to big dreams, Bowers pushed himself to the point of physical exhaustion, only to end up empty-handed and buried beneath a mountain of debt.

Then, just as most friends had written him off as a seedy, obsessive crank, he hit pay dirt.

In a victory hailed as a “glorious triumph of nerve, patient industry, indomitable will, and heroism,” Bowers came into sudden wealth, and found himself anointed with Luther Burbank as one of Sonoma County’s genius inventors.2

1855 Map of Petaluma (Sonoma County Library)

The path to Bowers’  began in Petaluma. After his retreat from the gold mines, he found employment as founding principal of town’s first common school.3 Among the most fertile and ingenious minds the town had seen, Bowers distinguished himself as a wonderful and magnetic teacher, able to get the best work out of his pupils. In appreciation, students voted to name the rickety, one-room schoolhouse at Fifth and B streets after him.4

But Bowers’ restless nature got the better of him. In 1856, as a side business, he and the school’s sewing teacher opened a millinery store, leading to bankruptcy within a year.5 Two years later, the newly incorporated city of Petaluma imposed a tax for funding construction of a new schoolhouse on the site of the dilapidated Bowers School.

Petaluma’s Brick School at the corner of B and 4th streets, which replaced the Bowers School built in 1859 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Bowers took the opportunity to resign as principal and open an office as a surveyor, topographer, and civil engineer.6

Surveyors were in high demand at the time. The California Land Commission had just completed its ownership assessments of the county’s 24 Mexican land grants, and the land grant owners—most of them American speculators by that time—were busy subdividing their holdings in sales to land-hungry farmers pouring into the county.7

Bowers lacked formal training in engineering, but growing up in Maine he was known as a mechanical savant, able to fix any machine in his father’s mills. By the age of 16 he had designed and constructed his first dam.8 He spent only a few months surveying in the field before becoming obsessed with the idea of creating the first topographical farm map of Sonoma County.9

Ad in Petaluma Argus newspaper, 1859

For funding, Bowers relied upon commissions form land grant owners. The frenzied pace of subdivisions however turned the map project into a time-consuming quagmire, requiring frequent revisions and driving Bowers $15,000 ($435,000 in today’s currency) into debt. Having finally exhausted all his lines of credit, in 1863 he suspended work on the map and asked the county Board of Supervisors for $5,000 as a commission on 20 copies of the map.10

In support of his request, Bowers submitted a petition to the supervisors a signed by nearly 900 prominent citizens, as well as endorsements from the county assessors, who were anxious to use the map as a means of accurately assessing farm boundaries for taxes. They expected it would generate many times its commission price in increased tax dollars.11

That prospect troubled some large landowners, who filed a legal challenge, arguing the commissioning of such a map lay with the state, not the county. The challenge came at the height of the Civil War, which split Sonoma County into two political camps—pro-Confederate Democrats in Santa Rosa and pro-Union Republicans in Petaluma. Bowers’ own political leanings as an abolitionist and a member of the Republican state central committee were well known. In 1862, he made an unsuccessful run for state surveyor on the Republican ticket.12

Bowers responded to the legal challenge by lobbying the state legislature to pass the Bowers Map Bill, authorizing the county to commission the map.13 The matter then went to the Sonoma County grand jury, which argued the map bill was a grievous overreach by Union legislators seeking to impose their will upon the county. They urged the Democratic-dominated Board of Supervisors to disregard Bowers’ requests for payment, which they repeatedly did.14

In order to earn the money to finish the map, Bowers took a state position as a Deputy Surveyor General, traveling around the state. He made frequent trips to Petaluma to finish his county map as well as pressing his case with the county for the $5,000 commission.15

In 1866, Bowers released his topographical map of Sonoma County, printing 500 copies and offering them for sale to private landowners. He also donated copies to libraries and schools, and delivered 20 copies to county officials, billing the Board of Supervisors $5,000.16

Bowers’ Map of Sonoma County, Second Edition, 1867 (courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection)

County assessors were able to immediately generate an additional $8,000 in property taxes by using Bowers’ map to determine that 16,859 acres of Knights Valley were actually located in Sonoma County and not Napa County, as previously assumed. Still, supervisors refused to pay Bowers, the vote coming down to party lines.17

Bowers sued the county for payment in a case that ultimately made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, who decided in the county’s favor, ruling that the state legislature’s Bowers Map Bill did not impose a mandatory decision upon the county.18

Bowers refused to let the matter drop. In 1867, he published an 80-page booklet, “The History of the A.B. Bowers Map,” detailing the supervisors’ tawdry treatment of him.19 For years afterward he lobbied the state legislature to wage an investigation into the county’s handling of his request, finally succeeding in 1874 in convincing the state senate to pass such a bill, only to see Sonoma County Democrats kill it in the state assembly.20

Although his campaign against the county placed him deeper in debt, the studious Bowers received an education in the legal and legislative system that proved invaluable in his next obsessive pursuit—dredging up muck.

During the years he spent surveying Sonoma County, Bowers became intimately familiar with the Petaluma tidal slough and its adjacent wetlands extending north from San Pablo Bay. Known as the Petaluma Creek until 1959, when Congress formally renamed it the Petaluma River, the slough was Sonoma County’s primary means of transporting goods to and from the docks of San Francisco.21

1860 U.S. Coast Survey of Petaluma Creek (courtesy of Petaluma Historical Hydrology & Ecology Study)

California, which had been granted ownership of unsold federal marshes along the state’s waterways, began selling off wetlands on both sides of the Petaluma slough, on the condition the land be diked, drained, and reclaimed for farming or grazing so as to generate tax revenues.22

The subsequent elimination of wetlands, along with the rechanneling freshwater tributaries feeding into the slough, posed an increasing problem for using the slough as a commercial waterway. During rainy seasons, sediment from farm fields flowed into the slough, trapping ships in its muddy grasp and contributing to flooding at high tide.23 Dredging suddenly became critical to Sonoma County’s main waterway.

Dredging in the 1860s was conducted by a “steam paddies.” These were named for Irish laborers (nicknamed paddies). They, along with Chinese laborers, previously conducted California dredging by hand. The steam paddy used a clamshell or bucket to scoop up the muck and dump it into barges, to be carried away to a spoils site.24

One morning in 1864, over breakfast, Bowers had a vision of a new type of steam dredger, one that operated on hydraulics. He quickly sketched it out on a piece of paper.25 Bowers’ dredger used a rotary blade to cut up the hardened debris at the bottom of a waterway or marsh, then sucked that debris up in a long pipe that floated on the water for thousands of yards to a spoils area, where it could be used for building levees or landfill.

Illustration of Bowers hydraulic dredger published Overland Monthly 44, Dec 1904

Despite being bankrupted by his mapping venture, three years later Bowers quit his job with surveyor general’s office to perfect a model of his dredging machine, moving between San Francisco and Petaluma, where he unveiled his first prototype in 1869. To finance it, he borrowed money and took the odd surveying job, including appointment to a board of engineers charged with remodeling the Mare Island Navy Yard in 1873.26

Drawing of Bowers’ Hydraulic Dredger, 1887 (Sonoma County Library)

The U.S. Patent Office delayed processing of Bowers’ patent applications for several years. As he could not afford an attorney, he began his own study of patent laws, traveling to Washington, D.C. by train to secure his patents. Between 1884 and 1888, he was successful in obtaining 12 invention patents related to the dredger.27

By that time, rich and powerful dredging companies were building and selling hydraulic dredgers based upon Bowers’ model, making small modifications to claim them as their own. After receiving his first patent in 1884, Bowers brought lawsuits against more than a dozen dredging firms across the country.

In 1888, he won a major infringement suit against Colonel A. W. Von Schmidt of Oakland, setting a precedent that would decide his other lawsuits. The wealthy Von Schmidt tied the case up in appeals until 1897, when the district appeals court ruled in Bowers’ favor, awarding him a virtual monopoly of the hydraulic dredging machine business.28

A.W. Von Schmidt’s version of Bowers’ dredging machine, 1884 (courtesy of U.C. Berkeley, Bancroft Library)

By that time, 25 companies were using Bowers’ patented design for dredgers being sold around the world for $40,000 each ($1.4 million in today’s currency). Bowers sued them for royalties retroactive in some cases to the early 1870s. It was speculated Bowers stood to reap between $6 million and $15 million dollars ($200 million to $500 million in today’s currency).29

“The Midas touch of his genius,” wrote the Sonoma Democrat, “at last turns his ideas, wrought out in want and misery, into gold upon his bands.”30

A lifelong bachelor, the 67-year-old Bowers remained based in San Francisco, where he launched his own dredging company. He spent most of the next two decades traveling across the country as well as to Europe, Russia, Japan, China, the Philippines, and Cuba to consult on major dredging projects as one of the most respected civil engineers in the world.

Painting of Alphonzo B. Bowers by Stephen William Shaw, Overland Monthly, Vol. 29, February 1904, p. 116 (public domain)

He also established a reputation as something of a Renaissance man, giving talks and writing for a range of American and European journals on a range of topics, including politics, economics, sociology, religion, and poetry. In his spare time, he used his fortune to design and erect both public and private buildings.31

Bowers last visited Petaluma in 1905. Despite his wealth and fame, he still felt slighted by the county’s refusal to pay him for his Sonoma County map.32 In his eighties, he retired back in New England, where he continued to wage patent infringement battles and write articles for journals until his death in 1926 at the age of 96.33


******

A version of this story appeared the Sonoma Historian, Fall 2022.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] William Walsh, “The Story of an Inventor,” Overland Monthly, January-June, 1897, pp. 166-179.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Overland_Monthly/XA9IAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=history+of+hydraulic+dredging+machine+bowers&pg=PA172&printsec=frontcover

[2] “A Pioneers Visit,” Petaluma Courier, March 4, 1905; “A Bit of Local History,” Sonoma Democrat, January 16, 1897; “Great Future for San Pedro,” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1908; Modern San Francisco 1907-1908 (Western Press Association, University of California, 1908).

[3] Walsh, pp. 166-179; “Petaluma Library Association,” Sonoma County Journal, December 1, 1855.

[4] “Bowers School,” Sonoma County Journal, October 6, 1855 “To the Public,” Sonoma County Journal, October 30, 1857; “Early History of Our Schools,” Argus, April 13, 1922.

[5] Ad, Sonoma County Journal, April 19, 1856; “Notice,” Sonoma County Journal, February 6, 1857.

[6] Ad, Sonoma County Journal, December 24, 1858; Ad, Petaluma Argus, February 12, 1861.

[7] James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-225320100002000; Petaluma Valley Historical Hydrology and Ecology Study.” SFEI Contribution No. 861, 2018. https://www.sfei.org/documents/petaluma-valley-historical-hydrology-andecology-study.

[8] Walsh, pp. 166-179.

[9] “A Valuable Map,” Sonoma County Journal, April 8, 1859.

[10] “Bowers Map Bill,” Petaluma Argus, May 20, 1863; Walsh, pp. 166-179.

[11] “The Other Side,” Sonoma Democrat, May 16, 1863.

[12] Republican State Convention,” Sacramento Daily Bee, June 20, 1861; “Proceedings of the Republican County Convention, Petaluma Argus, June 11, 1861.

[13] “To the Supervisors and People of Sonoma County,” Petaluma Argus, May 23, 1863.

[14] “Lacked the Power,” Petaluma Argus, February 11, 1863; “The Other Side,” Sonoma Democrat, May 16, 1863 “Grand Jury Report,” Sonoma Democrat, May 16, 1863; “Bowers Map Bill,” Petaluma Argus, May 20, 1863; “Constitution Answered,” Sonoma Democrat, December 8, 1866; “Rare Logic,” Petaluma Argus, February 14, 1867.

[15] Strategy, My Boy,” The Placer Herald, June 11, 1863; “Personal,” Petaluma Argus, November 3, 1864; “Alphonzo B. Bowers,” New York Times, January 25, 1926.

[16] “County Map,” Petaluma Argus, November 15, 1866; “Constitution Answered,” Sonoma Democrat, December 8, 1866; “Among Us Again,” Sonoma Democrat, April 19, 1873.

[17] “Bowers Map of Sonoma County,” Petaluma Argus, December 13, 1866; “County Map,” Petaluma Argus, November 15, 1866; Ad, Petaluma Argus, August 23, 1866; “Bowers Map,” Sonoma Democrat, November 17, 1866; No headline, Argus, February 7, 1867; “Reply to Jess O. Squires,” Petaluma Argus, December 27, 1866; “Rare Logic,” Petaluma Argus, February 14, 1867.

[18] “Our Santa Rosa Correspondence,” Petaluma Argus, December 20, 1866; “Bowers Map,” Sonoma Democrat, February 2, 1867; “Bowers Map Bill,” Sonoma Democrat, March 25, 1876.

[19] Alphonzo B. Bowers papers, 1657-1926, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, Online Archive of California.

[20] “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, April 3, 1874; “Bowers Map Bill,” Sonoma Democrat, March 25, 1876.

[21] “Petaluma Creek,” Petaluma Argus, December 5, 1879; Gerber.

[22] “Wetlands in the North Bay Planning Area,” San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, February, 1997, pgs. 7, 28. http://www.bcdc.ca.gov/planning/reports/WetlandsInTheNorthBayPlanningArea_Feb1997.pdf

[23] Petaluma Valley Historical Hydrology and Ecology Study.” SFEI Contribution No. 861, 2018. https://www.sfei.org/documents/petaluma-valley-historical-hydrology-andecology-study.

[24] Steam Paddy used on Petaluma Creek: “Straightening the Creek,” Petaluma Argus, February 11, 1862; David D. Schmidt, “David Hewes and His Steam Paddy Work,”www.foundSF.com. https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=David_Hewes_and_His_Steam_Paddy_Works

[25] “Bowers School,” Sonoma County Journal: November 3, 1855 (article notes that Bowers School was beginning its fourth term, implying the school opened in 1854, there being four terms a year then); “Our Common Schools,” Sonoma County Journal, December 18, 1857; “Our Public Schools,” Sonoma County Journal, December 28, 1860; Walsh, pp. 166-179.

[26] Walsh, pp. 166-179; Ad “Lost,” Petaluma Argus, December 4, 1869; Personal,” Petaluma Argus, June 13, 1879.

[27] A.B. Bowers Dredging Machine, patented August 21, 1888. https://patents.google.com/patent/US388253; Federal Reporter, Vol. 91: Bowers applied for patent in 1885; first patent issued on December 26, 1886; “Pacific Coast Patents,” Petaluma Argus, June 18, 1887, September 8, 1888; A Guide to the Alphonzo B. Bowers Papers, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, National Park Service, Online Archive of California

https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt1m3nf2t3/entire_text/

[28] A Guide to the Alphonzo B. Bowers Papers; “Agricultural Items,” Petaluma Argus, September 22, 1876; Washington Davis, “Hydraulic Dredger: A peculiar Story,” Overland Monthly, Volume 44, December 1904, pp. 587-592.

[29] “Millions for an Ex-Petaluman,” Petaluma Argus, January 5, 1897; “The Bowers Dredger,” Petaluma Courier, April 6, 1897; “Bowers Brings Suit,” Petaluma Courier, November 27, 1908.

[30] “A Bit of Local History,” Sonoma Democrat, January 16, 1897.

[31] “A Pioneer’s Visit,” Petaluma Courier, March 4, 1905; “Great Future for San Pedro,” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1908; Modern San Francisco 1907-1908 (Western Press Association, University of California, 1908).

[32] “Visit Here After Years,” Petaluma Argus, March 4, 1905.

[33] A Guide to the Alphonzo B. Bowers Papers; “Agricultural Items,” Petaluma Argus, September 22, 1876; “Alphonzo B. Bowers,” New York Times, January 25, 1926.

Featured

Petaluma’s Birth in a Devil’s Playground

Heman Bassett, 1870s (photo Philadelphia Studios, courtesy of Kay Bassett)

Heman Bassett arrived in Petaluma in the fall of 1852 in search of redemption. An excommunicated Mormon elder cast “into the buffeting hands of Satan,” Bassett and his family set out across the county in an ox-drawn wagon to settle among some of the people who had earlier persecuted him for his beliefs, among them Petaluma’s founder, George H. Keller.[1]

A failed gold miner from Missouri, Keller had created Petaluma just months before, making an illegal squatter’s claim to 158 acres of a 13,000-acre Mexican land grant called Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. After platting out the town on 40 acres, he began selling off lots from a makeshift general store he erected beside the Petaluma River on Washington Street.[2]

By the time Bassett arrived with his wife and five children, the new town was bustling with activity. Sailing scows laden with potatoes, meat, and grains plied the river to San Francisco. New settlers had erected fifty new homes of rough-hewn redwood. Main Street, laid out by Keller along a former Coast Miwok trading route, hosted a general store, a blacksmith, and three hotels.[3]

Petlauma House (from 1857 map of Petlauma, Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

One of the hotels, the Petaluma House, located at the site of today’s Odd Fellows Lodge, was for sale. Bassett decided to put a stake down and buy it.

Situated across from the river docks where boatloads of aspiring settlers disembarked, the Petaluma House welcomed overnight guests, many looking to catch the morning stage bound for Bloomfield or Santa Rosa’s Green Valley to cash in on the potato boom, and those seeking temporary living quarters until they got established as tradesmen or merchants in town.[4]

A number hailed, like Keller, from Missouri, in fact, 20% of the 560 settlers counted in the 1850 Sonoma County census. They were most likely drawn by word of the area’s rich farmlands and mild climate from Lilburn Boggs, Missouri’s former governor.

Lilburn Boggs (photo courtesy of Missouri Historical Society)

Boggs emigrated to California with his family in 1846, after losing his merchant business in an economic depression, and also surviving a shot in the head from an alleged Mormon assassin.[5] Initially taken in by General Vallejo at the Petaluma Adobe, he settled in the town of Sonoma, where he opened up a dry goods store and became alcalde, or judicial and administrative officer, for Mexico’s Northern California territory. After the Mexican-American War, he dealt in real estate before being elected to the state assembly.[

Bassett knew Boggs from his own time in Missouri. He had moved to Jackson County, Missouri in the early 1830s with Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, after Smith received a revelation it was the New Jerusalem where the Second Coming of Christ would soon occur.

Just a teenager when he first met Smith, Bassett was living in a Christian socialist commune called “The Family” outside Kirtland, Ohio. Smith was accompanied by a group of missionaries on their way to proselytize among American Indians, who they believed to be descendants of the Israelites.[7]

Etching of “The Family” commune outside Kirtland, Ohio (illustration Brigham Young University)

Soon after being baptized in Smith’s new church, Bassett had a vision of being called into the world to preach. Ordained a Mormon elder at 17, he worked the circuit of Mormon revival meetings dressed as a Native American speaking in tongues. His zealous, enraptured style was described as “that of a baboon.”[8] While preparing to accompany Smith to Missouri, Bassett was called out as “a false spirit.”[9]

“Heman Bassett,” Smith told him, “you sit still. The devil wants to sift you.”[10]

Joseph Smith, Jr. (photo courtesy of Dan Larsen, Desert News)

Part of that sifting may have been the watch Bassett took from a Mormon brother and sold. When confronted, Bassett cited the code of community property practiced in the commune. “Oh,” he said, “I thought it was all in The Family.”[11]

Bassett was denied missionary status, but still accompanied Smith to Jackson County in western Missouri, home to Boggs, then a state senator. The influx of Mormons quickly upset the social hierarchy of older settlers in the area, including Keller, who lived in nearby Platte County. They took issue with the Mormons’ abolitionism (Missouri was a slave state), their ecstatic performances dressed as American Indians and speaking in tongues, and their fervent belief they were to inherit the the land of their enemies in Jackson County.[12]

Within a short time, Smith and his followers were driven from the county to parts of northwest Missouri, where tensions with locals continued to mount, finally culminating in the Missouri Mormon War of 1838. At the height of the war, Governor Lilburn Boggs sent 2,500 militiamen to eject all Mormons from the state,signing an executive order calling for their extermination should they refuse to leave.[13]

Missouri Mormon War of 1838 (photo Mormon Musings)

Forcibly driven from their homes, which were then plundered and destroyed, along with their crops and livestock, a number of Mormons died violently or from the hardship of the exodus.[14]

Bassett, along with 10,000 others, fled to Illinois, where Smith set up his new headquarters in the town of Nauvoo. After a new Mormon majority elected him mayor, the local newspaper accused Smith of polygamy. He responded by having the newspaper shut down, for which he was arrested and incarcerated. While awaiting trial, a mob stormed the jail and killed him.[15]

After Smith’s death, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints split into two camps, one headed by Brigham Young, the other by James Strang. Bassett sided with the Strangites, joining them at their headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, where he served as an elder until 1850, when he was excommunicated for his rebellious ways.

Bassett, his wife Mary and their four children set out across the plains for California, stopping in Washoe County for Mary’s birthing of their fifth child. When they arrived in Petaluma, they found Keller and others engaged in California’s new gold rush: land speculation.[16] There was just one hitch—the land wasn’t for sale.

Squatting had become common in the American West thanks to the Preemption Act of 1841, which entitled a squatter to purchase 160 acres in the public domain, after inhabiting the land for 14 months or making improvements to it for five years.[17] But in California, aspiring settlers discovered that most of the land coveted for farming or ranching was privately held in Mexican land grants, protected by the Treaty of Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848.

Due to the laissez-faire legal system on the Mexican frontier, many grants were sketchy, incomplete or, in some cases, fraudulent.[18] In 1851, squatter advocates pushed through Congress the California Land Act, subjecting all Mexican land grant claims to legal review by an appointed Land Commission. Ostensibly created to bring clarity to the legal morass, the act effectively put the grants into play, opening the door to a host of American swindlers and land sharks.[19]

That included Keller, who, with the support of frustrated settlers, made his squatter’s claim to the town of Petaluma.[20] Despite the fact the claim had no legal bearing, his property sales were recorded by Sonoma County’s first recorder of deeds, William Boggs, son of State Assemblyman Lilburn Boggs.[21] 

William Boggs, 1870s (photo Sonoma County Library)

So began the Petaluma land scam, giving birth to one of California’s longest and most contested land grant disputes. Fueled by greed, exploitation, bribery, and fraud, it was a devil’s playground, one that placed Petaluma landowners in legal jeopardy for the next two decades.

Keller’s initial plat extended from the river west to Liberty Street, and from Oak Street south to A Street. In 1853, he sold off a large portion of his remaining claim to Columbus Tustin, an ambitious 26-year old from Illinois, who undertook the first extension of Keller’s development, creating a subdivision called Tustin’s Addition that ran from First to Eighth streets, and A to F streets.[22]

Stricken with money fever, Bassett purchased 40 undeveloped acres from Keller just before he departed town with his spoils for Missouri. Bassett’s Addition extended from Howard Street west to Fair Street, and from Stanley Street south to A Street, with Bassett Street laid out down the middle, adjacent to a large plaza (today’s city hall). Bassett began selling lots from his hotel on Main Street.[23]

Map of Petlauma, Thomas H. Thompson, 1877, Bassett’s Addition at lower left (public domain)
Bassett’s Addition, Map of Petaluma, Thos. Thompson, 1877 (public domain)

In June 1855, the party ended when the Land Commission confirmed the claim of James Stuart, a San Francisco speculator, to the 13,000-acre Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. Another speculator, Thomas Valentine, had filed a counterclaim which he agreed to drop in exchange for Stuart splitting his profits from rancho land sales. Two years later, Valentine sued to reopen the case, setting off 15 years of legal drama in the courts.[24]

Stuart opened a real estate office in Petaluma for residents to repurchase their property from him, regardless of whatever bogus deeds they had been issued by Keller, Tustin, or Bassett.[25]

Map of Petaluma, 1855 (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Shortly after the Land Commission ruling, Bassett’s wife Mary sued him for divorce, settling for $5,000 ($170,000 in today’s currency). Cash strapped, Bassett forfeited his unsold sections of Bassett’s Addition and leased out the Petaluma House. A year later, he opened the Petaluma Family Grocery on Main Street.[26] It didn’t last. In 1860, he declared bankruptcy, and left Petaluma for Sacramento, to join his youngest daughter and her husband.[27]

Over the next decade, he returned to his migratory ways, settling briefly in Half Moon Bay and San Jose, where he again filed for bankruptcy, before heading to Nevada with his two younger sons to work the mines. In 1872, he reunited in Utah with a childhood companion from The Family, Lucy Celesta Stanton, who had once been married to his brother, before becoming a notorious figure in her own right.[28]

After divorcing Bassett’s brother, Stanton married a former Black slave named William McCary and started a fringe Mormon movement with him that embraced not only polygamy, but also sexual threesomes. The two traveled the countryside posing as American Indians, performing at Mormon revivals and temperance meetings in native dress, until they were excommunicated and McCary disappeared. Stanton then opened a native healing clinic in Buffalo, New York.

Lucy Celesta Stanton Bassett (photo in public domain)

Just prior to reuniting with Bassett, Stanton was released from Sing Sing prison after serving nine years for an abortion she performed on a woman who died.[29]

Stanton and Bassett married and lived together in Utah until 1876, when Bassett died while on a transcontinental trip to Philadelphia for the nation’s centennial. He was 67. After his death, Stanton repented her ways and was rebaptized in the Church of Latter-day Saints. Having failed to repent his rebellious ways, Bassett was presumably cast after death into what the church calls “spirit prison.”[30]


********

For more on George H. Keller:

For more on Columbus Tustin:

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Notice,” Gospel Herald (Goree, WI), March 21, 1850; Bassett’s arrival in 1852 is confirmed by the marriage license issued on November 18, 1852, for his son Madison H. Bassett to Emily Woodward, by the California Marriage Licenses, 1850-1852, Sonoma County, and by the autobiography of his son Ralph Lowe Bassett, http://www.bassett.net/gendata-o/p15044.htm.

[2] John Sheehy, “History Mystery Solved,” Petaluma-Argus Courier, February 11, 2021; “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876; Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), p. 55.

[3] J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), pp. 263; “Historical: Petaluma’s Birth and Growth,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1892; Munro-Fraser, p. 263.

[4] Munro-Fraser, p. 263; Ad for Petaluma House, Sonoma County Journal, September 1, 1855.

[5] “Donald Edwards, pp. 15-18; “Gaye LeBaron’s Notebook,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 1, 1990; William Boggs, “Lilburn Boggs,” F.A. Sampson, ed., Missouri Historical Review, Vol. IV (October 1909-July 1910), pp. 109; Donald Edwards, “Lilburn Boggs,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016), pp. 15-16.

[6] William Boggs, pp. 109; Donald Edwards, pp. 15-16.

[7] Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (University of Missouri Press, 1990), pp. 10. 17-21.

[8] Christopher C. Smith, “Playing Lamanite: Ecstatic Performance of American Indian Roles In Early Mormon Ohio,” Journal of Mormon History, Vol. 41, No. 3, July 2015, pp. 131-166;  Susan Easton Black, “Heman Bassett,” Doctrine and Covenants Central. https://doctrineandcovenantscentral.org/people-of-the-dc/heman-a-bassett/

Smith, pgs. 131, 151; “Isaac Morley Farm and School House,” Brigham Young University, Idaho. https://emp.byui.edu/satterfieldb/rel341/Isaac%20Morley%20Farm.htm

[9] Black.

[10] Black.

[11] Black.

[12] Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints: Carefully Selected from the Revelations of God, 52:42; Norman F. Furniss,The Mormon Conflict(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 2.

[13] LeSueur, pp. 229-230.

[14] LeSueur, p. 19; “The Mormon Difficulties,” Niles National Register, October 6, 1838, October 13, 1838; Smith, pp. 159-160; “The Bloody History of Mormonism in Jackson County,” NPR Kansas City, February 12, 2015. https://www.kcur.org/show/central-standard/2015-02-12/the-bloody-history-of-mormonism-in-jackson-county

[15] LeSueur, p. 180-181.

[16] 1850 U.S. Census, Racine, WI; “Notice,” Gospel Herald (Goree, WI), March 21, 1850; Autobiography of Bassett’s son Ralph Lowe Bassett, http://www.bassett.net/gendata-o/p15044.htm.

[17] The Preemption Act of 1841, 27th Congress, Ch. 16, 5 Stat. 453 (1841), accessed from www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org; Paul W. GatesThe California Land Act of 1851, California Historical Society, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Dec., 1971), pp. 395–430.

[18] David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (October., 1979), p. 437.

[19] Pisani, pp. 291-292.

[20] Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pgs. 21, 29; “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876; Robert Allan Thompson, p. 55.

[21] Donald Edwards, “Lilburn Boggs,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016), pp. 15-16; “Deeds of Sonoma County, 1847-1901,” film #008117705, LDS FamilySearch database. familysearch.org.

[22] Munro-Fraser, pp. 259-260; Sonoma County Deed Records, show two grants in 1853 from Columbus Tustin, one to Edward S, Jones, May 16, 1853, and the other to Fred Starkey, August 12, 1853, indicating that he was selling lots; the boundaries of Tustin’s Addition defined in Thos. H. Thompson, Map of Sonoma County, 1877. 

[23] “Delinquent Tax List,” SCJ, November 25, 1859; the boundaries of Bassett’s Addition defined in Thos. H. Thompson, Map of Sonoma County, 1877.

[24] Robert Lee, p. 266.

[25] Ad for Office Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, Sonoma County Journal, October 27, 1855.

[26] Ad for Petaluma House, Sonoma County Journal, September 1, 1855; “Legal Notice,” Sonoma County Journal, December 29, 1855; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, May 1, 1857.

[27] “A Card,” Sonoma County Journal, January 28, 1859; “Married,” Sonoma County Journal, January 6, 1860; 1860 U.S. Census, Sacramento; “Legal Notice,” Sacramento Bee, January 5, 1861.

[28] Ralph Low Bassett Autobiography; “Insolvent Notice,” Times Gazette (San Mateo County), October 6, 1866.

[29] Angela Pulley Hudson, Real Native Genius: How and Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), pp. 1-16.

[30] Ralph Low Bassett Autobiography; “Died,” Petaluma Argus, July 28, 1876; Hudson, pp. 166-169.

Featured

The Petaluma Incubator Company

A snapshot history of 230-242 Petaluma Blvd. North

1895 photo of the Petaluma Incubator Company at 230-236 Petlauma Blvd North (photo Sonoma County Library)

Few sites are etched into Petaluma history deeper than the Petaluma Incubator Company, the engine behind the city’s reign as the World’s Egg Basket. Yet, thanks to urban renewal efforts in the 1960s, nothing remains of the building today other than a rock wall lining Brewster’s Beer Garden.

The incubator company had its genesis in 1877, when Isaac Dias, a young Jewish dentist from New Orleans invented an incubator capable of maintaining a steady temperature of 103 degrees, the same as a brooding hen’s body. By accelerating the hatching of newly laid eggs, the incubator freed the hen from her maternal nesting duties, allowing her to lay more.[1]

Dias patented his invention, and was joined in marketing it in 1882 by one of his patients, Lyman Byce, a 26-year-old medical student from Canada, who came to visit a sister in Petaluma, seeking the health benefits of the area’s Mediterranean sea breezes.[2]

Lyman Byce, circa 1890 (photo Sonoma County Library)

That same mild climate, along with the valley’s rich, alluvial soil, would set the stage for the chicken mania that followed.

In 1881, Byce—the Steve Jobs to Dias’ Steve Wozniak— joined Dias in forming the Petaluma Incubator Company, soon setting up their factory in a former armory near the Washington Street Bridge.[3]

After Dias’s mysterious death in an 1884 duck hunting accident, Byce employed his marketing talents in taking the Petaluma Incubator Company to new heights. Positioning himself as the “father of chickendome,” he wrote Dias out of the story.[4]

1890s photo of Petaluma Incubator Factory in the Hopper Building at 230-236 Main Street (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1889, Byce moved the incubator factory to the Hopper Building at 230-236 Main Street, beside George P. McNear’s Oriental Mills & Feed Store. After a fire burned down McNear’s building in 1902, Byce purchased the lot at 238-242 Main, and constructed a modern new factory in its place.[5]

Aftermath of 1902 fire destroying the McNear Oriental Mills and scorching parts of the Petlauma Incubator Company (photo Sonoma County Library)
New Petaluma Incubator Factory on former site of McNear’s Oriental Mills, 1912 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Overexpansion and distressed sales during World War I forced Byce to declare bankruptcy in 1919, and move to a smaller factory on East Washington Street. His former building was converted into a poultry packing plant by the Petaluma Poultry Company.[6]

1948 view of the Petaluma Milling Company, the white building on left (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

In 1938, the poultry company sold the building to Petaluma Milling Company, a feed and mill store. It operated until 1967, when the city, championing urban renewal, condemned both buildings that had once housed the Petaluma Incubator Company, 230-236 and 238-242, giving the owners the choice of either rehabilitating them or tearing them down. They buildings were demolished in 1968.[7]

2022 view of Brewster’s Beer Garden (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

The lots remained vacant until 2016, when Brewster’s Beer Garden created an open air facility on their ground floor facing Water Street, leaving a hole in the street landscape of Petaluma Boulevard North, a reminder of good intentions gone bad.[8]

******


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Thea Lowry, Empty Shells (Manifold Press, Novato, CA, 2000), p. 33

[2] Lowry, pp. 33-34.

[3] Lowry, p. 33; “Petaluma Incubator,” Petaluma Argus, October 3, 1883; A Gold Medal,” Petaluma Argus, November 22, 1884.

[4] Lowry, pp. 33-37.

[5] Ad, Petaluma Courier, August 25, 1888; “A Happy New Year,” Petaluma Argus, December 28, 1888; “Petaluma Industries,” Petaluma Courier, May 29, 1889; “A Midnight Blaze,” Petaluma Courier, June 11, 1902; “A Business Deal,” Petaluma Courier, August 29, 1902

[6] “Petition in Solvency,” Petaluma Argus, September 23, 1919; “Big Auction Sale Today,” Petaluma Argus, February 3, 1920; “Will Open a Monster Plant,” Petaluma Argus, March 25, 1920.

[7] “Milani Bldg. Bought by L. Hozz,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 20, 1938; “Petaluma Milling Company Closes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 2, 1967; “Council Orders Action,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 2, 1967; “City Budget,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 7, 1968.

[8] “Water Street Rising,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 5, 2016.

Featured

Petaluma’s Carriage & Car Heritage Site

A snapshot history of 217 Petaluma Blvd North

1901 photo of Robinson & Farrell Blacksmiths & Wagonmakers, 271 Petaluma Blvd. North (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

In Petaluma’s history of moving vehicles, 271 Petaluma Boulevard North is a local heritage site. Located between Martha and Prospect streets just north of Penry Park, people have been making, selling, and repairing wagons, buggies, and automobiles here since 1859, when Simon Conrad opened his blacksmith and carriage maker shop.

A native of Pennsylvania, Conrad not only gained a reputation as one of the finest carriage makers in the state, he also became a city leader, elected to the city’s Board of Trustees (city council), and serving as board president, or mayor. [1]

Upon his death in 1873, a former employee, John Loranger, took over the shop. Loranger’s buggies and blacksmithing won him top prizes at the Sonoma-Marin Fair. In 1879, he rented out to Isaac Dias a second story room in the shop, where he invented and patented a new egg incubator, partnering in 1882 with Lyman Byce to market it, kicking off Petaluma’s egg boom.[2]

After being elected to the city’s Board of Trustees in 1880, Loranger sold his shop to one of his blacksmiths, William F. Farrell and William Robinson. They secured an exclusive franchise to sell Studebaker buggies. Farrell bought out in 1901. Four years later, he replaced Simon Conrad’s original building with building that stands on the site today.[3]

1906 photo of Farrell Carriages, Buggies & Wagons, 271 Petaluma Blvd. North (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

After automobile sales came to Petaluma in 1903, Farrell expanded to selling and repairing them. Like his predecessors, he was a prominent civic leader, serving as fire chief and a member of the board of education. After his death in 1916, his sons Hamilton and William J. Farrell took over the business.[4]

In 1920, they became a dealership for Dodge cars, moving their showroom and auto repair shop next door to the north side of Prospect Street. Will Farrell became a city councilman in 1922, and was elected mayor in 1929. He resigned in 1934 after being accused of covertly profiting from servicing city vehicles at his shop.[5]

1944 photo of Inwood Auto Parts, 271 Petaluma Blvd. North (photo Sonoma County Library)

The building at 271 Main was occupied by a rotation of auto-related businesses until 1933, when William Inwood established his tire and auto repair business there. Upon his death in 1948, Jack Dunaway, who joined the firm in high school, assumed management of the shop, purchasing it from Inwood’s widow in 1952.[6]

His son Mike joined him in managing Dunaway Auto Parts in the 1970s, eventually taking over the business. In 1996, the company transitioned to Dunaway Auto Paints, which it remains today.[7]

2022 photo of Dunaway Auto Parts/ Auto Paint, est. 1952, 271 Petaluma Blvd. North (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

SOURCES:

[1] Sonoma County Journal, July 18, 1862; “Death of Simon Conrad,” Petaluma Argus, April 25, 1873.

[2] “Wagon Making,” Petaluma Argus, May 8, 1873; “John Loranger’s Manufactory,” Petaluma Argus, February 27, 1874; Petaluma Argus, October 15, 1875; Petaluma Argus, October 3, 1879; Ed Mannion’s Rear View Mirror, Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 22, 1960.

[3] “New Firm,” Petaluma Argus, December 9, 1881; “Notice of Dissolution, “Petaluma Courier, November 14, 1901; Carriage Repository,” Petaluma Courier, March 3, 1905; “Briefs,” Petaluma Courier, April 26, 1905.

[4] “W.F. Farrell Dies at His Old Home,” Petaluma Courier, December 19, 1916; “The Whole City Mourns the Death of W.F. Farrell, Petaluma Argus, December 18, 1916; “Notice,” Petaluma Courier, December 24, 1916.

[5] “Farrell Bros. Now Agents for Dodge,” Petaluma Courier, Mary 26, 1920; Moved into New Building,” Petaluma Courier, July 17, 1920; “Certificate of Partnership,” Petaluma Argus, July 30, 1924; “Beautiful New Home of Farrell Bros.,” Petaluma Argus, July 28, 1928; “W. Farrell Councilman,” Petaluma Courier, May 6, 1922; “Mayor Farrell, Four Aides, Quit Office,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 27, 1934.

[6] Ads, Petaluma Argus, September 7, 1920, June 16, 1921, 1922 “J.A. Cline, Dealer” selling used cars there; Ad listing, Petaluma Argus, April 24, 1926, June 14, 1927: Inwood & Greene auto repair at  267-271 Main; Ad for Inwood & Flohr, Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 14, 1932: listed at 304 Main Street; “Inwood & Flohr Have Fine New Store,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 20, 1933; “Wim. A. Inwood, Businessman, Dies From Heart Ailment,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 25, 1948; “Jack Dunaway Buys Inwood Auto Parts,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 1, 1952.

[7] Ad, Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 27, 1974; “Petaluma Access,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 8, 1996.

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Tribute to a Mentor—Ardie Fortier

Ardie Fortier, 1924-2029 (photo courtesy of Brigham Denison)

Today marks what would have been the 93rd birthday of my mentor Ardie Fortier, who died last fall.

When we’re young, some of us have the good fortune of finding a mentor—someone who sees a potential in us others don’t, and who is willing to provide us with a guiding light toward helping us realize it.

The word “mentor” comes from the name of a character in Homer’s book The Odyssey. Mentor was the person entrusted with the education of Odysseus’ son while Odysseus went off to fight the Trojan War, and then spent 10 years wandering the world before making it back home.

In my case, the roles were somewhat reversed—I left home shortly after graduating from high school, and set off for Europe with a backpack for four years. Along the way, I took as my mentor an incarnation of Odysseus in the lovely form of a woman named Ardie Fortier.

I had a passing acquaintance with Ardie growing up in my hometown of Petaluma, as she was the mother of one of my classmates, Carrie Steere. But when I first encountered her and her husband Joe during my travels in their little cottage overlooking the Shannon River in West County Clare, our connection as kindred souls was instantaneous.

View of the Shannon River from Joe and Ardie’s cottage in Knock, Ireland, 1974 (photo courtesy of Brigham Denison)

We spent hours in the kitchen—the only warm room in an Irish cottage—talking about everything under the sun—history, literature, philosophy, religion, politics, and psychology—all infused with Ardie’s contagious enthusiasm, curiosity, and good humor.

For an aspiring autodidact like myself, out to study the world first hand and not on some college assembly line, it was pure heaven.

Not long after that visit, Ardie and Joe moved to Munich, where Joe took a teaching position at an extension of the University of Maryland, and Ardie took a job at the nearby headquarters of the company that ran the PXs on American military bases in Europe.

Their Munich apartment became my refuge from the road, where I could recharge and reengage with Ardie and Joe in far-reaching discussions around the kitchen table. Some evenings, Joe’s faculty colleagues—an eclectic group of intellectuals from around the globe—would join us, and we’d have a literary salon of sorts with Ardie as host, employing her gracious humor and infectious laughter to keep things from going off the rails.

Ardie (right) with friend at Bavarian farmhouse, 1977 (photo John Sheehy)

After a couple years of hitchhiking around Europe, working odd jobs, studying history, literature, and culture, I hit a wall, both broke and burned out. I made my way back to Munich, where Ardie helped me find a place to live and a clerical job at the PX headquarters where she worked. In a weird twist of fate, some months later, I was made an office supervisor, managing a group of people twice my age, including Ardie.

Now, for most people, having to report to a scruffy 21-year old road bum you’ve just helped scrape off the streets, would be awkward, to say the least. But not Ardie.

She stepped in as a mentor, sharing her incredible wealth of emotional intelligence in coaching me on how to manage the crazy bunch of Germans and American expatriates in the office. Because she had a master’s degree in psychology and Joe was a psychology professor, that included a deep dive into the study the Myers-Briggs typology to understand how to work with others.

Ardie’s type was INFP—introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceptive. Mine type was similar—except I was typed as a thinker instead of a feeler, meaning that, while Ardie relied upon feelings to sort out the value of what she was intuitively taking in, I turned to analysis.

Joe and Ardie walking in Munich’s Englischer Garten , 1976 (photo John Sheehy)

Joe also conducted tests to determine which professions Ardie and I were best suited for. In Ardie’s case, I believe it was nursing, which she eventually gravitated to later in life. For me, it waswriting and reporting. My least suitable occupation was business management.

When I finally did get around to pursuing a career, it was indeed as an editor at a literary magazine in New York City. But within a couple of years, I gravitated to the least of my talents in becoming the magazine’s publisher. I went on to spend the next 35 years running media companies, with no business management training whatsoever aside from those tutorials with Joe and Ardie, and Ardie’s on-the-job coaching at the office in Munich.

The author riding the rails in Europe, 1974 (photo courtesy of Brigham Denison)

It was same with education. I hated the idea of going to college, but as an aspiring autodidact, I was a complete failure, overwhelmed with information. Ardie and Joe helped me to see that the “T” for thinker in my Myers-Briggs profile meant I needed some formal training in critical thinking to make sense what I was taking in.

Once again, Ardie was there as a mentor. She had attended Pomona College for two years before marrying her first husband. After her first two children were born, the family moved to Oregon and Ardie enrolled at Reed College in Portland. There she found her intellectual home, and absolutely thrived. She thought I would too.

Ardie, second from left, as a student at Reed College, 1955 (photo Reed Griffin yearbook)

As fate would have it, Reed had only one study-abroad program, and it was at the University of Munich. After hanging out with the Reed students there, I realized Ardie was right—I had found my people.

With Ardie’s help, I applied to Reed—it was the only college I ever applied to—and was surprisingly accepted. While Reed accepted me, they would not provide me with any financial aid, as they considered me a “spice student,” there to add a different life experience to the student body, but not expected to last long. I continued working in Munich for another year to save up the money for my first year of tuition.

Today, thanks to Ardie, I am not only a Reed graduate, but a long-serving member of the college’s board of trustees.

Ardie and Joe eventually returned to the states. After Joe passed away, Ardie joined the Peace Corps in Costa Rica at age 60. Upon her return, we found ourselves near neighbors in San Francisco.

Ardie in Costa Rica with the Peace Corps, 1990 (photo Steere family)

Ardie and I started volunteering together at a local food bank, making monthly food deliveries to people in need, mostly in the projects. I carried in the food, while Ardie greeted everyone with her generous smile and upbeat manner, mentoring me once again in the characteristics that opened doors wherever she went—courage, curiosity, and compassion.

“On the path laid out before you,” wrote the poet Gary Snyder, another Reed alum, “others have already been that way and picked all the berries. In order to get your own berries, you need to leave the path and make your own trail.”

On her personal odyssey in this life, Ardie not only carved out her own trail, and got her own berries, she inspired me, and I’m sure countless others, to do the same, for which I am eternally grateful.

******

A link to Ardie’s obituary in Reed College alumni magazine:

https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam/obituaries/2022/ardeth-owen-steere-fortier-1955.html

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Petaluma’s Days as a Roadside Attraction

Petaluma’s Main Street looking north from Western Avenue, 1930 (photo courtesy of Dan Brown)

On September 3, 1925, an auto caravan of 40 “cavemen” clad in the skins of mountain lions, panthers and wildcats, set off from Grants Pass, Oregon, to take possession of Petaluma, California. Before departing, they made sure to book 26 rooms at the Hotel Petaluma, requesting permission to set up a cave in the lobby.1

The cavemen were bound for a convention promoting the Redwood Highway, a new auto route extending from the Oregon Caves Monument outside Grants Pass to the docks of Sausalito. The name “Redwood Highway” was coined in 1921 by A.D. Lee, a Crescent City hotelier, who believed the new scenic thoroughfare too lucrative to be designated by merely a number.2 Regardless, in 1926 it would officially become part of U.S. Highway 101.

Lee’s inspiration for the name came from a conservationist group called Save the Redwoods League, who in 1918 mounted a campaign to preserve what remained of California’s old growth redwood groves by making them state parks.3

Members of the Save the Redwoods League, 1920s (photo Humboldt County Historical Society)

The conservationists’ call of the wild spoke to a new wave of automobility sweeping the country. No longer hampered by wretched roads, the limited speed and endurance of the horses pulling wagons and stages, or the inflexible timetable of steam locomotives, motor-savvy Americans were setting out aboard their gas-powered “vacation agents” for road trips to the wildest and most natural places on the continent.4

Auto tourists on the Redwood Highway, 1920s (photo public domain)
Petaluma’s Bungalow Auto Camp, 711 Petlauma Boulevard North at Cherry Street, 1928-1975 (photo Sonoma County Library)

To capitalize on the craze, Lee and a group of fellow entrepreneurs in Del Norte, Humboldt, and Mendocino counties launched the Redwood Highway Association.5 For help in convincing other counties to get on the bandwagon, Lee reached out to fellow “booster extraordinaire” Bert Kerrigan, secretary of Petaluma’s Chamber of Commerce.6

Known for putting Petaluma on the map as “The World’s Egg Basket,” Kerrigan specialized in the sort of razzle dazzle stunts that attracted filmmakers screening newsreels in movie houses across the country.

His National Egg Day was full of eye-catching visuals like the Egg Parade, Egg Queen, Egg Ball, Egg Day Rodeo of hens and horses, and a “chicken chase” down San Francisco’s Market Street accompanied by a biplane dropping chicken feathers affixed with coupons for free Petaluma eggs.7

Bert Kerrigan, Secretary of Petaluma’s Chamber of Commerce and local egg booster, 1920 (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

The opportunity to position Petaluma as one of the last civilized outposts before driving off into the woods captivated Kerrigan. He went to work convincing Petaluma merchants to be among the first to adopt the use of “Redwood Highway” in their advertising, followed by the Sonoma County Board of Trade and the mayor of San Francisco.8

By the time Lee and 150 other members of Redwood Highway Association gathered at the Hotel Petaluma in 1925, Kerrigan had been shown the door as Petaluma’s ringmaster, having bled the Chamber of Commerce dry with his flamboyant stunts.9

His Redwood Highway legacy however lived on in the steady stream of autos and “auto stages” passing through town on summer weekends, bound for what travel brochures described as “the world’s most scenic Paradise Wonderland, 100 miles of giant redwood trees, primeval, primitive, and untrammeled, with streams full of fish and woods full of game.”10

1921 map of the new Redwood Empire route (illustration courtesy of the San Francisco Examiner)

The majority of the auto tourists were from Southern California. That led the Redwood Highway Association to believe they had a shot at displacing Highway 99—the future Interstate 5 running up the Sacramento Valley—as the main trunk between San Francisco and Oregon, and raking in some of the estimated $2 million ($32 million in today’s dollars) spent at roadside attractions along the way.11

Turning to tourist conquest, they changed their name to the Redwood Empire Association.12

Brochure for Auto Stage Tour of Redwood Empire, 1928 (photo public domain)

The keynote speaker at their 1925 convention was Harvey Toy, California’s commissioner of state highways. Thanks to a recent two cent per gallon gasoline tax imposed by the state, Toy informed the group he had the funds to iron out the kinks in the Redwood Highway, making it a safe and efficient thoroughfare.13

The association’s treasurer, Santa Rosa banker Frank Doyle, who was part of a group advocating construction of a bridge across the Golden Gate, updated the group on the impact the bridge would have on tourist traffic north. To avoid becoming a bottleneck, Petaluma would need to widen its Main Street from two to four lanes.

Frank Doyle, president of The Exchange Bank (photo public domain)

The prospect gave local merchants pause. Main Street was not only the town’s main artery of commerce, but the heart of its social connections and celebrations, with ample 12 foot wide sidewalks and convenient diagonal parking lanes.

Petaluma’s Lower Main Street late 1920s, where Center Park replaced carriage hitching posts (photo courtesy of Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

The city had bent over backwards to assimilate the automobile since its arrival in 1903, paving Main Street’s bumpy cobblestones with asphalt, converting hitching posts to parking lanes, replacing liveries and stables with garages and filling stations. But reducing the width of the sidewalks and imposing parallel parking so as to accommodate four lanes of through traffic, struck many as a death knell for Main Street.

In 1935, with construction of the Golden Gate Bridge finally underway, the chief engineer of the state highway commission, Col. John Skeggs, paid Petaluma merchants a visit. Either widen Main Street to four lanes, Skeggs told them, or else the state would reroute Redwood Highway to the flats east of town.14

The Golden Gate under construction, 1935 (photo public domain)

Merchants proposed a compromise. They were willing to reduce the sidewalk widths from 12 to 9 feet to create a center third lane for making left turns, while retaining diagonal parking.

The matter remained at a standstill until May 1937, when the new bridge opened. The flood of through traffic the first two weekends convinced merchants they had no choice but to surrender to the motoring hordes of the Redwood Empire, converting Main Street to four narrow lanes and parallel parking.15

Main Street looking south from Washington Street, 1950 (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Twenty years later, Kerrigan’s two lingering Petaluma legacies came to an abrupt end. The advent of poultry-raising factory farms throughout the country emptied the Egg Basket of the World, and the Redwood Highway abandoned Petaluma’s sluggish Main Street for the breezy new U.S. 101 freeway constructed east of town in 1957.

Into the vacuum poured thousands of auto commuters, who, thanks to the new freeway and Golden Gate Bridge, found San Francisco within easy driving distance from Petaluma. As the ranchlands east of town began filling up with suburban tract homes, Petaluma found itself transformed into a bedroom community.

While the new freeway alleviated through traffic on Main Street, it also dealt a blow to the hotels, restaurants, bars, and gas stations that catered to it. In an effort to attract freeway travelers, in 1958 the city changed the name of Main Street to Petaluma Boulevard North. Third Street, which extended from B Street to the new freeway entrance south of town, was renamed Petaluma Boulevard South.16

It wasn’t enough. New shopping malls on the eastside drained the downtown of foot traffic. By the 1960s, Petaluma Boulevard was pockmarked with empty shops and old, dilapidated buildings, forcing the city to impose an ordinance requiring owners to bring them up to code or else tear them down.17 Many chose the latter.

Boards on the windows of Wickersham Building on Petaluma Boulevard North, 1970s (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1969, the city put before voters an urban renewal proposal calling for the demolition of all the buildings on the east side of Petaluma Boulevard from B to Oak streets, for the installation of a six-lane thoroughfare. Voters rejected it.18

In the mid-1970s, the city turned to historic restoration as a means of reviving the downtown, beginning with the Great Petaluma Mill, an abandoned grain mill downtown converted by Skip Sommer into a gallery of boutique shops and restaurants.

Great Petaluma Mill’s B Street entrance, 1978 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In a town besieged by homogenous housing developments, garden-variety business parks, and uniform chain stores, the unique character of Petaluma’s historic downtown proved the catalyst of its rebirth as a trendy nightlife and shopping district.19 That brought with it increased traffic and accidents, most of them sideswipes of parked cars due to Petaluma Boulevard’s inherently narrow travel and parking lanes.20

In 2003, city planners proposed a traffic calming measure known as the “road diet.” Much like the city’s 1935 compromise proposal, it called for reducing the number of travel lanes from four to two, with a center third lane for making left turns.21

But unlike in 1935, many merchants opposed it, worried it would reduce downtown traffic. Like a gradual approach to healthy eating, the city administered the road diet in three stages, beginning in 2007 and 2013, with the final stage along Petaluma Boulevard South scheduled for completion in fall 2022.22

Studies show the road diet has reduced collisions while maintaining the same level of pre-diet traffic, meaning that, a century after Kerrigan surrendered Main Street to the traffic of the Redwood Highway, Petaluma has finally recaptured the pedestrian-friendly heart of its downtown.23

Petaluma Boulevard today with road diet (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

******


A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 22, 2022

FOOTNOTES

[1] “Men to Boost Highway Here,” Petaluma Courier, August 29, 1925; “Oregon Cavemen Coming, Bringing Their Own Cave,’” Petaluma Argus, September 2, 1925; “Will Stop at Hotel Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, September 2, 1925.

[2] The basic routing for what became “Legislated Route Number 1” was defined in the 1909 First Bond Act, as part of a route from San Francisco to Crescent City. It was extended to the Oregon border by the 1919 Third Bond Act. Ground was broken for the route in August 1912. LRN 1 corresponds to present-day US 101 and US 199, which were assigned in 1926, between the Golden Gate and the Oregon border. https://www.cahighways.org/ROUTE001.html#LR001; “Redwood Highway Suggested for Hiway,” Petaluma Courier, July 11, 1921; A.D. Lee referred to as the “Father of the Redwood Highway”: “Officers are Elected by Highway Assn.,” Petaluma Courier, October 25, 1925; “Wanted—A Dozen More, The Del Norte Triplicate, March 26, 1920.

[3]“Redwood Highway Opens Vast Scenic World to Autoist,” San Francisco Examiner, July 21, 1921; Save the Redwoods League website, https://www.savetheredwoods.org/about-us/mission -history/

[4] Peter J. Blodgett, “How Americans Fell in Love With Taking Road Trips,” Time magazine, August 15, 2015. https://time.com/3998949/road-trip-history/

[5] The seven counties officially formed the North of Bay Counties Association to promote the highway, of which the Redwood Highway Association appears to have been a subsidiary, referenced as early as February 1922; “Great North of Bay Development Program Outlined at S.R. Session,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 6, 1921; “North of Bay Association is Formed,” Weekly Calistogan, November 18, 1921; “Redwood Highway to Traverse Scenic Wonderland,” Cloverdale Reveille, January 27, 1922; “Petaluma C. of C. Urge Highway Completion,” Petaluma Courier, February 19, 1922.

[6] “C.C. Endorses Naming of State Highway and Boulevard Road District,” Petaluma Courier, September 9, 1921; “Redwood Highway Booster is Here,” Petaluma Argus, October 21, 1922.

[7] John Benanti, “The Man Who Invented Petaluma,” Petaluma Museum Association Newsletter, Spring 2013, pp. 9-10.

[8] “C.C. Endorses Naming of State Highway and Boulevard Road District,” Petaluma Courier, September 9, 1921; “Pamphlets Advertising Sonoma County and Redwood Highway,” Petaluma Courier, June 22, 1922; San Francisco Press to Boost  Petaluma Egg Day and Sonoma County Fair,” Petaluma Courier, July 9, 1922.

[9] “Kerrigan Resigns as Secretary of the C.C.,” Petaluma Argus, June 4, 1924; Benanti, p. 10.

[10] “Transit Company Plans Tours on Redwood Highway,” Petaluma Courier, November 7, 1924.

[11] “North of Bay Association is Formed,” Weekly Calistogan, November 18, 1921; “Big Increase in Redwood Highway Use,” Petaluma Courier, October 20, 1925; “Redwood Highway Association Ends in Meeting with a Banquet,” Petaluma Courier, October 26, 1925;

[12] “’Redwood Empire’” is New Assn Name,” Petaluma Courier, October 3, 1926.

[13] “Officers are Elected by Highway Assn.,” Petaluma Courier, October 25, 1925; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Department_of_Transportation;

[14] “Parking Bar to Petaluma Projects,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 25, 1935.

[15] “Improved Highway Facilities,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1937; “Petaluma Bottlenecks Doomed,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 11, 1938; “Traffic Lanes are Painted,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 8, 1938; “Active Council Works for Petaluma Progress,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 15, 1938.

[16] “Old Redwood Highway Renaming,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 23, 1958. “Supervisors Vote to Change Name of Old U.S. 101,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 9, 1958.

[17] “Dangerous Building Code Action by Council,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 21, 1967.

[18] “Measure D is Most Vital,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 5, 1969; “Only One Bond Issue Survives Election,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 11, 1969.

[19] “Mill Played a Key Role in Downtown Revitalization,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 9, 1980; “Bill Murray and Mayor Putnam,” Petaluma Post, February, 2014.

[20] “Boulevard ‘Road Diet’ to Begin in September,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 8, 2007; “Downtown Road Diet Nixed,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 8, 2009.

[21] “Boost in Economy, Increase in Traffic Downtown Anticipated,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 8, 2003; “Boulevard ‘Road Diet’ to Begin in September,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 8, 2007; “Downtown ‘Road Diet’ Narrowly Approved,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 2010.

[22] Petaluma Boulevard Road Diet Funded,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 18, 2017; Petaluma Boulevard Road Diet, https://cityofpetaluma.org/pet-blvd-s-road-diet/

[23] “Have No Fear For Road Diets,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 14, 2016; “Petaluma Boulevard Road Diet Funded,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 18, 2017; “Petaluma Road Diet Nearly Finished,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 12, 2007; “Downtown ‘Road Diet’ Narrowly Approved,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 2010; “Road Diet Begins Again,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 2, 2013.

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Beau Bridges’ Search for His Petaluma Roots

Beau Bridges crossing Washington Street to the Phoenix Theater in his search for local family roots (photo Crissy Pascual, Petlauma Argus-Courier)

The actor Beau Bridges was in town last week ostensibly to shoot a movie—“A Christmas Mystery” with Petaluma filmmaker Ali Afshar— but while on location he found himself inexplicably drawn to local history, specifically that of his father, the legendary film and TV actor from Petaluma, Lloyd Bridges.

Accompanied by his wife Wendy and French bulldog Buster, Beau began his inquiry leafing through old yearbooks at Petaluma High School, from which his father graduated in 1930. They then set out to find the house his father grew up in, which they believed to be somewhere on the hillside behind the high school.

Driving along Hill Boulevard, Beau spotted an old schoolmate of mine, Harry Lewis, standing outside his house, and randomly pulled over to ask his help. Harry contacted me, and I agreed to do some quick research and meet with the Bridges the next day at Volpi’s Restaurant, where Harry tends bar on the weekends.

What unfolded in Volpi’s historic back barroom the next day was a Petaluma version of the popular TV show, “Finding Your Roots.” A curious and congenial raconteur, Beau made it clear he wasn’t looking for the dry facts of genealogy—a family member had already undertaken that task—he wanted to hear the stories.

Publicity photo of Lloyd Bridges starring in TV series Sea Hunt, 1958 (photo public domain)

That included stories about Volpi’s, which, during his father’s teen years in the 1920s, was an Italian grocery with a backroom speakeasy. He was also eager to hear about the Phoenix Theater across the street, where he understood his grandfather, Lloyd Vernet Bridges, Sr., had worked as a movie projectionist in the ’20s when it was the California Theater. His father used to watch screenings of the same film over and over when he was young to study acting techniques. [1]

Beau Bridges tossing a signed dollar bill to ceiling of Volpi’s Bar (photo John Sheehy)

Harry and I were more than happy to oblige his request. Growing up in Petaluma in the 1960s, we were both big fans of “Sea Hunt,” the adventure TV series Lloyd Bridges starred in, as well as his many films, including the classic western “High Noon” and the madcap comedy “Airplane.” After sharing local tales and initiating Beau in the Volpi’s tradition of signing a dollar bill and affixing it to the bar’s ceiling, we got down to discussing his family roots.

Lloyd Bridges, Jr.—“Bud” as he was known in Petaluma—moved to town when he was 10, along with his mother Hattie and older sister Belle. His parents had divorced a decade earlier, a year after Bud was born, with Hattie citing her husband’s relentless “amusement” with prize fights, baseball games and automobile rides, while Lloyd Bridges, Sr. complained of her monotony. [2]

Lloyd Sr. remained in San Francisco, where ran a hotel and boarding house, while Hattie moved with the children to San Rafael initially, and then to Petaluma in 1923, purchasing a home near the high school at 11 Spring Street, named for a natural spring on the site. [3]

11 Spring Street today (photo public domain)

Petaluma was in the midst of its heady reign as “The Egg Basket of the World.” Bud quickly distinguished himself as a gifted singer—performing at Sunday services in the Congregational Church at Fifth and B streets—and a talented performer in plays and musicals staged at the high school and at the California Theater. Local critics noted he had “a natural talent for the stage, a flair for comedy, and knack for serious acting as well.” [4]

Eleanore Hawthorne, Lloyd Bridges, and Jewel Johnson in the 1929 school play, “Captain Applejack” (photo 1930 Enterprise Yearbook, Petaluma High School)

His best friend was Art Parent, who would later go on to serve as Petaluma’s mayor and owner of Parent Funeral Parlor. Art noted that Bud was always the star in their plays together, because unlike Art, he could improvise. One night while they were performing at the California Theater, Bud fell coming up the back stage steps and knocked himself out, leaving Art to recite his lines over and over until Bud finally came to. [5]

Art Parent and Lloyd Reynolds at Petaluma High, 1930 (photo 1930 Enterprise Yearbook, Petaluma High School)

“Oddly,” said Beau, “what my dad talked most about growing up in Petaluma was playing basketball.”

A fierce competitor, Bud lettered in four sports and served as captain of the basketball team. After finishing high school, he took a brief job at the local Bank of America, before enrolling in UCLA to pursue a political science degree. He spent much of his time however on the basketball court and the stage. [6]

Lloyd Bridges, center, captain of 1930 Petaluma High basketball team (photo 1930 Enterprise Yearbook, Petaluma High School)

While Bud was in high school, his mother got remarried to Clarence Breuillot, a state contractor. In the late 1930s, Breuillot was appointed foreman of the newly constructed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and the couple left Petaluma for Berkeley. [7]

After UCLA, Bud spent five years working in New York theater, before being signed as a stock actor with Columbia Pictures in 1941. The same year, he and his wife welcomed their first child, Lloyd Vernet Bridges III, whom they nicknamed “Beau” after a character in “Gone with the Wind.” Beau’s first visit to Petaluma came three years later, when his parents visited Art Parent. [8]

A dogged performer, Bud appeared in more than seven dozen films, most of them potboilers and B-movies, before finally getting his big breakthrough in a film called “Home of the Brave,” in 1949. That same year, his second son, Jeff Bridges, was born. He would go on to become an Academy Award-winning actor.

In 1951, a budding young Petaluma newspaper columnist named Bill Soberanes arranged to stage the West Coast premiere of Bud’s latest movie, “The Whistle Stop at Eaton Hills,” at Petaluma’s Mystic Theater (then called the State Theater).

Poster for the film “The Whistle at Eaton Falls,” which had its west coast premiere at the State Theater in Petaluma in 1951 (photo public domain)

Soberanes arranged for a police escort from the city limits to bring Bud into town and to the Hotel Petaluma, where a banquet with 75 of his old friends and former teachers from Petaluma High awaited him. Art Parent served as master of ceremonies, and the city’s mayor read a proclamation declaring it Lloyd Bridges Day. Bud was then publicly sworn in as a member of the National Good Egg Club, taking an oath to “give due respect to the egg.” [9]

“I feel like I’m in high school all over again,” beamed Bud. He then lauded his music teacher, Agnes Bravo, for helping him learn his first operetta. [10]

Screening party for “The Whistle at Eaton Falls.” premiere in 1951. From left, Bill Soberanes, Hattie Breauillot (Lloyd’s mother), Lloyd Bridges, and Petlauma Mayor Leland Myers (photo Petaluma Argus-Courier)

Art remained Bud’s Petaluma connection over the years, as did Soberanes, who later enlisted him in helping to promote the World Wristwrestling Championship Tournaments. [11] When a TV show came to Petaluma in 1985 to film Bud’s early beginnings, Art filled in for Bud, who was on location as usual, taking the film crew on a tour to the Bridges home, the Phoenix Theater, and Fundas’ Candy Store beside the Mystic, where Bud and Art competed in high school for the attention of Dorothy Beidleman—a contest Art won, eventually convincing her to marrying him. [12]

After Harry and I concluded our roots presentation with Beau, we escorted him, Wendy and Buster across the street to meet Phoenix Theater manager Tom Gaffey, who started working at the theater when he, Harry and I were in high school together.

Beau Bridges crossing Washington Street to the Phoenix Theater in his search for local family roots (photo Crissy Pascual, Petlauma Argus-Courier)

Gaffey told us Soberanes was the source of the story that Beau’s grandfather had been the projectionist at the California Theater when Bud was growing up. To Beau’s disappointment, I had to dispel that lore.

Lloyd Sr. had owned a movie theater in San Leandro, where Bud was born in 1913. [13] But the next year he returned to the family hotel business in San Francisco. Shortly after Bud graduated high school, Lloyd Sr. took over the legendary Vance Hotel in Eureka, and lived out his days as a local hotelier and real estate mogul. [14]

As a consolation, Gaffey informed Beau—a three-time Emmy, two-time Golden Globe, and one-time Grammy Award winner—that as a legacy performer at the theater, he was entitled to make free use of the Phoenix for theatrical or musical productions. Beau appeared to give the offer serious consideration, expressing his love of serendipitous opportunities.

Beau Bridges inside the Phoenix Theater (photo Crissy Pascual, Petlauma Argus-Courier)

Before Beau and Wendy left to view the Bridges family home, Beau shared how he and his father bonded over playing tennis and one-on-one basketball together. In his father’s footsteps, Beau attended UCLA, where he joined the basketball team coached by the legendary John Wooden.

“My dad was always extremely competitive. But as he grew close to my age now—I’m 80—I realized I could handily beat him anytime I wanted. So to make it even, I started tanking balls into the net, but carefully, so he wouldn’t know what I was doing. One day, after three sets of tennis on a hot summer day, I looked at him sitting tired and slumped over on the bench, and I was overcome with a wave of melancholy.

Beau Bridges and Lloyd Bridges at the 44th Emmy Awards, August 1982 (photo credit Alan Light, public domain)

“Dad,” I said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”

There was a long pause. “What makes you think I’m going to go first?” he said. There was a little piece of a smile on his face, but he was dead serious.

Petaluman Lloyd Bridges died in 1998 at the age of 85, after starring in dozens of TV series and more than 150 feature films. [15]

******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 24, 2022.

RESPONSES FROM LOCALS

Menu at the Little Hill Banquet on Main Street following State Theater premiere of The Whistle at Eaton Falls” (courtesy of Melissa Musso James)

Beau Bridges’s search the local roots of his father, the actor Lloyd Bridges, prompted an outpouring of reminiscences from locals. Many people with family members who went to school with Lloyd dug out the old yearbooks they still keep from that era.

A number of people shared that their mother, grandmother, or aunt laid claim to being Lloyd’s date at the 1930 Petaluma High senior prom. Yvonne (Armour) Cornilson, who appeared in school musicals with Lloyd, appears to be the most likely candidate.

Tammie Tower-Snider said her grandmother told stories about riding to school on the handlebars of Lloyd’s bike when they were young. As the school was only a half a block away from his house on Spring Street, it must have been a short ride.

Marion Johnson said her mother recounted how Lloyd carried her books home from school for her. Lauri Carlson’s grandmother taught at Petaluma High in the 1920s, and had Lloyd for study hall.

Linda Parker shared that A Tale of Two Cities was required reading when Lloyd was in high school. You had to write your name on a list pasted in the back. When she was a student 30 years later, they were still using the same old copies. She got the one with Lloyd’s signature in it, and never gave it back.

Betty Prior remembered Lloyd’s return to Petaluma in 1951 for the West Coast premiere of a movie he was starring in, and visiting her and other students at Petaluma High.

Melissa Musso James shared the menu from her parents’ Little Hill restaurant on Main Street, where Lloyd Bridges was feted following the West Coast premiere of his 1951 film The Whistle at Eaton Fall at the State Theater.

Joe, the chef at the Little Hill restaurant ,and Lloyd Bridges, 1951 (photo courtesy of Melissa Musso James)

Some people shared that their fathers and uncles telling stories about attending school with Lloyd. Melinda Webb Zerrenner said her father, longtime Petaluma judge Rollie Webb, was a schoolmate of Lloyd’s, and took the family to see him whenever they visited Los Angeles.

Gig Schuster Jones said her grandfather Cap Schuster was Lloyd’s high school physical education teacher. When the family sat around watching Lloyd in his hit TV series Sea Hunt, her grandfather often boasted that he was the one who taught Lloyd to snorkel.

FOOTNOTES:

  1. “TV and Film Actor Lloyd Bridges Dies,” Washington Post, March 11, 1998.
  2. “Prize Fight Cause of Rout of Cupid,” Oakland Tribune, September 13, 1914.
  3. “Will Move Here from San Rafael,” Petaluma Argus, January 18, 1923; “Sold 7th Street Property,” Petaluma Courier, September 18, 1926; Katie Watts, “Names of Streets and Places,” Petaluma Argus Courier, March 26, 2008.
  4. “Lloyd Bridges Stars in High School Play,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 5, 1929.
  5. Bill Soberanes, “Art Parent: A Petaluma Legend,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 20, 1991.
  6. “Lloyd Bridges in Film at ‘Cal’,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 20, 1936; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Bridges
  7. “Local Couple Are Wedded,” Petaluma Courier, July 26, 1927; “Daughter Arrives for Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Stout,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 16, 1933; “Fire Damages 11 Spring Street,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, December 2, 1938 “Real Estate Deals Closed,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 21, 1941; “Clarence Breuillot Obituary,” Los Gatos Times, October 23, 1970.
  8. “Recent Guests at Arthur Parent Home,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 25, 1944.
  9. “Wonderful to be Back,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 2, 1951.
  10. “Wonderful to be Back,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 2, 1951.
  11. Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 2, 1981; “Petaluma Memories of the Late Lloyd Bridges,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 24, 1998.
  12. Bill Soberanes column, “Lloyd Bridges TV Special,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 26, 1985.
  13. “Motion Picture News: Best Theater, San Leandro,” Oakland Tribune, November 22, 1913.
  14. “Lloyd Bridges Sr. Dies,” Humboldt Standard, May 1, 1962.
  15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Bridges
Featured

Oyster Shells: Petaluma’s “Secret Sauce”

Gunerius “George” Aanunsen, standing center, in the first Aanunsen Oyster Shell Yard at the southwest corner of the D Street Bridge, with brother Pete seated on wagon, 1906 (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

On the evening of September 9, 1909, Gunerius Aanunsen sailed up the Petaluma River on his schooner the Fearless with a cargo of oyster shells, docking at his supply yard beside the D Street Bridge. Returning the next morning, he found the boat submerged. During evening low tide its hull, weighted by the shells, cracked on a hidden silt mound.1

The sinking of the Fearless illustrated the perils of using a tidal estuary as a shipping channel. The genesis of Petaluma’s founding, the waterway came with a congenital birth defect—instead of flowing like a stream, it rose and fell with the ocean tides twice each day, making it prone to silting up.

At the time of the mishap, only the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers exceeded the estuary as a waterway for shipping commercial tonnage in California.2 Two steamers and more than 60 flat-bottomed schooners plied its 18 miles to and from San Pablo Bay with an annual 200,000 tons of goods, including 100 million eggs, Petaluma’s new agent of wealth as the self-proclaimed “Boss Chicken Town of the Pacific Coast.”3

Steamer Gold steamer traveling up the Petaluma River, circa 1900 (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

But with economic prosperity came more silt. The expansion of farmlands led to the elimination of wetlands and rechanneling of tributary streams, sending erosion from the plowed fields into the estuary during rainy seasons, where it trapped boats like the Fearless in its muddy grasp. 4

Having a clogged artery at the heart of town raised the perennial question, according to local historian Skip Sommer, as to whether Petaluma wanted to be known as a river town or a mud town.5 For more than a century, the answer turned on the secret sauce of the Boss Chicken Town—oyster shells.

The arrival of oyster shells coincided with the Army Corps of Engineers’ first dredging of the estuary in 1880. Petaluma previously funded two dredgings of the upper channel north of Haystack Landing in 1859 and 1866, along with cuts made by ferryboat operator Charles Minturn.6 The arrival of the San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad in 1870 however made dredging an existential imperative.  

Having bypassed Petaluma, the railroad created its own shipping terminus on the estuary south of town near Lakeville. Fearing a transportation monopoly, local business leaders successfully lobbied Congress in 1880 for $28,000, or $875,000 in today’s currency, to have the Army Corps dredge the estuary and re-channel some of its 80 serpentine bends.7

The dredging coincided with the invention in Petaluma of an efficient egg-hatching incubator by Isaac Dias, a dentist from New Orleans. He was later joined in perfecting and marketing it by one of his patients, Lyman Byce.8

In 1880, Christopher Nisson, a Danish immigrant, purchased one of Dias’ incubators, and employed it to launch the country’s first commercial egg hatchery on his ranch in Two Rock.9

Christopher Nisson’s Pioneer Hatchery Ranch in Two Rock (Sonoma County Library)

The one ingredient Nisson lacked in his transformation of the chicken from pastoral farm animal to egg assembly line was calcium. If his hens were to dramatically increase their egg production, they needed many times their natural amount of calcium to avoid brittle bones and soft-shelled eggs. For a calcium supplement, Nisson turned to oyster shells.10

Crushed oyster shells were already being used in feed for backyard chickens, but not on the industrial scale he envisioned. Fortunately for Nisson, large mounds of ancient oyster shells, or middens, had been preserved beneath the waters of the South San Francisco Bay near San Mateo, built up by indigenous tribes over thousands of years.11

Sacks of “Egg Food” with oyster shells being loaded for delivery at George P. McNear’s Oriental Flour Mill on Petlauma Boulevard North across from Penry Park, 1895 (Sonoma County Library)

In 1880, Nisson persuaded Petaluma grain merchant George P. McNear to ship oyster shells up the estuary from the South Bay. The shells enabled him to quickly increase his flock to 2,000 hens, and begin selling incubated baby chicks to his neighbors.12 Within a decade, six additional hatcheries were operating in Petaluma, drawing hundreds of aspiring chicken ranchers to the area.13

Gunerius “George” Aanunsen immigrated to San Francisco from Norway in 1889.14 At the turn of the century, he and his brother Pete opened a supply yard in Petaluma for oyster shells, coal, and wood at the southwest corner of the D Street Bridge. The brothers dissolved their partnership un 1907, with Pete retaining the coal and wood supply business while Gunerius opened the South Bay Shell Company on the southeast side of the D Street Bridge. The site would remain an oyster shell facility for the next 110 years.15

Schooner on Petaluma River just north of D Street Bridge, circa 1900 (Sonoma County Library)

In 1907, the brothers dissolved their partnership, with Pete retaining the coal and wood supply business while Gunerius opened the South Bay Shell Company on the southeast side of the D Street Bridge.16 The site would remain an oyster shell facility for the next 110 years.

The opening of Aanunsen’s new shell yard coincided with the third major dredging of the estuary by the Army Corps, the second having taken place in 1892.17 In the River and Harbor Act of 1904 Petaluma was provided a $7,500 ongoing annual appropriation for dredging ($234,000 in today’s currency).18 The Army Corps recommended accumulating the annual allocation to fund a thorough dredging of the channel every four or five years.19

Dredger on the Petaluma River, 1920s (Sonoma County Library)

But, as the Fearless’ sinking demonstrated just two years later, Petaluma couldn’t wait that long. After only one or two heavy rain seasons, enough silt filled the estuary’s upper channel to make it a mud trap for vessels at low tide. As a result, the annual funding allocation was eaten up by regular maintenance dredging. The exception was the River and Harbor Act of 1930, which allocated $200,000, or $4.4 million in today’s currency, to fully dredge and straighten parts of the estuary to Cloudy Bend.20

1930 also saw Aanunsen’s retirement from the oyster shell business. After resurfacing the sunken Fearless, he converted it into a sloop-rigged barge, purchasing a tugboat to pilot it up and down the creek.21 The tugboat also served as his home. For the next 30 years, he helped keep the Boss Chicken Town supplied with shell as annual egg production soared to half a billion eggs.22

Gunerius “George” Aanunsen aboard his tugboat Solano docked in Petaluma, circa 1930 (Sonoma County Library)

At the age of 70, Aanunsen set sail for the San Diego Bay, where he devoted a year to collecting sea shells for museum collections before his body was found floating in the bay, the apparent victim of an unsolved murder.23

Aanunsen’s shell yard beside the D Street Bridge changed hands a few times before being purchased in 1948 by the Pioneer Shell Company, which constructed a processing plant on the site capable of crushing 10 to 12 tons of oyster shell an hour. By then, oyster shells were being used not only for poultry feed, but horse feed, fertilizer, and landscaping.24

Pioneer Shell Company plant, southeast corner of D Street Bridge, 1954 (Sonoma County Library)

Other shipments on the estuary were decreasing however, due to the rise of trucking and the demise of Petaluma’s chicken industry. After World War II, more efficient caged factory farms were springing up around the county, putting the area’s small chicken ranches out of business.25

In an attempt to turn the tide, Petaluma presented Congress with two bold proposals. The first was a name change for the estuary from the Petaluma Creek, which it was commonly called, to the Petaluma River. Contrary to popular lore, the name change was not required to maintain federal funding for the dredging. Instead, Petaluma believed that “river” would carry more prestige than “creek” in helping the town attract new industries in need of water transportation.26

Site of the oyster shell plant beside the D Street Bridge (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

The second proposal, which carried a price tag of $6.5 million ($58 million in today’s currency), called for a major reengineering of the estuary in hopes of attracting new commercial traffic and also recreational boats.27 Congress quickly passed the name change in 1959, but the reengineering proposal was eventually ruled out as cost prohibitive.28

The city succeeded however in attracting a handful of enterprises that used the river for transporting heavy construction materials like gravel and concrete. Together with the oyster shell plant, then owned by Jerico Products who diversified to also transporting sand for construction, there was sufficient commercial tonnage to qualify for continued dredging by the Army Corps.29

Mitch Lind, owner of Jerico Products (later renamed Lind Marine), at the oyster shell plant beside the D Street Bridge, 1981 (photo courtesy of Murray Rockowitz)

After the Corps’ dredging in 2003, the Petaluma River was classified as a “low use” waterway, placing future dredging in jeopardy. At that time, barge traffic was largely dependent on just two companies, a concrete plant and the oyster shell plant. In 2006, the concrete plant closed, leaving only oyster shells to justify future dredging.30

It wasn’t enough. Lind Marine, the new name of Jerico Products, steadily reduced the tonnage of shells and sand on their barges to navigate the increasingly shallow channel until 2017, when it proved no longer profitable to do so.31

By then, river traffic consisted almost entirely of recreational boats which, while contributing tourism revenues to the city, didn’t figure into the Corps’ criteria for dredging. By 2020, even they were unable to safely navigate the muddy channel. Thanks to local lobbying, the Army Corps returned that year for a $9.7 million dredging of the river, with the understanding that it would be their last.32

By that time, most of the industrial sites on the riverfront that once neighbored Aanunsen’s oyster shell yard had been converted to infill housing, shopping malls, and office space, reflecting Petaluma’s transformation from an agricultural shipping hub to a suburban community.

In 2022, Lind Marine announced plans to replace its historic shell plant with an infill housing development called Oyster Cove.33

Proposed design of new Oyster Cover development at the southeast corner of the D Street Bridge (courtesy of Urban Design Associates)

******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 20, 2022.

Video of Proposed Oyster Cove Development:

FOOTNOTES

[1] “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Courier, December 1, 1902;“Schooner Fearless Sinks,” Petaluma Argus, September 7, 1909.

[2] Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 78.

[3] 200,000 annual tons is cited in “Saw the Engineers,” Petaluma Argus, January 18, 1908, but 155,000 annual tons in “Official Report of Government Engineer on River Improvements,” Petaluma Courier, November 24, 1909; egg production volume is from an advertisement from the Petaluma Chamber of Commerce, Pacific Rural Press, April 10, 1910; “Boss Chicken Town of the Pacific Coast” was first used in an 1898 issue of the Petaluma Weekly Budget, as cited in Thea  Lowry’s Empty Shells: The Story of Petaluma, American’s Chicken City (Novato, CA: Manifold Press, 2000), p. 27.

[4] Petaluma Valley Historical Hydrology and Ecology Study”. SFEI Contribution No. 861, 2018. https://www.sfei.org/documents/petaluma-valley-historical-hydrology-andecology-study.

[5] “Petaluma River Dredging Due,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 1, 1983.

[6] “Approved,” Sonoma County Journal, April 15, 1859; “Improvement of the Creek,” Sonoma County Journal, October 14, 1859: “Act to Improve the Creek,” Sonoma County Journal, April 13, 1860; “Straightening the Creek,” Petaluma Argus, February 11, 1862; “Notice To Contractors,” Petaluma Argus, August 23, 1866; “Contract Awarded,” Petaluma Argus, August 30, 1866.

[7] “Petaluma Creek,” Petaluma Argus, December 4, 1876; “Straighten the Creek,” Petaluma Courier, January 1, 1879; “Petaluma Creek,” Petaluma Argus, December 5, 1879; “Of Interest to Us,” Petaluma Courier, March 8, 1880; “Improvement of Petaluma Creek,” Petaluma Argus, August 27, 1880; “Work Commenced,” Petaluma Argus, October 8, 1880; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, October 22, 1880; “Important Change,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1881; “Petaluma Creek,” Petaluma Courier, November 15, 1882; “Petaluma Township,” Petaluma Argus, January 5, 1884. “Petaluma Creek,” Petaluma Argus, August 9, 1884.

[8] Lowry, pp. 33-34 (after Dias’s death in a mysterious 1884 hunting accident on the estuary, Byce wrote him out of the incubator’s origin story).

[9] Lowry, pp. 49-51; p. 146; “Nisson’s Famous Poultry Yard,” Petaluma Courier, November 11, 1891.

[10] Lowry, p. 156.

[11] N.C. Nelson, “Shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Region,” University of California Publications in Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 7, No. 4, Berkeley, The University Press, 1909, pgs. 337, 346. https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/anthpubs/ucb/text/ucp007-006-007.pdf; Lydia Lee, “Olympian Dreams,” Alta magazine, January 4, 2022. https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a38325907/west-coast-native-oyster-lydia-lee/ Charles H. Townsend, “Report of Observations Respecting the Oyster Resources and Oyster Fishery of the Pacific Coast of the United States,” Report of the Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries for 1889 to 1891,United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, 1893. https://penbay.org/cof/cof_1889_91.html;

[12] “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, March 18, 1881; “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, August 31, 1881.

[13] Lowry, p. 50; “Nisson’s Famous Poultry Yard,” Petaluma Courier, November 11, 1891.

[14] Ancestry.com: Norway Select Baptism 1634-1927 (Gunerius Aanunsen’s birth: May 10, 1862, Ostre Moland, Aust-Agder, Norway); Hamburg Passenger Lists (Hamburg departure date: May 2, 1889); San Francisco Directory, 1889.

[15] Note: It appears that the Aanunsens formed their first shell yard along the river near Washington Street Bridge by 1902, before moving to the First and D street location a few years later; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Courier, December 1, 1902; “Briefs,” Petaluma Courier, August 31, 1906; “Has Sued for Accounting,” Petaluma Argus, October 21, 1907.

[16] “Briefs,” Petaluma Courier, July 24, 1907; “Has Sued for Accounting,” Petaluma Argus, October 21, 1907; Ad, Petaluma Courier, January 22, 1908; “Opinion in Local Case,” Petaluma Argus, April 24, 1908; The 1914 Petaluma City Directory lists George Aanunsen as owner of the South Bay Company, Petaluma Historical Library & Museum.

[17] “Local News,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 9, 1889; “Local Brevities,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 3, 1891; “Official Report of Government Engineer on River Improvements,” Petaluma Courier, November 24, 1909.

[18] “Official Report of Government Engineer on River Improvements,” Petaluma Courier, November 24, 1909; “Who Got the Money,” Petaluma Argus, October 22, 1914; “City Dredging Woes Date to 1890,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 7, 1983.

[19] “Official Report of Government Engineer on River Improvements,” Petaluma Courier, November 24, 1909.

[20] “Saw the Engineers,” Petaluma Argus, January 18, 1908; “Official Report of Government Engineer on River Improvements,” Petaluma Courier, November 24, 1909; “River & Harbor Committee Reports to the C. of C. Board,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 10, 1930 “Dredging Crew Start $200,000 River Cut Here,” AC, January 24, 1933; “Extensive River Improvements Coming to River Channel,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 4, 1959.

[21] “Schooner Fearless is Now a Sloop Rigged Barge,” Petaluma Argus, April 29, 1910; “Briefs,” Petaluma Argus, October 8, 1908.

[22] Heig, p. 115; “Poultry Industry in Upward Trend,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 4, 1929.

[23] “Has Taken Over Shell Business,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 28, 1930; “George Aanunsen Meets Mysterious Death in San Diego Bay,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 10, 1931; Findagrave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/142750468/george-aanunsen

[24] Note: Aaunensen sold his shell yard to William Cartensen. Jerry Hannigan purchased it in 1939, renaming it Jerry’s Shell Yard. In 1945, he moved the yard across the river to 735-741 Third Street. In 1948, Pioneer purchased the yard; Ad, Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 20, 1939; Ad, Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 4, 1945; “City Council,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 5, 1948; “Oyster Shell Processing Plant Opens In Petaluma,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, February 22, 1950.

[25] “Poultry Must Organize,’” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 2, 1959; Lowry, Empty Shells, pp. 229-233.

[26] “Creek Naming and Dredging Supported,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 14, 1959; “Miller Submits Bills, Works on More,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 23, 1959; “River Name Bill Sails To Senate,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 16, 1959.

[27] “Creek Naming and Dredging Supported,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 14, 1959; “Extensive Improvements Coming to River Channel,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 4, 1959.

[28] “Petaluma Might Get River Yet,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 20, 1959; “International Scoop,” So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 24, 1959; “River Dredging Should Be Completed by September,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 8, 1964; “River Project Gets a Boost,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 26, 1965; “City records Progress and Problems in 1967,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 30, 1967.

[29] “Oakland Firm Given Contract to Dredge the River,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 1964; “River Project Gets a Boost,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 26, 1965 “City Records Progress and Problems in 1967,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 30, 1967.

[30] “The Ebb and Flow of the River Industry,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 19, 2006:

[31] “Nearly $10 million Petaluma Dredging Project Begins after 13-year Wait,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 5, 2020; “River Dredging Crucial for City,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 27, 1992; Katherine J. Rinehart, “Processing Oyster Shells Along the Petaluma River,” Sonoma County Farm Bureau Newsletter, February 11, 2022. https://sonomafb.org/processing-oyster-shells-along-the-petaluma-river/

[32] “Nearly $10 million Dredging Begins After 13-year Wait,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 5, 2020; John Shribbs, “Dredging,”2021,  Petaluma Wetlands Alliance, petalumawetlands.org. https://petalumawetlands.org/dredging/

[33] “Oyster Cove Project,” a video presentation by UrbanMix Development and Urban Design Associates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTg6JZcx1Ms&list=PLtMVX2ASLE4rwOq9VROofcEcGpFkfnk6e&index=2

Featured

Women of the Wheel

Fashion, Sex, and Suffrage During the 1890s Bicycle Craze

Two young Petaluma women with their safety bicycles, circa 1890s (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

On July 4, 1896, Petaluma found itself anointed the new “bicycling Mecca” of the West Coast, as a reported 6,000 people turned out at the city’s new Wheelman Park for the annual divisional meet of the League of American Wheelmen.

Among the 18 Northern California teams competing were two comprised entirely of women—San Francisco’s Alpha Cycling Club and Petaluma’s own “women of the wheel,” the Mercury Cyclists.

Their presence embodied perhaps the greatest social disruption of the 1890’s bicycle craze: women were no longer dependent upon men for their transportation.

Women’s cyclist club, 1890s (photo public domain)

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling,” Susan B. Anthony told New York World reporter Nellie Bly in 1896. “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

Female liberation came thanks to introduction of the “safety bicycle” in the early 1890s. Its predecessor, the high-wheel, had been strictly a masculine pursuit. With its enormous front wheel and small back wheel, both made of rubber-lined wood, the bike was nicknamed the “boneshaker” for its jarring and often dangerous ride.

Men with their highwheelers, 1880s (photo public domain)

The safety, with its two equal-sized wheels and inflated rubber tires, not only provided a smoother ride but was easier to mount, making it accessible to women in dresses, who dubbed it the “freedom machine.”

Petaluma’s first safety bicycles went on sale in 1892 at Joe Steiger’s Gunsmith Shop on Main Street, across from current day Putnam Plaza. The following year, a group of young men led by Frank Lippitt formed a local chapter of the League of American Wheelmen called the Petaluma Wheelmen.

By 1894, the national bicycle craze was in full swing. New dealerships started popping up in hardware stores around town. Lyman Byce, the entrepreneur behind Petaluma’s booming new egg industry, opened one at his Petaluma Incubator Company across from today’s Penry Park. The bikes weren’t cheap. Byce’s popular Erie model sold for $100 ($3,150 in today’s currency).

Lyman Byce’s Petaluma Incubator Company and Eric Bicycle shop, 1896 (photo Sonoma County Library)

A popular novelty among Petaluma’s younger, middle-class set, bicycles also found early adopters among some older residents, including the city’s leading capitalist, 63-year old John A. McNear. After purchasing a bicycle from Byce, McNear was convinced by Petaluma’s “father of chickendome” to build a local velodrome for racing events. With bicycles at Byce’s incubator factory selling as fast as he could stock them, Byce assured McNear he would make his money back within a year.

In 1895, McNear converted an old baseball stadium he owned on the city’s east side (now the site of the Petaluma Public Library) into Wheelman Park. After building a quarter-mile race track with six-foot-high banked curves, he surfaced it with hard-packed decomposed granite, making it conducive to speed. He then doubled the seating capacity of the baseball bleachers to accommodate 2,500, leaving ample room for standing spectators as well as those who wished to watch from their parked carriages.

John McNear on bicycle alongside a Sonoma Express wagon of chickens (photo Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

Shortly before the track was completed, a group of young women led by Gertrude Hopkins and Florence Mauzy formed the Mercury Cyclists, joining a number of women’s cycling clubs starting up around the country

“The bicycle,” wrote the League of American Wheelmen, “has taken those old-fashioned, slow-going notions of the gentler sex, and replaced them with a new woman, mounted on her steed of steel.”

As the Mercury Cyclists and other wheelwomen took to their steel steeds, they ran into some cultural speed bumps from conservative Victorians, who wanted to know where they were riding to.

When the question was put to women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton by American Wheelman magazine, she succinctly replied: “To suffrage.”

San Francisco’s Liberty Cycling Club, 1895 (photo California Historical Society)

Victorians believed otherwise. For them, women were stationary, and men mobile. Any female intrusion into the outdoor world of travel, athleticism, or free movement threatened their world order. The only place women were riding to, in their opinion, was heavenly disgrace and eternal destruction.

“As a chivalrous gentleman,” a newspaper article asked of Victorian men, “do you tremble at the revolution of bicycling women?”

Actress Mabel Love with bicycle, 1897 (photo public domain)

The answer was complicated, especially for men grappling with conflicted feelings of repulsion and attraction. A man’s poem in the San Francisco Examiner in 1895 conveyed their dilemma.

“The Bicycle Girl, oh, the Bicycle Girl, /with a spinnaker skirt and a sleeve like a furl; / such a freak on the wheel, such a sight on the tire, / I am certain I never will love or admire.”

Within a few lines of this dismissive opening, the poet fell into a head-turning swoon.

“The sound of her bell and the hum of her wheel / Is enough to make any man’s cranium reel . . . And why did she smile as she lightly spun by? . . . The Bicycle Girl, oh, the Bicycle Girl, / she has tangled my heart in her mystical whirl.”

The introduction in 1895 of tandem bicycles for sale at Joe Steiger’s shop created a small sensation in town. As moonlight rides in the countryside began to usurp dates to dances and musical concerts, some men looked to the bicycle as a revealing test of character.

The popular song Daisy Bell, or Bicycle Built for Two, was written by Harry Dacre in 1892 (Illustration in public domain)

“The woman you see is seldom the woman you think you see,” wrote a man in the Petaluma Courier in 1896. “Mounted upon bicycles, most women have to tell the truth about themselves. One can distinguished at a glance the daring, willful beauty from the timid, tender girl. A woman’s health, vigor of mind and body are apparent. I will even go so far as to advise a man not to get married until he has seen the object of his choice disport herself upon a bicycle.”

Victorians disagreed. The only character trait they believed a woman revealed on a bike was a proclivity for sin and fast living. A woman out cycling without male supervision was not only placing herself in danger, she was exposing herself to the temptations of sexual stimulation, caused according to medical professionals by the protruding pommel of bicycle saddles.

The fear of unleashed female sexuality led bicycle manufacturers to introduce special “hygienic” saddles with little or no pommels, along with high seat stems and upright handlebars that supported a more dignified and ladylike riding position than the bent over, “camel back” style, which required women to provocatively lean forward in the saddle.

Ad for bicycle saddle with reduced pommel for women, Ladies Home Journal magazine, April 1896.

The break with tradition most disturbing to Victorians was fashion. At a time when middle-class women rarely challenged fashion’s dictates, the practicality of bicycling offered them an opportunity to rethink their clothing.

Shedding the restrictive Victorian corsets and large, billowy dresses, women wheelers adopted for riding the “divided skirt,” or baggy trouser cinched at the knee. Originally championed in a dress reform movement led by suffragist Amelia Bloomer, the divided skirts were commonly known as “bloomers.” Their appeal rapidly spread beyond the practicalities of bicycling to women who didn’t ride.

Ad for Continental Bicycle Tires (photo courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

When asked about bloomers in her interview with Nellie Bly, Susan B. Anthony was blunt.

“Dress to suit the occasion. A woman doesn’t want skirts and flimsy lace to catch in the wheel. Safety, as well as modesty, demands bloomers or extremely short skirts. You know women only wear foolish articles of dress to please men’s eyes anyway.”

The male gaze gladly overlooked the bloomers’ practical modesty, as the trousers scandalously exposed a woman’s ankles, raising an outcry form Victorians.

The hotly contested fashion battle that ensued forever altered public perceptions of female athleticism and proper female behavior. Bloomers permitted women cyclists to jettison the heavy, drop-frame bicycles designed for riding in a dress, and jump aboard the much lighter, diamond-framed bicycles ridden by men, making the women viable competitors in races like Petaluma’s meet on Independence Day in 1896.

Women competing in cycling race in Buffalo, NY, 1897 (photo courtesy of BnF–Bibliothèque nationale de France) 

Disappointingly, no records were broken that day at the new Wheelman Park by men or women cyclists. Likewise, while the new safety bicycle technology was liberating for women, it failed to place them on the fast track to suffrage. Their right to vote wasn’t secured in California until 1911, and not on a national scale until 1920.

Bicycling mania itself proved to be short-lived, dying off before the turn of the century, as production improvements dramatically lowered bike prices and the novelty wore off among the younger middle class.

In 1903, Joe Steiger’s Gunsmith Shop sold the first automobile in Petaluma, after which the moral panic over women finding liberation on a bicycle shifted locally to women finding liberation behind the wheel of a car. 

A joke from the time captured the challenge women faced:

Jack and Jill have just climbed a steep hill on their tandem bicycle, with Jill riding in front. “Phew, that was a tough climb,” Jill said, leaning over, breathing hard. “The climb was so hard, and we were going so slow, I thought we were never going to make it.”

“Yeah,” said Jack, “good thing I kept the brakes on, or we would have slid all the way back down!”

Couple riding a tandem bicycle, 1890s (photo in public domain)

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier on March 3, 2022.

SOURCES:

Newspapers

Los Angeles Herald: “Sports of the Day,” February 10, 1895.

Lincoln (Nebraska) Courier: “The Bicycle as a Reformer,” August 17, 1895.

New York World: Nellie Bly, “Champion Of Her Sex: Miss Susan B. Anthony,” February 2, 1896.

Petaluma Argus: “Two New Automobiles for Petaluma People,” October 31, 1903.

Petaluma Courier:  “Bicycling,” April 1, 1893; “Here and There,” August 13, 1893; “The New Track,” April 30, 1894; “The Bicycle Trade,” July 18, 1894; “The Riders,” July 25, 1894; “The New Track,” June 22, 1895; “Out of Door Life for Women,” June 22, 1895; “The Wheel: a Test of Character,” September 12, 1895; “Bicycle Chat,” September 13, 1895; “The Mercury Cyclists,” October 16, 1895; “Local Counsel,” November 15, 1895; “For the Fourth of July,” December 19, 1895; “The League Meet,” January 29, 1896; “Bicycle Notes,” February 12, 1896, June 24, 1896; “Bicycle Races,” May 13, 1896; “Getting Ready,” June 24, 1896; “The Day,” “The League Meet,” July 8, 1896; “Osen Does Some Sprinting,” July 22, 1896.

San Francisco Call: “Wheel Races at Petaluma,” July 5, 1896; “Lady Cyclists Indignant,” August 28, 1896.

San Francisco Chronicle: “Petaluma’s Day to Shine,” June 26, 1896; “Wheelmen Race at Petaluma,” July 5, 1896; Gary Kamiya, “Sex and Cycling,” October 18, 2019.

San Francisco Examiner: “Wheelmen Make Merry,” July 4, 1896; “Greeting the Wheelmen,” July 2, 1890.

Magazines & Websites

Adrienne LaFrance, “How the Bicycle Paved the Way for Women’s Rights,” The Atlantic, June 26, 2014.

Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Reframing the Bicycle: Advertising-Supported Magazines and Scorching Women,” American Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 1 (John Hopkins University Press, March 1995), pp. 66-101.

Liz Murphy, “Women’s (Bike) History: Amelia Bloomer;” Carolyn Szczepanski, “March is Women’s (Bike) History Month!” The League of American Bicyclists. https://bikeleague.org/content/march-womens-bike-history-month

Matt Reicher, “Photography, the Bicycle, and the Women’s Movement of the 1890s,” Medium, February 12, 2020. medium.com.

Michael Taylor, “Rapid Transit to Salvation: American Protestants and the Bicycle in the Era of the Cycling Craze,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 9, No. 3 (July 2010), pp. 337-363.

Featured

Petaluma’s Days as a Sundown Town

Yosemite Hotel, East Washington and Copeland streets, 1950 (Photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

One Sunday evening in December 1919, two Black men, Arthur Davis and Harry Crosby, entered the Yosemite Soda Fountain Emporium across from the Petaluma railroad yard. Located on the first floor of the Yosemite Hotel, a boarding house for cowhands, hay balers, and railroad workers on the corner of Copeland and East Washington streets, the Emporium was a working man’s soda fountain.[1]

The soda jerk that evening was George Delehanty, an Irish immigrant with a history of assault charges, including a shootout in a Bodega saloon that left two men dead, one of them shot five times in the chest.[2] Delehanty’s recent transition from bartending to soda jerking was dictated by the Wartime Prohibition Act, a temporary measure passed by Congress during World War I to conserve grain used in the making of alcohol.

By the time the act was implemented July 1, 1919, the war had ended, the 18th Amendment indefinitely banning the making and sale of alcohol had been ratified, and Prohibition was set to commence on January 17, 1920.[3] Rather than nullify the temporary act, Congress let it stand as a soft launch of banning alcohol.

“Last call” in Detroit before the Wartime Prohibition Act went into effect on July 1, 1919 (Photo courtesy of Wayne State University)

While most Petaluma’s saloons were forced to close on July 1st, a handful like the Yosemite converted to soda fountains. At least publicly. Privately, many surreptitiously added jackass brandy to the sugary syrup used in making sodas with carbonated water drawn from a spigot, giving birth by necessity to the fizzy cocktail.[4]

But serving booze under the table wasn’t the Yosemite’s only concealed practice—it also had an implicit “whites only” policy, as Crosby and Davis discovered the evening they walked into the soda fountain, when Delehanty grabbed them by their collars and began dragging them to the door.[5]

Davis was relatively new to town, having operated a sidewalk shoeshine stand for three months outside the Ecker Barbershop in the Washington Hotel, which wrapped around either side of the Bank of Sonoma County building on the northwest corner of Main and Washington streets. He boarded at the hotel.

Entrance to Washington Hotel under awning on Washington Street, with the Petaluma Hotel in the background, 1928 (Photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

Crosby worked as a chauffeur for Dr. Arthur Lumsden, a prominent physician in town. He and his wife Josie, who worked as a domestic for the doctor and his family, lived in the doctor’s household at 301 Sixth Street.[6]

Davis and the Crosbys were among only 13 Blacks living in Petaluma at the time, out of a total population of more than 6,000.[7] While the city served during the Civil War as Sonoma County’s abolitionist enclave with a small but vibrant Black community, by the turn of the century it had become what was known as a “sundown town,” excluding non-whites through some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, or violence.

Its racial barriers were maintained institutionally through legal covenants inserted in property deeds banning the sale or rental of homes to “persons of African, Asiatic or Mongolian descent,” as well as more informal means, such as the reception Crosby and Davis received the night they entered the Yosemite.[8]

In Delehanty’s effort to eject them, a scuffle ensued that left Delehanty with a deep, eight-inch wound down his left arm. Crosby and Davis promptly fled the soda fountain, with Davis running up East Washington Street toward the Washington Hotel, and Crosby speeding home in Dr. Lumsden’s sedan.

Hillside Hospital, 223 Kentucky Street, 1920s (Photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

Delehanty was rushed to Hillside Hospital, a repurposed Italianate-style Victorian house at 223 Kentucky Street across from Penry Park, to be stitched up.

Police Chief Mike Flohr and Officer Otto Rudolph arrived at the scene in a cab, as the police force lacked patrol cars. The two quickly set out after Davis, arresting him in Penry Park across from his hotel.[9]

Taxi fleet outside Prince Building at northwest corner of Kentucky Street and Western Avenue, circa 1920 (Photo courtesy Sonoma County Library)

Charges against Davis and Crosby were dropped a few days later at their arraignment for lack of evidence. Police were unable to locate the knife used in the stabbing, or find anyone in the Yosemite that night willing to testify to having witnessed the incident.[10] As became clear in coming months, when it came to enforcing the town’s racial boundaries, some Petalumans preferred to take a vigilante approach.

Part of that had to do with the high level of national racial tension at the time. The release of Birth of a Nation, a 1915 epic silent film glorifying white supremacism, had spawned a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which grew to more than two million members nationwide. Petaluma’s KKK chapter made its presence known in 1925 with a giant burning cross at a nighttime rally held near the Petaluma Adobe, so large it was visible from the downtown.[11]

The period also saw the beginning of The Great Migration as Blacks left the South for urban areas in the North, seeking to escape the violence and oppression of living under Jim Crow. In a number of Northern cities their arrival was met with attacks, violent riots, and lynchings in what came to be known as The Red Summer of 1919.[12]

The national unrest was relayed to Petaluma that summer by the city’s two newspapers, which depicted America in the midst of a racial war.[13]

Davis and Crosby left Petaluma shortly after their arraignment, no doubt fearing for their safety.[14] Davis’ position at the shoeshine stand outside the Ecker Barbershop was filled by a Black man from San Francisco named Sidney Smith. Like Davis before him, he lodged at the Washington Hotel.

Smith had only been in town a month when rumors began circulating that he was making “slurring remarks” about young white women in town. One night an angry mob assembled in the hall outside his hotel room, violently threatening him. They had just knocked him to the floor when Flohr arrived, and took custody of Smith, escorting him to the police station in City Hall at Fourth and A streets.

Police Chief Mike Flohr sitting behind desk with fellow officers and secretary in police station, 1924 (Photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

Smith was detained for half an hour while police searched for someone willing to press charges against him. Finding no one, Flohr had no choice but to release him.

The mob was waiting for Smith outside the police station. They escorted him on foot to the city limits, warning him not to return.

City Hall from intersection of Western & Kentucky streets, 1920 (Photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

The next afternoon, a defiant Smith returned to work at his shoeshine stand. That night, a large mob gathered for him outside the Washington Hotel. Flohr met with the mob’s leaders, requesting they swear out a warrant against Smith, allowing the chief to arrest him. They refused.

At 10 p.m. Flohr and Rudolph rushed Smith out of the hotel and into a waiting taxi. As they sped off, members of the mob secured other taxis and gave chase, raising alarm as they raced through the streets of the city. They failed to overtake the taxi carrying Smith and the police as it headed south into Marin County.

A few days later, one of Smith’s customers from Petaluma ran into him outside the Ferry Building in San Francisco, where Smith asked him to buy him a meal, as everything he owned was back at the hotel, which he was unable to return to.[15]

By 1930, Petaluma’s Black population had dropped to just three residents. It would remain in the single digits for the next two decades. In 1960, a federal commission on civil rights found only one home in town owned by a Black family, that of shoeshine operator Henry Chenault and his wife Bessie at 32 West Street. Their daughter Nancy had been the only Black student in Petaluma High School when she graduated in 1950.[16]

Home of Henry and Bessie Chenault, 32 West Street (photo public domain)

Petaluma’s Black population would not increase significantly until after passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, reaching 136 in 1970.[17]

By that time, the Yosemite Hotel was targeted for demolition. Three months after the incident with Crosby and Davis, the soda fountain was shut down by federal marshals, who arrested Delehanty and the Yosemite’s owners after finding liquor on the premises. The establishment operated as a speakeasy throughout Prohibition, and then as an Italian restaurant and bar until 1966, when it was shuttered for good.

In 1971, the entire hotel was demolished for the widening of East Washington Street.[18]

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 10, 2022.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Yosemite Opened,” Argus, April 4, 1905; Bill Soberanes, “Petaluma Loses Well-Known Landmark,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 14, 1971.

[2] “Blood at Bodega,” Petaluma Courier, July 18, 1894; “Delehanty,” Sonoma Democrat, October 13, 1894; “Delehanty Acquitted,” Healdsburg Tribune, October 18, 1894.

[3] Michael A. Lerner, “Going Dry,” Humanities, The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, September/October 2011, Volume 32, Number 5.

[4] “The Great Drought Begins at Midnight,” Petaluma Argus, June 30, 1919; Tristan Donovan, Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), pp. 89-98.

[5] “Stabbing Affray Sunday,” Petaluma Argus, December 15, 1919; “Man Stabbed by a Negro,” Petaluma Courier, December 16, 1919.

[6] 1920 U.S. Census.

[7] 1920 U.S. Census.

[8] “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; “Notice,” Petaluma Argus, November 30, 1865; “Flag Presentation,” Petaluma Argus, January 1, 1869; “The Picnic,” Petaluma Argus, July 9 1870; “Uncle Aleck Dead,” Petaluma Argus, August 4, 1886; Moore, Montojo, Mauri, “Roots, Race, and Place,” Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, University of California, Berkeley, October 2019, p. 22; Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 58; James E. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: Touchstone Books, Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 3-5; An example of the covenants can be found in the Sonoma Deeds of Record, Book 293, Page 330, April 13, 1931, for the sale of property by Willian and Marie J. Deiss to Clifford B. and Minnie J. Murphy: “FOURTH: That prior to the first day of October, 1990, no persons of African, Asiatic or Mongolian descent shall be permitted to purchase or lease said property, or any part thereof and this restriction shall bind, whether such attempted purchase shall be made at any execution sale, foreclosure sale or in any other manner.”

[9] “Stabbing Affray Sunday,” Petaluma Argus, December 15, 1919; “Man Stabbed by a Negro,” Petaluma Courier, December 16, 1919.

[10] “Dismissed at the Hearing,” Petaluma Argus, December 18, 1919.

[11] “Initiation of KKK Before Guests,” Petaluma Courier, June 2, 1925.

[12] “Racial Violence and the Red Summer,” African American Heritage, The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/wwi/red-summer

[13] “Race War in Washington,” Petaluma Argus, July 21, 1919; “More Die in Race War in Chicago,” Petaluma Courier, July 31, 1919;“Race War Deaths Now Total 33,” Petaluma Argus, October 13, 1919.

[14] “Case Dismissed for Lack of Evidence,” Petaluma Courier, December 18, 1919.

[15] “Negro Threatened by Angered Citizens,” Petaluma Courier, June 2, 1920; Brief Item, Petaluma Courier, June 5, 1920.

[16] “Ex-Petaluman Honors King: As a Girl, She Was the Only Black Student,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 19, 1993; U.S. Census; United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Hearings held in Los Angeles, California, January 25, 1960; San Francisco California, January 27, 1960, January 28, 1960 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960), p. 588, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hearings_Before_the_United_States_Commis/fUXVAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

[17] U.S. Census.

[18] “8 Violators of ‘Prohi’ Law Arrested,” Petaluma Courier, December 30, 1925; “Two Are Fined $500 Each and One Case Pending Following Federal Raid,” Petaluma Argus, June 22, 1926; “Abatement Proceedings Against East Petaluma Hotel,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 19, 1927; “Federals Start Abatement Suits Here,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 18, 1931; Bill Soberanes column, “Petaluma Loses Well-Known Landmark,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 14, 1971.

Featured

Petaluma’s Black History

Linda Jones, second from right, first Black contestant for Petaluma Dairy Princess, 1971, standing with other contestants outside the Brown mansion at 920 D Street (photo Sonoma County Library)

The successful and persistent efforts of Black people to reach Petaluma, find jobs, combat discrimination, raise families, create positive images, and become a part of the community represent the creative and heroic aspects of Black history.

While Petaluma’s Black population has historically remained below two percent, it doesn’t mean the city lacks in stories of remarkable Black citizens. Even in the face of persistent racism, Black people have thrived, accumulating wealth, property, political clout, and a legacy that has left an indelible mark on Petaluma as we know it today.

Rivertown Era (1852 to 1900)

The Gold Rush

Black miner during Gold Rush era (photo California History Room, California State Library)

The Gold Rush brought Black people, both those free-born and educated in the North and those enslaved in the South, to California in search of economic and social opportunities. While many of those enslaved were able to purchase their freedom working for their owners in the gold mines, others escaped to freedom.

California’s Fugitive Law of 1852 authorized the return of runaway slaves to the South, placing any Black person who lacked clear legal documentation of their freedom at risk of being kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. Although slaveowners were only briefly allowed to keep their slaves in California, many informally held them until 1864.[1]

While most Black people settled in mining counties or in San Francisco during the 1850s, some chose towns like Petaluma, a small but bustling agricultural river port. Settled largely by Protestant abolitionists from New England, Petaluma was the sole Union outpost in Confederate Sonoma County during the Civil War.[2]

George W. Miller (1825-1873)

Inside a 19th century Black barbershop (photo public domain)

One of the more lucrative occupations for Black men was barbering. Their access to a white clientele provided them with economic and social advantages that conveyed prestige and influence within their communities.[3]

Petaluma’s leading barber was George W. Miller. Born a free man in New Jersey, Miller migrated to San Francisco in 1850, before moving to Petaluma in 1855 and opening a barbershop on Main Street.[4]

Miller continued to commute regularly to San Francisco, where he maintained his membership with prominent Black organizations, including the Olive Branch Lodge of the Black Masons, the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Brannan Guards ceremonial militia. The latter inspired him to establish the Colfax Guard in Petaluma.[5]

Miller was also a contributor to San Francisco’s two Black-owned newspapers, the Pacific Appeal and the Elevator, which provided Black people on the Pacific Coast as sense of community.[6]

He also represented Sonoma County at the four California Colored Conventions held between 1855 and 1865, where members organized to fight for full citizenship rights for Black people, including the right to court testimony, homesteading, publicly-funded schools, and suffrage.[7]

Union African Methodist Episcopal Church

Former Union A.M.E. Church, 109 Howard Street (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

In 1865, the first African Methodist Episcopal church (A.M.E.) in the North Bay was established in Petaluma. Located in a house at 109 Howard Street, the church served as a religious, social, and political center for the town’s small but vibrant Black community, a number of them homeowners.[8]

Reverend Peter Killingsworth, a former slave and A.M.E. circuit preacher, was assigned as founding pastor.[9] In 1865, he accompanied George Miller to the Colored Convention held in Sacramento, serving as the convention’s chaplain. Killingsworth noted in his convention report that Sonoma County had 70 black residents, 58 adults and 12 children. Of the adult men, a dozen were general laborers, ten farmers, seven barbers, two blacksmiths, and two carpenters.[10]

A schism later developed between Killingsworth and the Petaluma church’s more politically cautious trustees—all former slaves—leading to his departure in 1869. That same year, those trustees were among 12 Black residents who signed a petition for woman’s suffrage, on the eve of ratification of the 15th Amendment, which extended voting rights to Black men.[11]

The church operated with visiting preachers before shutting down in 1878 after a large decline in the local Black population.[12]

“Colored School”

“Colored school” in Oakland’s Brooklyn neighborhood, 1870 (photo in the public domain)

In 1864, George Miller spearheaded the opening of a private “colored school,” as it was called at the time. A young Black woman from San Francisco, Mrs. Rachel Coursey, was hired as the school’s first teacher.[13]

Later that year, after the California Supreme Court ruled public school districts were required to provide “separate but equal” schools for Black students, Petaluma’s “colored school” became one of six such schools in the state to be publicly funded.[14]         

In the early 1870s, Miller joined with other members of the Colored Convention’s Education Committee in bringing a case for school integration before the California Supreme Court. Although the court upheld “separate but equal” schooling in Ward v. Flood, committee members convinced most of the cities with “colored schools” to voluntarily integrate.[15]

Petaluma was the lone hold-out, generating national press and serving as a polarizing issue locally.

The city’s “colored school” remained in operation until 1880, at which time the state legislature voted to abolish segregated schools.[16] By that time, the school had only one student, as most Black families had relocated to friendlier communities in Vallejo and Oakland, where jobs were readily available in the shipyards and on the railroads.[17]

Egg Boom Era (1901 to 1945)

Sundown Town

New housing development in Los Angeles, 1950 (photo Irving C. Smith, California Eagle newspaper; California Eagle Photo Collection, Southern California Library, Los Angeles, California)

Having served as an abolitionist, pro-Union enclave during the Civil War, Petaluma became less friendly for Black residents following the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

Abolitionists may have supported the end of slavery, but not all were in favor of providing Black people with equal rights.

Black barbers in town, who had gained wealth, prominence, and influence servicing white clientele, found themselves displaced in the 1880s by German and Swiss-Italian immigrants.[18]

By the beginning of Petaluma’s prosperous egg boom at the turn of the century, the city had become a so-called “sundown town,” intent on excluding non-whites through a combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence.

This was accomplished largely by restricting housing access to Caucasians through both implicit and explicit means. The latter came in the form of institutional racism.[19]

In 1927, the National Association of Real Estate Boards championed the inclusion of legal covenants in property deeds that banned the sale or lease of property to non-whites. The Federal Housing Administration, created in the 1930s to insure home mortgages, also required racial covenants to guarantee loans, a practice better known as “redlining,” referring to the red colored areas on maps they would not insure. [20]

While Petaluma’s population surged with the egg boom in 1920 to 6,226 residents, only 13 of them were Black, and were employed as domestics, porters, chauffeurs, and shoeshine men.[21]

The largest Black presence in town during the 1920s and 30s were traveling Black minstrel troupes and jazz groups performing at the Mystic Theater and Hill Opera House, and Black cowboys at the local rodeos held at the fairgrounds.[22]

Black rodeo champion Jesse Stahl, a frequent visitor to Petaluma (photo public domain)

The 1920s also brought a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, thanks largely to the release of the epic silent film Birth of a Nation, which glorified white supremacism. The local Petaluma KKK chapter staged a recruiting rally in 1925 with a nighttime cross-burning outside the Petaluma Adobe that was visible from the downtown.[23] By 1930, the city’s Black population had dropped to three citizens.[24]

One open-minded group in town was the Men’s Forum of the Congregational Church, led by grain merchant George P. McNear. The forum regularly brought to town Black speakers, including Dr. E.W. Moore, a Baptist preacher and charter member of the NAACP, to educate them on race matters.[25]

Suburban Boom Era (1946 to current)

Housing Discrimination

Chenault House at 32 West Street, only Petaluma home owned by a Black family in 1960 (photo John Sheehy)

The suburban tract housing boom following World War II more than tripled Petaluma’s population to almost 25,000 by 1970. However, the boom however came with restrictive deed covenants redlining by the banks that prevented the sale or resale of homes to “persons of African, Asiatic or Mongolian descent.”[26]

Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such covenants unenforceable in 1948, they were still being used in the North Bay as late as the 1960s, often serving as a means of placing social pressure on white families not wishing to discriminate.[27]

In 1960, a report by a federal commission on civil rights found only one home in Petaluma owned by a Black family, that of Henry and Bessie Chenault. The commission attributed this to a cabal of bankers, realtors, developers, and neighborhood associations who ostracized and financially threatened anyone attempting to sell or rent a home to Black people.[28]

In 1963, the California Fair Housing Act was passed, making it unlawful to discriminate against home buyers and renters. The next year, the California Real Estate Association put forth a successful ballot measure to nullify the Fair Housing Act. The ballot measure was overruled by the U.S Supreme Court in 1967.[29]

Henry Chenault (1895 -1969)

Henry Chenault at his Western Avenue shoeshine stand, 1954 (photo Sonoma County Library)

From the 1940s through the 1960s, Petaluma’s most prominent Blacks were Henry and Bessie Chenault. Actively engaged in politics, they served as officers of Petaluma’s Democratic Club and founding members of the Sonoma County NAACP, where Bessie was elected the chapter’s first treasurer.[30] 

Henry moved to Petaluma in the 1930s, after serving 13 years in Leavenworth Prison for his participation in a deadly uprising of Black soldiers on a Houston army base in 1917.[31]

Keeping his past secret, he operated a sidewalk shoeshine stand at 18 Western Avenue, across from Andresen’s Tavern, until his death in 1969.

Thanks to Henry’s outgoing personality, his stand became a popular downtown crossroads. Among merchants, it served as the city’s “second chamber of commerce.” For local politicians, many of whom relied upon Henry as a trusted advisor, it helped them keep a finger on the pulse of the community.[32]

For many years, Henry was Petaluma’s only Black businessman, and he and Bessie were the city’s sole Black homeowners.[33] Henry was posthumously pardoned in 1972 for his role in the Houston uprising, determined to have been staged by white racists.[34]

Sonoma County NAACP

Sonoma County NAACP leaders meeting in Petaluma, 1970 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The 1950s and 60s marked a period of unprecedented protests against the status of second class citizenship accorded to Black Americans.

The protests took form in civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, marches, protests, boycotts, “freedom rides,” and rallies. There were also continuing efforts to legally challenge segregation through the courts.[35]

In 1955, Platt Williams and Gilbert Gray of Santa Rosa spearheaded organizing the Sonoma County chapter of the NAACP. Henry and Bessie Chenault represented Petaluma as founding members.

One of the chapter’s first actions was closing down the Montgomery Village Lions Club’ annual minstrel charity show, which harkened back to blackface entertainment.[36]

While the chapter supported the national NAACP movement—for example, picketing and boycotting the F.W. Woolworth department stores in Petaluma and Santa Rosa over the chain’s refusal to serve Black people at lunch counters in the South—their primary focus was securing equal treatment in jobs and housing for the county’s Black residents, who by 1960 totaled 916. [37]

That included successfully lobbying for the California Fair Employment Practice Act of 1959 and the California Fair Housing Act of 1963.[38]

Petaluma Blacks for Community Development

Gloria Robinson, 1982 (photo courtesy of Petaluma Argus-Courier, Brant Ward photographer)

Gloria Robinson moved to Petaluma from San Francisco in 1971 with her husband Herbert and four children, attracted by the affordable real estate. She quickly made friends with civil rights activist Bessie Chenault, and began working with the NAACP and Sonoma County People for Economic Opportunity.[39]

Petaluma’s Black population by that time had grown from 11 in 1960 to more than 100, and was on its way toward reaching almost 500 by 1980.[40]

In 1976, Gerald Ford became the first U.S. president to recognize February as Black History Month, an event started 50 years before by Black historian Carl G. Wooden.[41]

Seeing an opportunity to increase Black visibility and representation in town, in 1978 Robinson formed Petaluma Blacks for Community Development. Serving as president, she was joined by founding board members Faith Ross, Ted Morris, and Nadine Lawson.

The group’s mission has been to share Black history and culture with the Petaluma community and bring Black families together for social and educational activities by sponsoring events, speaking engagements, and exhibits.

Their vision is to help “make the Petaluma community free of hate and get rid of those issues that divide us based on color.”[42]

******

FOOTNOTES


[1] Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites (University of California Press, 1990), pp. 12-13; Mike McPhate, “California’s Black Slaves and the Myth of Free Soil,” California Sun, January 23, 2019. Californiasun.com.

[2] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 42; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 47.

[3] Douglas W. Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Sean Trainor, “The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard,” The Atlantic, January 20, 2014.

[4] Advertisements, Sonoma County Journal, August 25, 1855, and September 5, 1856; “Deaths: George Miller,” Pacific Appeal, October 25, 1873.

[5] “Prince Hall Freemasonry,” Freemason Information, freemasoniformation.com; Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 146; “Masonic Notice,” The Elevator, December 21, 1872; “Died,” The Elevator, October 25, 1873; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; “Flag Presentation,” Petaluma Argus, January 1, 1869; “The Picnic,” Petaluma Argus, July 9 1870.

[6] https://blackvoicenews.com/2008/07/31/mirror-of-the-times-founded-1857/; “Agents,” Pacific Appeal, January 17, 1863.

[7] Herbert G. Ruffin II, “The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865),” February 9, 2009. BlackPast.com.

[8] “Rudolph Lapp, Afro-Americans in California (San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser Publishing Company, 1987); “Santa Rosa,” The Elevator, July 4, 1865, the first newspaper mention of Rev. Killingsworth at the A.M.E. Church in Petaluma; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; “Notice,” Petaluma Argus, November 30, 1865; “Campbell’s Chapel,” Petaluma Argus, November 30, 1865.

[9] California State Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Sacramento on the 25, 26, 27, 28 of October 1865. Coloredconventions.org; Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 158; “The Appointments of the A. M. E. Church for the Conference,” Pacific Appeal, November 8, 1862; “The Appointments of the A. M. E. Church for the Conference,” Pacific Appeal, September 12, 1863; 1860 U.S. Census, Sacramento, California; 1861 Sacramento City Directory.

[10] http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/268, p. 14.

[11] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 252-253. “Petaluma,” The Elevator, November 1, 1867; “Correspondence of the Elevator,” The Elevator, February 19, 1869; “Petition for Woman’s Suffrage in Senate, March 2, 1870,” Journals of Senate and Assembly of the 18th Session of the legislature of the State of California, Volume II, pp. 14-18, 23-24; Note: the 12 identified Black residents who signed the 1870 woman’s suffrage petition were Charles and Rebecca Montgomery, Peggy Barnes, Alexander and Malvina McFarland, Thomas and Juliana Johnson,  John and Ellen Looney, E. Cooper and Eliza A. Smith, and Mary Espee.

[12] “Sixteen Volume: A.M.E. Appointments,” Pacific Appeal, August 10, 1878; City of Petaluma Deed Records, Lot 276, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library, Ref. 979.418.732: Sold on October 3, 1885 by two trustees of the AME, a religious society not incorporated; includes a small frame structure; states it has been many years since any religious services were held, and that but four or five members of the society remain; remains of the sale to be extended to other A.M.E. churches throughout the state. Last service listed in the Petaluma Argus was August 14, 1878, when Bishop Black of Baltimore preached there.

[13] “Correspondence,” Pacific Appeal December 12, 1863; “Married,” Pacific Appeal June 27, 1863; “Arrivals from the Interior,” Pacific Appeal, February 13, 1864; “School for Colored Children,” Petaluma Argus, December 16, 1863; “Opened,” Petaluma Argus, January 13, 1864.

[14] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864.

[15] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 180-182; “Educational Public Meeting at Bethel Church,” The Elevator, April 27, 1872; “Address of the Educational Committee,” The Elevator, May 11, 1872; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/

[16] “Educational Items,” Petaluma Argus, August 13, 1875; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” Petaluma Argus, May 18, 1876; “Our ‘Colored Schools,’” Petaluma Argus, December 22, 1876; “Our Colored School,” Petaluma Argus, August 11, 1876; “The Negro School,” Petaluma Argus, April 5, 1877; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” Petaluma Argus, May 18, 1877.

[17] Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 58; History of Sonoma County, Sonoma County, CA (Archives History – Books …..Petaluma Township, Part 3 1880); Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 25; John Ford, Journal of the American Association, Volume 6, 1907, p. 84; “The Public Schools,” Petaluma Courier, June 18, 1879.

[18] Douglas Walter Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers on Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009).

[19] Moore, Montojo, Mauri, “Roots, Race, and Place,” Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, University of California, Berkeley, October 2019, p. 22.

[20] “Is There Racism in the Deed to Your Home?” New York Times, August 17, 2021.

[21] 1920 U.S. Census; “Negro Attacked Officer; Arrested,” Petaluma Courier, April 24, 1920.

[22] “At the Theaters, California,” Petaluma Courier, June 19, 1927.

[23] “Initiation of K.K.K. Before Guests,” Petaluma Courier, June 2, 1925.

[24] U.S Census.

[25] The Negro and His Outlook,” Petaluma Argus, March 30, 1925; “Negro Lecturer Returns to Congregational Open Forum,” Petaluma Argus, November 18, 1925; “Solve the Race Problem If We Would Avoid War, Says Noted Authority,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 21, 1932; “Dr. Kingsley Addresses Club,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 8, 1933.

[26] An example of the covenants can be found in the Sonoma Deeds of Record, Book 293, Page 330, April 13, 1931, for the sale of property by Willian and Marie J. Deiss to Clifford B. and Minnie J. Murphy: “FOURTH: That prior to the first day of October, 1990, no persons of African, Asiatic or Mongolian descent shall be permitted to purchase or lease said property, or any part thereof and this restriction shall bind, whether such attempted purchase shall be made at any execution sale, foreclosure sale or in any other manner.”

[27] Moore, Montojo, Mauri, pgs. 7, 13; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,2017), pgs. 6, 36, 52.

[28] “United States Commission on Civil Rights: Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights.” Hearings held in Los Angeles, California, January 25, 1960; San Francisco California, January 27, 1960, January 28, 1960 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960), p. 590.

[29] Moore, Motojo, Mauri, p. 54.

[30] Bill Soberanes, So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 24, 1960; “Santa Rosa Unit of NAACP to Receive Charter,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 2, 1955.

[31] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault,” South Texas College of Law Digital Collection, https://cdm16035.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15568coll1/id/1707

[32] Bill Soberanes, “So They Tell Me” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 19, 1952; Bob Wells, “Everybody Here Knows Henry L. Chenault,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 24, 1954; “A Paragraph for Mr. Chenault,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 29, 1954; Bill Soberanes, “Henry Chenault Was a Petaluma Institution,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 20, 1993.

[33] Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 20, 1993; United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1960, p. 588.

[34] Jaime Salazar, Mutiny of Rage: The 1917 Camp Logan Riots and Buffalo Soldiers in Houston (Prometheus eBooks, 2021), p. 51.

[35] “The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship,”Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/abolition.html

[36] “County Negroes are Forming NAACP Unit,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, February 9, 1955; “Santa Rosa Unit of NAACP to Receive Charter,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 2, 1955; “Village Minstrel Show Called Off After Protest,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 16, 1955.

[37] “Picketing by NAACP Continues in County,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 20, 1960; “Negro ‘Test’ Stores Open—Part of the Way,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 9, 1960.

[38] “F.E.P. Bill To Be Discussed,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 29, 1955; Michael C. Tobriner, “California FEPC,” Hastings Law Journal, 1965, Vol. 16, issue 3; Moore, Motojo, Mauri, p. 54.

[39] 1970 U.S. census; Ann Gray Byrd, Glimpses: Santa Rosa African Americans (Santa Rosa, CA, 2003),p. 96; “Gloria Robinson: If Not You, Then Who?” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 3, 2013; “Gloria Robinson Still Active, Still Working for Change,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 16, 2019.

[40] U.S. Census.

[41] “Black History Month,” history.com: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-history-month

[42] Petaluma Blacks for Community Development website: https://pbcd4us.com/about/.

Featured

Tall Tales and Rev. Waugh

THE REAL STORY OF WAUGH SCHOOL

Rev. Lorenzo Waugh, circa 1870s (photo by George Ross, courtesy of the Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

The tall tales regarding Reverend Lorenzo Waugh began a month before his death in September 1900, with a story that ran in the Petaluma Argus celebrating his upcoming 92nd birthday.

The Argus reported that Waugh: 1) built the first Methodist Church in Petaluma at Fourth and A streets, hauling lumber from the redwoods north of town with the same team of oxen he used to cross the plains; 2) was gifted with 320 acres by General Vallejo as a reward for his services as a missionary among the Shawnees; and 3) donated the land upon which Waugh School at Corona and Adobe roads was built in 1864.[1]

Over the next century, these and other apocryphal stories grew, fueled by newspaper articles that relied upon twice-told tales. Waugh was credited with not only donating the land for Waugh School, but also with building the 1865 schoolhouse, alleged to be the first country school established in Sonoma County.

Children with their teacher outside Bethel School (later renamed Waugh School), 1908 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The school itself, originally named Bethel, was reported by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat in 1991 to have been initially founded as a religious school in accordance with Waugh’s Methodist beliefs. The paper went on to say it was converted to a public school in 1897, three years before Waugh’s death, at which time it was renamed Waugh School.[2]

None of these stories are true, as the facts assembled below demonstrate.

The Founding of Petaluma’s Methodist Episcopal Church

By all accounts, Rev. Waugh was a moral upstanding and admirable man. Most of what is known about his life however comes from the autobiography he wrote and first published in 1883. None of the 19th century historians who wrote books about Sonoma County— Thompson (1877), Munro-Fraser (1880), Cassiday (1889), Gregory (1911)—mention Waugh in any detail in their biographies of prominent early settlers.

As is true for all autobiographies, Waugh’s life story is selectively depicted through his eyes, with omissions and inaccuracies.

Title page of Waugh’s 1883 autobiography, third edition published in 1885 (public domain)

In the book, Waugh writes that he rode across the plains to California in 1852 with his wife and children in a wagon pulled by a team of oxen. He came not for the gold rush, but for his health, having suffered for years from the long-term effects of malaria, possibly contracted during his time as a missionary among the Shawnee and Kaw tribes in pre-terriotorial Kansas. After spending 20 years as an itinerant Methodist preacher in Ohio and Missouri, Waugh came west with the aim of retiring from the being a circuit rider and taking up farming. [3]

Petaluma’s first Methodist Episcopal Church, constructed in 1856 at Fourth and A streets, was not built by Waugh, nor was he ever one of its resident ministers. He did give sermons from time to time, as well as wed couples and perform burials.

In 1859, he took up what would become his main preoccupation for the next 40 years: traveling the state giving temperance lectures to young people. He also launched that year the Sonoma County chapter of the Settlers’ League, in protest of fraudulent land grant claims and the eviction of homesteaders on the land grants denounced as squatters.[4]

The Gift from Vallejo

After arriving in Petaluma, Waugh purchased 160 acres of farm land near the junction of Davis Lane and East Railroad Avenue in current-day Penngrove, planting a fruit orchard and vineyard. The two men Waugh purchased the land from told him it was government owned, and so available for homesteading.[5]

Under the terms of the Preemption Act of 1841, a squatter had the right to purchase up to 160 acres in the public domain, assuming he resided on the land for at least 14 months or made agricultural improvements to it for five years. [6].

Unfortunately, the men who sold Waugh his property lied about it being in the public domain. When Waugh learned he was actually squatting on part of the 66,000-acre Rancho Petaluma land grant owned by Mariano Vallejo, he asked for a meeting with Vallejo.

According Waugh’s account, Vallejo agreed orally to sell him the farm in recognition of his missionary work on the Shawnee and Kaw tribes reservations back in pre-territorial Kansas. But first, Vallejo said, they had to wait for the California Land Commission to survey the boundaries of his land grant as part of their legal review of his claim.[7]

Mariano Vallejo, circa 1870s (photo Sonoma County Library)

Since Vallejo was actively selling off other parcels of Petaluma Rancho without awaiting final claim review from the Land Commission, it’s likely his concern with Waugh’s farm was that it bordered the Rancho Cotate land grant, raising some uncertainty as to its exact boundaries.[8]

In 1856, the commission approved Vallejo’s land grant claim (although, like most of the commission’s decisions, the approval was subjected to years of court appeals), clearing the way for Waugh to purchase his farm. For unknown reasons, Waugh failed to make the purchase.

Instead, on October 25, 1858, two years after the commission’s approval, and six years after Waugh first squatted on the Rancho Petaluma, Vallejo sold Waugh’s farm to two of his sons, Antonio and Jose, as part of a larger 1,039-acre land acquisition.[9]

In his autobiography, Waugh blamed the sale on Vallejo’s lawyer, whom he claimed stealthily exercised his power of attorney during a period in which Vallejo was away in Monterey County, tending to the death of his brother. Vallejo’s brother died in 1856, and while it’s true Vallejo temporarily moved to Watsonville to tend to his brother’s estate, by the fall of 1858 he had returned to his home in Sonoma. His signature, not his lawyer’s, is on the county deed record of the sale.[10]

Three weeks after purchasing the 1,039 acres for $100 from their father, Vallejo’s sons flipped the property for $8,500 to George L. Wratten, the lawyer who served as the notary public on their original deed transaction with their father. A week later, Wratten sold 501 acres of his new purchase at a profit to a real estate agent named George W. Oman. Included in the sale was Waugh’s farm. [11]

A month after acquiring the land, Oman sold off Waugh’s 150-acre farm to a settler named Jacob Adamson for $1,500, and filed a lawsuit to evict Waugh from the property.[12]The property had been reduced from 160 to 150 acres following the Land Commission’s survey of the Petaluma Rancho and Cotate Rancho land grant boundaries).

Waugh’s original farm (circled), lot 376 of Vallejo Township near Penngrove, was sold in 1859 to Jacob Adamson (1877 Thompson Atlas map courtesy of of Sonoma County Library)

Waugh claims he approached Oman with a counter offer, but was turned down. Given that Waugh’s net worth according to the 1860 U.S. census was only $600, it’s possible the terms of his offer came up short.

In 1860, with the eviction lawsuit still making its way through the courts, Waugh again approached Vallejo. According to Waugh, Vallejo offered him 320 acres of lots 286 and 287 in the Vallejo Township as recompense for selling his farm out from under him.

Waugh claimed Vallejo gifted him the property, however the deed records show a murkier series of transactions. [13]

Vallejo first sold the 320 acres to Hereziah Bisel Wilson, a workingman in San Francisco, for $1. A week later, Wilson sold the land to Waugh for $3,200. Given Waugh’s net worth at the time, it’s possible the land was in fact a gift, and that Vallejo used the intermediary sale to Wilson as a means of hiding that from county officials. The terms of transaction remain a mystery however. [14]

1866 map shows in circle Lots 286 and 287, comprising the 320 acres Waugh received from Vallejo, of which he gifted half, lot 287, to his son John; the arrow points to Bethel School (listed as “Waugh School”) at the southwest corner of Adobe Road and Corona roads (1866 Bowers Map courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

The Founding of Bethel School (Waugh School)

In the early 1850s, American settlers in rural areas outside Petaluma created public school districts as a means of taxing themselves to build country school houses, and also to qualify for county and state school taxes in operating them.

Bethel School was most likely established in 1853 or 1854. While one of Sonoma County’s earliest country schools, it was not the first. That honor goes to Iowa School near Two Rock, established in 1852. [15]

Bethel was originally one of three rural schools established in the Vallejo Township, which extended east from the Petaluma River to Sonoma Mountain, north to current day Cotati, and south to San Pablo Bay, comprising the western portion Vallejo’s Rancho Petaluma and the southeastern portion of Cotate Rancho.

Waugh was appointed one of three school trustees to oversee the Vallejo’s Township’s initial schools, along with Judge Stephen Payran and County Supervisor Alexander Copeland, both of whom lived in the township.

Because of the township’s large size, the county board of supervisors decided by 1855 to divide it into three school districts, each named after a founding trustee: District No. 1, the Payran District; No. 2, the Waugh District ; and No. 3, the Copeland District. [16]

Bethel School was the only school in Waugh School District during the 19th century and most of the 20th century. From early on, the schoolhouse served as the district’s election precinct as well as a community center for festivals, lectures, elections, political gatherings, and fraternal groups.[17]

Men outside Bethel School on election day, circa 1890s (photo Sonoma County Library)

The location of the Bethel Schoolhouse in the 1850s and early 1860s is uncertain, as no property transaction could be found in the county’s deed records. It most likely wasn’t located on Waugh’s original farm, lot 386 of the Vallejo Township, as country school houses were usually centrally located within school districts for commuting purposes.

Waugh’s farm resided at the far western edge of the Waugh School District, bordering both the Eagle School District in current-day Penngrove to the west and the Copeland School District to the north.

1877 map of the Waugh School District (in tan), with a star marking location of Bethel School and an arrow pointing to Waugh’s first farm at the edge of the district, adjacent to the Eagle School District of Penngrove (map Sonoma County Library)

Bethel School most likely sat originally at the same place it occupied throughout the 19th century—the southwest corner of Adobe and Corona roads, which served as the main crossroad of the Waugh School District, Corona Road being its primary thoroughfare to Petaluma.

The property the school sat on was originally part of a 160-acre parcel purchased in 1853 from Mariano Vallejo by Judge Philip R. Thompson, an elected associate county judge.[18]

Born into a prominent Virginia family in 1797, Thompson came to California during the gold rush.[19] He was soon joined by his nephews, Thomas and Robert Thompson, who went on to edit and publish Petaluma’s first newspaper, the Sonoma County Journal, and then Santa Rosa’s Sonoma Democrat, as well as write some of early history books of Sonoma County.

Judge Thompson, along with two other elected judges, served as the initial judicial body of Sonoma County, whose population in 1851 numbered only 561. Along with their judicial powers, the three were responsible for dividing the county into townships and school districts, and establishing county-owned buildings.[20]

Despite Bethel School’s lack of deed records, it appears likely Thompson donated a small portion of his property for the Bethel School soon after purchasing it in 1853.

As the school-age population in Waugh School District grew, by the early 1860s a larger school house was needed. Waugh’s term as trustee apparently ended sometime in the mid-1850s. The district’s subsequent three trustees—Lorenzo Jackson, John Hardin, and George W. Frick—held a successful tax election in March 1863 to raise $1,650 to construct a schoolhouse that would accommodate 60 to 70 students.[21]

Judge Thompson, who became a real estate agent in Petaluma after retiring from the bench in the mid-1850s, sold his farm due to failing health in September 1864 to an English immigrant named Mark Carr, who had originally settled in California during the gold rush. A month after the sale, Thompson died.[22]The new Bethel schoolhouse opened that fall.[23]

Arrow points to Bethel School (listed here as “Waugh Dist. Schl.”) at the corner of Adobe and Corona roads in 1877 map, directly across from Waugh’s 40-acre farm (1877 Thompson Atlas map courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

The 320-acre ranch Rev. Waugh acquired from Vallejo in 1860 sat directly across the street from the Bethel School property, on the southeast corner of Adobe Road and Hardin Lane.[24]No deed records have been found of Waugh having owned the property the school sat on, nor of his donating it to the school district.

In the 1860s, Waugh gave or sold all but 40 of his 320 acres to his three children, building a home for himself and his wife on remaining acreage at 1515 Adobe Road. In 1890, three years after his wife died, he sold his 40 acres and moved to San Francisco to live with his granddaughter.[25]

The boarded up remains for Waugh’s 1860s house at 1515 Adobe Road (photo public domain)

The Bethel School was often referred to in the newspapers during the 19th century as the “Waugh School.” In 1925, the school was formally renamed the Waugh School, after residents of the Waugh School District approved a $10,000 school bond to erect a new schoolhouse. [26]

Waugh School, 1925-1991 (photo in public domain)

The old Bethel schoolhouse was divided into two structures, and moved to the nearby chicken ranch of Thomas King at 1055 Adobe Road, where it was repurposed as an egg house and a shop.[27]

The new school Waugh School remained in operation until 1991, after which it was sold as a private residence, which it remains today. [28]

******


Thanks to Simone Kremkau of the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library for her research assistance.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Lorenzo Waugh Visits Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, August 3, 1900.

[2] “Pioneers Bought Vallejo’s Land,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1955; “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 9, 1963; “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 13, 1963; “Mumbly peg’ and ‘Giant Stride,’” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 7, 1991; “Waugh School the Way it Was,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 27, 1991; “Larry Reed and Cinda Gilliland Have Converted the Former Waugh School into Their Residence,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, February 19, 2011.

[3] Lorenzo Waugh, Autobiography of Lorenzo Waugh (Oakland, Calif.: Pacific Press, 1883), pgs. 135, 189; “A Long Life: Short Historical Sketch of Rev. Lorenzo Waugh,” Daily Commonwealth, August 27, 1884.

[4] J.P. Munro-Fraser, “Methodist Episcopal Church,” History of Sonoma County (Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), pp. 311-12; Waugh autobiography, pp. 218-220; “The Temperance Cause,” Marysville Daily Appeal, June 1, 1860; “M.E. Church in Windsor,” Russian River Flag, June 10, 1869; “Settlers’ Meeting,” Sonoma Democrat, March 24, 1859.

[5] Waugh, pp. 208-209; According to deed records, Waugh’s farm was lot 276 in Vallejo Township of Bower’s 1866 map of Sonoma County.

[6] The Preemption Act of 1841, 27th Congress, Ch. 16, 5 Stat. 453 (1841), accessed from www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org; Paul W. GatesThe California Land Act of 1851, California Historical Society, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Dec., 1971), pp. 395–430.

[7] Waugh, p. 212.

[8] Note: Waugh’s ranch was originally 160 acres. It sat on lot 376 of the Vallejo Township. The sale of lot 376 at 150 acres by Vallejo to his sons is listed as a partial sale, implying the additional 10 acres may have extended into the adjacent Cotate Rancho, and hence were cut from the lot in Rancho Petaluma.

[9] “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book 7, page 763, index image 390, October 25, 1858,” Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org.

[10] Killed,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 29, 1857; Allan Rosenus, General M.G. Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), pp. 215-218; Waugh autobiography, p. 213. Note: Waugh also erroneously states he lived on the land for 9 years, not the actual 6 years (1852-58), before Vallejo sold the farm.

[11] “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book 7, page 764, index image 390, November 19, 1858”; November 24, 1858; Book 7, page 795-6, index image 407; Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org.

[12] “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book 9, page 123, index image 840,” Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org.

[13] Waugh autobiography, p. 216.

[14] “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book 10, page 583, index image 428, September 29, 1860,” and “Book 10, page 604, index image 4439, October 11, 1860,” Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org.

[15] “Iowa School Built Way Back in 1852,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1955; Note: the report that Bethel was the first country school house built in Sonoma County most likely goes back to an erroneous news item in the July 17, 1863, edition of the Sonoma County Journal entitled “Laudable Enterprise,” reporting on the initiative of the Waugh School District to pass a tax to build a new schoolhouse for Bethel School.

[16] “Schools in Vallejo (Township),” Sonoma County Journal, February 26, 1858; “Our Public Schools,” Sonoma County Journal, December 19, 1856; “County School Funds,” Sonoma Democrat, January 28, 1858; “Apportionment,” Sonoma Democrat, July 14, 1859; “County School Funds,” Sonoma Democrat, January 28, 1858; “Apportionment,” Sonoma Democrat, July 14, 1859.

[17] “Sonoma County Elections, Sonoma County Journal, August 18, 1855; “Union Meeting at Bethel School House,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, October 13, 1864; “Bethel League,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 9, 1865; “May Day Festival,” Sonoma Democrat, May 13, 1865.

[18] “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book K, pages 176-77, index image 138,” Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org; Note: Unfortunately, Book K is not included in the digitized database of deeds previously on microfilm, so this is an assumption that Thompson, who located to the Vallejo Township at that time, purchased lot #269 from Vallejo, and that it totaled 160 acres. This assumption is reinforced by newspaper ads from the 1850s that cite Judge Thompson’s ranch as a landmark in the Vallejo Township.

[19] Thompson’s younger brother, Robert A. Thompson, Sr., a former U.S. Congressman, followed him to Petaluma in 1853, before moving to San Francisco where he served on the justices’ court in the 1870s. Two of Robert A. Thompson’s sons, Robert Jr. and Thomas Larkin Thompson, became newspapermen in Sonoma County. Thomas  founded the Sonoma County Journal and was the longtime editor and publisher of the Sonoma Democrat, and later a U.S. congressman and ambassador to Brazil. Robert Jr. served as the county’s longtime county clerk, and also wrote a history of the county in 1877 (Sources: Robert A. Thompson (1805-1876), findagrave.com; “Thomas L. Thompson,” Petaluma Courier, February 1, 1898; “R.A. Thompson,” Petaluma Courier, August 4, 1903).

[20] Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), p. 47.

[21] “To the Electors of the Waugh School District,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 11, 1863; “Enterprising,” Sonoma County Journal, March 27, 1863.

[22] “Deaths,” The Sacramento Daily Bee, October 28, 1864; “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book 15, page 254, index image 180,” Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org; “Pioneers Bought Vallejo’s Land,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1955: this article states that Mark Carr donated the land for Bernal School from his property, but no records of that donation or sale was found in the Sonoma County database of deed transfers; The deed of sale lists the property—lot 289 in the Vallejo Township— at 145 acres, which is also how it is also reflected on the 1866 A.B. Bowers map of Sonoma County. At some point not found in the deed records, Thompson reduced his property by 15 acres from the original 160 acres he purchased from Vallejo.

[23] “To the Electors of Waugh School District,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, April 20, 1865; “May Day Festival,” Sonoma Democrat, May 13, 1865.

[24] “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book 10, page 604, index image 439,” Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org.

[25]Index to Grantors, Vols. 8-12, 1888-1901: March 14, 1890, Book 125, page 330, image 418, Lorenzo Waugh, grantor, John Caltoft, grantee; San Francisco Directory, 1891 to 1892: Rev. Lorenzo Waugh, 1605 Mission Street, along with Edwin and Franklin Waugh; “Peggy’s Pencilings,” Courier, October 1, 1890: Waugh returned to his property on Adobe Road to remove the remains of his young son who died 20 years before, and move the body to Cypress Hill Cemetery; Source of boarded up Waugh home photo at 1515 Adobe Road: “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 9, 1963.

[26] “Contract for School at Waugh is Let for $8,114,” Petaluma Courier, June 26, 1925; “New Waugh School to Open November 1,” Petaluma Courier, October 16, 1925; “Waugh P.T.A. Plans Old Fashioned Dance, Petaluma Courier, October 15, 1925.

[27] “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 9, 1963.

[28] “New Use for Old Waugh School,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 13, 1991.

Featured

Yoneda and the “Red Angel”

The Love Story of Two Penngrove Social Justice Activists

By John Patrick Sheehy and Jack Withington

Karl Yoneda and Elaine Black, 1933 (photo public domain)

As if poultry farming wasn’t hard enough, being questioned by the FBI while vaccinating hens in a chicken coop seems an unnecessary strain for most.

But not Penngrove rancher Karl Yoneda.

A longtime political activist, he was used to living under surveillance, including during his military service in World War II, for which he was awarded a Gold Star.

Karl enlisted in the U.S. Army on December 7, 1942, a year to the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, he was incarcerated along with his wife and three-year-old son in Manzanar, one of ten concentration camps holding 110,000 Japanese Americans during the war. Located in the high desert of Owens Valley close to Mount Whitney, the camp was 200 miles north of Los Angeles, where Karl, the son of Japanese immigrants, was born in 1906.

Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1943-44 (photo by Ansel Adams, Library of Congress)

When he was seven, his family decided to move back to their native village near Hiroshima after his father was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Karl spent his formative years in Japan, during which the country was transitioning into a modern, industrialized colonial empire. By the early 1920s, labor unions and a variety of socialist, communist, and anarchist activists, were mounting public demonstrations for economic and democratic reforms, as well as protesting Japan’s rising militarism.

Idealistic and headstrong, Karl organized his first strike while still in high school, staging a walkout of  Hiroshima’s newspaper delivery boys over low pay. At 16, he made his way to Beijing, where he studied for two months with the blind Ukrainian anarchist and Esperanto teacher, Vasili Eroshenko.

Returning to Japan, he committed himself to a life of fighting social injustice, participating in several major Japanese labor strikes and publishing a journal for impoverished farmers.

Karl Yoneda (photo by Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress)

In 1926, to avoid being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, he boarded a freighter for San Francisco. Upon arriving, immigration officials classified him a kibei-nisei—born in the United States and educated in Japan—and locked him up at the Immigration Detention Center on Angel Island for two months. After his release, he went to Los Angeles, where he found work as a dishwasher and window washer.

As the American Federation of Labor (AFL) excluded people of color at the time, he joined the Japanese Workers’ Association, serving as their publication director. Changing his first name from Goso to Karl in honor of Karl Marx, he also began working with the communist-affiliated Trade Union Educational League, organizing migrant field workers in the Central Valley and Fresno.

In 1931, while at a Los Angeles demonstration calling for unemployment insurance in the midst of the Depression, Karl was severely beaten and thrown into jail by the police department’s notorious “Red Squad.”

Yoneda (with arrow in first photo) be beaten by the undercover Red Guard, LA Unemployment Protest, February 1931 (photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times)

Not wanting a dead corpse on their hands, the police called the International Labor Defense—which billed itself as “the legal department of the working class”—to bail him out.

Elaine Black, a young woman who had started working for the ILD just the day before, paid Karl’s bail and rushed him to the hospital. Sparks clearly flew during their initial encounter. A year later, after Elaine was assigned to the ILD offices in San Francisco, Karl showed up at her office, having taken a job in the city as editor of Rodo Shimbun, a Communist Party Japanese-language publication. Defying California’s “Anti-Miscegenation Law” against mixed race couples, the couple moved in together in the city’s Japantown.

A firebrand who mixed her moral fury at injustice with a sense of fashion, Elaine grew up on New York City’s Lower East Side, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, Mollie and Nathan Buchman. Marxist activists, the Buchmans fled their native Russia after Nathan was drafted into the Czar’s army. In 1920, the family relocated from New York to Southern California.

After being accidently caught up in a brutal sweep by the Red Squad, an outraged Elaine took a job with the ILD and joined the Communist Party, adopting the last name Black, initially as an alias when questioned by police. Conservative newspapers labeled her “The Tiger Woman.” Fellow activists dubbed her “The Red Angel” for her tireless work among striking workers, providing them with food, lodging, and bail money.

Elaine Black with “Free the Scottsboro Boys” activists in 1934 (photo People World Archives)

In 1934, Elaine and Karl became involved in the West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, with Elaine serving as the only woman on the strike committee, and Karl leading the effort to dissuade Japanese laborers from crossing the picket line. Both were jailed—Elaine four times, including for seditious utterances and vagrancy when she went to court to bail out other activists. The strike ultimately resulted in the unionization of all of the ports on the West Coast.

In the fall of 1934, Karl made California history as the first Japanese American to campaign for the state Assembly, running unsuccessfully on a platform of racial equality, unemployment insurance, and a living wage. Shortly before election day, the Red Squad arrested him during a campaign speech, charging him with vagrancy and making sure the newspapers highlighted his immoral living arrangement with the Tiger Woman.

In 1935, concerned their “shacking up” together was a political liability, Karl and Elaine boarded a train for Seattle, where they could be legally wed. To avoid being charged with violating the Mann Act, which criminalized transporting someone across state lines for immoral behavior, they rode in separate train cars. 

For the remainder of the 1930s, Karl and Elaine pursued their political activism, with Karl forming a union for cannery workers in Alaska, and the two of them picketing Japanese cargo ships on the San Francisco docks that were being loaded with scrap iron for making Japanese military armaments.

In need of a steady income during the Depression, Karl became a longshoreman. In 1939, Elaine gave birth to their son Tom. A few months later, she made an unsuccessful run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, calling for low-cost housing, free childcare for working women, and civil rights.

Then came Pearl Harbor. Two months after the attack, President Roosevelt, bowing to xenophobia, racism, and baseless fears of spies, signed Executive Order 9066, leading to the incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese descent, both American citizens and immigrants, living on the west coast.

Surprisingly, Karl and Elaine initially joined others—many of them Japanese Americans—in publicly supporting Roosevelt’s order. As Communists, they felt that the need to fight fascism outweighed other concerns.

Yoneda family, Elaine, Tom, and Karl, at Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1942 (photo California Historical Society)

Karl and his two year-old son Tommy were sent to the camp at Manzanar. Elaine had to fight her way in, becoming one of only seven Caucasians interned there. Karl initiated a petition at the camp to permit young Nisei—men born in the U.S. to immigrant parents—to volunteer for military service. After eight months at Manzanar—during which they received regular death threats from a small group of pro-Japan fascists known as the Black Dragons—Karl was accepted into the army, and Elaine and Tommy were allowed to return to San Francisco.

Karl was assigned with other Nisei to the psychological warfare team of Military Intelligence Service, whose motto was “Go For Broke.” Deployed to India, Burma, and China, he drafted and edited propaganda to be scattered among Japanese troops and transmitted over radios, often deep behind enemy lines. Karl was usually accompanied by Caucasian soldiers, not only to ensure his protection, but also to keep him from falling into enemy hands by shooting him if necessary.

Karl Yoneda, 2nd from right, with the Military Intelligence Service in Burma, 1944 (photo California Historical Society)

At the war’s end, Karl reunited with Elaine and Tommy, and returned briefly to working on the San Francisco docks before a health issue put him out of work. A group of Jewish chicken ranchers in Petaluma, who knew Karl and Elaine from their socialist circles, urged them to try raising poultry. With financial help from Elaine’s family and a GI loan, the couple were able to buy a six-acre ranch on the Petaluma Hill Road in Penngrove. Elaine’s parents soon joined them from Los Angeles.

Devoting themselves to the hard work of raising meat birds, Karl and Elaine also found time to become engaged in the local community, with Karl joining the board of the Petaluma Cooperative Hatchery, and Elaine serving as county president of the Civil Rights Congress. During the Red Scare of the McCarthy Era, they were routinely kept under observation by the FBI, who even found it necessary to question Karl while he was vaccinating his chickens.

Their son Tom graduated from Petaluma High in 1957. A straight-A student, he lettered in basketball, football, and track, and was elected student body president, winning the Petaluma B’nai B’rith Frankel-Rosenbaum Award for outstanding scholarship, and an academic scholarship to Stanford.

By 1960, Petaluma’s role as the Egg Basket of the World was in serious decline due to the rise of factory farms elsewhere. Karl and Elaine sold their chicken ranch and moved back to San Francisco, where Karl returned to working as a casual longshoreman, and Elaine went to work in the office of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

Elaine and Karl Yoneda, 1980s (photo courtesy of Jack Withington)

They remained engaged activists, traveling to Tokyo as delegates at a nuclear disarmament conference, participating in numerous anti-Vietnam protests, and writing articles and lecturing on labor history. In recognition of their 50th anniversary together in 1983, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors saluted them for dedicating their lives to fighting for the betterment of other people’s lives.

Elaine died in 1988, a day after taking part in a San Francisco demonstration for peace in Nicaragua with Jesse Jackson. Karl died eleven years later.

In 2011, members of Karl’s all-Japanese Military Intelligence Service unit were honored with the nation’s highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal.

******

C0-author Jack Withington is the author of Historical Buildings of Sonoma County. A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.

SOURCES:

Books, Journals, Websites

Displaced: Manzanar 1942-1945, edited by Evan Backes (T. Adler Books, 2018).

Vivian McGuckin Raineri, The Red Angel: The Life and Times of Elaine Black Yoneda, 1906-1988 (New York: International Publishers, 1991).

Rachel Schreiber, Elaine Black Yoneda (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022).

Tim Wheeler, “Karl Yoneda and Elaine Black—star-crossed lovers in a class war,” People’s World, November 19, 2020; https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/karl-yoneda-and-elaine-black-star-crossed-lovers-in-a-class-war/

Bill Yenne, Rising Sons: The Japanese American GIs Who Fought for the United States in World War II (New York: Macmillan, 2007).

Karl G. Yoneda, Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (University of California Los Angeles, Asian American, Studies Center, 1983).

“Military Intelligence, Densho Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Military%20Intelligence%20Service/

“Congressional Gold Medal Presented to Nisei Soldiers of World War II,” United States Mint, November 2, 2011.  https://www.usmint.gov/news/press-releases/20111102-congressional-gold-medal-presented-to-nisei-soldiers-of-world-war-ii

“Japanese American Soldiers Will Receive Congressional Gold Medal,” Army.mil, November 4, 2011.https://www.army.mil/article/66904/japanese_american_soldiers_will_receive_congressional_gold_medal

Newspapers

Los Angeles Times: “Riots Mark Nationwide Red Demonstrations,” February 11, 1931; “Elaine Black Yoneda, 81; ‘The Red Angel’ of the 1930s,” May 29, 1988.

San Francisco Examiner: “Couple Battled the Prejudices of Politics and Race,” August 2, 1978; “Friends Salute Labor Activist,” May 21, 1988; “Labor and Socialist Activist Yoneda,” May 14, 1999.

The Los Angeles Mirror: Les Wagner, “The Mirror Daily” column, August 21, 1950.

The Miami Herald (AP): “‘War Forces’ Hit by Leftists,” August 3, 1960.

Oral Histories

“Oral History with Karl Yoneda,” CSU Fullerton Center for Oral and Public History, March 3, 1974;

https://cdm16855.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16855coll4/id/38194
Featured

The Making of Mr. Petaluma, Bill Soberanes

Soberanes and his pipe, 1940s (photo courtesy of Soberanes Archives)

My mother first met Billy Soberanes in the summer of 1944, while he was home on leave from the Merchant Marine. Single, her fiancé having been killed while fighting in the Pacific, she was working behind the soda fountain at Pete Fundas’ Candy Store beside the Mystic Theater. She thought he was handsome and good-hearted, but somewhat jittery, speaking in such excited bursts she had trouble following what he was saying. That wasn’t unusual, as a number of men home on leave from the war seemed rattled.

After striking up a conversation, Soberanes invited her out for dinner and a movie. She accepted, thinking it was the least she could do before he returned to sea. Following the movie, he took her to the top of the hill west of town to view the stars above the evening fog layer. He drove like he talked—fast and skittish. They were still shrouded in fog when they reached the top of the hill. He parked the car and awkwardly leaned over to kiss her. She slapped him across the face, and ordered him to drive her home.

A few weeks later, Soberanes smashed up the family car before returning to sea.[1] He never drove again. Neither did he ever date my mother again, although they became lifelong friends, bonding over a shared love of local gossip.

Soberanes was, by most measures, an odd duck. My father, a classmate of his at St. Vincent’s Academy, regarded him as something of a buzzing fly, firing off stray ideas and offbeat jokes with the rapidity of a machine gun. My aunt, who also attended school with him, said he was a mischievous prankster who nervously ate through a pencil a day at school. As a grown man, Soberanes traded in his pencils for a briar pipe, although he often smoked more matches than tobacco, incessantly tamping down and relighting his pipe.[2]

Born in 1921, William Caulfield Soberanes grew up in Petaluma’s Old East neighborhood extending from the railroad tracks to Payran Street, among an enclave of Irish relatives orbiting around the home of his grandfather, Thomas A. Caulfield, on East Washington Street between Wilson and Lakeville streets. Caulfield, who immigrated to California from Ireland in 1876, was Petaluma’s top cattle dealer, with a 32-acre stockyard operation that extended along Lakeville Street from Wilson Street to Caulfield Lane.[3]

In 1900, one of Caulfield’s three daughters, Maggie, married Ed Soberanes, an accountant for a shoe manufacturer that had recently relocated a new factory from Oakland to the Old East.[4] A native of St. Helena, Soberanes descended from a family of early 19th century Californios with ties to General Mariano Vallejo, who built the Petaluma Adobe in 1836.[5]

Ed and Maggie purchased a house at 421 East Washington Street, two doors down from Thomas Caulfield’s home. The Old East was then a working-class neighborhood, populated largely by Italian and German immigrants, many of whom worked in Petaluma’s eastside factory district, the railroad yard, the grain mills, and the shipping docks of McNear Canal. On the corner across the street from the Soberanes house sat the Tivoli Hotel, whose restaurant, bar, and backlot bocce ball court served as an Italian hub in the neighborhood.

The Soberanes home at 421 East Washington Street (Photo Sonoma County Library)

Ed Soberanes eventually became manager of the shoe factory. He and Maggie had five children, of which Bill was fourth in the birth order, born ten years after their third child. After the shoe factory closed in 1927, Ed went to work for his two brothers-in-laws, Will and Tom Caulfield, Jr., who had taken over their father’s cattle trade business and also opened a chain of local meat markets, one of which sat beside the Tivoli, directly across from the Soberanes house.

Ed died when his son Billy was 15. He was looked after by his uncles on the block, in particular Tom Caulfield, who, in addition to trading cattle, was one of the town’s preeminent storytellers and vaudeville performers. He also judged rodeos and refereed boxing matches throughout the state, both of which Soberanes engaged in as a young man.

After graduating from high school in 1941, Soberanes briefly followed his two older brothers and cousins into the family cattle business. Then came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. After initially enlisting in the National Guard, in 1943 Soberanes joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, whose ships kept overseas troops armed and fed during the war.[6]

Soberanes (at top) with Merchant Marine crew (Photo courtesy of Soberanes Archives)

It was undoubtedly a colorful experience for the young Soberanes. With most able-bodied men enlisted in the military, the Merchant Marine was forced to lower their standards, filling out their civilian crews with drunks, idlers, thieves, brawlers, and card sharps who went by nicknames like Low Life McCormick, No Pants Jones, Screwball McCarthy, Foghorn Russell, and Soapbox Smitty.[7]

Following the war, Soberanes tried his hand at a variety of jobs around Petaluma, including buying and selling hay, and working for his uncles in the cattle business. But nothing caught his fancy. “The trouble with work,” he told a friend, “is that it stops a fellow from talking.”[8]

That wasn’t the case at Gilardi’s Corner, the town’s swanky cocktail lounge at the northeast corner of Washington and Kentucky streets where talking was the primary pastime, when one wasn’t rolling bar dice or placing discreet bets on horse races and boxing matches in the back room. The atmosphere in Gilardi’s was relaxed, playful, and open to possibilities. Men wore fitted suits and narrow ties, while women were dressed in high heels and cocktail dresses.

Gilardi’s Corner, circa 1950 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

Together with the Hotel Petaluma’s Redwood Room across the street, Gilardi’s comprised Petaluma’s “night club row,” where the post-war “smart set” gathered to listen to jazz, dance, and imbibe highballs served by mixologists like “Happy” Merango, “Red” Cockrill, and “The Sheik” Sheehy, my father.[9]

“Diamond Mike” Gilardi opened the lounge in 1937, looking to bring a touch of class to the cluster of local bars and taverns opening up after Prohibition. Having refashioned himself from the son of a Swiss-Italian dairy rancher in Hicks Valley into one of the town’s preeminent Dapper Dans, Gilardi became a mentor to the young Soberanes.[10]

The bar at Gilardi’s Corner, late 1940s (Photo Sonoma County Library)

But while Soberanes was naturally drawn to the glamour and excitement of night club row, his quirky nature and awkwardness with women left him somewhat on the periphery. That is, until he found his way to the inside through the camera.

As a boy, Soberanes redeemed a bunch of cereal box tops through the mail to help purchase his first Brownie camera.[11] Photography soon became not just a hobby but an obsession, the attraction not in the aesthetics of what he captured on film, but in the charged excitement of people he caught in the spotlight.

With the predatory instincts of a paparazzo, Soberanes began covering sporting competitions, political rallies, theatrical events, music performances, parades, and even fires, coaxing his way into some events, sneaking into others.[12] As a charm offensive, he employed his natural sense of curiosity, learning a little about practically everything, just enough to ask seemingly informed questions of boxers, baseball players, rodeo cowboys, politicians, movie stars, labor leaders, poets, policemen, gamblers, and outlaws.

Soberanes with camera, 1950s (Photo courtesy Soberanes Archives)

Once he photographed them, he posed to be photographed with them, like a hunter showing off his trophy kill. Those who refused his cameo request, he photobombed.[13]

By 1950, Soberanes was ready to turn his avocation into a full-time profession. Assisted by his cousin Nettie Rose Caulfield, a freelancer who wrote for rodeo and motorcycle racing publications, as well as Cat Fancy magazine, he began writing a weekly column for the Petaluma News, a local newspaper.[14]

Called  “So They Tell Me,” the column featured Soberanes’ photographs paired with short, snappy items readers could quickly skim. A cornucopia of scoops, sightings, sports, social events, politics, personalities, and historical trivia, it bristled with as many names as he could squeeze in, having learned that readers scanned for either their name or the name of someone they knew for a bit of gossip to share with friends over lunch.

Logo for Soberanes’ column in the Petaluma News (courtesy of Petaluma Argus-Courier Archives)

As his model, Soberanes turned to popular San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, whose rapid-fire “three-dot journalism”—named for the ellipses separating his column’s short items—was itself a blatant imitation of Walter Winchell, the syndicated American newspaper gossip columnist and radio news commentator known for having turned journalism into a form of entertainment.

Soberanes used his new column as a launch pad for his first big public campaign: building a second firehouse in town on the east side. A new, postwar suburban housing boom had descended upon Petaluma, beginning with subdivisions along Payran and Madison streets, inundating the Old East neighborhood with new young families. That created an access issue for the fire department located on the west side of the Petaluma River, which was sometimes hampered by raised drawbridges at D and Washington streets due to riverboat traffic.

For Soberanes, the campaign held personal meaning, as his father had been a long-serving fire commissioner. After the bond issue passed in June 1951 for constructing a new firehouse at Payran and D streets, the 29-year-old Soberanes was honored by town leaders at a special banquet dinner. He was now in the spotlight himself.[15]

Petaluma Fire Station No. 2, Payran & D streets (Photo Sonoma County Library)

A few months later, the Petaluma News closed down. Soberanes’s weekly column was quickly picked up by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, who expanded it to three times a week.[16] He now had a profession, but not a lucrative one, as he was paid no more than $5 a column.[17] To get by, he continued living at home with his mother and older sister Margaret, a teacher at McKinley School.

In 1954, the “So They Tell Me” column moved to the Petaluma Argus-Courier. In his first column on June 2nd, Soberanes announced his intentions: “We will tell you about local happenings, about the many people we chance to meet from all walks of life, the famous, near famous, the characters, and the everyday citizen.”[18]

Soberanes on on his beat, 1954 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

Since he no longer drove, Soberanes made his daily rounds around town on foot. Nattily dressed in suit and tie, a camera bag slung over his shoulder, coat pockets filled with pens and spiral-bound notebooks, a pipe held between his teeth or left smoldering in his coat pocket, he covered an average 20 miles a day, checking in with his network of tipsters.[19]

Able to get by on little sleep, Soberanes devoted the wee hours of the morning to sitting down at his Royal typewriter and, with two fingers, pounding out his column from a pocketful of notes.[20] Although he was careful to avoid expressing malice toward anyone, his column was largely hearsay, and not fact-checked. He relied on readers to set him straight, happily publishing their letters, in the belief that a complaining reader was better than no reader at all.

He also regularly featured reports in his column from anonymous “correspondents,” using pennames like Desert Dan Delaney, The Dreamer, Turkeylegs Thomas, and Fast Walking Charley.[21] To help keep Petaluma tangentially connected to the national stage, he took regular trips to San Francisco, returning with first-hand gossip and trophy pictures of himself with high-profile actors, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities.[22]

Soberanes and Jayne Mansfield at the Flamingo Hotel, 1950s (Photo courtesy of Pierre Ehret, Flamingo Hotel)

In 1954, he began hosting a weekly 15-minute show on KAFP, the local radio station located at the south end of town, whose call letters were anecdotally said to stand for “Krowing Always For Petaluma.”[23] He interviewed sports figures and colorful local characters like Pop Pickle, an old woodsman who responded to his questions with a variety of bird calls.[24] Soberanes himself was often introduced as the “man who talks faster than the speed of sound.”[25]

Soberanes interviewing Pop Pickle at KAFP radio station, 1954 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

On good days, Soberanes’ column offered everything one might expect from an entire newspaper—only in 1,100 words. Much as John Steinbeck said about Herb Caen, Soberanes made a many-faceted character of Petaluma.[26] It wasn’t long before people were calling him the “Walter Winchell of Petaluma.”

That proved a valuable service during the 1950s and 1960s, as Petaluma transformed from an agriculturally based town of 8,000, into a sprawling suburb of more than 30,000. The poultry and dairy industries that had powered the city’s prosperity for half a century were declining due to the rise of factory farms elsewhere, and the downtown business district was being decimated by new shopping malls erected on the east side of town.

A city used to proudly punching above its weight, first as the third busiest river port in the state, and then as the Egg Basket of the World, Petaluma suddenly found itself facing an existential crisis. For Soberanes, that spelled opportunity. Despite his love of old-time Petaluma, he wasn’t interested in living in a museum, he relished the excitement of the new too much.

To help stave off the city’s fear of becoming ordinary, he devoted his column to celebrating all that was eccentric, wonderful, and unique about Petaluma. In doing so, he provided long-time residents with reassurance that their small-town values remained intact, and offered newcomers an introduction to the town’s idiosyncratic nature as well as a path to local acceptance—to be mentioned in Soberanes’ column was to have arrived in the clubby city.

Soberanes playing bocce ball behind the Tivoli Hotel, 1950s (Photo courtesy of the Petaluma Argus-Courier)

The one thing missing for him was excitement, the sort local promoter Bert Kerrigan had brought to town following World War I, when he put the city’s chicken industry on the map nationally.[27] Kerrigan advised Soberanes not to “put all his eggs in one basket”—while reminiscing about the past was fun, one couldn’t base one’s future on it, as change was inevitable.[28]  

One evening in the fall of 1954, Soberanes dropped by Gilardi’s Corner to find two men preparing to engage in a common barroom bout of wristwrestling. As he watched customers lay down their bets and cheer on the two competitors, he had an idea.

Jack Homel, a trainer for the Detroit Tigers baseball team, wintered in Boyes Hot Springs during the off-season and was a frequent Gilardi’s patron. Soberanes had heard him boast many times of having never lost a wristwrestling match, despite having faced hundreds of opponents, including football players, boxers, steel workers, and longshoremen. The same claim was made by Lakeville rancher Oliver Kullberg who, at two-hundred-and-something-pounds, was reputedly the strongest man in Petaluma.

Soberanes proposed to Gilardi they pit Homel and Kullberg against each other in a fundraising match during the annual Sports Show that raised money for the March of Dimes.

On the evening of January 27, 1955, Homel and Kullberg sat down for their match at a round table in the back room of Gilardi’s Corner and clasped hands. For almost three minutes, the two men struggled to best one another before the table reportedly collapsed beneath them. The referee declared the match a draw.

Oliver Kullberg, left, and Jack Homel, right, compete in first wristwrestling match at Gilardi’s Corner, as Soberanes (behind Kullberg) and Mike Gilardi (behind Homel) look on, 1955
(Photo Steve Farley, courtesy of the Petaluma Argus-Courier)

In the days following, wristwrestling became the most talked about sporting event in town. People clamored for more. Happy to oblige, Soberanes, Gilardi, and Homel formed a three-man committee to create an annual wristwrestling tournament, with Soberanes’ cousin, Nettie Rose Caulfield serving the tournament’s secretary.

Within a few years the tournament’s popularity outgrew Gilardi’s Corner, moving first to Hermann Sons Hall and then to the Petaluma Veterans Memorial Building, where it played to thousands of attendees, including a variety of movie stars, public officials, and celebrity athletes recruited by Soberanes.[29] In 1969, ABC’s Wide World of Sports began televising it.[30]

Wristwrestling, Petaluma’s answer to the Calaveras frog jumping contest, became the biggest thing to happen to the town since Bert Kerrigan declared it the Egg Basket of the World.[31]

Its success spawned a more annual events for Soberanes—the Walkathon from Sonoma to Petaluma, the Whiskerino Contest, Petaluma River Rowboat Contest, the Table Tennis Championship Tournament, the Ugly Dog Contest, and the Harry Houdini Séance—but none of them matched the worldwide appeal of the Wristwrestling Tournament.[32]

Left to right: Ross Smith, Jim Withington, and Soberanes at Old Adobe Fiesta Boat Race, 1970 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1964, at the age of 42, Soberanes married his longtime girlfriend, 39-year-old Jane Edgerton Turner, and began dividing his time between Jane’s house in Santa Rosa and his mother’s house on East Washington Street.[33]

Like many others, my mother would always stop to give him a lift when she spotted him shuffling along the street. He would climb into the car with his camera bag and pipe, the two of them engaged in a breakneck exchange of gossip as we rode along.

Soberanes was a regular guest at my parents’ cocktail parties, his rapid-fire voice carrying throughout the house to my bedroom. Some nights he would showed up unannounced at the family dinner table, regaling us with a scattershot of news he’d gathered that day mixed with memories of people and places from the old days in Petaluma.

After dinner, my parents retired to the living room to watch television, leaving my sister and me to clean up in the kitchen while Soberanes smoked his pipe and rambled on. Growing up in an Irish family, I was used to colorful raconteurs, but nothing prepared me for his erratic, pinball manner of storytelling—except perhaps watching a Marx brothers movie.

Soberanes photo-bombing Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford at Lake Tahoe, 1950s (Photo courtesy of Petaluma Argus-Courier)

The 1970s marked a turning point in Soberanes’ reporting. After two decades on the beat, many of his reliable tipsters had aged into retirement or the grave. A number of his old haunts were likewise gone, including Gilardi’s Corner, torn down in 1967 to make way for a new bank’s parking lot.[34]

In 1971, he changed the name of his column from “So They Tell Me” to simply “Bill Soberanes,” and increasingly turned his focus to local history and nostalgia, creating a new running feature called “My Fascinating World of People,” which featured a personality profile of someone he had interviewed in the past, along with a photo taken of himself with the subject.[35]

Bill Soberanes with “Diamond Mike” Gilardi at the Soberanes Room in the Hideaway Bar, 1971 (photo courtesy of Anthony Tustler, Sonoma County Bugle)

Commonly referred to as “Mr. Petaluma” by this time, he sought to distinguish himself from other columnists by coining the term “peopleologist,” which he defined as a person who studies people from all walks of life. Unlike a traditional journalist who tries to remain invisible behind the camera, a peopleoglogist liked to be in front of the lens, taking part in the action.[36] To underscore the point, he began laying claim to having been photographed with “more famous, infamous, usual and unusual people than anyone in the world.”[37]

Soberanes photo-bombing the Beatles at San Francisco press conference, 1966 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

In his own way, Soberanes was rebranding himself with the times, which was seeing the rise of a “new journalism” practiced by writers such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, who placed themselves in the stories they reported.

In 1983, he moved back to town with his wife, taking up residency in a house his father had built beside the family home at 421 East Washington Street, which was now occupied by just his sister Margaret, his mother having died a decade before.

Much had changed. East Washington Street was now a four-lane artery connecting the east and west sides of town. The Tivoli Hotel was gone, as was Caulfield’s Meat Market and Thomas Caulfield’s house on the corner. The old block Soberanes had grown up on was now host to a gas station, a carpet store, and a couple of fast food restaurants.

Soberanes on the porch of 423 East Washington Street, 1999 (Photo by Leena Hintsanen, courtesy of the Petaluma Argus-Courier)

When not making his rounds around town, Soberanes spent his days sitting on the front porch of his house with his pipe and typewriter, entertaining visitors and waving to people as they honked their horns while driving past. When with my mother and I visited him, he was much the same as I remembered him as a boy, jumping around from topic to topic like a pinball. Having created a many-faceted character of Petaluma, I realized he had also created a character of himself. At the end of the day, I wondered if anyone could say they actually knew him beneath the mask.

On January 27, 2003, my mother unexpectedly died of a sudden heart attack. In his column that week noting her passing, Soberanes recalled her working behind the soda fountain at Pete Fundas’ Candy Store, whose slogan was “We hire the prettiest girls in town.”[38]

Four months later, on June 2, 2003, Soberanes died of congestive heart failure. It was 49 years to the date that he published his first column in the Petaluma Argus-Courier. In all those years, he never missed a deadline, including for his final column, a remembrance of his meeting with the comedian Bob Hope.[39] The column’s title, “Thanks for the Memories,” was a fitting farewell for the man known as Mr. Petaluma.

Soberanes on the beat along Kentucky Street, 1980s (Photo Sonoma County Library)

*****

FOOTNOTES:


[1] “News of Our Men and Women in Uniform,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 13, 1944;

“Personal Items,” Petaluma Argus-Courier July 15, 1944.

[2] DFL Miller, “Sixteen Years of Columns,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1970.

[3] “A Son Arrived at the Ed Soberanes Home, Petaluma Argus, October 20, 1921; “T.A. Caulfield Called by Death,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 19, 1928.

[4] “Shoe Factory to Pass into History,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 16, 1927.

[5] “Searching for the Elusive Howes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 25, 1997.

[6] “E.T. Soberanes Claimed by Death,” P, January 3, 1938; “St. Vincent High School Graduation,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 1941; “Billy Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 7, 1943; “California State Assembly Resolution by the Honorable Bill Filantes, M.D., 9th Assembly District; Relative to commending Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 1988.

[7] William Geroux, “The Merchant Marine Were the Unsung Heroes of World War II,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 28, 2016.

[8] “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968.

[9] Bill Soberanes, “Petaluma Landmark Closes Doors,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 1, 1967; Bill Soberanes, “Colorful Fifties in Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 22, 1969.

[10] “People You Should Know,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 30, 1937;

[11] “Bill Soberanes: Columnist, Petaluma Booster,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 1988.

[12] “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968.

[13] “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968.

[14] Bill Soberanes, “Colorful Fifties in Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 22, 1969; Bill Soberanes, “Nettie Rose’s Writing Boosted Morale of WWII Servicemen,” AC, July 2, 1986; “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968.

[15] “Thanks Given to Bill Soberanes in Promoting Fire Sub-Station,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 30, 1951.

[16] “Soberanes’ Column Now Three Times a Week,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 6, 1952.

[17] Interview with Lee Torliatt, fellow Press-Democrat columnist in 1954, September 2021; Torliatt reported they were paid 20 cents an inch.

[18] “So They Tell Me” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 2, 1954.

[19] DFL Miller, “Sixteen Years of Columns,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1970; Prescott Sullivan sports column, San Francisco Examiner, January 30, 1963.

[20] “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968; “Bill Soberanes” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 31, 1996; “About Bill: Facts and Trivia,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 25, 2003.

[21] Prescott Sullivan sports column, San Francisco Examiner, January 26, 1966.

[22] “How Does Soberanes Manage to Get All Those Photos?” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 1988.

[23] “Sunday Column is Missed,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, October 9, 1951; “KAFP Program—1490,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 23, 1954.

[24] Bob Wells, “Pop Is 70 but Spry as a Cricket,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 23, 1954.

[25] DFL Miller, “Sixteen Years of Columns,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1970.

[26] “Cool Gray City Found its Voice in Herb Caen,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 2, 2002.

[27] “1925 Egg Day Festival,” Petaluma Argus, August 8, 1925.

[28] “Bill Soberanes” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1984.

[29] “Dimes Parade, Sports Show, Kick Off Tonight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 13, 1954; Bill Soberanes, “So They Tell Me” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier: October 23, 1954, December 11, 1954, December 15, 1954, January 30, 1962, March 29, 1967, September 28, 1977; “The Early Days of Wristwrestling in Petaluma: How a Game Became a Sport,” ArmwrestlersOnly.com, December 5, 2013; “Dimes parade, Sports Show, Kick Off Tonight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 13, 1954;

[30] “Big Show’s Tonight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 2, 1969.

[31] “The City,” Dick Nolan column, San Francisco Examiner, January 22, 1959.

[32] “Remembering Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 18, 2003.

[33] “Marriage Licenses,” San Francisco Examiner, March 13, 1964; DFL Miller, “Sixteen Years of Columns,” Petaluma Argus-Courier,  June 15, 1970

[34] Bill Soberanes, “Petaluma Landmark Closes Doors,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 1, 1967.

[35] “Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 29, 1971; “Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 16, 1972, February 14, 1973.

[36] Carl Nolte, “Big Put Down at Petaluma,” San Francisco Examiner, February 12, 1967; Bill Soberanes, “A Columnist Reflects,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 20, 1971.

[37] “Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 6, 1973.

[38] Bill Soberanes, “Go Fly a Kite,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 19, 2003; “Sweet Memories of Pete Fundas,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 19, 2000; “Bill Sobernes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 2, 1995.

[39] Katie Watts, “Bill ‘Mr. Petaluma’ Soberanes Dies,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 2003; “Thanks for the Memories,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 2003.

Featured

Petaluma’s Spooky House

The High Life and Low Times of a 19th Century Victorian Mansion

By John Patrick Sheehy & Katherine Rinehart

Clark Mansion,11 Hill Drive, 1977 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1967, attendees of Petaluma’s second annual Beauty Conference were treated to a bus tour around town, looking for areas in need of a facelift. The major blemishes they identified were dozens of abandoned chicken houses, decrepit remains of Petaluma’s heyday as Egg Basket of the World.1

But old chicken shacks weren’t the only eyesores marring the city’s good looks. The west side was pockmarked with timeworn Victorians, many of them carved into apartments during the Depression and World War II.

Following the tour, the city’s Beautification Committee, appointed by Mayor Helen Putnam to help spruce up the town, began a vigorous campaign to burn down the dilapidated chicken houses. By Christmas, 25 had been torched.2

Dilapidated Petaluma chicken house (photo public domain)

The committee then turned its attention to the aging Victorians.

Facing decades of deferred maintenance, many Victorian landlords found it stylish—and less costly—to encase the houses in stucco, aluminum, or asbestos siding. Others merely covered up the polychromatic palettes of their ornamental houses with a single color of paint, commonly white with green trim.

During Petaluma’s suburban housing boom in the fifties and sixties, developers began bulldozing the Victorians and replacing them with modern ranch style homes. With their open floor plans and long, close-to-the-ground profiles, ranch houses offered a more informal and casual living style than the ornate, multi-floored Victorians, which struck many people as creepy and old-fashioned.

That was, until the sixties counterculture rediscovered their beauty.

Stick Style Victorian, 908 Steiner Street, San Francisco, painted by Maija Gegeris, 1967 (photo courtesy of San Francisco Heritage)

Among the most striking visual icons of San Francisco’s legendary “Summer of Love” in 1967 were the old Victorians. A band of artists known as “the colorist movement” proudly reasserted their ornamentation and design in a dazzling array of hues as “Painted Ladies,” rekindling a love of Victorian architecture.3

That love soon spread to Petaluma. In February 1968, a group of local women, inspired by Mayor Putnam’s call to beauty, formed an advocacy group for the preservation and restoration of Victorians. They called themselves the Heritage Homes Club.4


Shirley Butti, center, with Lillian Fratini and Kay Stack, at Heritage Home meeting, Petaluma Woman’s Club (photo courtesy of Petlauma Argus-Courier, March 18, 196

The club held its second meeting at the Victorian home of their newly elected president, Shirley Butti.5 A fourth-generation Petaluman, Butti and her husband Plinio were in the process of restoring the long neglected Queen Anne mansion they had purchased at 11 Hill Drive. Locally known as “The Spooky House,” it was originally built in 1886 for Michigan lumber baron Melvin Clark and his wife Emily6

Clark Mansion, 11 Hill Drive, 1979 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The Clarks began wintering in Petaluma in 1874, after Mrs. Clark’s father and stepmother, Edward and Sarah Ann Jewell, moved out from Michigan with their four children for Edward’s health. The Jewells apparently chose Petaluma because a nearby relative, Omar Jewell, owned a 680-acre dairy ranch in Olema.7

Melvin Clark operated a large wholesale grocery business in Grand Rapids with his brother. Planning to escape to Petaluma during Michigan’s snowy winters, Clark and his wife purchased a large Victorian for the family at the northwest corner of Liberty Street and Western Avenue.8

For reasons unknown, they sold the house after a year, and returned with the Jewells to Grand Rapids, where Melvin Clark ventured into the lumber business, soon becoming one of the largest lumber barons in the county, with thousands of acres of timber and mineral land, and a series of mills in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Puget Sound area.9

After Edward Jewell’s health took a turn for the worse in 1880, he returned with his family to Petaluma. The Clarks also returned, purchasing house on D Street.10 In 1885, they decided to build their own home, purchasing John McGrath’s 87-acre ranch extending across Petaluma’s west hills from Western Avenue to near Hayes Lane. The next year they erected a 14-room, three-story Victorian mansion—the future “Spooky House”—at the top of Western Avenue overlooking Petaluma.11

The house’s two and half storeys had irregular roof forms, with windowed gablets and two corner towners. The upper story was clad in fish scale shingles, and the lower in shiplap siding. The windows were long and tall, with colored squares of “flash glass” around the upper sashes. The veranda over the entrance included a small impediment with the letter “C” for Clark.

Clark Mansion turret, colored flash glass attic window, and triangle gable above portico with “C” for Clark (photo courtesy of Ken Butti)

The features were similar to other Queen Anne Victorians designed that same year in town by a young local architect named Ed Hedges, the A.L Whitney home on Sixth Street and the David Tibbitts home on Post Street, which indicate that Hedges may have been the architect.12

For 14 years, the Clark family wintered at the ranch, while the Jewells lived there year round, growing oats and barley.13 After Edward Jewell’s death in 1900, his widow and children relocated to Oakland, and the Clarks’ visits from Grand Rapids became less frequent.14 In 1905, they sold the mansion and ranch to the Hillside Land Company, a local development group headed by Alexander B. Hill.15

A scion of William Hill, one of Petaluma’s early bankers, “Allie” Hill joined his father’s banking firm in 1886. After his father’s death in 1902, he inherited a great fortune that reputedly made him the wealthiest man in Sonoma County. He also faced a period of personal turmoil, when in 1903, his wife Hattie, daughter of Hiram Fairbanks, another wealthy local banker, and the mother of his three children, divorced him in a very public court case.

A year later, in a surprising turn of events, Hill married Hattie’s sister Elizabeth, and soon after moved into the 8,500 square foot Victorian mansion of his in-laws, the Fairbanks, at 758 D Street.16

In the fall of 1904, he assisted his widowed mother, Josie Hill, in erecting the Hill Opera House on Keller and Washington streets—site of today’s Phoenix Theater—as a tribute to his father.17

A few months later, Hill and his partners purchased the Clark Ranch, and set about subdividing it into small lots for into small lots for “hillside villas, to be anchored by street named Hill Boulevard that stretched from Western Avenue to D Street. 18Hill selected a spot at the top of Bassett Street upon which to build a mansion for himself and his new bride.19

1910 Sanborn map of Hill’s street layout for Hillside Tract in section of map not colored, extending south from Western Avenue along Webster Street to B Street (map courtesy of Library of Congress)

Directly behind the Clark Mansion, Hill opened a quarry to provide crushed rock for the development’s roads and sidewalks. He left the mansion itself vacant, renting out a small white house beside it to the quarry’s foreman, German immigrant Louis Neilsen and his family.20

Aside from its unfortunate fate of residing upon a formation of valuable basalt, the mansion’s abandonment may have also been related to changing tastes. The egg boom overtaking Petaluma at the turn of the century gave rise to a professional class of doctors, lawyers, and merchants, who had little interest in the stylistic excesses of the Victorian era.

While Queen Anne style houses still held some appeal—especially those designed with large rooms and round turrets—buyers were drawn to the new Tudor and Colonial Revival homes, as well as the Craftsman and Shingle Style houses of the Arts & Crafts movement, with their emphasis on natural woodwork, large rooms in a horizontal orientation, and logical floor plans.

Sales for Hillside Tract were slow to manifest. Lots in the flats along Webster Street quickly sold out, but those on the hillside failed to attract buyers, despite Hill’s significant investment in roads and water and sewer mains. A discouraged Hill never built his dream mansion, instead remaining at his in-laws’ mansion on D Street.

Finally, in 1919, Hill asked the city council to abandon the proposed street layout for the hillside they had approved earlier, and allow him to reconfigure the area into 5-acre farms, which, given the egg boom, were in high demand.21 He sold the Clark Mansion and 20 adjoining acres to the Neilsens for $10,350 ($163,000 in today’s currency).22

Hilma and Louis Neilsen outside Clark Mansion,1920s (photo courtesy of Shirley Neilsen Blum)

Three years later, Hill died, leaving an estate of $22 million in today’s currency. The remaining undeveloped parts of the Hillside Tract development were sold off to speculators.23

It wasn’t until after World War II that his vision for the development became a reality. With Petaluma’s egg boom in decline following the rise of factory farms in the Central Valley, the city began transforming into a housing suburb of San Francisco. One of the first suburban tracts built after the war was on Melvin Street (named for one of Neilsen’s sons), between Dana and English streets, by Blackwell Brothers in 1947.24

Two of the Neilsen’s sons, Elmer and Leo, on south side of Clark Mansion with a cow (photo courtesy of Ken Butti)

After purchasing the abandoned Clark Mansion in 1920, Louis and Hilma Neilsen set about restoring it with the help of their four sons. To help pay the mortgage, they converted the upstairs into a five-room apartment rental, and sold dairy cows, hens, kale for chicken feed, and goldfish they raised in a pond that had formed in the abandoned quarry. Hilma Neilsen also took in young children for day care.

In the mid-20s, they began subdividing their 20 acres into lots for sale, extending from the road to the mansion they now called Hill Drive, presumably in honor of Alexander Hill, down to Webster Street and across to Dana Street.25

After Louis Neilsen died in 1929, Hilma divided the downstairs of the Clark Mansion into two apartment units, living in one of the units until her death in 1943. Her sons Carl and Leo lived in the other unit. Her son Melvin, who became a doctor in town, built a house for his family at the top of Dana Street in 1941.26

Hilma Neilsen with son Leo on front porch of Clark Mansion, c. 1920 (photo courtesy of Shirley Neilsen Blum)

In the mid-50s, the family sold the house to Aloysius W. Boron and his wife. By that time it was well known as “The Spooky House,” which the Borons attempted to lay to rest, saying the ghosts were now guardian angels of the place. 27

Carl Neilsen claimed the rumor stemmed from the ghostly rattling of chains in the quarry, which lulled him to sleep at night as a boy.28 Eleanor Welch Ameral, who lived in the upstairs apartment in the 1940s, said the rumor started when Melvin Neilsen began studying late nights in the attic, leaving a light shining through the colored glass window, while the rest of the house was dark.29

In 1963, Shirley and Plinio Butti purchased the Clark Mansion for $13,000, or $116,000 in today’s currency, and reunited it into a single home. By that time, the mansion’s lot had been reduced to one-third of an acre, leaving it cheek-by-jowl with other homes on Hill Drive and Melvin Street.30

Shirley, a homemaker who would later open an antique store on Kentucky Street, and Plinio, a lumberman who soon became foreman of the Petaluma Co-operative Creamery, restored the exterior of the house in an array of colors, as well as the upstairs, where they lived with their three sons. They put off restoring the downstairs, which Shirley used for storing her vast collection of antiques.31

The Clark Mansion 1979 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In the spring of 1968, Shirley Butti assumed leadership of the Heritage Homes Club. A year later, one of Petaluma’s most prominent Queen Anne style homes, the Healey Mansion at the corner of Washington and Keokuk streets, designed by J. Cather Newsom, was torn down and replaced with a gas station. Built in 1903 by Petaluma merchant and city councilman Dennis J. Healey, it was converted in 1919 into a funeral parlor, which it remained until its destruction.32

The demolition of the Healey Mansion became a rallying cry that ignited the local preservation movement, eventually transforming Butti’s club into Heritage Homes of Petaluma. Over subsequent decades the organization helped to bring a number of Victorians—and their pretty colors—back to life, documenting and branding homes of historical significance with “Heritage Home” brass plaques, issuing preservation recognition awards, and hosting home tours.33

Healey Mansion at Washington and Keokuk streets, in the eve of its destruction, 1969 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The Buttis’ restoration of the Clark Mansion came to a halt after Plinio died in 1981. In 1987, Shirley moved into the house of her recently deceased mother on Eighth Street, and ten years later into a local senior living center. For 30 years the Clark Mansion sat vacant, except for Shirley’s antiques. After her death in 2018, her family sold the house for $949,550 to Karen Maxwell of San Francisco, who has since begun its next restoration.34

Clark Mansion interior, 2018 (photo courtesy of realtor.com)

Shirley’s antiques collection was another matter. While she was alive, she guarded it closely, not allowing anyone to touch it. Despite fears of being cursed for doing so, her family sold the collection in bulk to J.W. McGrath Auctions of Sebastopol. Within weeks of moving the collection to their store and warehouse, the McGrath Auctions building caught fire and burned down.35

The Spooky House had spoken.

*****

Thanks to Ken Butti, Shirley Neilsen Blum, and Amy Hogan for their assistance with the research for this story.

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.

Footnotes:

[1] Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Beautification Plan Will Not Up Taxes,” September 28, 1967; “Assessor Clouds Issue on Chicken Houses,” October 23, 1967.

[2] “Cleaning Up Area Must Come First,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 18, 1967.

[3]Victoria Maw, “Restoration of San Francisco’s Victorian ‘Painted Lady’ Houses,” The Financial Times, October 11, 2013; “Rainbow Victorians and The Colorist Era,” S.F. Heritage, April 17, 2020. https://www.sfheritage.org/features/colorfully-painted-victorians/

[4] “Heritage Homes Meeting Friday,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 11, 1968.

[5] “So They Tell Me Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 1, 1968.

[6] Emails from Ken Butti to John Sheehy, August 2021; Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Lillian Tobin Claimed by Death,” February 9, 1950; “So They Tell Me Column,” June 4, 1958; “Obituaries: Lillian Helman Tobin,” October 20, 1977; “Obituaries: Plinio Butti,” April 22, 1981.

[7] Petaluma Weekly Argus, “Farms in Marin County,” November 17, 1873; “Frightful Accident,” July 16, 1875; “From Michigan,” December 1, 1876; Findagrave.com: Omar Jewell died January 1, 1875 at age 53, buried at Cypress Hill.

[8] Petaluma Weekly Argus: “Real Estate Sale,” August 14, 1874; “Petaluma Cheese Factory” February 27, 1874; “Petaluma Cheese,” June 19, 1874; “From Michigan,” December 1, 1876.

[9] Petaluma Weekly Argus: “Local Brevities,” February 25, 1875, April 9, 1875; “M.J. Clark is Summoned,” November 26, 1909; Ernest B. Fisher, Grand Rapids and Kent County, Volume 2 (Robert O. Law Company, 1918), pp. 84-85; Biography of Melvin J. Clark, http://www.migenweb.org/kent/white1924/personal/clarkmj.html

[10] “Personal,” Petaluma Argus, June 11, 1880; “Real Estate Transactions,” Petaluma Courier, February 22, 1888; “M.J. Clark is Summoned,” Petaluma Argus, November 26, 1909. Note: they sold the house at 920 D Street to Catherine Farley Brown in 1888, who then built the current Queen Anne Victorian on the property in 1893.

[11] Petaluma Courier: Real Estate Transactions,” March 18, 1885; “Fine House,” March 13, 1886.

[12] Dan Petersen, Petaluma’s Architectural Heritage” (Santa Rosa, CA: Architectural Preservation Associates, 1978), p. 52; Information on Ed Hedges homes built in 1886 provided by Katherine Rinehart.

[13] Petaluma Courier: “Courierlets,” February 10, 1882, May 1, 1889 May 22, 1897, April 18, 1898.

[14] “M.J. Clark is Summoned,” Petaluma Argus, November 26, 1909; Petaluma Courier: “A Good Man Gone,” June 12, 1900; “Courierlets,” July 28, 1900; “About People,” February 19, 1897, April 23, 1902, May 15, 1902, November 4, 1904.

[15] “Hillside Villa,” Petaluma Courier, March 3, 1905; “Ties Are Severed,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 2, 1903.

[16] Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Ties Are Severed,” April 2, 1903; “Betrothal Causes Surprise,” May 26, 1904. Note: Hill was living at his parents’ house at 106 7th Street until 1906, when he moved into the Fairbanks Mansion.

[17] “A.B. Hill is Taken by Death at His Home,” Petaluma Courier, June 14, 1922.

[18] “Clark Place Sold,” Petaluma Courier, February 11, 1905.

[19] “Hillside Tract to Aid Our Greater Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, March 3, 1905.

[20] “Hillside Tract to Aid Our Greater Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, March 3, 1905; 1910 U.S. Census, Petaluma, Louis William Neilsen; Interview with Shirley Neilsen Blum, August 27, 2021; “Hilma Marie Neilsen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 11, 1943; Ad for L. Neilsen, chicken houses for sale, Petaluma Argus, June 9, 1909; Ad for L.W. Nielsen, hens and roosters for sale, inquire at hillside rock crusher, Petaluma Courier, May 11, 1912; Anna Keyes Neilsen, The Book of Anna, privately published memoir, 1999, pp. 31-35, courtesy of Shirley Neilsen Blum; Petition for Naturalization, U.S Department of Labor: Louis William Neilsen, no. 1502, November 13, 1928; Interview with Shirley Neilsen Blum, August 27, 2021.

[21] “To Abandon Hillside Tract,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1919; “The Action Will be Regretted,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1919; Ad by realtor D.W. Batchelor for Hill subdivision tracts, Petaluma Courier, August 8, 1919.

[22] Signed receipt for down payment and purchase terms, signed by realtor D.W. Bachelor, dated May 5, 1919; “Record of Survey: Being a Portion of the Lands of Jason Ferus Blum as Described by Deed Recorded Under Document No. 2002-101193, Sonoma County Records, 2017.

[23] “A.B. Hill is Taken by Death at His Home,” Petaluma Courier, June 14, 1922.

[24] “18 New Homes to Be Built In Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 11, 1947.

[25] Ads placed by the Neilsens, Petaluma Courier: September 20, 1920, April 7, 1925, May 10, 1927, March 22, 1922, May 11, 1927.

[26] Interview with Shirly Neilsen Blum, August 27, 2021; Interview with Ken Butti, August 2021; Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Hilma Marie Neilsen,” October 11, 1943.

[27] “So They Tell Me Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 31, 1958.

[28] “So They Tell Me Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 1958.

[29] Email to Katherine Rinehart from Eleanor Welch Ameral, July 28, 2008.

[30] Emails from Ken Butti to John Sheehy, August 2021.

[31] Emails from Ken Butti to John Sheehy, August 2021.

[32] Petaluma Courier: “Left for San Francisco,” June 4, 1903; “Certificate of Use of Fictitious Name,” June 14,1919.

[33] “Heritage Homes,” Petaluma Historical Library & Museum. https://www.petalumamuseum.com/heritage-homes/

[34] Interview with Ken Butti, August 2021.

[35] “Sebastopol Business Fire Causes Chaos, Damage,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, May 10, 2018; Emails from Ken Butti to John Sheehy, 2021.

Featured

Black Sonoma County’s Political Birth

Sonoma Historian, Autumn 2021 issue

1870 illustration of 15th Amendment celebration (image in public domain)

On April 1, 1870, Sonoma County’s Black militia, the Colfax Guard, gathered at noon in Petaluma’s Hill Plaza Park to celebrate passage of the 15th Amendment. Their 30-gun salute—one for each of the 30 states to ratify extending voting rights to Black men—marked the first celebration of the amendment held in California.

The festivities continued into the evening at Hinshaw Hall, beginning with a rousing performance by the Petaluma Brass Band, a prayer from the white minister of the First Baptist Church, and a reading of the new amendment by George W. Miller, captain of the Colfax Guard. The evening’s featured speaker, Edward S. Lippitt, then stepped to the stage.

President of the Sonoma County Republican Party, the eloquent Lippitt began his oration with a quote from the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

Excerpt from preamble to the Declaration of Independence

Once the cheering died down, he launched into a sermon about God-given rights, making a sharp distinction between political and social rights, and arguing that the right to vote did not, in any way, imply nor grant to Blacks social equality or integration. The social order, he told the crowd, would remain unchanged.1

Lippitt’s belief reflected a political calculus on the part of Republicans. The end of slavery also meant an end of the Three Fifths Compromise to the Constitution, which allowed Southern states to count slaves as partial humans for purposes of congressional apportionment and votes in the Electoral College.

The change to counting emancipated Blacks as full citizens ironically increased the electoral power of the recently defeated Southern states and of their predominantly Democratic congressmen. To create a numerical counterbalance, Republicans extended the franchise to Black men, assuming the majority would vote for their party, the party of Lincoln.2

Lippitt closed his talk with a call to Blacks to “educate up their race” in meeting their new responsibilities as voters. It was another area that the erudite Lippitt, a longtime educator, believed best addressed by racial segregation.

Petaluma’s Brick School at the corner of B and 4th streets, built in 1860 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1863, six months after he moved to Petaluma to assume the role of superintendent of schools, Lippitt found himself faced with a new California Supreme Court ruling that required public school districts with more than ten Black students to fund “separate but equal” schools.3

In Petaluma, a Black barber named George W. Miller had opened a private Black school just a few months earlier. Lippitt quickly agreed to fund Miller’s school, making Petaluma one of six California cities with a state-supported “colored school.”4

The next year, Miller set out to establish Sonoma County’s first African Methodist Episcopal Church in town. Lippitt, who, in addition to his duties as school supervisor, served as minister of Petaluma’s Methodist Episcopal Church, offered the support of his abolitionist congregation, taking time himself to teach Sunday school at the new church.5

Petaluma map with Union African Methodist Episcopal Church (“Colored”) highlighted in yellow (map courtesy of Katherine J. Rinehart)

Miller’s alliance with Lippitt was typical of many Black barbers of the time—their access to an exclusive white clientele provided them with economic and social advantages in assisting their Black communities. (In Santa Rosa, barber John Richards played a similar role).

19th century Black-owned barbershop in Baltimore (photo in public domain)

Born and educated a free man in New Jersey, Miller spent a good deal of time in San Francisco, then a center of Black intellectual and social activity, as a member of the Black Freemasons, the Bethel A.M.E. Church, and the California Colored Citizens Convention, a prominent group of activists working to rescind the state’s Black restriction laws.6

Colored Citizens Convention announcement, June 3, 1870 (The Elevator newspaper)

He was also sergeant of San Francisco’s Black militia, in the Brannan Guard. In 1869, as the 15th Amendment was making its way through the state ratification process, Miller decided to form a local Black militia, the Colfax Guard, named for Ulysses S. Grant’s newly elected vice-president, Schuyler Colfax.7

As previously the Speaker of the House, Colfax helped to shepherd through Congress the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and the 14th Amendment protecting the civil rights of former slaves. In 1865, Speaker Colfax came to Petaluma to visit his uncle, Elias Matthews, and made an inspiring address outside the American Hotel (site of today’s Putnam Plaza), directly across from Miller’s barbershop.8

U.S. Vice President Schuyler Colfax (Photo by Library of Congress)

After proudly assembling the Colfax Guard for their 30-gun salute on April 1st, Miller’s hopes of an easy political birth were quickly dashed, when the county clerk refused to register Black men to vote.9

With the exception of Petaluma, Sonoma County was politically dominated at the time by the Democratic Party, which also held the governor’s seat and control of the state legislature. State Democratic legislators, having made California just one of seven states to reject ratifying the 15th Amendment prior to its passage, now invoked, with the governor’s support, states’ rights in denouncing the amendment as unconstitutional.

The Democratic state attorney general instructed county clerks to defer Black registration until “appropriate legislation”—a clause in the amendment— could be adopted by Congress.10

Santa Rosa’s Sonoma Democrat was even more blunt. “Let it be understood, far and near,” the newspaper wrote, “that negroes are not permitted to register as voters in Sonoma County.”11

In California, such opposition was largely theatrical, as only 1,731 of the state’s 4,272 Blacks were men 21 years of age or over, posing little threat to the political balance of power. Sonoma County had only 80 Blacks, more than half of whom lived in Petaluma.12

In mid-April, Lippitt—then in the process of leaving education to open a law practice—was appointed interim editor of the Republican Petaluma Journal & Argus, when the editor, Henry L. Weston, left for an extended trip to Europe.

Edward S. Lippitt in his law office, 1910 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Waging a war of words against the Democrats, he argued that efforts to suppress Black voters would forever align Blacks with the Republicans, keeping the party in control of the national government indefinitely.13

On April 18th, the city of Petaluma defied the county clerk, allowing George Miller and 13 other Black men to vote in a city election.14 Their defiance came on the heels of a similar election in San Jose, making the two cities the first in California to put the 15th Amendment to work.15

It was only after Congress instituted “appropriate legislation” on May 31st, passing the first of three Enforcement Acts imposing fines and penalties on those who obstructed or hindered any person from voting, that Sonoma County’s clerk allowed Blacks to register.16

Their first opportunity to officially vote came in June during a special election seeking voter approval of construction subsidies for new railroad lines.17 A week later, Miller and a delegation of Black citizens turned up with a band at Lippitt’s home, presenting him with a set of silver tablespoons, with the Goddess of Liberty engraved on one side and his initials on the other, as a token of their appreciation for his able advocacy on their behalf.18

It wasn’t long however before the Colored Convention grew frustrated with the reluctance of Republicans to embrace their full civil rights, especially in education. In November 1871, the convention’s Educational Committee, of which Miller was a member, decided to lobby for all school children, regardless of color, being admitted to common public schools.19

Engraving of the 1869 Colored Citizens Convention in Washington, published in Harper’s Weekly (credit Jim Casey Collection)

After championing two bills that died in the state legislature, the committee took their case to the state Supreme Court.20 In the test case of Ward v. Flood, the court upheld the “separate but equal” principle in California school law, but also mandated that Black children be publicly educated, including, if necessary, in white schools.21

With the court’s ruling in hand, the committee began lobbying school districts to abolish “colored schools.” They were helped by the Recession of 1873, during which school districts strapped for funding, opted to enroll Black students rather than fund two separate school systems. By 1875, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, and Vallejo public schools had all been integrated, leaving Petaluma, its school board dominated by Democrats, the lone holdout.22 Thanks to Lippitt, it became a polarizing local issue.

1870 Brooklyn Colored School in Oakland, Mary Sanderson, teacher (photo Oakland History Room)

That same year, Lippitt resigned as county chairman of the Republican Party, and in 1876 launched the Petaluma Courier, a pro-Democratic newspaper. Although he attributed his political conversion to the Republican’s egregious treatment of the South during Reconstruction, it also came on the heels of his defeat in the Republican primary for county district attorney.23 (Republican party officials may have also discovered that Lippitt fled to California from Cincinnati in 1862 while under indictment for embezzlement).24

As editor of the Courier, Lippitt initiated a newspaper war with Weston’s Petaluma Argus, labeling it a “negro-worshipping sheet” for its support of integrating Black students into white schools.25

The skirmish went viral, drawing ridicule in Republican newspapers from San Francisco (“an ante-rebellion spirit of caste is still alive and dominate in Petaluma”) to Pennsylvania (“a great blotch on the face of human progress”).26

Lippitt also renounced his support of the 15th Amendment, accusing northern carpetbaggers of subjecting the South to “the rule of the most ignorant races of servile men” in giving Blacks the vote while denying the same right to former Confederate officers. He maintained that it would take generations for Blacks to be sufficiently educated to vote.27

During the 1876 U.S. presidential election, Lippitt threw his support behind the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, even though his Republican opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, was someone Lippitt had worked with before the Civil War as a young lawyer in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Hayes served as city solicitor.28

After a contested election, Hayes assumed the presidency in return for agreeing to withdraw federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction. That same year, the United States Supreme Court struck down the Enforcement Acts protecting the 15th Amendment, ruling that voting rights were best-regulated by state authorities without federal intervention. The two actions led to a series of “Jim Crow” restriction laws that disenfranchised the Black voters for decades.29

President Rutherford B. Hayes (photo courtesy of WhiteHouse.gov)

In 1880, President Hayes paid a visit Petaluma, lunching at Lippitt’s home, even though Lippitt had publicly denounced him as “rotten, low, mean, and sneaking.”30 That same year, the California legislature outlawed the state’s “separate but equal” educational policy. By that time, most of Petaluma’s Black population had departed for more supportive communities in Vallejo and Oakland, leaving just one student enrolled in the town’s “colored school.”31

George Miller did not live to see this legislative triumph he had long fought for. In the fall of 1873, at the age of 48, he died unexpectedly while preparing for a Colored Convention in Sacramento on education.32

*****

A version of this article appeared in the Sonoma Historian.

FOOTNOTES:

1“Celebration of Our Colored Citizens,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, April 9, 1870.
2Gary Dauphin, “On February 26, 1869, Congress Sent the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to the States for Ratification,” California African American Museum, caamuseum.com, February 26, 2020. https://caamuseum.org/learn/600state/black-history/february-26-1869-congress-sends-15th-amendment-to-constitution-states; Melissa De Witte, “What Did ‘All Men Are Created Equal’ Mean in 1776?” Futurity.com, July 2, 2020. https://www.futurity.org/all-men-are-created-equal-2397112-2/
3Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25.
4“Segregation and John Swett,” Southern California Quarterly, 1964, Vol. 46 (1), pp. 69-82; Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864.
5“Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; “An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt,” edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p.42.
6Herbert G. Ruffin II, “The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865),” February 9, 2009. BlackPast.com; The Elevator: “Masonic Notice,” December 21, 1872; “Died,” October 25, 1873; Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 42.
7Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 146.
8Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p.133. Ovando James Hollister, Life of Schuyler Colfax (Funk & Wagnalls, 1886) p. 257; Schuyler Colfax, 17th Vice President (1869-1873), https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/vice-president/VP_Schuyler_Colfax.htm.; Schuyler Colfax Journals, “Across the continent by overland stage in 1865,” BYU Library Digital Collections, p. 21; “Personal,” Petaluma Argus, July 6, 1865.
9Petaluma Journal & Argus: “Woe is Me, Alhama,” April 16, 1870; “The ‘Democrat’ on Negro Registration,” April 23, 1870.
10“Attorney General,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, April 23, 1870; Ralph E. Shaffer, “California Reluctantly Implements the Fifteenth Amendment: White Californians Respond to Black Suffrage, March – June 1870,” Cal Poly Pomona, p.42, https://www.cpp.edu/class/history/faculty/documents/shaffer15thamend.pdf.
11Shafer, p. 94.
12Shafer, p.69; “1870 Sonoma County Census,” Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopedia, 1876, p. 721; 1870 Census, Ninth Census of the United States, Vol. 4 (Ohio State University, 1872), p. 129.
13Petaluma Journal & Argus: “We Bow,” April 16, 1870; “They Voted,” April 23, 1870; “The Colored Vote,” April 30, 1870; “Professor E. S. Lippitt,” Sonoma Democrat, April 23, 1870.
14“A House Divided Against Itself,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, April 23, 1870; “Enjoying Their ‘Rights,’” Sonoma Democrat, April 23, 1870; Shafer, p. 94.
15“The Fifteenth Amendments,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, April 23, 1870.
16Shafer, pp. 65-67; Kianna Wright, “The Enforcement Act of 1870 (1870-1871),” December 11, 2019. Blackpast.com. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/the-enforcement-act-of-1870-1870-1871/
17Petaluma Journal & Argus: “The Railroad Subsidy,” June 11, 1870; “The Railroad,” June 18, 1870; “Railroad Election Returns,” June 18, 1870; “Great Register, Sonoma County, 1870,” California, U.S., Voter Registers, 1866-1898. Ancestry.com.
18“A Splendid Testimonial,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, June 25, 1870.
19Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) pgs. 178-179.
20The Elevator: “Educational Public Meeting at Bethel Church,” April 27, 1872; Address of the Educational Committee, May 11, 1872.
21Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/
22Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; Jo Ann Williamson, Lori Rhodes, Michael Dunson, “Chapter 7 A Selected History of Social Justice in Education,” Review of Research in Education, November 15, 2016, Vol. 31 (1), pp. 195–224; “1874 Ward V. Flood,” Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/
23“Temperance Convention,” Petaluma Argus, July 9, 1875.
24“The Grand Jury,” Daily Ohio Statesman, April 26, 1862; “Young and Pure—More of it,” The Cadiz Sentinel, April 2, 1862.
25“The Negro School,” Petaluma Courier, April 5, 1877.
26Petaluma Argus: “Our ‘Colored Schools,’” December 22, 1876; “Educational Items,” August 13, 1875; “Our Colored School,” August 11, 1876; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” May 18, 1877; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” May 18, 1876.
27“An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt,” edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p. 43; “Reminiscences of a Long Life,” Petaluma Argus,” October 29, 1910.
28Alumni Record of Wesleyan University, Middleton, Conn, 1883, p. 83-84; “Reminiscences of a Long Life,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1910.
29Michael Les Benedict, “Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876-1877: A Reconsideration of Reunion and Reaction.” Journal of Southern History (1980): 489-524.
30“Democratic Meeting,” Sonoma Democrat, August 18, 1877; “President Hayes in Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, September 15, 1880.
31“Local Dots,” Petaluma Courier, July 21, 1880.
32“Deaths: George Miller,” Pacific Appeal, October 25, 1873.

Featured

Petaluma’s Pioneer Black Leader

19th century Black barbershop (photo public domain)

In September of 1855, George Webster Miller took out in advertisement in the Sonoma County Journal, Petaluma’s newspaper at the time, announcing the opening of his new Humboldt Shaving & Hair Dressing Saloon on Main Street, two doors north of today’s Putnam Plaza. Miller had just moved to Petaluma from San Francisco, where he had resided for four years, with his twenty-three year old wife Catherine and their two infant children, Elizabeth and George Frank. Although Miller proclaimed in his ad that he was determined to please his customers “in the tonsorial art,” his intentions extended beyond merely providing a close shave and a good haircut.[1]

Ad for George Miller’s barbershop (Sonoma County Journal, November 17, 1855)

Like a number of free-born, educated Blacks from the Northeast and Midwest, Miller had come to California looking for economic and social opportunities at the height of the Gold Rush. A native of New Jersey, the twenty-five-year old Miller had arrived in California in 1850 via the Steamer Pacific, which meant that he would have sailed from New York to Nicaragua, traveled cross that country by boat on the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua, then taken a stagecoach to the west coast port of San Juan del Sal, where he would have boarded the sidewheel steamer Pacific bound for San Francisco.

The route, operated by shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, transported many people to California during the Gold Rush, including both free and enslaved African Americans, most of whom headed straight for the mining towns.[2] Slaves brought to California by their Southern owners to work the mines, where often able to purchase their freedom by working nights in the mines to earn money.[3]

Black miner working a sluice box in Auburn Ravine, 1852 (photo courtesy Getty Images)

As news of Blacks finding success and freedom in California spread among newspapers back east like Frederick Douglass’ North Star, the state’s black population climbed from 962 in 1850 to 4,800 by 1855. Half of the newcomers settled in the mining counties of El Dorado, Yuba, Nevada, and Sacramento; a third in the fast-growing city of San Francisco; and the remainder in towns like Petaluma, then a small but bustling river town supplying San Francisco with agricultural goods.[4]

1855 Map of Petaluma (illustration courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

In California, most free Black men and women were relegated to low skilled and poorly paid jobs. One of the more lucrative occupations for Black men however was barbering. In the South, slave owners had turned a profit by leasing out black barbers to neighboring plantations and local establishments to groom both slaves and affluent white men alike. As a result, many Black men literally “cut” their way to freedom.[5]

Access to an exclusive white clientele provided Black barbers with economic and social advantages that placed them in positions of prestige among Black communities. As customers demanded a high level of gentility from their surroundings, barbers were also expected to excel as interior decorators. The best of these shops were what historian Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr., author of Knights of the Razor, a history of Black barbers, called “first-class.”

Barbers cultivated the personae to match these surroundings. Refined in dress and graceful in movement, they were also expert conversationalists, engaging and entertaining their customers while they worked. They were disseminators of every bit of news, politics, gossip, and anecdote customers shared with each other in the shop. But they also had to watch their step.

A Barber’s Shop at Richmond, Virginia, 1861 (illustration courtesy of The Atlantic)

If their knowledge of politics or business was too extensive, or their jokes too pointed, customers might accuse them of overstepping racial boundaries—with potentially disastrous consequences. Their biggest challenge was the simple intimacy of the shop between the barber and patron. Listening in on the schemes and foibles of the white elite, they were expected to keep their secrets in confidence.[6]

Navigating these situations, a number of 19th-century barbers parlayed their work into economic independence, and in a few cases, investments that brought them extraordinary wealth. In a number of U.S. cities, Black barbers ranked among the richest and most powerful members of the free Black community.[7] 

In turn, they often used their prestige to advance the welfare of those communities, occupied positions of authority in Black organizations and working side-by-side ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in California, which persistently advocated for the social improvement, religious autonomy, and political engagement of Blacks.[8]  

Two months after arriving in Petaluma, George Miller traveled to St. Andrew’s A.M.E. Church in Sacramento to attend the first Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California. The convention drew forty-nine attendees, representing all of California’s ten counties, with Miller serving as Sonoma County’s sole representative. Its primary focus was to mobilize Blacks to lobby for rescinding the state’s restriction laws on African Americans.

A.M.E. Church in Sacramento, 1920s (photo courtesy of California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento)

Although California had entered the Union in 1850 as a free, non-slave state, the early state legislature enacted a number proscriptions against people of color—specifically, Blacks, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants—including the right to testify against a white person in court, homestead on public land, attend publicly-funded common schools, and vote.[9]

After its inaugural meeting in 1855, the Colored Citizens Convention held annual meetings again in 1856 and 1857, with George Miller once again representing Sonoma County (along in 1857 with Elisha Banks, also of Petaluma).

An engraving featured in harper’s Weekly of the National Colored Convention in Washington, D.C., 1869 (courtesy of the James Casey Collection/New York Times)

At the 1857 gathering Miller reported that Sonoma County’s Black population—which in 1850 had consisted of just Joseph and Louisa Silver, two free blacks working as servants to Santa Rosa physician Elisha Ely—had grown to seventy-two, thirty-one of whom resided in Petaluma and were living independently.

Of the remanding forty-one, twenty-seven were listed as farmers, with all but one claimed as slaves by their employers from the South, who, like many other southerners in Sonoma County, had settled primarily on the Santa Rosa plain.[10] Petaluma, by contrast, had drawn as much as fifty percent of its early white population from the Northeastern states, and another twenty percent from Europe, Britain, and Ireland.[11]

The differences in the background composition of the two towns became more pronounced and acrimonious during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era, as expressed in the adversarial relationship between their respective newspapers, the Petaluma Argus and the Sonoma Democrat, with Santa Rosa’s paper backing the Confederacy, and Petaluma’s paper supporting the Union. As a result, Petaluma’s small Black community enjoyed a relatively more supportive social, political, and economic environment than was found in Santa Rosa.[12]

Freedom for former slaves in California became tenuous in 1852 after the state passed its own version of the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, allowing whites to keep slaves they had brought into California as long as they eventually transported them back to the South. This placed freed slaves, who often lacked clear legal documentation of their freedom, at risk of being kidnapped and sold back into slavery in the South.[13]

The state of affairs for all Blacks in California became more precarious in the mid-1850s, when many whites, concerned that their economic livelihoods were being threatened by the relatively cheap labor provided by Blacks and Chinese workers, mounted an anti-immigration campaign to drive them from the state.

In 1858, after the state assembly approved a bill banning further Black immigration, some blacks fled the state, a number of them to British Columbia, where a new gold strike was underway. The bill subsequently died in the state senate, overshadowed by passage of the first anti-Chinese immigration law.[14]

Despite the general adversarial climate in California, some of the legal restrictions Blacks faced began to lift in the early 1860s, as Republicans gained control of the governorship and state legislature. In 1863, the Franchise League, a lobbying group formed by members of the Colored Conventions, succeeded in securing Blacks the right to testify in court, placing a check on the immunity violent white racists had benefitted from. In 1862, the Federal Homesteading Act overrode the prohibitions California had placed on Black homesteaders with its Homesteading Acts of 1851 and 1860.[15]

One area however where  Blacks were dealt a setback was access to education. Along with Chinese and Indian students, they had been excluded from California’s common public schools since the state’s admission to the Union in 1850. The California School Law of 1855 strengthened that exclusionary policy by providing school funding based strictly on the number of white students attending a school. The policy was further fortified by an 1860 law that prohibited public schools from admitting “Negroes and Mongolians” under the threat of losing all funding.[16]

Segregated 19th century school (photo courtesy of Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com)

For George Miller and the other members of the Colored Conventions—most of whom had been educated as free men in the North—access to education was vital to Black success in California, not only in terms of becoming financially autonomous, but also in being viewed as educated and respected members of the community, and hopefully extinguishing some of the racist attitudes that whites held toward them. By embargoing Blacks from entering public schools, California was choosing to perpetuate the Southern fallacy that Blacks didn’t have the ability to survive off the plantation because of their illiteracy.

At the 1855 Colored Convention, members made it one of their top priorities to lobby the state legislature to educate all of California’s children. But they also took matters into their own hands, pooling their resources to buy land and create private schools for black children, often in alliance with the A.M.E. Church, which opened its basements for use as school rooms, deployed its ministers and their wives to serve as teachers, and raised money from its congregations to keep the schools operating.[17]

Report of the first California Colored Convention held in 1855

Petaluma at the time lacked both an A.M.E. Church and a school for black children. George Miller set out to change that. By the early 1860s, his Humboldt Shaving & Hairdressing Saloon was thriving. In 1861, he added a bath house, and in 1863 moved into the newly constructed Towne Building on Main Street across from the American Hotel (today a small parking lot extending between Petaluma Boulevard North and Water Street).[18]

That same year, Miller was joined by another Black barber in town, Frank Vandry Miller, who had immigrated to American from Jamaica in 1843. He opened up his barbershop a couple doors down from George Miller’s shop, also in the Towne Building.[19]

While the Chinese residents in Petaluma at the time lived close together in a designated “Chinese colony” on Main Street between Western Avenue and B Street, there was no clearly distinguished pattern of neighborhood groupings among Black residents. They lived in buildings scattered throughout the city. As a result, a challenge George Miller and other local Black leaders faced was bringing the Black community together. The appearance in 1862 of the Pacific Appeal, the west coast’s first major black newspaper, provided them with one means of doing that.

The Pacific Appeal, “A Weekly Journal devoted to the interests of the People of Color,” launched in 1862

Sporting the motto “He who would be free, himself must strike the blow,” the Pacific Appeal was co-founded by Peter Anderson, an early leader of the Colored Conventions, and Philip Alexander Bell, a pioneering Black journalist from New York. Launched in San Francisco shortly after the demise of California’s first black newspaper, Mirror of the Times, the Pacific Appeal provided a voice for California’s Black communities.[20] George Miller immediately signed on as the newspaper’s distribution agent in Petaluma and Santa Rosa, and Frank Miller as their agent in Sonoma.[21]

In an early edition of the Pacific Appeal, George Miller offered a colorful account of his weekly delivery route aboard the horse-drawn mail wagon from Petaluma to Santa Rosa (a five hour ride), describing some of the newspaper’s subscribers he conversed with along the way, including Santa Rosa barber John Richards.[22]

Born into slavery in Kentucky in 1824, Richards had made his way in 1856, after having acquired his freedom, to Santa Rosa, California, where he opened a shaving saloon and bathhouse at the southwest corner of Main (Santa Rosa Avenue) and Second streets.[23] By the early 1860s, Richards had established branches of his barbershop in Ukiah and Lakeport, and had also began to acquire large land holdings, eventually amassing an estate more than $12,000 ($300,000 in early 21st century currency), making him one of the most prosperous men in Sonoma County.[24] He and Miller would become close allies in educational initiatives for Blacks in Sonoma County.

In addition to networking among Sonoma County’s Black community, George Miller kept strong ties to the Black community in San Francisco, making frequent visits to the city, where he stayed in Black boarding houses.[25] In July of 1862, he represented Sonoma County at the Grand Festival of the Colored Citizens of San Francisco commemorating the emancipation of slavery in the British West Isles and the District of Columbia.[26] Six months later, upon President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, he joined in a large celebration held at Platt’s Hall on Montgomery Street in the city.[27]

By 1863, Miller’s wife Catherine had given birth to two more children, bringing the total number of school-age children in their house to four. Miller felt that it was time to establish a school for African American children in town. On December 4th, he organized a gathering of Petaluma’s Black community, presided over by John Richards of Santa Rosa. (Richards would personally fund the opening of Santa Rosa’s “colored school” a year later in January, 1865).[28] After the meeting, the group pooled their resources to rent a small house on Washington Street and furnish it with seats and desks.

They also began recruiting for a teacher in the pages of the Pacific Appeal. A young Black woman from San Francisco named Mrs. Rachel Coursey, responded to the query. Despite having been married just six months before to John G. Coursey, a music teacher at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in San Francisco, Rachel Coursey came to Petaluma and began teaching at the so-called “colored school” on opening day, January 11, 1864.[29]

Two months after the school opened, the California Supreme Court ruled that public school districts were required to provide “separate but equal” schools for Blacks, except in cases where there were fewer than ten such students in the district, in which case they would be integrated into white schools. At the time, there were 831 Black children of school age living in California. After some pushback, two years later, the Revised School Law of 1866 specified that in the event a town had fewer than ten Black children, the school district could integrate those students into its white schools, assuming that a majority of the white parents didn’t object—a clause that would later become a bone of contention in Petaluma.[30]

Although Petaluma’s “colored school” had only eight students, George Miller’s group succeeded in obtaining public funding for their “colored school” after the passage of the new school law, thanks in part to Petaluma’s new Superintendent of Public Schools, Rev. Edward S. Lippitt, a Republican abolitionist minister originally from Connecticut.[31] By the end of 1864, Petaluma was identified as one of six California cities with a public-funded “colored school,” the others being San Francisco, Sacramento, Marysville, San Jose, and Stockton.[32]

Miller’s group also launched plans in 1864 to establish an Black church in Petaluma.[33] For help, they turned to the A.M.E.’s Presiding Elder, Rev. Thomas M.D. Ward of San Francisco’s Bethel A.M.E. Church. Miller knew Ward from the Colored Conventions, where Ward had played a major role. Ward traveled by steamer to Petaluma where, in a makeshift church, he delivered a Sunday sermon entitled “The Importance of Mental and Moral Culture Among the Colored People of America.”[34]

By 1965, Miller’s group had secured the use of a house near the northwest corner of Western Avenue and Howard Street, believed to be the Greek Revival house at 109 Howard Street, to serve as Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church.[35]

A.M.E. Church, 109 Howard Street, in 1871 map (map courtesy of Sonoma County Library and Isabel Fischer)

Rev. Ward assigned seventy-five year-old Peter Killingsworth to serve as pastor.[36] Born into slavery in South Carolina, Killingsworth had immigrated to California in 1857 after purchasing his and his wife’s freedom in Atlanta, Georgia, for $3,000 ($93,000 in early 21st century currency).

Soon after they reached California foothills, Killingsworth’s wife died in El Dorado County. The reverend consoled himself knowing that “her bones lie in the free soil of El Dorado.”[37] Prior to being assigned to Petaluma, Killingsworth had served as a clergy member of the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Sacramento, and as one of their traveling preachers with assignments in Grass Valley, Nevada County, and San Jose.[38]

Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church opened sometime in the summer of 1865, and was formally dedicated in a ceremony presided over by the Rev. Ward on December 10, 1865, an event that also served as a fundraiser to address the $150 debt still looming over the church ($2,400 in early 21st century currency).[39]

109 Howard Street today, site of original African Methodist Episcopal Church (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

Rev. Killingworth would sometimes feature A.M.E. pastors from other parts of California to deliver Sunday services, as well as invite white men and women from the local Methodist Episcopal Church, where School Superintendent Rev. Edward S. Lippitt served as pastor, to teach at Sunday school classes.[40] In addition to serving as a place of worship and religious education, the church also provided a meeting place for George Miller and other members of the Black community interested in securing their civil rights.[41]

Methodist Episcopal Church at the corner of Keller Street and Western Avenue, 1885 (photo Sonoma County Library)

To that end, in November of 1865, Rev. Killingsworth attended the fourth Colored Convention in Sacramento, where he served as Sonoma County’s sole representative and also the convention’s chaplain. In his report on Sonoma County, Killingsworth noted that the county had seventy Black residents, comprised of fifty-five adults and twenty children.

Twelve of the adults were general laborers, ten farmers, seven barbers, two blacksmiths, and two carpenters. Together, their combined property holdings were estimated to have a total valuation of $25,000 ($400,000 in early 21st century currency). Killingsworth also noted that the county had one Black church and one Black schoolhouse (Santa Rosa’s “colored school” was clearly operating at that time, but it’s not certain that Petaluma’s was still active).[42]

The members of the Colored Convention were generally hopeful that year, seeking to capitalize on California’s changing social and political climate in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, the end of the Civil War, and California’s Republican-dominated legislature led by Governor Leland Stanford, which, in 1863, had repealed California’s ban on blacks testifying in court against whites. The convention’s Committee on Education revised their proposal from their earlier conventions, once again calling on the legislature to end segregated public education in California.[43]

Their call went unanswered thanks to the Democrats in the state legislature, who also succeeded in blocking California’s ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing civil rights to Blacks, and the Fifteenth Amendment granting Black men the right to vote (California, in fact, would not ratify these two amendments until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s). Ultimately, it was national ratification of the two amendments in 1868 and 1870 respectively that extended these rights to California Blacks.[44]

Miller had a near death experience in August 1866, when the steam engine of the Petaluma & Haystack Railroad he had just boarded at the depot in town, killing four people and injuring many others, including Miller, whose arm was broken.[45]

As the school year began in July 1867, Petaluma had 627 school-age children between the ages of five and fifteen, eight of whom were black.[46] Petaluma’s “colored school” however was clearly shut down by the fall of 1867 when Philip A. Bell, editor of The Elevator, a Black newspaper in San Francisco that Bell spun off from the Pacific Appeal in 1865, came to Petaluma to lecture on the topic of education at the bequest of Rev. Killingsworth.

Drawing of Philip A. Bell, editor of The Elevator (courtesy of blackpast.org)

The day before Bell’s scheduled lecture, the trustees of Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church overruled Rev. Killingsworth, cancelling the talk. Bell, an articulate and outspoken advocate of education for Black children, instead spent the weekend attending Rev. Killingsworth’s Sunday sermon at the church and being introduced around the community by Petaluma’s two Black barbers, George Miller and Frank Miller. [47]

By the time of Bell’s visit, George Miller and Frank Miller were both prospering in their tonsorial businesses, one of the few areas, along with boot black, livery, restaurant, and drayage businesses, that a Black man could reasonably expect sufficient white patronage to be able to work for himself (Black women also worked for themselves, operating hair salons, dressmaking businesses, restaurants, and hiring out as nursemaids and midwives).[48]

Still, Black businesses faced unique risks, as Frank Miller experienced soon after expanding his barbershop to include a bathing salon “for exclusive use of the Ladies” called the Crystal Baths. Late one night his shop windows were smashed out, assumedly by members of the local Ku Klux Klan.[49] Undeterred, Miller repaired the damage and added a new ladies hair salon to his business, featuring “the latest Paris styles” from a Miss Aralena Purnell, “recently arrived from Philadelphia.”[50]

The twenty-six year old Purnell was the daughter of Zedekiah J. Purnell, a barber, literary scholar, and popular orator in Philadelphia, who had recently relocated his family to Petaluma.[51] His daughter Aralena was an educated and trained operatic singer who, prior to coming to California, had undertaken singing tours of Pennsylvania, New York, and New England. In addition to working for Frank Miller as a hairdresser, she and her sister Louisa began performing concerts to rave reviews at Petaluma’s Hinshaw Hall on Main Street just north of Washington Street.[52]

After discovering the Purnell sisters in Petaluma, Philip Bell of The Elevator recruited them to perform at a musical benefit in San Francisco to a white and Black audience of fifteen hundred people. For the Purnell sisters, it became the first of many subsequent performances in the city.[53] In 1870, Zedekiah Purnell and his family left Petaluma for Oakland, where in 1877, Purnell mounted the first Black candidacy for the Oakland city council. He withdrew from the campaign upon the unexpected death of his daughter Aralena at the age of thirty-six.[54]

Philip Bell would make subsequent trips to Petaluma, but he summed up his first visit to town by noting that its Black community was relatively cautious and conservative. “Many of them cannot disengage themselves from their old ideas engendered while in slavery in Virginia and Missouri,” he wrote. “They have no ideas of progress.”

The Elevator newspaper, launched in 1865 by Philip A. Bell

Bell also reported that while George Miller had exerted himself to obtain educational privileges from the local school district with a “colored school,” the effort had not been sustained by a majority of other Black residents, which was why, he contended, the trustees had cancelled his talk on education.[55]

By 1869, things began to change for Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church. In April of that year, Rev. T.M.D. Ward, now a bishop, came to Petaluma to visit Rev. Killingsworth. A few weeks later, Killingsworth, then eighty years old, gave one last sermon before leaving Petaluma for a new A.M.E. parish in Oregon, before returning to preach at the Bethel A.M.E. in Sacramento, where he died in 1872.[56]

Killingsworth was not replaced by a new pastor in Petaluma. Instead, the church appears to have operated under the supervision of the A.M.E. elder for Sonoma and Napa counties, with visiting ministers coming through from time to time. As he departed Petaluma, Killingworth appointed a group trustees —Lewis Barnes, Cooper Smith, Thomas Johnson, and Alex McFarland— to oversee all operations of the church.[57]

Three of the trustees—Barnes, Smith, and McFarland—owned homes on Fifth Street between E and F streets in town. The oldest among them, Alexander McFarland, was born into slavery in Tennessee in 1794 and brought to California by his owner in 1850, where he eventually purchased his freedom. McFarland and his wife Melvina, who was from Florida, married in Sonoma County in 1865 when McFarland was seventy, and adopted a daughter named Eliza.[58]

The next oldest, Lewis Barnes, was born into slavery at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, in 1801, sold twice on the auction block, and brought to California in the 1849 as a slave of a Mr. Cassidy, eventually working his way to freedom and settling in Petaluma in 1855 with his wife Peggy, who had originally been brought to Santa Rosa by her owners, the Overton family. “Uncle” or “Father” Barnes, as he was known around town, worked as a general laborer.[59] The two younger trustees were also general laborers.

Irwin Cooper Smith lived next door to McFarland on Fifth Street with his wife Elizabeth. Both were born slaves—he in North Carolina in 1831, and she in Georgia in 1830. Smith came to California during the Gold Rush to work for his owner in the mines. After two years, he was able to purchase his freedom. Thomas Johnson lived on Petaluma Boulevard South (then Third Street) with his wife Julianna and their three small children. Thomas had been born into slavery in Virginia in 1825, and Elizabeth in South Carolina in 1837. They settled in Petaluma in 1863.[60]

Although George Miller was no longer a trustee of the A.M.E. Church, he continued his efforts to advance Petaluma Blacks by serving as a conduit to larger Black organizations in the state. One of the most vital of these was the fraternal order of the Black Masons, whose membership rolls read like a who’s who of California Black leadership.[61] Miller was a member of the Olive Branch Lodge, which like other Black lodges, had descended from the Black Freemasons established for freed slaves in Boston during the War of Independence by a Black man named Prince Hall.

Prince Hall Lodge gathering, circa 1900 (photo courtesy of the Journal of African American History)

While the Prince Hall Lodges had been officially chartered by the Grand Lodge of England, they were still not recognized by the white Mason lodges in America a century later when Miller joined the Olive Branch Lodge, where he served as Deputy District Master for Petaluma.[62]

Miller was also a member of the Brannan Guard, a Black militia organized in San Francisco in 1866 by John Jones, James Riker, and Alexander G. Dennison. Volunteer militias had become popular in the country following the Civil War, serving as something of a national guard. The Brannan Guards were named after California pioneer Sam Brannan, who had helped to pay for their uniforms.[63] Comprised of forty-five members, they maintained an armory on Pacific Street in the city, and marched with white militias in parades on special occasions like Independence Day. They also staged their own an annual celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of each year.

In the summer of 1869, a white militia called the Hewston Guard had been commissioned in Petaluma by California’s governor, Henry Haight. Led by Captain James Armstrong, they were provided with an armory in the Hopper Building on Main Street opposite Penry Park.[64] That fall, George Miller decided to form a black militia he called the Colfax Guard, named for the newly elected U.S. vice-president, Schuyler Colfax.

Before becoming U.S. Grant’s running mate in the election of 1868, Colfax had served as Speaker of the House, where he helped guide through the congress both the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment protecting the civil rights of former slaves. (Speaker Colfax made a visit to Petaluma in 1865 to visit his stepfather’s brother from Indiana, Elias Matthews).[65]

U.S. Vice-president Schuyler Colfax (photo courtesy Getty Images)

Although not commissioned by Democratic Governor Haight, an openly white supremacist, Miller’s militia become the third Black unit of the Colfax Guard formed in the country that year, joining units already established in New Orleans and Annapolis, Maryland.[66]

On December 30, 1869, the Colfax Guard, joined by Petaluma’s Hewston Guard, inaugurated their  new armory on Washington Street with a “Flag Presentation” that featured a large brass band and presentations by both Captain Miller and his wife Margaret. The festivities were followed by a dinner and a dance that lasted until dawn, with music provided by Miller’s own quadrille, or square dancing, band.[67]

On April 1, 1870, the day after the Fifteenth Amendment had been ratified and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, Miller served as Marshal of the Day for the first formal celebration of the amendment held in the state of California. The festivities began with the Colfax Guard staging at noon in Hill Plaza a 30-gun salute—one gun for each state that had ratified the amendment—followed in the evening by what the Petaluma Argus called a “general jollification” by “the colored people of this city,” across the street from the plaza in Hinshaw Hall.

After the Petaluma Brass Band played to a packed hall, Rev. R.W. Johnson of the First Baptist Church offered a prayer that Blacks would use their newly acquired political power “to the glory and advancement of the whole country.” Miller then read aloud the amendment and a declaration of principles, before introducing Rev. Edward S. Lippitt, the former superintendent of schools who had since become the principal of his own private high school on D Street.[68]

In his oration, Lippitt was keen to distinguish between political and social rights, noting that “the mere exercise of the ballot was not a key to society, and no matter how far the freedom of the polls might be extended, yet individuality and social relations were not in the least compromised thereby.”

That had been a Republican theme throughout the battle for the 15th Amendment, with many Republicans denying that extension of the franchise conferred nor advanced social equality. Lippitt furthered the point, made by Rev. Johnson, that “the colored people” should educate their race up to the requirements of their new responsibilities, a theme that was expressed in editorials and speeches elsewhere during the next few weeks.

Postcard map of Petaluma, 1870 (Illustration Sonoma County Library)

Weeks later the Colfax Guard also joined in San Francisco’s Fifteenth Amendment celebration, which featured the singing talents of Petaluma’s Purnell sisters, Aralena and Louisa. When election time rolled around in the fall of 1870, George Miller and thirteen other Black men in Petaluma cast their votes for the first time.[69]

A year later, on May 10, 1871, Miller learned the limitations of his new voting status when Petaluma constable Frank Adel happened upon his barbershop one day during a lull in customers. Adel, who was having trouble finding jurors for a criminal case, decided to give the Fifteenth Amendment a test and summon Miller to jury duty. Miller marched into the courtroom and took his seat to the gasps of other jurors. Someone yelled out, “Nigger in the pit, put him out!” After a few preliminary questions by the deputy district attorney, Miller was issued a peremptory challenge and sent on his way.[70]

Call in The Elevator to 1870 Color Convention of the Pacific Coast, featuring George W. Miller as President of the Executive Committee

Soon after that event, George Miller and other Black parents in Petaluma began to lobby the school district to reopen the “colored school.” The town’s Black population had grown to forty-four, twenty-two of whom were school-age children.[71] George Miller, whose wife Catherine died in the mid-1860s, had remarried in 1868 to a twenty-year old woman from San Francisco named Margaret Nugent.[72] In addition to the four school-age children living in the house from his first wife, Miller and his second wife Margaret had added two infants, Richard Hoddie Miller, born in 1869, and James Harris Miller born on January 1, 1871 (James would die in 1872, one day after his first birthday).[73]

Brooklyn Colored School in Oakland, Mary J. Sanderson teacher, 1870 (photo in the public domain)

There was also a sixth child living in the house, a white boy named Richard Page Jessup, that the Millers had taken in as something of a foster child. Jessup was born in 1866 out of wedlock as the result of an affair in Marysville between a white couple, Gershom Page Jessup, the local manager of the California Stage Company, and Josie Landis, a local nineteen year old woman attending the Mills Seminary boarding school in Santa Cruz. Without the knowledge of Landis’ parents, Jessup took her out of school in her last moth of pregnancy to live at the home of a black woman in San Francisco named Mrs. Abigail Nugent. Nugent, who had arrived in San Francisco from Philadelphia in 1856, was a midwife and nurse to women in the “400 Club,” the city’s social elite.

A few weeks after giving birth to a son, Landis returned to Marysville, where within months she wedded a local dentist. Gershom Jessup, who the year before had inherited a small fortune from his deceased brother Richard, vice-president of the California Steam Navigation company, paid Abigail Nugent to continue raising his son, visiting him frequently at Nugent’s home. Nugent, a prominent member and donor of San Francisco’s Bethel A.M.E. church, had the child baptized in the church by Rev. T. M. D. Ward, and brought him up assisted by her eighteen-year old daughter Margaret, an only child.[74]

Two years later, Margaret Nugent wed the widower George Miller, and joined him living with his children in Petaluma. In 1869, she gave birth to the couple’s first son, Richard “Hoddie” Miller.[75]

Richard “Hoddie” Miller, 1887 (photo courtesy of Sharon mcGriff Payne)

That same year, Margaret’s mother, brought Richard Jessup, a sickly child, to live with the Millers in Petaluma, hoping to improve his health. Mrs. Nugent lived with the Millers as well, working on fundraising for the local A.M.E. Church, before returning to San Francisco in 1871.[76] She left behind Richard Jessup, who had his own separate room in the Miller home, to be raised among the Millers’ children, with Gershom Jessup continuing to provide monthly financial support. [77]

In 1871, George Miller and other African American parents in Petaluma succeeded in convincing J.W. Anderson, who had replaced Rev. Edward S. Lippitt as the town’s school superintendent, to their cause. “The colored citizens,” Anderson said, “are clamoring for a school, and should have one.” The school district rented a dilapidated house on Fifth Street between D and E streets to house the “colored school,” and in January of 1872 hired A.G.W. Davis, a young man just beginning his teaching career, to teach the twelve African American students who had enrolled. That year Petaluma joined nineteen other “colored schools” in California teaching a total of 510 students.[78]

The Millers enrolled their three younger children in the “colored school,” as well their white foster child, Richard Jessup, who attended under the name Richard Miller. The next year Jessup transferred to the white school, but after a week of being taunted by the other students, he withdrew, after which he was homeschooled by his foster mother Margaret Miller.

Margaret Miller, 1886 (photo courtesy of Sharon McGriff Payne)

At the start of the school year in July, 1873, eighteen-year old Miss Rose Haskins was appointed teacher of the “colored school.”[79] Haskin lived just half a block away from the “colored school,” in the house her father, English contractor and stonemason Robert Haskins, had built on the southeast corner of 5th and E streets. Enrollment that year totaled seventeen students, two of whom were Chinese.[80] In July, 1874, the school district, after complaints about the school’s ramshackle condition, moved the “colored school” into a former private school at the northeast corner of Fifth and D streets.[81]

During Rose Haskins’ first semester in the fall of 1873, the Petaluma Argus, a weekly newspaper edited by Henry L. Weston under the motto “equal rights and equal justice to all men,” began a campaign employed by other Republican newspapers in the state of questioning the cost efficiency of maintaining a separate school for such a small number of Black students (the Radical Republican Party, of which Weston was a member, were abolitionists supportive of expanding civil rights, including school integration, while the southern-dominated Democratic Party, for which Santa Rosa’s Sonoma Democrat newspaper served as the county organ, was strongly opposed to granting such rights).

Petluma Argus editor, Henry L. Weston (Photo Sonoma County Library)

Weston pointed out that, given Haskins’ salary and rent for a separate school building, the average annual cost of educating a student in the “colored school” was $35, as opposed to $12 in Petaluma’s white schools ($1,100 and $370, respectively, in early 21st century currency). Denouncing school segregation as an abomination, Weston declared that the “colored school” must soon “fade away before the ceaseless march of progress and civilization.”[82]

George Miller, meanwhile, remained actively engaged in that ceaseless march on a statewide level. In November of 1871, he and other members of the Colored Convention’s Educational Committee met in Stockton to draw up a petition calling for all school children, regardless of color, to be admitted to common public schools.[83]

Although they succeeded in getting two bills passed by Republicans—then the progressive party—in the state assembly, both were defeated by Democrats—then the conservative, proslavery party—in the state senate. In the spring of 1872, Miller again gathered with the Educational Committee in San Francisco, and under the leadership of Elevator newspaper editor Philip Bell, decided to put a test case before the California Supreme Court.[84]

The case was initiated by Mrs. Harriet A. Ward on behalf of her daughter Mary Frances. After the closing of a “colored school” on Broadway Street in San Francisco, Mary Frances was faced with having to walk a long distance to the nearest available “colored school” across town. Instead, Harriet A. Ward applied for admission of her daughter to the nearby white Broadway School. Her application was denied by Principal Noah F. Flood.

The case of Ward v. Flood became the first school segregation case to go before the state Supreme Court. In May, 1874, the court ruled on the case, upholding California’s School Law of “separate but equal” facilities for Blacks and Native American children, but also affirming that, based upon the civil rights extended by the Fourteenth Amendment ratified in 1868, the education of Black and Native American children must be provided for in separate schools upon the written application of parents of at least ten such children. If the trustees of the schools failed to do so, the children had to be admitted into the white schools.[85]

For the members of the Educational Committee, the ruling overall was disappointing, but it also represented an incremental victory in that it clearly mandated the public education of Black children, including admitting them into white schools if need be. With the ruling in hand, committee members turned their efforts to lobbying school districts to abolish “colored schools.” They were helped by the Recession of 1873, during which school districts, strapped for funding, opted to enroll black students rather than fund two separate school systems. By 1875, San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland, and Vallejo had done so.[86] But not Petaluma.

As the school year began in July, 1875, Rose Haskins was promoted to a teaching position at the Brick School, Petaluma’s main grammar school for white students, at Fifth and B streets. She was replaced at the “colored school” by her cousin, Miss Annie Camm, the daughter of local English contractor William Camm.[87] A few months into Camm’s tenure, Henry Jones, a native of Massachusetts who had recently opened a new barbershop on Washington Street, complained about Camm’s competency in teaching his son at the ungraded “colored school.” He requested that Principal Martin E. Cooke Munday of the Brick School admit his son to the white school.[88]

Petaluma Brick School at the corner of Fifth and B streets, 1900 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

Munday, a young leader of the local Democratic Party, claimed to have examined Jones’ son—a claim Jones subsequently denied—and found him to be unqualified for entry into the Brick school. Privately, he told Jones that “no colored child should be admitted as long as he was principal of the school.” Jones, who pointed out that he paid school taxes just like everyone else in town, told the Petaluma Argus that he was “just looking for some justice.”

Instead of returning his son to the “colored school,” Jones placed him in a private school.[89] (Although this incident occurred in 1875, it was not made public until 1877 when the Argus reported it in an effort to embarrass Principal Munday, who at the time was running for county school superintendent. Munday ended up losing to the race to the Republican candidate, but subsequently went on to be elected to the state assembly and then to mount an unsuccessful campaign for Lieutenant Governor.)[90]

In the fall of 1876, a new weekly newspaper, the Petaluma Courier, was launched by two leading Democrats in town, publisher William F. Shattuck, and editor Edward S. Lippitt, the former school supervisor. Lippitt, who had formerly served as chairman of the Sonoma County Republican Party, was a longtime progressive abolitionist and supporter of the local Black community.

Following ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, George Miller and other African Americans had paraded with a band to Lippitt’s house, where they presented him with two silver spoons adorned with Lady Liberty in recognition of his “fearless and able advocacy of their rights, and of universal suffrage.”[91]

Lippitt house at Sixth & D streets, 1959 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1876 however, Lippitt, distressed and angered by what he considered the Republican Party’s retribution against the South during the Reconstruction Era, switched his allegiances to the pro-South Democratic Party. He and Shattuck launched the Courier as an advocacy organ for Democratic candidates running in the 1876 election, including presidential candidate Samuel Tilden. They wasted no time attacking the Republican positions held by Henry Weston’s Argus, labeling the paper a “negro-worshipping sheet” for its stand on integrating Black students into the white schools.[92]

(Later in life, Lippitt wrote that although he believed in freeing the slaves, he did not expect Blacks to be granted the vote until they had been properly educated to execute it, which he suspected may take generations; he deplored passage of the Fifteenth Amendment as merely a Republican political maneuver to humiliate the South.)[93]

Edward S. Lippitt, 1910 (photo Sonoma County Library)

One result of the newspaper war waged between the Argus and the Courier in 1876 is that the “colored school” became a polarizing topic. Ezekiel Denman, one of the town’s most prominent and wealthiest men, was defeated in his 1876 re-election bid to the Board of Education after voicing support for eliminating the “colored school.”[94] The Board’s stubborn refusal to abolish the “colored school” went viral in 1877, drawing ridicule from newspapers from as far away as San Francisco (“an ante-rebellion spirit of caste is still alive and dominate in Petaluma”) and Pennsylvania (“a great blotch on the face of human progress”).[95]

The presidential election of 1876 was undermined by voter fraud, resulting in an deal between Republicans and Democrats to allow Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to ascend to the presidency, on the condition that he formally end Reconstruction in the South. The end of Reconstruction reversed whatever gains Blacks had made since the Civil War, ushering in an era of Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, and lynchings.

During this period, many Blacks living in Petaluma were drawn away to more vibrant Black communities in Oakland and in Vallejo, the latter of which offered jobs in the nearby Mare Island shipyards.[96]

Vallejo wharf, 1860s (photo in the public domain)

By the spring of 1877, enrollment in the “colored school” had dropped to four students, which Henry Weston was quick to point out in the Argus raised the annual cost per student to $125, as opposed to $12 for students in the white schools.[97] Still, Petaluma’s Board of Education held its ground.

The following spring, Miss Annie Camm resigned from teaching at the “colored school” in order to get married.[98] She was replaced by Miss Mary C. Waterbury.[99] By 1880, Petaluma’s “colored school” was down to merely one student who was being taught by a Black teacher named Miss Louisa Dickson.[100] The population census year listed only seventeen Blacks living in Petaluma.[101]

In April, 1880, the California state legislature voted to abolish “colored schools,” citing the expense of providing a separate education system for a relatively small number of children. They passed a new law requiring that schools be open “for the admission of all children.”[102] At the beginning of the new school year in July 1880, E.S. Lippitt’s Petaluma Courier, unwilling to acknowledge the new law, spuriously reported that the “colored school” had been discontinued after enrollment had dwindled down to but one student.”[103]

In 1882, there were four Black students enrolled in the newly integrated Petaluma public schools. By 1885, there were none.[104]

As the size of Petaluma’s Black community declined at the end of the Reconstruction Era, the local A.M.E. Church lost what remained of its vibrancy. After the A.M.E.’s final appointment of Rev. Fielding Smithea to the church in 1878, it appears the church stopping offering Sunday services altogether.[105] In 1879, William Zartman, a prominent business leader in town who owned a carriage factory across the street from the church as well as property adjacent to it, filed a city nuisance petition against the “colored folks church,” signed by a dozen neighbors.[106]

William Zartman’s Blacksmith, Wagon, and Carriage Shop, corner of Howard Street and Western Avenue, 1877 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1885, the church’s two surviving trustees, Alexander McFarlane and Irwin Cooper Smith, sold the church building and property to Zartman for $300 ($8,000 in early 21st century currency), distributing the proceeds from the sale to other A.M.E churches in the state.[107]

White men’s fondness for their Black barbers didn’t last. The reasons were varied: The temperance movement and the evangelical religious revivals of the “Second Great Awakening” caused many customers to frown upon the barbershop’s liquor-fueled conviviality. The most important explanation for whites’ anxiety about the shop, however, involved Black barbers’ growing wealth.

For many, the success of leading Black barbers seemed to threaten the social order. As white customers were shaved by men with fortunes worth many thousands of dollars, some must have wondered who was serving whom. Meanwhile, at the other end of the social spectrum, immigrant barbers—many of them Germans—catered to a growing population of working-class customers: men too poor, and in many cases too resentful of Black barbers’ success, to patronize the best Black-owned barbershops. A handful of elite Black barbers continued to prosper, but the days when Blacks dominated the trade were coming to an end.[108]

Frank Miller, who by the 1870s had become Petaluma’s most prosperous Black citizens with property holdings of fifteen hundred dollars and a personal estate worth four hundred dollars ($38,000 and $10,000, respectively, in early 21st century currency), was working in 1878 as a barber in the Union Hotel, located at the southwest corner of Western Avenue and Main Street. By the time the hotel was moved in 1881 to B and Main streets to make way for construction of the new Masonic Lodge building, it appears Miller and his wife Charlotte, who he had married in 1871, relocated to San Francisco where they managed a boarding house together.[110]

George W. Miller did not live to see any of this—the decline of Black barbershops in town, California’s integration of public schools, the end of Reconstruction, nor the closing of the A.M.E. church he had helped to start. In the fall of 1873, after returning from one of his regular trips to San Francisco with his wife Margaret, and preparing for the upcoming Colored Citizens Convention to be held in Sacramento, Miller unexpectedly died on October 20 at the age of forty-eight.

Illustration of a Colored Convention held in 1876 (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper)

His funeral, held at St. John’s Episcopal Church in town, was overseen by his fellow barber Frank Miller. The pallbearers included Santa Rosa barber John Richards, Napa Barber Joseph Hatton, and fellow Brannan Guard, Major Alexander Dennison, who had recently moved to Petaluma.[111]

A few weeks after the funeral, Frank Miller and Alexander Dennison traveled to Sacramento to represent Sonoma County at the Colored Citizens of California Convention in place of George Miller.[112]

******


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Advertisement, Sonoma County Journal: August 25, 1855; September 5, 1856. “Deaths: George Miller,” Pacific Appeal, October 25, 1873.

[2] Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[3] Rudolph Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 15-19; Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 71.

[4] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 42;“Proceedings of the First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California, Held at Sacramento Nov. 21st and 22nd in the Colored Methodist Church, 1855.” http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/265

[5] Douglas W. Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

[6] Sean Trainor, “The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard,” The Atlantic, January 20, 2014.

[7] Sean Trainor, “The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard,” The Atlantic, January 20, 2014.

[8] Douglas Walter Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers on Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009). J. Gordon Melton, J. Gordon, A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism (MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) pp. 8–11.

[9] Herbert G. Ruffin II, “The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865),” February 9, 2009. BlackPast.com; Proceedings of the First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California, p.16, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/files/original/e2ddec1776e38c21ee7782d6b4d96eba.pdf

[10] Gaye LeBaron, et. Al., Santa Rosa: A Nineteen Century Town (Santa Rosa, CA: Historia, LTD, 1985), p. 87.“State Convention of the Colored People of California, San Francisco, October, 1857.” Coloredconventions.org. http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/267. ; “State Convention of the Colored People of California, San Francisco, October, 1856,” p.133, Coloredconventions.org.https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/266.

[11] Adair Heig, History of Petaluma,: A California River Town, (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 47.

[12] Sean Carroll, Sonoma County Early African Americans, paper for California State University, Hayward, 2008. Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library.

[13] Mike McPhate, “California’s Black Slaves and the Myth of Free Soil,” California Sun, January 23, 2019. Californiasun.com.

[14] Journal of the Eighth Session of the Legislature of the State of California, Volume 9, Part 1858, p. 623; Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009). Pgs. 17-18.

[15] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) pgs. 59-61.

[16] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25.

[17] J. Gordon Melton, J. Gordon, A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism (MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) pp. 8–11; Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, editors, The Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840-1865, Volume 2 (Temple University Press, 1979).

[18] Petaluma Argus: Humboldt Shaving Saloon Advertisement, December 15, 1863; “Passing Away,” July 30, 1862.

[19] Advertisement for “Frank Miller’s Hairdressing Saloon,” Petaluma Argus, January 23, 1863.

[20] https://blackvoicenews.com/2008/07/31/mirror-of-the-times-founded-1857/

[21] “Agents,” Pacific Appeal, January 17, 1863.

[22] “Communications,” Pacific Appeal, April 26, 1862.

[23] Advertisement for the Santa Rosa Shaving Saloon, Sonoma Democrat, June 20, 1861.

[24] “Our Principal Taxpayers,” Petaluma Courier, January 31, 1878. “Death of John Richards,” Petaluma Argus, May 2, 1879.

[25] “Arrivals,” The Elevator, September 20, 1873.

[26] “Emancipation Grand Festival,” Pacific Appeal, July 26, 1862.

[27] Celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1st, 1863, at Platt’s Hall,”  Pacific Appeal, January 17, 1863.

[28] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 24. “Correspondence,” Pacific Appeal, December 12, 1863. The Elevator: “Santa Rosa,”, July 4, 1865 (The Santa Rosa “colored school’ was entering its second semester in July, indicating the first started in January of 1865). “School Examination in Santa Rosa,” February 16, 1866.

[29] Petaluma Argus: “School for Colored Children,” December 16, 1863; “Opened,” January 13, 1864; Pacific Appeal: “Correspondence,” December 12, 1863, “Married,” June 27, 1863, “Arrivals from the Interior,” February 13, 1864.

[30] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25.

[31] “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; Lippitt’s role is speculated given the silver spoons presented to him by Miller and other A.M.E. members in 1870 for his advocacy in helping them attain their civil rights.

[32] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864. (Eight students is an estimate–it’s unknown exactly how many students were in attendance during the Petaluma’s “colored school’s” first year. George Miller had four school-age children. In 1867 and 1868, Petaluma’s annual school census counted eight black school-age children between the ages of five and fifteen in town, out of a total of 627 children in the city.)

[33] “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864.

[34] “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864.

[35] City of Petaluma Deed Records, Lot 276, Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library, Ref. 979.418.732. The church appears on the 1865 Stratton Map of Petaluma, at which time the lot it sat upon was legally owned by a homesteader named Thomas Craine, who owned a number of the subdivided lots in the area known as the Bassett Addition. Craine sold the church lot in 1866 to John Little John, who, in turn, transferred ownership to the A.M.E. Church, as recognized by the city as of January 1, 1867. It’s possible the church rented the building prior to that. (In his book, Petaluma’s Architectural Heritage, Dan Petersen notes that the houses on Howard Street between Western Avenue and Harris Street were typical examples of the western Greek Revival vernacular built for early residents. He dates the house at circa 1870).

[36] California State Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Sacramento on the 25, 26, 27, 28 of October 1865. P. 14., coloredconventions.org.

[37] California State Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Sacramento on the 25, 26, 27, 28 of October 1865. Coloredconventions.org.

[38] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 158. “The Appointments of the A. M. E. Church for the Conference,” Pacific Appeal, November 8, 1862; “The Appointments of the A. M. E. Church for the Conference,” Pacific Appeal, September 12, 1863; 1860 U.S. Census, Sacramento, California; 1861 Sacramento City Directory.

[39] Petaluma Argus: “Notice,” November 30, 1865; “Campbell’s Chapel, November 30, 1865. “Santa Rosa,” The Elevator, July 4, 1865, the first newspaper mention of Rev. Killingsworth at the A.M.E. Church in Petaluma.

[40] An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p.42.

[41] Rudolph Lapp, Afro-Americans in California (San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser Publishing Company, 1987).

[42] “Proceedings of California Convention of Colored Citizens, 1865” http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/268, pgs. 14, 24. (no mention of Santa Rosa’s colored school” in Killingsworth’s report to the convention).

[43] Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, editors, The Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840-1865, Volume 2 (Temple University Press, 1979); Herbert G. Ruffin II, “The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865),” February 9, 2009. BlackPast.com

[44] Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction(The University of North Carolina Press; Reprint edition, 2015)

[45] “Frightful Explosion,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, August 30, 1866.

[46] Petaluma Argus: “School Census,” July 4, 1867, July 2, 1868, July 1, 1869, June 18, 1879.

[47] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 252-253. “Petaluma,” The Elevator, November 1, 1867.

[48] Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 29.

[49] “Cowardly,” Petaluma Argus, April 30, 1868.

[50] Advertisement for Miss Purnell from Philadelphia, Petaluma Argus, December 24, 1868.

[51] “Acknowledgments,” The Elevator, January 29. 1869. “Remittances received from . . . Z. F. Purnell, Petaluma.”

[52] “Remember It,” Petaluma Argus, March 25, 1869; Site of Hinshaw Hall: “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror, Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 7, 1861.

[53] The Elevator: “Personal,” February 26, 1868; “Letter to the Editor, Miss Purnell’s Concert,” December 4, 1868. “Deaths,” Pacific Appeal, November 30, 1877. “A Dramatic Novelty,” San Francisco Examiner, November 22, 1870.

[54] Pacific Appeal: advertisement for concert, August 12, 1871; advertisement for board house, September 2, 1871; “Brilliant Fifteenth Amendment Celebration,” May 2, 1874; “Personal,” December 21, 1872; “Deaths,” November 30, 1877. The Elevator: “Letter to the Editor,” December 4, 1868; “Personal,” February 26, 1869; “Freedom’s Jubilee,” March 18,1870. San Francisco Examiner: “A Dramatic Novelty,” November 22, 1870. The Evening Telegraphy (Philadelphia): “Musicians,” March 30, 1867; “A Political Rumpus,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 18, 1877.

[55] The Elevator: “Petaluma,” November 1, 1867; “Correspondence of the Elevator,” February 19, 1869; California State Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Sacramento on the 25, 26, 27, 28 of October 1865. P. 14. http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/268

[56] “Lecture,” Grass Valley Daily Union, February 15, 1871; “General Dispatches,” Grass Valley Daily Union, December 3, 1871; 1871 California Voter Registration, Nevada County; “Died,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 28, 1872;

[57] Petaluma Argus, “Lecture,” May 20, 1869; “If a Man Die, Shall He Live Again?” October 19, 1872; “Religious Notice,” March 25, 1871; “Bishop Black at A.M.E. Church,” August 14, 1878. Legal Agreement by Killingsworth Assigning Church Trustees, May 18, 1869, Sonoma County Archives; “Zion Conference Appointments, The Elevator, April 7, 1877. (Note: McFarland is not listed in the May 18, 1869 legal agreement, but is listed as a trustee on the city deed records for the church entered January 25, 1869; he also is listed as a church trustee along with Cooper Smith the recorded sale of the church property October 3, 1885—from deed records at the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library).

[58] “Uncle Aleck Dead,” Petaluma Argus, August 4, 1886. “Melvina & Alexander McFarland,” Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library archives.

[59] “Death of a Septuagenarian,” Petaluma Argus, January 21, 1871.

[60] Katherine Rinehart research papers, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library archives. Regarding Cooper Smith: Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 42.

[61] Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 42.

[62] The Elevator: “Masonic Notice,” December 21, 1872; “Died,” October 25, 1873. “Prince Hall Freemasonary,” Freemason Information, freemasoniformation.com

[63] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 146.

[64] “Commissions,” San Francisco Examiner, July 19, 1869; Petaluma Argus: “Target Excursion and Ball,” October 23, 1869. “Target Practice,” October 30, 1869.

[65] Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p.133. Ovando James Hollister, Life of Schuyler Colfax (Funk & Wagnalls, 1886) p. 257; Schuyler Colfax, 17th Vice President (1869-1873), https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/vice-president/VP_Schuyler_Colfax.htm.

[66] “Processiana,” New Orleans Cresent, September 13, 1868; “The Grand Demonstration,” New Orleans Republic, September 15, 1868; Miscellaneous,” The Daily Standard (Raleigh, NC), October 18, 1869.

[67] Petaluma Argus: “Flag Presentation,” January 1, 1869; “The Picnic,” July 9 1870.

[68] Petaluma Journal & Argus: “Celebration,”, February 25, 1870; “Jubilant,” April 2, 1870; “Celebration of Our Colored Citizens,” April 9, 1870; Ralph E. Shaffer, “California Reluctantly Implements the Fifteenth Amendment: White Californians Respond to Black Suffrage,” Cal Poly Pomona, 2020. https://www.cpp.edu/class/history/faculty/documents/shaffer15thamend.pdf

[69] Petaluma Argus, “They Voted,” April 23, 1870; Registration of the Domicile Inhabitants, County of Sonoma, 1872: George Miller listed as first registering to vote in 1870.

[70] “Nigger in the Pit! Put Him Out!” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1871.

[71] 1870 Population Census.

[72] “Married,” The Elevator, June 26, 1868.

[73] 1870 census records; “Died,” Petaluma Argus, January 6, 1972.

[74] “Young Jessup Wins,” Napa Register Weekly, July 5, 1889; “Jessup Contest,” Napa Register Weekly, September 19, 1890; “Estate of Gershom P. Jessup, Deceased,”  Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, by California Superior court (San Francisco Probate dept., James Vincent Coffey, Bancroft-Whitney, 1909). Pp. 476-509.

[75] “Deaths,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 27, 1902.

[76] “Resolutions of Thanks,” Pacific Appeal, September 2, 1871;

[77] The 1870 census doesn’t list Richard Jessup in the Miller house but instead a child born in 1866 named “Richard Robinson,” most likely an alias to hide Jessup’s identity from his birth mother).

[78] Petaluma Argus: “Our Public Schools,” June 3, 1871; “Our Public Schools,” January 6, 1872; “Educational,” March 9, 1872; “The Public Schools,” July 20, 1872.

[79] Petaluma Argus: “Our Public Schools,” July 18, 1873;

[80] Petaluma Argus, “The Colored School,” November 7, 1873.

[81] Petaluma Argus: “Educational Notes,” July 17, 1874; “Colored Schools Elsewhere,” April 27, 1877. (E.S. Lippitt confirms that the “colored school’ was on the northeast corner of Fifth and B streets in An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt, p. 42.)

[82] Petaluma Argus: “Our ‘Colored Schools,’” December 8, 1876.

[83] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) pgs. 178-179.

[84] The Elevator: “Educational Public Meeting at Bethel Church,” April 27, 1872; Address of the Educational Committee, May 11, 1872.

[85] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/

[86] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; Jo Ann Williamson, Lori Rhodes, Michael Dunson, “Chapter 7 A Selected History of Social Justice in Education,” Review of Research in Education, November 15, 2016, Vol. 31 (1), pp. 195–224; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/

[87] Petaluma Argus, “Educational Notes,” June 25, 1875; “Educational Notes,” July 9, 1875.

[88] The Colored School,” Petaluma Courier, April, 12, 1877. Petaluma Argus: “Cozy Barber Shop,” April 23, 1875; “Died,” September 3, 1879; “Our Colored School,”

[89] Petaluma Courier: “The Colored School,” April, 12, 1877; “Letter from a Citizen,” April 19, 1877. Petaluma Argus: “The Colored School,” April 6, 1877; “The Colored School,” April 20, 1877; “Personalities,” August 31, 1877;  “How is This?” August 24, 1877.

[90] “The Election,” Petaluma Courier, September 6, 1877. “In the Assembly,” San Francisco Examiner, January 28, 1884.

[91] “A Splendid Testimony,” Petaluma Argus, June 25, 1870.

[92] Petaluma Courier, “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877.

[93] An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p. 43.

[94] Petaluma Argus: “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877.

[95] Petaluma Argus: “Our ‘Colored Schools,’” December 22, 1876; “Educational Items,” August 13, 1875; “Our Colored School,” August 11, 1876; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” May 18, 1877; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” May 18, 1876.

[96] Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 58.

[97] Petaluma Argus: March 30, 1877; “Our Colored School,” March 23, 1877.

[98] “Our Public Schools,” Petaluma Argus, June 14, 1878 (listed her as teaching for two months the spring). “Married,” Petaluma Courier, July 18, 1878.

[99] Petaluma Courier, “Election of Teachers,” June 19, 1878; “Teachers Elected,” January 8, 1879.

[100] Petaluma Courier, “The Public Schools,” June 18, 1879; History Of Sonoma County, Sonoma County, CA (Archives History – Books …..Petaluma Township, Part 3 1880).

[101] 1880 Population Census, Sonoma Country History and Genealogy.

[102] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 25.

[103] “Local Dots,” Petaluma Courier, July 21, 1880.

[104] Petaluma Argus: “School Census Report,” June 2, 1882;  “School Census,” June 6, 1885.

[105] “Sixteen Volume: A.M.E. Appointments, Pacific Appeal, August 10, 1878. Per the City of Petaluma Deed Records, Lot 276, Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library, Ref. 979.418.732: Sold on October 3, 1885 by two trustees of the AME, a religious society not incorporated; includes a small frame structure; states it has been many years since any religious services were held, and that but four or five members of the society remain; remains of the sale to be extended to other A.M.E. churches throughout the state. Last service listed in the Petaluma Argus was August 14, 1878, when Bishop Black of Baltimore preached at the A.M.E. Church.

[106] “Petition of Wm Zartman et al.,” February 24, 1879, Sonoma County History and Genealogy Library archives.

[107] City of Petaluma Deed Records, Lot 276, Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library, Ref. 979.418.732.

[108] Sean Trainor, “The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard,” The Atlantic, January 20, 2014; Douglas Walter Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers on Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009).

[109]

[110] “Married,” Petaluma Argus, October 28, 1871. “Peggy’s Pecilings,” Petaluma Courier, May 13, 1891. McKenney’s District Directory for 1878-9 of Yolo, Solano, Napa, Lake, Marin, and Sonoma Counties, p. 274, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library: Miller as listed as working in the Union Hotel, which at the time had a barbershop operated by Charles Whitehead, called Whitehead Shaving Saloon); it’s possible that Miller was working for Whitehad. “Miller and wife running board house . . .” Katherine Rinehart, biography of Frank V. Miller, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.

[111] “Deaths: George Miller,” Pacific Appeal, October 25, 1873. “Grand Ball.” The Elevator, March 28, 1874 (one of many listing for Alexander Dennsion representing Petaluma).

[112] “Call for a State Convention,” Pacific Appeal, November 15, 1873. “Pacific Coast Dispatches,” San Francisco Examiner, November 26, 1873.

[113] “Estate of Gershom P. Jessup, Deceased,”  Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, by California Superior court (San Francisco Probate dept., James Vincent Coffey, Bancroft-Whitney, 1909). Pp. 476-509.

[114] “Dancing Party,” Napa Register Weekly, November 30, 1883; “Real Estate Transfers,” Napa Register Weekly, March 5, 1885; “Local Brevities, Napa Register Weekly, April 1, 1886; Local Brevities, Napa Register Weekly, August 5, 1887.

[115] “Jessup Jr Wins,” Napa Register Weekly, March 9, 1888; “Richard Jessup’s Money,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 11, 1893;“Death Comes to Senator Mahoney,” San Francisco Examiner, December 24, 1897.

[116] “Local Briefs,” Napa Valley Register, January 17, 1890; “Personal,” Napa Valley Register, August 14, 1891; “Letters,” The Sacramento Record Union, October 11, 1897.

[117] “Death of Edward Hatton,” Napa Register Weekly, May 11, 1897; “Deaths,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 9, 1897; “Deaths,” Napa Valley Register, August 27, 1902; “Deaths,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 27, 1902; “Deaths,” San Francisco Examiner, December 28, 1928.

Featured

The Secret Life of a Petaluma Shoeshine Man

Henry Chenault’s Unknown Role in 1917 Houston Race Revolt

Henry Chenault at his shoeshine stand outside the Arcade Barbershop, 18 Western Avenue, 1955 (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Rain was falling the night of August 23, 1917, when 150 Black soldiers marched on the city of Houston. They were protesting the inhumane treatment they had received from residents and police, including the brutal beating that day of two soldiers by white policemen. By the end of the evening, 20 people would be dead, 16 of them white, resulting in one of the largest court-martials in American history and, ultimately, the death of 19 Black soldiers by hanging.1

Henry Chenault was among an additional ten soldiers scheduled to be hung. At the last minute, President Woodrow Wilson commuted their sentences to life imprisonment, later reduced to 20 years. Chenault ended up serving 13 years of hard labor at Leavenworth Federal Prison. After his release, he made his way to Petaluma, where he opened a shoeshine stand in the early 1930s.2

Thanks to Chenault’s engaging charm, his sidewalk stand—first on Main Street and then Western Avenue across from Andresen’s Tavern—quickly became a popular local crossroads.

Henry Chenault’s empty shoeshine stand outside the Arcade Barbershop beside Pedroni’s Delicatessen, late 1940s (photo courtesy of Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

For sports enthusiasts, the stand was a mecca to stop at and check the radio—always tuned to a ball game—for the latest score and Chenault’s play-by-play commentary. Among downtown merchants, it served the city’s “second chamber of commerce.” To newcomers it was an unofficial welcome center, stocked with brochures and Chenault’s recommendations of places to go and things to see. For local politicians, many of whom relied upon Chenault as a trusted advisor, it was a spot to keep their fingers on the pulse of the community.3

Street sign outside Henry Chenault’s shoestand, painted Lew Barber (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

With his uncanny ability to recall names, dates, and scraps of street conversation, Chenault was said to be on a first-name basis with nine out of ten people who passed by. During Petaluma’s suburban housing boom in the 1950s and 60s, as the city’s population more than tripled to 25,000, that became increasingly important. A personalized greeting from Chenault was reassurance that Petaluma remained a place where people knew your name.4

Longtime Argus-Courier columnist Bill Soberanes attributed his popularity to a personal creed that if one looked for the good in others, the bad points would vanish.5

Henry Chenault and Petaluma Argus-Courier columnist Bill Soberanes at Chenault’s shoeshine stand, 1960s (photo courtesy of Petaluma Argus-Courier)

While that may have been self-fulfilling—Chenault never spoke of his incarceration, telling people he worked on the railroads after being discharged from the army—it didn’t erase Petaluma’s bad points when it came to race, no matter how much good Chenault brought out in the town.6 For most of his years in Petaluma, he was the city’s only Black businessman, as well as its sole Black homeowner.7

That wasn’t by accident. Unlike the blatant and violent Jim Crow racism he faced as a young soldier in Houston, the discrimination he found in Petaluma was largely covert, camouflaged behind a smiling face.

That didn’t stop Henry Chenault from trying.

Born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1895, Chenault quit school at 16 to apprentice as a teamster and stableman. Upon turning 18 in 1913, he enlisted for a three-year stint in the U.S. Army. Following his discharge, he settled in Oakland, where he met and married Willie Bernice Butler, originally of Red Bluff, adopting her five-year old son Samuel.

On May 24, 1917, almost two months after the United States entered World War I, Chenault was recalled to active duty, and assigned to the all-Black Third Battalion of the 24th Regiment. A unit of the famed Buffalo Soldiers, the 24th had charged up San Juan Ridge with Teddy Roosevelt and fought in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War.8

Soldiers of the Third Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment at Camp Logan, Texas, August 1917 (photo courtesy of the Houston Chronicle)

In late July, the Third Battalion was dispatched to Fort Logan, three miles outside of Houston, Texas, to guard the construction off a new aviation training facility.

Racial tensions were high across the country that summer. In July, white mobs in East St. Louis, Illinois, staged a labor riot, killing dozens of Blacks who had moved there from the South to work in war factories.

East St. Louis Race Riot headline, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Friday, July 6, 1917 (image public domain)

Houston officials and business leaders, looking to capitalize financially on the new army base, assured the military that Black soldiers would not pose any problem in their city.9

It proved to be an empty promise. A segregated state, Texas had a reputation for lynchings and racial violence. In Houston, the mere presence of Black men in uniform threatened the social hierarchy. A year before, a member of the 24th stationed in Del Rio, Texas, had been killed for no other reason than he was Black. It angered many white Texans to see Black men in uniform. They feared that if they weren’t kept in check, local Black civilians would begin demanding equal treatment for themselves.10

Soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment, Camp Logan, Texas, 1917 (photo public domain)

As a result, soldiers in the 24th endured an onslaught of racial slurs and discrimination from city residents, along with pistol whippings and arrest from police officers for violating such Jim Crow laws as sitting in “white only” sections on the streetcars and drinking from “white only” fountains.

Tensions came to a boil the night of August 23rd, after two white police officers assaulted a Black private for interfering in the arrest of a Black woman. When a Black M.P. patrolling the city asked the officers about the soldier’s whereabouts, he was hit with a pistol, shot at three times, and brutally beaten before being thrown in jail.

News filtered back to the 24th that police had killed the two soldiers and an armed white mob was headed for the camp. Shots rang out, sending the frightened soldiers scrambling for their rifles and shooting into surrounding buildings at suspected snipers. An examination of soldiers inflicted with bullet wounds that evening at the camp, found the bullets came from non-military rifles.

Camp Logan , Texas, 1917 (photo U.S. National Archives)

After forming a skirmish line to secure the camp, 150 soldiers began marching toward the Houston police station to hold the police accountable for their attacks on the two soldiers.

All in all, 20 people died in the soldiers’ uprising that evening, including 11 white residents, five policemen, and four Black soldiers killed by friendly fire. Afterward, 118 soldiers were court martialled for murder and mutiny. All pleaded not guilty. They included Chenault, who claimed to be sick that night, and so remained behind in camp.11

As the night was dark and rainy, identification of individual participants proved impossible. Instead, military investigators persuaded seven frightened soldiers to testify against their battalion mates in exchange for immunity. The resulting testimonies were conflicting.12 In Chenault’s case, an informant posing as a participant in the uprising, was planted in his cell to trick him into allegedly revealing his participation.13

The court martial of members of the 24th Infantry Regiment, 1917 (photo U.S. National Archives)

The men were tried in three groups. Despite inconclusive evidence, 19 black soldiers in the first group sentenced to hang, their executions expedited under the Articles of War, as the U.S was at war with Germany. Another 10 soldiers in the second group, including Chenault, were sentenced to death. After an outcry from the NAACP and high-ranking military officials, President Wilson, an avowed racist, reluctantly commuted their sentences to life in federal prison.

All told, 110 men of the 24th were convicted, 63 men of them received life sentences. Some soldiers served as many as 20 years before their release.14 Chenault was released after serving 13.15

Upon his release, Chenault reunited with his wife Willie, then working as a hotel manager in San Francisco. By 1933, they were renting a house in Petaluma, where he opened a shoeshine stand outside Damon and Oster’s, the town’s largest barbershop and beauty salon, on Main Street across from the town clock.

Damon & Oster’s Barbershop and Beauty Salon across from the town clock, in 1935 (photo Sonoma County Library )

Chenault soon became a Petaluma fixture with a signature technique of taking a deck of cards and placing individual cards in a customer’s shoe to keep the polish from rubbing off on the man’s socks.17 Behind his happy demeanor however, he struggled.

In 1937, he and his wife divorced, after which he became engaged to Cecily Clapp, a 30-year old Black woman working as a domestic for the Herold family of Herold Drug Store in town. In May 1938, Chenault purchased a house at 32 West Street. Three months later, Clapp died from an illness apparently brought on by sunstroke. Chenault accompanied her body by train to her hometown in Virginia.18

When World War II broke out, disrupting his shoeshine business, he took a job on Mare Island, where thousands of Blacks had immigrated from the South to work in the shipyards. In 1944, he married Bessie Thompson, a Kansas native who had moved to Petaluma from Eureka in 1939 with her young daughter Nancy Lou.19

After the war, Chenault opened a new shoeshine stand outside the Arcade Barbershop at 18 Western Avenue, where he would remain for the next twenty-one years.20

Henry Chenault at 18 Western Avenue stand, 1949 (photo courtesy of Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

He and his wife became actively engaged in politics, serving as officers of the Petaluma Democratic Club, and founding members of the Sonoma County NAACP. Established in Santa Rosa in 1955, the chapter elected Bessie Chenault as its first treasurer.21

While the county chapter supported the national civil rights movement—for example, picketing and boycotting the F.W. Woolworth’s Department Stores in Petaluma and Santa Rosa over the chain store’s refusal to serve Blacks at lunch counters in the South—their primary focus was securing equal treatment in jobs and housing for Sonoma County’s estimated 1,000 Black residents, most of whom lived either in rural areas or Santa Rosa’s South Park neighborhood.22

F.W. Woolworth Co. department store in Phoenix Building on Main Street in the mid-1950s (photo Sonoma County Library)

That included lobbying for the controversial California Fair Employment Practice Act, which barred businesses and labor unions from discriminating against job applicants because of race, color, or creed. After many legislative defeats, it was signed into law in 1959.23

They also pressed for the California Fair Housing Act of 1963, which made it unlawful to discriminate against home buyers and renters.

In 1960, a federal commission on civil rights found Petaluma had only one home owned by a Black family—that of Henry and Bessie Chenault at 32 West Street.24

The Chenault home, 32 West Street, purchased in 1938 (2021 photo by John Sheehy)

The Chenaults’ daughter, Mary Lou, was Petaluma High School’s only Black student when she graduated in 1950. Santa Rosa Junior College, which she went on to attend, was only marginally better in terms of student diversity.25

The commission determined Petaluma’s lack of Black residents was due to exclusionary housing practices. They pointed to a cabal of Sonoma County bankers, real estate agents, developers and neighborhood groups who blackballed and financially threatened anyone attempting to sell or rent property to Blacks.26

Such exclusionary practices were reinforced by formal housing policies. In 1927, the National Association of Real Estate Boards championed racial covenants, creating a model clause that was inserted into countless deeds: “No part of said premises shall be sold, given, conveyed or leased to any negro or negroes.” The Federal Housing Administration, created in the 1930s to insure home mortgages, also required racial covenants to guarantee loans—better known as “redlining.”27

In Petaluma, the suburban tract housing boom on the city’s east side following World War II was accompanied by restrictive covenants that preventing the sale or resale of homes to Blacks.

Covenant in deed for Madison Square Subdivision development by Goheen Construction on Petaluma’s east side in 1946 (courtesy of Connie Williams)

Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that such covenants were not legally enforceable, they did not rule that they couldn’t be used.28 Stifling Black homeownership in suburbs like Petaluma pushed Black Americans, many who had migrated to California during the war to work in shipyards and factories, into zones of concentrated urban poverty in the East Bay and San Francisco.29

Henry Chenault near his shoeshine stand outside the Arcade Barbershop, late 1960s (photo Sonoma County Library)

According to the 1960 civil rights commission report, Black families showing an interest in buying in Sonoma County were often told the property had “just been sold,” even though the house remained on the market. Blacks who did manage to purchase property in Sonoma County had to contend with the possibility of racially motivated violence and vandalism.

In the 1950s, the Santa Rosa weekend home of Jack Beavers, a leader of the San Francisco NAACP chapter, was burned. Black and white neighbors alike agreed that the fire was likely a deliberate act of discrimination.30

The California Fair Housing Act, championed by the Chenaults and other members of the Sonoma County NAACP, was met with opposition after being adopted in 1963. The next year, the California Real Estate Association put forth a ballot measure to nullify the act, and explicitly allow discrimination in the housing market. It passed with 65% of the vote, but was overruled in 1967 by the U.S Supreme Court.31

Chenault was still shining shoes on Western Avenue and fighting the good fight in 1969 when he died unexpectedly at age 74.

Henry Chenault, 1895-1969 (photo courtesy of Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

In 2023, the Army formally overturned the convictions of Chennault and the other 109 soldiers charged with crimes association with the 1917 riot, acknowledging that the military trials had been unjust, tainted by racial discrimination.32

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and in the 2022 Buffalo Soldiers Exhibit at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.

*****

Sidebar: In 2020, a motion picture based upon the 1917 Houston Race Revolt was released. It is currently streaming on Apple TV and Starz.

Footnotes:

[1] C. Calvin Smith, “The Houston Riot of 1917, Revisited,” The Houston Review, Spring 1991, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 85-102.

[2] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault,” South Texas College of Law Digital Collection, https://cdm16035.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15568coll1/id/1707

[3] Petaluma Argus-Courier: Bill Soberanes, “So They Tell Me” column, June 19, 1952; Bob Wells, “Everybody Here Knows Henry L. Chenault,” June 24, 1954; “A Paragraph for Mr. Chenault,” October 29, 1954; Bill Soberanes, “Henry Chenault Was a Petaluma Institution,” January 20, 1993.

[4]“Shoe Shine Operator is C. of C.,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1949.

[5] Bill Soberanes, “Henry Was a Friend to All,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 15, 1969.

[6] “Henry Chenault is Dead,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 14, 1969.

[7] Soberanes, January 20, 1993; “United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Hearings held in Los Angeles, California, January 25, 1960; San Francisco California, January 27, 1960, January 28, 1960,” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960), p. 588.

[8] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault”; “Who Are the Buffalo Soldiers,” https://www.buffalosoldiermuseum.com/

[9] Allison Keyes, “The East St. Louis Race Riot Left Dozens Dead, Devastating a Community on the Rise,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 30, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/east-st-louis-race-riot-left-dozens-dead-devastating-community-on-the-rise-180963885/; Smith, pp. 86-89.

[10] Smith, pp. 86-89.

[11] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault”; Christian, Garna L. (2009). “The Houston Mutiny of 1917,” Trotter Review: Volume 18, Issue 1, Article 14. https://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol18/iss1/14

[12] Outline of events from Smith, pp. 85-102.

[13] Robert V. Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), digital edition, p. 286; “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault.”

[14] Smith, p. 97; Haynes, p. 301; “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault”; “5 Surprising Facts About Woodrow Wilson and Racism,” Christian Science Monitor, December 14, 2015,.

[15] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault”; The 1917 Houston Riots/Camp Logan Mutiny. Prairie View A&M University. 

[16] Burroughs Miller is Bride of Julio Coehlo,” Petaluma Argus Courier, August 7, 1933;

[17] Bill Soberanes, So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 3, 1966.

[18] “Final Divorce Decrees Granted,” San Francisco Examiner, November 10, 1937; “H. Chenault’s Fiancee is Called,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1938; “Henry Chenault Home from East,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 9, 1938; Sonoma County Deeds, Sonoma County Clerk: May 19, 1938: Grantee- Henry Chenault; Grantor – Central Bank, etc., Deed, Book 455, page 138; 1940 U.S. Census, Petaluma, lists Henry Chenault, single, white, living at 32 West Street.

[19] “Henry Chenault is Dead,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 14, 1969.

[20] Bob Wells, June 24, 1954.

[21] Bill Soberanes, So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 24, 1960; June 27, 1966; December 19, 1966; “Santa Rosa Unit of NAACP to Receive Charter,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 2, 1955.

[22] “Picketing by NAACP Continues in County,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 20, 1960; “Negro ‘Test’ Stores Open—Part of the Way,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 9, 1960.

[23] Bill Soberanes, So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 20, 1955; Michael C. Tobriner, “California FEPC,” Hastings Law Journal, 1965, Vol. 16, issue 3.

[24] Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, p. 588. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hearings_Before_the_United_States_Commis/fUXVAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

[25] “Petaluma High School Will Hold Graduation Exercises on Durst Field Friday Night,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 8, 1950; “Ex-Petaluman Honors King: As a Girl, She Was the Only Black Student,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 19, 1993.

[26] Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, p. 590. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hearings_Before_the_United_States_Commis/fUXVAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

[27] “Is There Racism in the Deed to Your Home?” New York Times, August 17, 2021.

[28] Moore, Montojo, Mauri, “Roots, Race, and Place,” Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, University of California, Berkeley, October 2019, pgs. 7, 13; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,2017), 6.

[29] Rothstein, p. 6.

[30] Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, p. 590.

[31] Moore, Motojo, Mauri, p. 54.

[32] Jaime Salazar, Mutiny of Rage: The 1917 Camp Logan Riots and Buffalo Soldiers in Houston (Prometheus eBooks, 2021), p. 51; “Army Overturns Convictions of 110 Black Soldiers Charged in 1917 Riot,” New York Times, November 14, 2023.

Featured

The Judge Who Fought the Law . . . and Won

The Colorful Trial of Judge Rollie Webb

Judge Rollie Webb in 1954, striking a Japanese temple bell in his chambers (photo Sonoma County Library)

Early in the evening of May 6, 1953, Judge Rollie Webb entered The Bend cocktail lounge, for what he claimed was business with Max Oncina, the proprietor. Oncina served Webb “more than one but less than four” highballs, before turning the bar over to Albert Curry at 6 p.m., for the evening shift.

Curry and Webb had history—some months earlier, Curry refused Webb service because he was intoxicated.

While Curry poured Webb two more highballs of vodka and 7-Up, Webb struck up a conversation with a young private from Two Rock Ranch Army base named Gerald Jones. After learning Jones shared a common Welsh ancestry, Webb insisted they sing a “Welsh” song together. Standing up, he launched into a rendition of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

The Bend in the Gross Building on Main Street, 1952 (photo Sonoma County Library)

When Curry asked him to keep it down, Webb turned to Jones and suggested they “clean up the bar” in proper Welsh fashion. Instead, Jones bolted for the door.

Webb continued stumbling about the bar, singing Irish ballads. He responded to Curry’s repeated requests to sit down with profanity, demanding that he “buy him a drink.” Finally, Curry called the police to complain that the judge was drunk and raising Cain. After the call, Webb left The Bend and crossed the street to the 101 Club.

When patrolman George Wagner entered the 101, Webb ordered him to remove his hat in his presence. “I am the law in Petaluma,” he told Wagner, “and I can do what I want.”

The 101 Club on Main Street to the right of Western Auto, across from the town clock, 1956 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Placing Webb under arrest, Wagner helped Webb into his patrol car and drove him to the police station two blocks away in City Hall on Fourth Street. At the station he was booked for being drunk in a public place, and released on his own recognizance. His physician drove down to give him a ride home to his house on Galland Street.

The county district attorney refused to prosecute the case, as did Petaluma’s city attorney, Karl Brooks, who cited an ordinance that a person could not be arrested for being drunk inside a bar.

That surprised Police Chief Melvin “Noonie” Del Maestro, who took Brooks’ interpretation of the ordinance to mean his department had arrested hundreds of people without authority since that particular ordinance went into effect in 1942.

Left-to-right: Officer George Wagner, who arrested Webb, Police Chief Noonie Del Maestro, and Officer Dale Moore, 1952 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Once news of the dropped charges went viral in newspapers across the country—“Petaluma Judge Freed in Drunk Case,” casting a pall of corruption over the town, Brooks reversed himself, instructing Del Maestro to charge Webb with being intoxicated on a city street while crossing from The Bend to the 101 Club.

Announcing his plea of not guilty, and demanding a jury trial, Webb had just one thing to say about the circus-like atmosphere of the case: “I’d like to have the TV rights to this.”2

Born in Oakland in 1911, Rolland Clyde Webb was two months old when his parents moved to Petaluma. After graduating from Petaluma High School in 1928, he married Le Tier Beck and took a job as a mortician in town with the John C. Mount Funeral Parlor, while also serving as a deputy county coroner.

In 1935, Webb was stricken with tuberculosis, spending most of the next two years undergoing surgeries at Stanford Hospital and recuperating at a sanitarium in St. Helena. Upon his recovery, he returned to Petaluma with new-found determination, throwing his hat in the ring as a candidate for justice of the peace, a position that didn’t require a law degree.

Only 28 years old, he cited his work as a mortician as good experience in working with the public. Surprisingly, he won.3

Rollie Webb and Melvin “Dutch”Flor at Petaluma High School, 1928; Dutch Flor served as Santa Rosa’s chief of police, 1940-1974 (photo courtesy of Torliatt Family Collection)

“Rollie,” as he was widely known, quickly became a colorful fixture among Petaluma’s 8,000 residents. Diminutive in stature, he was a popular track star and debater in high school, and retained a competitive and argumentative spirit, both on and off the bench. Active in various fraternal orders and non-profit organizations, he took joy in writing poetry and singing light opera and Irish ballads.

After being reelected to two more terms as justice of the peace, he set his sights on higher office, making an unsuccessful run in 1948 for Congress, and a second unsuccessful run in 1950 for county supervisor.4

Judge Rollie Webb, meting out a 3,000-word essay on driving safety in lieu of a traffic fine, 1949 (photo courtesy of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

Shortly thereafter, a change in state law required that Petaluma’s two lower courts—the justice of the peace and the city police court, which handled police arrests—be merged into one so-called justice court.

The new court remained limited to minor duties—criminal misdemeanors, small dollar civil cases, administering oaths, and performing marriage ceremonies—but with a higher jurisdiction in terms of the fines and jail time it was able to impose. As had been the case for justices of the peace like Webb, there were no special qualifications for being a judge.5

In November 1952, Webb won election to the new justice court, beating out Petaluma’s former city police court judge. His election marked the beginning of a long-running feud with Del Maestro.

Like Webb, Del Maestro grew up in Petaluma. After graduating from Petaluma High in 1924, he married his high school sweetheart, went away to barber school, and then opened up his own barbershop in town.

The onset of the Depression hurt his business, leading him to join the police force in 1933. He was recruited largely because of his skills as a former Golden Gloves boxing champion. With Prohibition ending, a new era of barroom brawls was born. Known for being able to hold his own in a fight, Del Maestro’s talents came in handy during the 1940s as well, when soldiers stationed at nearby Two Rock Ranch and Hamilton Field made Petaluma their favorite drinking spot.

Del Maestro was also known for operating by a code of street justice. One telling example occurred in the mid-1940s when he went to question a transient in the railroad yard. After the man took off running, Del Maestro, an excellent marksman who trained at the FBI Academy, drew his revolver and felled him with a flesh wound to his right leg. Fastening a bandana around the bleeding wound, he took the man home to his wife Gladys for treatment.6

Police Chief Noonie Del Maestro training in 1950 at the FBI National Academy in Virginia, where he placed first in marksmanship (photo courtesy of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

After 17 years on the force, Del Maestro was appointed chief of police in 1950, overseeing an eight-man department.7

While Webb shared Del Maestro’s disposition for not operating strictly by the book—he liked to point out that if the book worked in every case, there wouldn’t be a need for judges—he tended to lean in the opposite direction of De Maestro, tempering justice with mercy, so much mercy in some cases that officers of the law often left his court in despair.

In one of his classic cases involving a young man convicted of assault, Webb asked Del Maestro if he would agree to delaying the start of the man’s jail sentence, so as to allow him to continue operating his family business in Tomales. Del Maestro said no. “Every consideration is for the defendant when we get to court,” he added. “No thought is given to the poor people he abused. He should know that if he breaks the law, he will have to go to jail.”

As a compromise, Webb sentenced the man to 10 two-day weekends in jail.

It was no secret Webb was a drinker. He often found before him on the bench suspects he had shared drinks with the night before at a bar in town. “You only had three beers?” the common joke about Webb went. “I bought you four myself!”

Webb’s new role as judge of the justice court presiding over police arrests, went into effect in January 1953. Five months later Webb was arrested at the 101 Club.

City Hall and police headquarters at Fourth and A streets, early 1950s (photo Sonoma County Library)

His jury trial was held in the city council chambers at City Hall. The case drew an estimated 100 spectators, many of whom stood in the hall throughout the trial. The proceedings were retried in the evenings at every bar in town.

For legal counsel, Webb hired LeRoy Lounibos, Sr., one of Petaluma’s most prominent attorneys. Unleashing an aggressive, theatrical defense, Lounibos raised the tension in the courtroom, overwhelming City Attorney Brooks, a relatively inexperienced prosecutor.

Lounibos zeroed in on the weakness in the city’s case, which was finding a witness who had actually seen Webb cross Main Street in an inebriated state. He called to the stand the 101 Club’s owner and bartender, Joe Monteno, who testified that he watched Webb walk into his bar angry but completely sober.

Willie Brown, a legless man who operated a shoeshine stand adjacent to the 101 Club, testified Webb walked across the street from The Bend “very correctly.” Webb’s physician said he examined him that night after driving him home, and found him to be “perfectly sober.”

Defense attorney LeRoy Lounibos, Sr. and Judge Rollie Webb, on recess during first day of trial (photo courtesy of Petaluma Argus-Courier)

In his caustic cross-examination of the prosecution’s witness Private Jones, who testified watching a drunk Webb causing trouble in The Bend, Lounibos got him to admit that he was only 19 and drinking in the bar. Lounibos asked the judge to strike Jones’ testimony and have him taken into custody for violating the state liquor control law.

Private Jones passed out in the hallway after leaving the courtroom, and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

Testifying on his own behalf, Webb attributed his boisterous actions that evening to a “big slug” of the medicine he took just before going into The Bend. His doctor explained that he had prescribed dexadrine for him to use as a stimulant when he was feeling emotionally upset, mentally fatigued, or physically exhausted, all three of which Webb said he was experiencing that evening.8

The trial lasted two days. The jury of 11 men and one woman took only eight minutes to reach a verdict of not guilty. Acquitted, Webb left the courtroom announcing he had “malice toward none.”9 Four days later, he filed a claim against the city and several individuals for $100,000 in damages for false arrest, and inflicting “severe and unusual mental anguish, pain, and humiliation.”

Among those named in the claim were Del Maestro and Wagner. “It looks like I’m Petaluma’s political pawn,” Webb told the press. “And a small group of people are our to get me.”10

Two weeks later, Brooks found the claim to be without merit. The city council agreed. Webb had a year in which to respond with a lawsuit against the city.11 He did not. The claim had achieved its purpose of smearing Del Maestro and the police department.

In late January 1954, Webb failed to show up in court one morning. It turned out the county sheriff had issued a temporary holding charge of inebriation against him, placing him in the Sonoma County Hospital to sober up.12 In the court of Petaluma it didn’t matter. Webb was reelected to two more six-year terms as justice of the judicial court.

Police Chief De; Maestro examining seized evidence, mid-1960s (photo Sonoma County Library)

The feud between Webb and Del Maestro continued unabated until the late 1960s, as both law enforcement and the courts nationwide found themselves under increasing scrutiny due in large part to Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam protests.

“The negative, resentful attitude many people have toward the police,” officer George Wagner later observed, “is due to an unfortunate attitude that has become too prevalent in out society.”

He noted that when he walked the beat alone in the early 1950s, he could always count on assistance from citizens if he needed it. “Now it’s a whole new ball game. The majority of people seldom cooperate when a crime is committed. As the city grew larger and more people moved here, there seemed to be less compassion.”13

His boss, Del Maestro, retired from the force in 1968, replaced by a Petaluma Police Sergeant Larry Higgins, a native of Idaho.

That same year, a new state law converted Petaluma’s justice court to a municipal court, one that now required a sitting judge with a law degree. Alexander J. McMahon, a judge in Sonoma and a native of San Francisco, was appointed the new district judge for south Sonoma County. Forced to resign from the bench, Webb was appointed a municipal clerk in McMahon’s new court.14

So ended Petaluma’s era of homegrown justice.

Clerk Rollie Webb, seated at right, and Judge Alexander McMahon seat behind the bench in the new Southern Sonoma County Municipal Court on its first day in session, January 22, 1968 (photo courtesy of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

*****

Footnotes

  1. “Webb is Arrested on Drunk Charge,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 7, 1953; “Judge Webb’s Case May Go To Jury Today,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, July 9, 1953; “Verdict on Webb is ‘Not Guilty,’” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, July 10, 1953; “Doctor Says Webb Was Sober May 6th,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 9, 1953.
  2. “Petaluma’s Only Judge Charged as Drunk, City Without Court,” Napa Register, May 7, 1953; “Petaluma Judge Freed in Drunk Case,” Sacramento Bee, May 14, 1953; “City Attorney Opinion Holds Up Webb Case,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, May 14, 1953.
  3. “Rolly Webb in Justice Race,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 3, 1938; “Rolland Webb’s Election Seems Sure,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 1, 1938.
  4. “Death Takes Rolland Webb,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 10, 1972.
  5. Oral History Interview with Judge Monty Hellam, 1970, Mayo Hayes O’Donnell Library, Monterey, California. https://www.mayohayeslibrary.org/transcription-of-an-oral-history-of-the-monterey-police-court.html
  6. “No One’s Afraid of Cops Anymore,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 26, 1993.
  7. “Del Maestro, ex-Police Chief, Dies,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 21, 1993; “George Wagner,” Petaluma Argus Courier, April 23, 1977.
  8. “Doctor Says Webb Was Sober May 6th,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 9, 1953.
  9. “No Malice, Webb Admits,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 10, 1953; “Verdict on Webb is ‘Not Guilty,’” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, July 10, 1953.
  10. “Long Range City, Court Fight Seen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 15, 1953.
  11. “Webb’s Big Claim is Denied by the City,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 4, 1953.
  12. “Judge Webb Held for Inebriacy,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 25, 1954; “Judge Webb Out of Hospital,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 27, 1954.
  13. Chris Samson, “George Wagner,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 23, 1977.
  14. “Del Maestro, ex-Police Chief, Dies,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 21, 1993; “Rolland Webb Dies at Age 63,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 10, 1972; “Petaluma Police Chief Resigning,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 7, 1967; “Gov. Reagan Signs Bill on New Municipal Court,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 26, 1967; Judge McMahon, 53, Dies in His Sleep Wednesday,” Petaluma Argus Courier, September 23, 1976.
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A Bend in the Road: the Legacy of Columbus Tustin

1870 map of Petaluma (image in the public domain)

Petaluma’s first death was by potatoes. In the fall of 1851, a farmer named Shirley was thrown from the wagon load of potatoes he was driving to the potato warehouse near today’s Washington Street Bridge, and crushed beneath its wheels.1

At the time, Petaluma was just coming into existence. The year before, meat hunter Tom Lockwood set up camp at an abandoned Miwok trading village called Lekituit (today’s Cedar Grove) for shipping game to gold rush San Francisco. By the time of Shirley’s death, the encampment had expanded to include a couple of trading posts, a handful of rustic cabins, the potato warehouse, and a combination general store, dining hall, and hostel operated by a disappointed miner from Missouri named George H. Keller.2

Shirley’s death occurred just north of the camp, at what is today the intersection of Petaluma Boulevard North and Skillman Lane. Keller and Lockwood, along with a young man named Columbus Tustin, dug a grave on the hillside of what would become Penry Park, where Keller read the service while the other men laid Shirley to rest in a rough coffin they fashioned out of redwood.3

A few months later, in January 1852, Keller set out to turn the camp into a real town. Staking an illegal squatter’s claim to 158 acres of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, a 13,000-acre, privately-owned Mexican land grant, he hired John A. Brewster to survey and plat a town of 40 acres, extending west from the creek to Liberty Street, north to Oak Street, and south to A Street. Keller called it Petaluma.4

After selling off the lots to a growing influx of new settlers, most of them failed gold miners like himself, Keller returned with the proceeds to his farm in Missouri (where, two years later, he became one of the founders of Leavenworth, the first town in Kansas Territory).5

1855 map of Petaluma (Sonoma County Library)

Back in Petaluma, the potato boom went bust and much of the wild game was bagged within a year of Keller’s departure. But thanks to the continued growth of hungry San Francisco and to the steady stream of farmers settling in the area, Petaluma quickly became Sonoma County’s primary shipping port for an ever-expanding variety of agricultural goods.6

Soon after Keller’s departure, 26-year old Columbus Tustin decided to embark upon one of the first extensions of the downtown development, surveying and platting a subdivision he called Tustin’s Addition, that extended from First to Eighth streets, and A to F streets. He followed Keller’s example of positioning his street grid parallel to the Petaluma Creek (renamed the Petaluma River in 1959).7

However, Tustin aligned his grid with a different stretch of the creek, one just south of today’s Turning Basin, placing it at roughly a 45-degree angle to Keller’s grid. Then, instead of extending the street names designated by Keller, he adopted his own sequence of numbers and letters for street names, creating a disjunction where the streets of the two developments met.

1877 Map featuring Tustin’s Addition, extending from A to F streets, and First to Eighth streets (Thos. H. Thompson, Map of Sonoma County, 1877; Sonoma County Library)

Keller’s Kentucky Street (which he named for his native state, a common street naming strategy at the time) turned into Tustin’s Fourth Street; Keller Street (which Keller named for himself) into Fifth; Liberty Street into Sixth; and Main Street into Third (the two streets were combined in 1958 under the name Petaluma Boulevard, with a north and south designation).8

Just as Keller had centered his development around Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park)—marking the spot where Shirley was buried—Tustin did the same with the creation of D Street Plaza (renamed Walnut Park in 1896).9

Postcard of Walnut Park, circa early 1900s (postcard photo in public domain)

Tustin also deeded the northeast corner of Fifth and B streets to the town for its first public educational institution, the Bowers School, which was replaced in 1860 by the Brick School, and in 1911 by Lincoln School (converted later to an office building).10

Petaluma’s Brick School at the northeast corner of B and Fourth Streets (Sonoma County Library)

Unlike Keller, Tustin chose to stay in Petaluma, partly because he had come to town with his extended family. He built a home in the heart of Tustin’s Addition, at the southwest corner of Fourth and C streets (no longer standing).11

Born in Philadelphia and raised in Illinois, Tustin came west across the plains in 1847 with his parents and eight siblings. The family went first to Oregon, and then to the gold rush town of Sacramento, before settling in 1851 in the Two Rock Valley. By that time, the hardships of the frontier had taken the lives of Tustin’s mother and two of his siblings.12 Following the creation of Tustin’s Addition, the Tustin family members moved into town.

In 1855, Tustin’s father Samuel opened a lumber supply business in a fireproof stone warehouse, later known as “Steamboat Warehouse,” at the southeast corner B and Second streets, adjacent to the creek.13 Across the street from warehouse, Tustin’s sister Barbara Ann and her husband Joshua Lewis owned and operated the railroad depot for Charles Minturn’s Petaluma & Haystack Landing Railroad.

Despite being the third rail line in the state at the time, the tracks extended only two-and-a-half miles south of town to the deeper waters of Haystack Landing, where Minturn’s larger passenger steamboat could dock (Joshua Lewis was killed in an infamous explosion of Minturn’s steam locomotive at the depot in 1866, along with three other people, after which Minturn used draft horses to drawn the railcars along the track).14

Two of Tustin’s brothers, John and William, became successful inventors of farm machinery, including a self-regulating windmill, a grain reaper, and a gang plow that turned multiple furrows at a time. Their inventions proved popular during the California wheat boom that began in the mid-1850s, spurred by wheat demand first in Australia and New Zealand, and Europe during the Civil War. The boom continued into the 1870s, serving as the main driver of Petaluma’s river town prosperity, thanks to local industrious grain merchants like John A. McNear and his brother George Washington McNear, who was anointed in the 1880s as California’s “Wheat King.” 15

Columbus Tustin, 1870s (photo courtesy of the Tustin Area Historical Society)

Columbus however proved the most successful of the enterprising Tustin clan. In addition to Tustin’s Addition, in the 1850s he developed one of Petaluma’s first large-scale nurseries, initially comprising 80 acres west of town at today’s Western Avenue and Chapman Lane. Comprising 75,000 grafted fruit trees, Tustin’s Orchard won the prize for best nursery at the 1860 Sonoma County Agricultural and Mechanical Fair.16

By that time, the restless Tustin was already looking for new opportunities. Sales in Tustin’s Addition were slow. Property buyers appeared to prefer the north side of town, its hills less prone to winter flooding. Then there was the uncertainty of clear property titles given the legal battle over ownership of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. It hung over Petaluma like a dark cloud.

In 1851, Congress passed the California Land Act, subjecting all Mexican land grant claims to the review of a Land Commission. By then, nearly half of California’s 813 land grants, comprising the best farming and ranching land in the state, had fallen into the hands of either American speculators or else American settlers who married into Mexican families.17

1860 U.S. survey map of Mexican Land Grants within 40 miles of San Francisco (map by Lander Ransom, Bancroft Library)

Ownership of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio was, like a number of the grants, cloudy. Originally awarded in 1838 to Antonio Ortega, General Mariano Vallejo’s major-domo in secularizing the Sonoma mission, the rancho had competing claim that read like a potboiler novel.

The same year he received the grant, Ortega entered into what appears to have been an arranged marriage with a woman 40 years his junior, Francisca Miranda, the 18-year old daughter of Juan Miranda, who had preceded Ortega as major-domo of the Sonoma mission before it was secularized in 1834.

By Mexican law, grantees were required to make the rancho their primary, actively improved the land with livestock grazing or crop cultivation, and not move out of Alta California. Ortega broke all three conditions.18

Leaving the occupation and running of the ranch to his father-in-law, Ortega, a notorious sexual predator, remained for the most part in Sonoma, where he operated a liquor store of the square. In 1843, soon after discovering his young pregnant wife had been having an affair, Ortega departed for Oregon on a cattle drive to make some money. He was gone for four years.

During that time, his father-in-law made his own claim to the land grant, asserting that Ortega had abandoned the property. Miranda died however before his claim was signed by the Mexican governor.19

Excerpt of 1860 U.S. Survey land grant map with Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio listed as “Miranda Rancho” (map by Lander Ransom, Bancroft Library)

When Ortega returned from Oregon in 1847, he turned over his claim to a Jesuit priest in exchange for educating his children at a school the priest was looking to build. The priest subsequently sold the claim to an American speculator, who died soon after filing his claim with the Land Commission. In 1853, the man’s wife sold the claim to James Stuart of San Francisco.20

Stuart soon discovered the competing claim, which had been filed by Thomas B. Valentine, a 22-year old speculator who purchased Miranda’s unsigned claim from his family in 1850, what many believe was a private rather than a public auction, as it was never advertised. That belief was supported by the fact that Valentine sold off portions of the rancho to his attorney, the court administrator, and the probate judge who approved the sale.21

Valentine ad in the July 23, 1852 edition of the Daily Alta California

After comparing notes, Stuart and Valentine became concerned that the weaknesses of their respective claims might cancel each other out before the Land Commission. They decided to cut a deal. Valentine agreed to withdraw his claim in exchange for a percentage of the subdivision sales Stuart made from the land grant.22

In 1855, the Land Commission approved Stuart’s claim to the rancho.23 He immediately opened a real estate office in Petaluma and began placing notices in the local newspaper, alerting residents of their need to purchase a bonafide deed from Stuart, regardless of whatever bogus deeds they held from Keller, Tustin, or any of the other squatter developers in town.24

Illustration of James Stuart (San Francisco Call, November 18, 1893)

Stuart’s claim applied only to the west side of town. The land east of the creek was part of the 66,000-acre Rancho Petaluma land grant awarded to Mariano Vallejo. In 1853, Vallejo sold 327 acres of what became early East Petaluma to a settler named Tom Hopper, who would go on to become a prominent banker and one the largest landowners in the county.25

More than 200 Petaluma residents paid Stuart an average of $350 ($10,000 in today’s currency) for their lots, resulting in a total take of $70,000 ($2 million in today’s currency).26 Tustin, it appears, partnered in purchasing unsold lots in Tustin’s Addition with Isaac Wickersham, a Pennsylvania lawyer who settled in Petaluma in 1853. Wickersham would go on to become a major land developer and banker, establishing Petaluma’s first bank in 1865.27

Illustration of Thomas B. Valentine (San Francisco Examiner, October 28, 1898)

Although Stuart split his Petaluma earnings down the middle with Valentine, the division of spoils wasn’t to Valentine’s liking. When Stuart’s claim went before the U.S District Court on appeal—a standard procedure for most Land Commission decisions—Valentine refiled his original claim, including depositions that spotlighted the weaknesses of Stuart’s claim, including that the Mexican governor’s signature on Ortega’s grant was postdated when the claim was submitted to the Land Commission.

Drawing of Petaluma’s Main Street looking south from Washington Street, 1862 (Sonoma County Library)

In 1857, the District Court upheld Stuart’s claim, after which Valentine filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.28 Meanwhile, the town of Petaluma, having grown to a population of 1,300, decided in 1858 to officially incorporate as a city, accepting Stuart’s assurances that his ownership of the rancho would withstand Valentine’s appeals.29

Tustin’s father, an active participant in early civic affairs, was elected to Petaluma’s founding Board of Trustees (city council).30

In 1861, Tustin set off to seek his fortunes in the newly discovered Comstock silver mines of Nevada. Accompanying him were three partners of a wagon-making business in Petaluma—William Zartman, John Fritsch, and Nelson Stafford. The men settled among 4,000 prospectors in the boomtown of Washoe City, just south of Reno, where they invested in mining operations and also constructed a mill for extracting silver ore from quartz they called the Petaluma Quartz Mill.31

Mining boomtown of Washoe City, Nevada, circa 1860s (photo in public domain)

After corporate bankers began assuming control of the Comstock mines and shifting milling operations to company-owned plants, the men sold their interests in 1864 and returned to Petaluma.32

While they were away, Valentine’s persistent court appeals resulted in an 1864 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated both his and Stuart’s claims to the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, releasing the land into the public domain.33 Under the Preemption Act of 1841, that meant Petaluma residents were granted first right of refusal in purchasing their property from the government at a nominal fee of $1.25 per acre ($21 in today’s currency).34

The large number of claims however presented an bureaucratic bottleneck. Prompted by Petaluma’s predicament, Congress in 1865 passed the General Townsite Bill, which provided for the government to survey and plat a city (for a fee), after which land patents could be easily obtained by citizens for their property.35

A committee of five men, including Tustin, appointed by Petaluma’s Board of Trustees, raised $3,000 ($50,000 in today’s currency) for a government survey of the city.36 Within a year of the survey’s completion, roughly 2,500 people had purchased pre-emptive claims on the 13,000-acre Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio.37

1871 bird’s eye view map of Petaluma (Sonoma County Library)

In 1867, Congress strengthened Petaluma’s position by passing a bill ceding to the city all government-owned land within city limits.38 Valentine however persisted in lobbying Congress for a court review of his claim. Finally, in 1872, he succeeded. Two years later, after favorable review in the Ninth District Court, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, who surprisingly approved Valentines’s claim of the rancho.

In lieu of the actual Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio however, Congress stipulated as a condition of the review, that should he be successful, Valentine would be compensated with land scrip that he could be applied toward the purchase of property in the public domain anywhere else in the country. With that, the cloud that had hung over Petaluma since its founding by Keller in 1852, was lifted for good.39

Tustin, meanwhile, had moved on from Petaluma. In 1868, he and his former mining partner, Nelson Stafford, purchased 1,360 acres of the 63,000-acre Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana in Orange County, splitting the property between them.40 Tustin surveyed and platted 100 acres of his half into a new town he called Tustin City.

Tustin City, California, circa 1890s (photo in public domain)

As he had done in Petaluma, Tustin laid out the street grid using numbers and letters as street names. True to his arborist roots, he planted trees throughout the city, leading to its distinction as Southern California’s “City of Trees.”41

Before leaving Petaluma, Tustin sold his residence at Fourth and C streets, along with the rest of the block it sat on, to grain merchant John A. McNear, who constructed an elaborate estate on the site in 1867.42

John A. McNear residence, Fourth and D streets (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Tustin Orchards was split between W.W. Chapman and Ezra Cleveland, who named their respective roads to the property Chapman Lane and Cleveland Lane.

The Tustin Stone Warehouse at B and 2nd streets, which Tustin inherited after his father died in 1863, was purchased by Charles Minturn, owner of the Petaluma & Haystack Landing Railroad, along with the adjacent railroad depot. Following Minturn’s death in 1873, W.D. Bliss purchased the property, renaming it the Bliss Warehouse (site today of Ayawaska Restobar, 101 2nd Street, across from the Great Petaluma Mill).43

Tustin City found soon itself in the middle of the emerging orange belt of Southern California. Tustin’s grand vision for the city however was undermined when Southern Pacific Railroad rejected the city as the site of its southern terminus, choosing nearby Santa Ana instead.

The city of Tustin beside Santa Ana in 1900 Orange County map (public domain)

Consequently, Santa Ana grew into a large city, while Tustin (the “City” was dropped from the name in 1892) remained a relatively small agricultural town. Tustin died in 1883 at the age of 57, reportedly a disappointed man.

Much like in Petaluma, Tustin found itself transformed following World War II into a suburban bedroom community, growing to a current population of 80,000.44

In 1876, the coffin of the potato farmer named Shirley, who Tustin and Keller buried in 1851, was discovered during preparations in Main Street Plaza (Penry Park) for the city’s celebration of America’s centennial. They were respectfully moved to the John McNear’s new cemetery at Cypress Hill.45

Main Street Plaza, 1895, later renamed Hill Plaza Park, and then Penry Park (Sonoma County Library)

*****

Footnotes:

1“Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876.
2J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), pp. 258-259; John Sheehy, “History Mystery Solved,” Petaluma Argus Courier, February 11, 2021.
3“Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876; Letter regarding Theodore Skillman’s Magnolia Hotel, Petaluma Courier, May 7, 1879.
4Munro-Fraser, pp. 259-260.
5Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), p. 55; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pgs. 21, 29; Henry Miles Moore, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the City and County of Leavenworth,” Western Life (Leavenworth, KS), August 3, 1900.
5Heig, pgs. 69-70; Munro-Fraser, p. 263; “Early Hunters,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1855; David Wharff letter to A.P. Behrens, dated April 26, 1918, page 18, from personal collection of Lee Torliatt.
7Sonoma County Deed Records, show two grants in 1853 from Columbus Tustin, one to Edward S, Jones, May 16, 1853, and the other to Fred Starkey, August 12, 1853, indicating that he was selling lots; the boundaries of Tustin’s Addition defined in Thos. H. Thompson, Map of Sonoma County, 1877.
8“Goodbye Main Street; It’s Petaluma Boulevard Now,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 26, 1958.
9The plaza appears in maps of Petaluma from 1865 and 1871. It was apparently under private ownership until 1873, when I.G. Wickersham sold it to the city of Petaluma; “Miscellaneous,” Petaluma Argus, December 26, 1873. It was renamed apparently by the newly formed Ladies Improvement Club. First newspaper listing under the new name Walnut Park: “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, September 22, 1896.
10“Former Resident Here,” Petaluma Courier, May 25, 1904
11“Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, November 23, 1898.
12Munro-Fraser, p. 350; “Tustin’s Family Traced,” The Tustin News, March 25, 1982.
13Ads for Tustin’s Lumber Yard with the start date of December 18, 1855, first appeared in the Sonoma County Journal December 19, 1856; This was on lot 157, sold in 1870 to Charles Minturn by Columbus Tustin, after Samuel Tustin died in 1873. “Changed Hands,” Petaluma Argus, July 16, 1870; Sonoma County Deeds: Columbus Tustin grantor to Minturn, grantee, June 14, 1870; liber 20, p. 147.
14Heig, p 76.; “Married,” Sacramento Transcript, April 18, 1850; “Mrs. Lewis Called,” Petaluma Argus, February 15, 1900; “Petaluma Old Landmarks Going,” Petaluma Courier, August 2, 1912; “Ed Mannion’s Rear View Mirror” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 14, 1963; Ed Mannion, “Historian Recalls Earlier Incident,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 5, 1967.
15“Sixth Annual Fair of the State Agricultural Society,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 22, 1859; “Tustin’s Newly Invented Self-raking and Double-acting reaper and Mower,” California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences, September 7, 1860; “Railroad Accident,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, October 30, 1869.
16“Sonoma Co. A&M Society,” Sonoma County Journal, April 22, 1859; “Sonoma County Agricultural Fair,” Daily Alta California, September 3, 1860; “Nursery for Sale,” Sonoma County Journal, October 26, 1860; “Sonoma County Fair,” Petaluma Weekly Argus,” October 3, 1867; “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, August 1, 1883.
17Paul W. Gates, “California’s Embattled Settlers,” California Historical Society Quarterly, June, 1962, Vol. 41, No. 2, p. 104.
18Transcript of the legal appeal in the District Court for the Northern District of California of “White vs. The United States,” December Term, 1863; George Tays, “Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Sonoma: A Biography and History,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sep., 1937), p. 237.
19“White vs. The United States” transcript; George, Tays, pp. 240-241.
20“White vs. The United States” transcript.
21Robert Lee, “Valentine Scrip,” South Dakota State Historical Society, 1972, pp. 263-264; “Report in the Matter of Juan Miranda,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 2, 1865.
22“After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863; “Supreme Court Decisions, Sacramento Daily Union, April 4, 1860.
23“After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863.
24Ad for “Office Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio,” Sonoma County Journal, October 27, 1855.
25“Ancient Land History,” Petaluma Courier, November 30, 1912; Tom Gregory, History of Sonoma County, California (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1911), pgs. 433-437.
26“The First Fight of the Lobby,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 25, 1863.
27Ad for “Desirable Property for Sale,” Sonoma County Journal, December 24, 1858; Gregory, pgs. 271-272.
28“After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863.
29Thos. Thompson, p.20.
30Munro-Fraser, p. 284.
31Munro-Fraser, p. 551; “Things at Washoe,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, May 14, 1861; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, April 18, 1862: Stephen Madler and Kelly Tighe lease the carriage firm of Fritsch, Zartman & Co.; “Petaluma Mill,” Gold Hill Daily News, January 4, 1864; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, September 25, 1863: Fritsch & Stafford open wagon shop at old stand on Keller and English, having bought out Zartman; “Thanks,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, August 12, 1863; “Consolidated Gold and Silver Mining Company,” Gold Hill Daily News, November 27, 1863.
32“Washoe City Fades from View,” Northern Nevada Business Weekly, September 10, 2019; “John Fritsch,” Petaluma Courier, June 2, 1902.
33Robert Lee, p. 266; Transcript of the legal appeal in the District Court for the Northern District of California of “White vs. The United States,” December Term, 1863. https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/US/68/68.US.660
34“Citizens Lookout,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, December 7, 1865;
The Preemption Act of 1841, 27th Congress, Ch. 16, 5 Stat. 453 (1841) Text of the law, accessed from www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org
35“Legislation for California,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 16, 1865; “The Miranda Case Defeated,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, April 3, 1865.
36“Settler’s Meeting, Petaluma Weekly Argus, June 23, 1864; Citizens Lookout,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, December 7, 1865.
37“Cause for Rejoicing,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, May 17, 1866; “Opposed to Miranda,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, April 26, 1866.
38Thirty-Ninth Congress Records, Session 2, 1867, page 418. www.loc.gov/law.
39Robert Lee, p. 272.
40“About to Leave Us,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, December 25, 1869.
41“Traces of Tustin’s Founding Family Still Visible in Town,” Orange County Register, August 30, 2012. 42“Former Resident Here,” Petaluma Courier, May 25, 1904.
43“For Sale at Great Bargain,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, May 14, 1868; “Changed Hands,” Petaluma Argus, July 16, 1870; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, June 7, 1878; “Tustin’s Family Traced,” The Tustin News, March 25, 1982.
44“Tustin History,” Tustin Area Historical Society, https://www.tustinhistory.com/tustin-history.htm; “Bill Soberanes Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 29, 1974.
45“Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876.

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How Petaluma’s Founder Saved Abraham Lincoln

The north front of the White House, 1861 (photo White House Historical Association)

On April 12, 1861, five weeks after moving into the White House, Abraham Lincoln found himself stranded in the nation’s capital. Railroad tracks leading into the city had been torn up, bridges burned, telegraph lines severed. Across the Potomac River, a seditious mob gathered to either kidnap him or hang him from a tree on the South Lawn.

Army units protecting the capital had been dispatched to the western frontier by the previous administration, just before Lincoln’s arrival. What military remained consisted of clerks, ceremonial guards, and a military band, none of whom had fighting experience.

When news reached the capital that day that Confederates had fired upon Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the Union residents of D.C., surrounded by the slave states of Virginia and Maryland and anticipating an imminent siege, began fleeing the city.

In desperation, Lincoln turned to a group of battle-experienced office seekers staying at the Willard Hotel a block from the White House. Among them was Petaluma’s founder, George Horine Keller.  

Keller and Lincoln had met the previous year, when Keller helped escort Lincoln during his five-day visit to Leavenworth, Kansas, the city Keller co-founded shortly after establishing Petaluma.

Like Lincoln, Keller was born in Kentucky. At age 12, he enlisted to fight in the War of 1812, but was rejected because of his youth. After operating an inn in Indiana, he settled down for 15 years with his family on a farm in Weston, Missouri, before catching gold rush fever and setting off in 1850 for California.

Striking out in the gold mines, Keller found his way to a meat hunters’ encampment at the headwaters of the Petaluma Creek, where he opened a makeshift store and overnight lodge for disappointed miners like himself. Many came searching for land to homestead, only to be thwarted by California’s Mexican land grants.

In the fall of 1851, a group of frustrated settlers encouraged Keller to illegally claim 158 acres at the northern tip of a 13,000-acre land grant known as the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. Hiring a surveyor, he platted and subdivided 40 acres of his claim into a town he called Petaluma, selling off the lots to land-hungry settlers.

1855 map of Petaluma (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1853, Keller returned to Weston, Missouri, leaving behind a town built on fraudulent land deeds, which, along with a protracted court battle over the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio land grant, would leave Petaluma on shaky legal ground for the next 20 years.

When Kansas Territory opened for settlement in 1854, Keller and a handful of partners from Weston formed a development company to create Leavenworth, the territory’s first town, along the Missouri River.

As was the case in Petaluma, Keller and company squatted on land they didn’t own—in this case, land held by the Delaware Indian tribe—with plans to subdivide it, reap the rewards, and address the legal consequences down the road (which they eventually did, settling with the Delawares).

Two days before the Leavenworth Town Company began auctioning off town lots, Keller and his son-in-law A.T. Kyle opened the town’s first hotel, The Leavenworth House, to a full house of land buyers.

Ad for Keller’s Leavenworth House in the Leavenworth Herald, October 13, 1854

Or so they thought. It quickly became clear most of their guests were activists from Missouri, more interested in establishing residency for voting purposes in Leavenworth than actually living there.

The seeds of the influx were planted in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which left it to territory residents to determine whether to eventually become a free or a slave territory.

Authored by Stephen Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois looking to boost his presidential prospects, the act overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which banned slavery above the latitude of Missouri’s southern border.

Enraged by the act, abolitionists formed the Republican Party to stop the further spread of slavery. Lincoln, who had returned to legal practice after serving a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, was so incensed he decided to reenter politics to run against Douglas in the next senate election.

Leavenworth rapidly turned into a hotbed of electoral fraud, assaults, and murders, in a violent struggle between pro- and anti-slavery factions known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

Kansas Territory abolitionist militia (Jayhawkers), 1858 (Photo Kansas Historical Society)

An abolitionist, Keller turned his hotel into a popular gathering place for militant “Free-Staters” known as “Jayhawkers,” as well as part of the network providing refuge to escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad, making him a target of the “Border Ruffians,” a pro-slave militia openly assaulting Free-Staters on the streets, in their homes, and at public meetings.

Shortly after fending off 20 armed Border Ruffians one night at his hotel, Keller was taken prisoner and confined to a blockhouse in Weston, before eventually escaping to safety in Nebraska Territory.

In 1856, after most of the partisan violence had been quelled, Keller returned to Leavenworth to find Border Ruffians had taken over his hotel. He quickly built a new hotel, the Mansion House. Dubbed “Abolition Hill” by pro-slavers, it soon became the local Free-Staters headquarters.

Leavenworth, Kansas, 1867 (photo courtesy of Legends of America)

Among his allies in town, the amiable Keller acquired the fond moniker “Uncle George” for resourcefulness and generosity—“the husband of all the widows and the father of all the orphans.” In 1857, he was elected to the first Kansas Territorial Legislature, which created a constitution establishing Kansas as a free territory.

Their request for statehood was blocked by Southern legislators in Congress until January 1861, when enough Southern states seceded from the Union to override the blockage. On April 4, 1861, Kansans elected James H. Lane as one of their first U.S. senators.

James Henry Lane, U.S. Senator from Kansas, 1861 (photo Library of Congress)

A lawyer known for electrifying oration, the daring and flamboyant Lane was a close colleague of Keller. He was also a Mexican War hero, and had commanded the Free State militia during “Bleeding Kansas,” ruthlessly and cunningly out maneuvering much larger pro-slaver forces.

Lane befriended Lincoln during Lincoln’s visit to Leavenworth in 1859, a year after his senate race against Douglas. Despite Lincoln’s defeat, his debates with Douglas—in which Lincoln argued that the fundamental rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness triumphed over Douglas’ advocacy of states’ rights for institutions like slavery—elevated him to the national stage.

Postage stamp commemorating the 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas durung the U.S. Senate race (image in public domain)

By the time of Lincoln’s visit, Leavenworth had grown to 10,000 residents, making it the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco. Lincoln used the city as a focus group for a speech he was planning to deliver two months later at the Cooper Union in New York City, an event that would launch his campaign for the presidency.

After Lane’s election to the senate, Keller accompanied him and dozens of former Free State militia veterans to Washington to lobby President Lincoln for commissions in the Union army or federal appointments back home. Most of them checked into the Willard Hotel, just down the street from the White House.

On April 17, 1861, five days after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln received reliable intelligence that Confederates across the Potomac River in Virginia were preparing to march on Washington. He immediately summoned Senator Lane to the Oval Office, and asked him to assemble an armed militia of his Kansas colleagues to defend the White House.

Lincoln in his White House office (photo White House Historical Association)

Back at the Willard, Lane formed the Frontier Guard of Kansas, ultimately comprising of 115 members of his former militia, including Keller. They marched in formation down the street to the White House, where they set up camp in the East Room, arming themselves with crates of pistols, rifles, bayonets, and ammunition.

Mounting a propaganda campaign, Lane spread rumors throughout D.C. that the Frontier Guard was more than 1,000-men strong and planning a counter attack on the Confederate stronghold across the river. For ten tenuous days, the Frontier Guard defended Lincoln in the White House until Union troops were able to break through the Confederate blockade.  

Frontier Guard of Kansas on South Lawn of the White House, April 1861 (photo Library of Congress)

Lincoln thanked each of the guard members personally for having saved the government from overthrow. The guard returned to Kansas, where they formed the nucleus of two Union companies during the Civil War.

Keller assumed command of Leavenworth’s “Old Guard,” protecting the city from Confederate forces. A year after the war ended, the Kansas governor rewarded him for his service by appointing him the first warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary.

Keller died on his farm outside Leavenworth in 1876, two years after the legal battle over the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio land grant, on which he had founded Petaluma, was finally settled.

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier

SOURCES:

Books, Magazines, Journals

Samuel Cassiday, Pen Pictures From the Garden of the World, An Illustrated History of Sonoma County (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, 1889), pp. 109-114.

William Connelley, editor, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, Volume 14 (Chicago: Lewis, 1918), pp. 1209-1210; Frank M. Gable, “The Kansas Penitentiary,” p. 379.

Jelani Cobb, “How Parties Die,” New Yorker, March 15, 2020.

William G. Cutler, History of the State of Kansas (Chicago: A.T. Andreas, 1883).

Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 29.

David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Oct., 1979), pp. 434-448.

Jesse A. Hall and Leroy T. Hand, History of Leavenworth County, Kansas (Topeka, Kansas: Historical Publishing Company,1921), pp. 116-123.

George W. Martin, editor, “Territorial Legislature of 1857-58: George Horine Keller,” Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, p. 211.

James McClure, editor, Abraham Lincoln’s Stories and Speeches (Chicago: Rhodes & McClure Publishing Company, 1908), p. 111.

Henry Miles Moore, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the City and County of Leavenworth,” Western Life (Leavenworth, KS), August 3, 1900.

Henry Miles Moore, Early History of Leavenworth, City and County (Samuel Dodsworth Book Co., Leavenworth, KS, 1906), pgs. 21, 24, 56, 86, 103, 123-127, 147, 161, 171.

James P. Muehlberger, The 116: The True Story of Abraham Lincoln’s Lost Guard (Ankerwycke, 2015). 

J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 131, pp. 259-262.

Donald J. Pisani, “Squatter Law in California, 1850-1858,” Western Historical Quarterly, Autumn, 1994, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 277-310.

Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pp. 53-54.

Websites

“Guarding the White House,” The White House Historical Association, whitehousehistory.org
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/press-room/press-timelines/guarding-the-white-house

“1851, March 3 – 09 Stat. 631, Act to Settle Private Land Claims in California,” US Government Legislation and Statutes. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hornbeck_usa_2_d/7

Newspapers

Leavenworth Bulletin: “The Flag Still Waves (Election results),” November 4, 1863; “Lane Pays His Own Expenses,” August 3, 1864.

Leavenworth Times: “The Old Guard,” July 31, 1861; “Official Vote of Leavenworth County,” November 10, 1861;”Kyle’s Reminiscence of Early Border Life,” January 11, 1902; “The Planters House Is a Monument to Exciting Past,” February 25, 1940; “Lincoln’s Visit to the First City of Kansas,” February 14, 2018.

National Republican (D.C): “The Military Movements Yesterday,” April 20, 1861; “Gen. James H. Lane’s Company,” April 24, 1861; “The Frontier Guard,” April 27, 1861; “Visit to the Capital,” April 29, 1861.

Featured

Petaluma’s Night Club Row

Bar at Gilardi’s Corner, 1940s (photo Sonoma County Library)

The swanky Lanai Lounge opened in the Hotel Petaluma on August 16, 1938. Taking up the hotel’s entire front corner, it was adorned with South Seas murals, bananas hanging from the ceiling, a koi pond, and a horseshoe-shaped bar that served exotic rum cocktails, transporting its customers to a romantic and languorous tropical paradise of rattan furniture, flower leis, and live Hawaiian music.

To the delight of hotel operator Vernon Peck, the lounge was an overnight sensation. The Golden Gate Bridge had opened the year before, and waves of tourists were passing through town on the Redwood Highway, headed for resorts along the Russian River, where they danced the night away to the big bands of Harry James, Buddy Rogers, and Glenn Miller.

Hotel Petaluma, with lanai Lounge sign, 1938 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Meanwhile, Tiki culture was sweeping the Bay Area, having made a big splash in 1937 with the opening of Trader Vic’s restaurant in Oakland. As word spread of Peck’s exotic roadside attraction, members of the Bohemian Grove, an exclusive Monte Rio men’s club, made ritual stopovers at the lounge on their way from San Francisco to their annual summer gathering on the Russian River. Their chauffeured limousines lined up outside the hotel caused a sensation in town.

Ad announcing Lanai Lounge opening, 1938 (Petaluma Argus-Courier

That cachet helped draw in Peck’s other target clientele, Petaluma’s “smart set.” While a number of bars and grocery taverns sprang up around town following Prohibition’s repeal in 1933, there was a crowd of young men and women more attracted to the lure of night clubs. That was largely a hangover from the speakeasies of Prohibition, which ushered in both the cocktail culture and mixed sexes drinking together in a semi-public establishment.

Mike Gilardi, owner of a cigar store across the street from the hotel, had converted his store into a popular cocktail lounge in 1937, offering jazz, dancing, and an exciting mixology of new slings and fizzes.

Gilardi’s Corner at Washington & Kentucky streets, c. 1949 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Piggybacking on the success of Gilardi’s Corner, the Lanai Lounge quickly became the second anchor of Petaluma’s “night club row.”

Peck needed the business. The Great Depression had sent many hotel properties into receivership, or else turned them entirely into single-room occupancy hotels (SROs). Traveling businessmen and salesmen were starting to take rooms in the inexpensive new motels being built  along the highways, which, in addition to convenient parking, also relieved them from running a gauntlet of hotel staff with their hands out for tips.

Lanai Lounge matchbook cover (image in public domain)

In 1940, after successfully guiding the Hotel Petaluma through the Great Depression, Vernon Peck departed for a hotel in Los Angeles, selling his lease to Harold Eckart, a hotelier from Olympia, Washington. Eckart undertook a major renovation of the hotel in 1945, including a complete makeover of the Lanai Lounge, which he rechristened the Redwood Room. Newly decorated with large photo murals of the redwoods, the cocktail lounge quickly became a favorite hangout of Petaluma’s postwar café society, known as “the 400.”

Postcard of mural in the Redwood Room (image public domain)

They were serenaded most evenings by Earle Bond, a locally renowned organ player. Eckart also created a studio in the hotel for the local arm of the Santa Rosa radio station KSRO, and on the roof a Civil Air Patrol spotting station that continued to operate during the Cold War.

Redwood Room at corner of Hotel Petaluma, 1954 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The opening of Highway 101 to the east of town in 1956 put an end to travelers passing through the downtown on the Redwood Highway. As inexpensive motels were available just off the freeway, the Hotel Petaluma converted to being primarily an SRO.

In 1959, the local Elks Club, seeking more space for their club gatherings, purchased the hotel from the original Petaluma Hotel Company trust for $91,160, far short of the $285,000 local citizens had invested in 1924, when the hotel was built in a GoFundMe fashion. The Elks closed off the Redwood Room, carving it up into retail shops, blocked out the lobby for meeting spaces, and roofed over the open courtyard entrance, turning it into an exclusive barroom for club members.

Ed Mannion and Bill Soberanes of the Argus-Courier standing outside Gilardi’s Corner on the eve of its demolition in 1967 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1967, Gilardi’s Corner fell to the wrecking ball when Washington Street was widened into four lanes. A parking lot for the corner bank was eventually built in its place, erasing the last of Petaluma’s night club row.

*****

SOURCES:

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Lanai Cocktail Lounge Opens at Hotel,” August 17, 1938; “KSRO to Close Local Station,” February 16, 1951; “Through the New Hotel Petaluma This City Offers Accommodations to Local People, Travelers-Unexcelled,” November 29, 1953; “Elks Hotel Project Will Cost $50,000,” January 22, 1960; “Colorful Fifties in Petaluma,” January 22, 1969.

Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier: July 3, 1959, August 17, 1971, October 29, 1974, July 7, 1978, October 24, 1980, February 2, 2000.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “$35,000 to be Invested in ‘Motels,’” March 20, 1938.

Featured

A Wronged Woman’s Rights

The Groundbreaking Trial of Penngrove’s Mary Ann Kenney

By John Patrick Sheehy & Jack Withington

Penngrove Rail Station, circa 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)

To Sarah Looney, it looked like cold-blooded murder. 

On the afternoon of July 18, 1872, Looney was standing outside her Penngrove ranch house watching  William Cummings, a 20-year-old Irish laborer, leave the ranch with a wagonload of wood pulled by a team of horses. The wagon’s bed creaked as the wagon turned onto Adobe Road, heading for the Lavin Ranch half a mile to the south, where Cummings was regularly employed. 

As the wagon passed Bannon Lane, Looney spotted John Bannon’s daughter, Mary Ann Kenney, walking across her family’s ranch toward Adobe Road. She was carrying a double-barreled shotgun in her hands. After jumping over the picket fence next to the road, the 17-year-old Kenney approached Cummings’ wagon from behind and leveled the shotgun at his back. 

Looney couldn’t make out any conversation between the two, only the first shotgun blast, which missed Cummings. As Cummings turned in his seat, Kenney again leveled the gun and pulled the trigger. The second shot took off the top of Cummings’ head. The horses bolted, throwing Cummings back onto the wagon’s load of wood as they raced down the road.

Penngrove’s Main Street, circa 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Upon hearing the gunshots, Looney’s husband Robert came running out of the house in time to see the petite, five-foot Kenney walking back to the picket fence, where she carefully placed the shotgun on the top rail, took hold of two pickets, and vaulted over the four-foot high fence in a single bound. Picking up the gun, she calmly walked toward her parents’ house. 

When the horses pulling Cummings’ wagon arrived at the Lavin Ranch, they found the gate closed. As they swerved to avoid it, the wagon lurched to one side, throwing Cummings onto the road. Ranch owner Tim Lavin found him there, breathing his last gasps, the top of his skull blown off. 

1877 Map of Penngrove, with the Bannon, Looney, and Lavin ranches (courtesy of Thompson’s 1877 Sonoma County Atlas)

By that time, John Bannon was driving his daughter in a carriage to Petaluma, where she surrendered to James Knowles, the town marshal. She explained to Knowles that Cummings left her no choice. Despite her warnings, he persisted in spreading lies and slander about her virtue, leading her to painfully separate from her newlywed husband Thomas.

Knowles placed her under arrest at his home until an inquest hearing could be held two days later. 

At the inquest, Kenney appeared, her face hidden by a veiled Shaker bonnet. On the advice of her lawyer, she refused to testify. After listening to the testimony of Sarah Looney and a few character witnesses, the grand jury, with Robert Looney as its foreman, charged Kenney with first degree murder. 

Penngrove rancher and county supervisor John O’Hara served as a jury member at Mary Ann Kenney’s inquest hearing (photo Sonoma County Library)

In terms of the law, the case was cut-and-dried. The only justification for homicide was either self-defense or the defense of one’s home. Neither seduction nor slander qualified. However, small town society at the time was merciless to young women whose reputations had been blemished by sexual scandal. Once disgraced, their options for marriage or honorable work often became severely limited.

As a result, in the court of popular opinion, or “highway law” as it was called, deadly retribution was viewed as justifiable in cases where a young woman had been seduced, sexually assaulted, or had her virtue slandered, assuming such retribution was carried out by one of the woman’s male relatives. Likewise, in cases where a husband discovered another man making love to his wife, or else boasting about making love to her, he was viewed as justified in killing the man. What made Kenney’s case unusual was that she had meted out the deadly vengeance herself.

The case attracted a flock of reporters from San Francisco. Their stories were carried on the wires around the country, setting off a national debate as to whether women had rights equal to men when it came to exercising highway law.

Article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 2, 1872

To add some celebrity sparkle, Kenney was identified in news reports as the niece of the famous Irish prizefighter and New York congressman, John Morrissey.

Mary Ann Kenney’s uncle, legendary prizefighter and congressman John Morrissey (photo Library of Congress)

Kenney’s bail was set at $20,000 ($450,000 in today’s currency). It was posted by her father and 16 of his friends, including Petaluma coroner Kelly Tighe who had performed the autopsy on Cummings’ body. A barrel-chested, loquacious man with a booming Irish accent, Tighe operated the Brooklyn Hotel at the corner of Kentucky and Washington streets, site of today’s Hotel Petaluma. The hotel’s saloon, The Reading Room, was a popular gathering place for Irish immigrants.

On the Fourth of July, two weeks before Cummings’ murder, Kenney and her husband Thomas ventured into town to celebrate with friends. It was their first trip off the Bannon Ranch since their wedding five months earlier. Kenney’s parents had surreptitiously worked to keep the newlyweds secluded in Penngrove in an effort to protect them from Cummings’ vicious rumors.

Four of July parade on Main Street, Petaluma, circa 1880s (photo Sonoma County Library)

Once in town, the couple split up, with Mary Ann going off to visit her girlfriends, and Thomas joining a group of fellow farmhands at The Reading Room. No sooner had he ordered a beer, than an inebriated Cummings sauntered up to the bar and began making salacious remarks about Mary Ann. Thomas threw his beer in Cummings’ face, and the two began to fight.

Thomas’s friends quickly separated them, hurrying Thomas out to the street, where they told him about the slanderous stories Cummings had been spreading—that his wife was a common prostitute with whom he, and other men he could name, had engaged in sex with since she was 12 years old.

On their carriage ride home that night, Thomas told Mary Ann what he had heard and asked if any of it was true. Bursting into tears, she denied it all as lies. Once they reached the ranch, Mary Ann’s parents encouraged the couple not to pay any attention to the foul slanders, that they would die out with time. 

Main Street leading into Penngrove, circa 1890 (photo Sonoma County Library)

A week passed. During that time, Thomas brought the matter up with Mary Ann a couple of times, leading to fights between the couple. Finally, concerned that her husband did not believe her assertions of innocence, Mary Ann insisted they separate and not reunite until her name was cleared. Thomas reluctantly left the ranch to take a job working for the railroad in Sonoma Valley.

Kenney’s murder trial was held at the county courthouse in Santa Rosa. A number of her Penngrove neighbors who had known her since she was a child, testified to her modest chastity, describing her as intelligent, quiet and retiring, with a good-natured disposition. A bold horsewoman, she was known for her physical prowess, taking charge of plowing the fields of her family’s 140-acre ranch while still a teen.

Sonoma County Courthouse, Santa Rosa, circa 1875 (photo Sonoma County Library)

William Cummings had come to live on the ranch five years before, when Mary Ann’s father hired him as a young ranch hand. He quickly became enamored with Mary Ann, asking her parents repeatedly for her hand in marriage, which they refused. Instead, another Irish laborer on the ranch, 30-year-old Thomas Kenney, won her heart.

After Mary Ann’s parents accepted his proposal to marry their daughter, Cummings left the ranch to work on the Lavin Ranch down the road. Following the wedding of Mary Ann and Thomas on Feb. 4, 1872, Cummings announced to friends he would dedicate himself to separating the couple before the year was out. 

It took the jury only 50 minutes of deliberation to return with a verdict of not guilty in the case. Public opinion also sided with the verdict, extending their approval of a wronged woman’s right to deadly revenge. Wrote one local newspaper: “The tongue of her slanderer is silent forever. Not only she, but everybody else is safe from his malice.”

Three months after Mary Ann’s acquittal, Thomas filed a legal notice that his wife had abandoned him. “She left me,” he told reporters, “because she was conscience-struck.”

Unidentified couple at their Penngrove ranch, circa 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Mary Ann continued to live and work on the family ranch in Penngrove for the rest of her life. In 1899, at the age of 43, she married Jens Thomsen, a Danish chicken rancher, who joined her on the ranch until his unexpected death in 1906. She herself died in 1932 at the age of 76. 

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 15, 2023, as well as in Jack Withington’s book, Looking Back at Penngrove, published in 2023.

SOURCES:

Newspapers

Cloverdale Bee: “Our Petaluma Letter,” August 3, 1872.

Daily Alta California: “Mrs. Kinney’s Case,” July 27, 1872.

Petaluma Argus: “Terrible Tragedy,” July 20, 1872; “The Cummings Murder,” July 27, 1872; “Examination of Mrs. Kinney,” July 27, 1872; “The Petaluma Tragedy,” July 27, 1872 (reprinted in the Weekly Butte Record); “Notice (of abandonment),” February 26, 1873; “Nonagenarian Passes Away,” January 22, 1917.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Loved Pioneer Woman Called,” January 28, 1932.

Petaluma Courier: “Local News: Bannon Estate,” December 31, 1891.

Petaluma Crescent: “The Petaluma Tragedy,” July 19, 1872 (reprinted in the Cloverdale Bee, July 27, 1872); “Verdict in the Petaluma Case,” July 20, 1872 (reprinted in the Daily Alta California, July 21, 1872); “Why the Woman Shot Her Slanderer,” July 27, 1872 (reprinted in the Weekly Colusa Sun).

Sacramento Bee: “Slander and Killing,” July 23, 1872.

San Francisco Chronicle: “The Petaluma Tragedy,” July 21, 1872; “Not Guilty,” October 27, 1872.

San Jose Mercury News: “Pacific Coast Items,” July 25, 1872.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Sonoma Ranches Change Hands,” August 29, 1900.

Books & Documents

Thea Lowry, Empty Shells (Novato, CA: Manifold Press, 2000) p. 33.

U.S. Sonoma County Census: 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1930.

Featured

Penngrove’s Harum Scarum Argonaut

David Wharff’s Gold Rush Odyssey

Illustration of the David Wharff Ranch, Penngrove, current site of the Green Mill (from Thos. Thompson’s Historical Atlas of Sonoma County, 1877)

In August 1849, shortly after arriving in Sacramento from a six-month voyage around Cape Horn, David Wharff watched as a man in a gambling hall walked up to a faro table and casually placed $10,000 in gold nuggets ($315,000 in today’s currency) on the queen of spades. A game of chance, faro was more popular than poker in gold country because the odds were better.

As a crowd of awed onlookers gathered around the table, the faro dealer made nine consecutive draws from a deck of cards, with each draw turning one card over for himself and another for the gambler. On the tenth draw, as a matching queen card fell to the gambler’s side of the table, the crowd erupted with a roar. The gambler, a local merchant named Sam Brannan, pocketed his winnings, bought drinks for the house, and strolled out into the night.

Sam Brannan (photo courtesy of Utah Historical Society)

For Brannan, the wager may have seemed like small change, but to Wharff and the other Forty-niners in the hall it captured the high stakes gamble they had undertaken, deserting their families, jobs, and farms to sail around the world or trek across the country to California with hopes of hitting the jackpot. Brannan was among those who made a fortune enabling their California dream.

In 1848, while working in his dry goods store in Sacramento, then called Sutter’s Fort, Brannan sold some goods to a group of men who paid in gold nuggets. They had discovered the nuggets while constructing a sawmill for John Sutter along the South Fork of the American River.

With foresight, Brannan quickly converted his store into a mining supply center, the only one between San Francisco and the Sierra foothills. By 1849, 50,000 gold seekers had descended upon the area, and Brannan’s store was generating $150,000 a month in sales (almost $4.7 million in today’s currency), making him California’s first millionaire.

Illustration of Sam Brannan’s store at Sutter’s Fort, 1848 (photo Gutenberg Project)

But while Brannan and others made fortunes selling goods and services—one prostitute claimed to have made $50,000 ($1.5 million in today’s currency) after a year’s work—the majority of the Forty-n­iners came away from the gold fields empty handed, left to retreat back to the lives they discarded or, like David Wharff, redirect their California dream to a new wager with better odds, like farming.

Born into a colonial family in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Wharff inherited the stern demeanor of his Protestant ancestors, as well as a close attention to the value of a dollar. After finishing grammar school, he moved to Boston at age 14 to apprentice as a carpenter. By the time he turned 20, he was earning a journeyman’s wage of $1.25 a day ($40 in today’s currency), not enough to marry and settle down with the girl of his dreams, Olive Densmore from Nova Scotia. When word reached Boston of a gold strike in California, it resounded like a shot across the bow for frustrated men like Wharff.

Ad for Clipper Ship to Gold Rush (photo in the public domain)

Unable to afford a ticket on a first class clipper ship, Wharff and six of his friends pooled their money to book passage on a small, battered brig, the Christiana, departing Boston on February 15, 1849, among a flotilla of more than 500 vessels leaving eastern ports, packed with “Argonauts”—named for the band of heroes in Greek mythology who accompanied Jason on a sea quest for the golden fleece—undertaking the 15,000-mile voyage around Cape Horn to San Francisco and the golden state.

Wharff and the other nine passengers on the Christiana passed their time gambling, playing checkers, smoking, drinking, telling stories, and daydreaming of how to spend their gold. After subsiding for two months on salted meat that went bad, butter and lard that turned rancid, hard bread that became laced with bugs, and cheese nibbled on by rats, they put in for ten days just south of Rio de Janeiro for fresh water, provisions, and new sails.

“We could buy oranges, $1 a thousand; wine, 10 cents a gallon,” Wharff wrote.

Then came the most perilous leg of the journey, rounding Cape Horn. After 55 days braving monstrous waves, terrifying winds, and frigid temperatures, the ship docked at Valparaiso, Chile, where Wharff and his friends spent five days ashore watching Spaniards bet stacks of gold doubloons on horse races, further fueling their desire to reach California.

Valparaiso, Chile, 1850 (photo in public domain)

Finally, on the morning of August 16, 1849, six months after leaving Boston, the Christiana sailed through the Golden Gate alongside twenty other windjammers. The crew deserted the moment the ship docked. During the two days it took the captain to find replacements, Wharff and his friends took in the night life of the mushrooming metropolis, more than 500 bars and 1,000 gambling dens.

San Francisco, 1851 (photo Library of Congress)

At establishments like the Parker House or the El Dorado, women dealt the cards, brass bands or banjo musicians performed, and gold nuggets sat piled high on the gambling tables. They could eat at places like the Fly Trap or Monkey Warner’s Cobweb Palace, which was decorated with whales’ teeth. After six months of boredom cooped up in close quarters at sea, it was like entering a carnival.

From San Francisco, a pilot boat guided the Christiana up the river to their final destination, Sacramento. By the time Wharff stepped off the boat, he was down to his last 25 cents. Spotting a house under construction near the wharf, he approached the foreman, who, after learning he was a carpenter, hired him on the spot for $20 a day.

Sacramento waterfront, 1850s (photo courtesy of Bancroft Library Collection)

Wharff and his Boston friends formed a company to share in the collective spoils of their gold diggings, purchasing an empty lot in Sacramento for $10 upon which to erect a small, prefabricated house they had brought with them on the Christina, to serve as company headquarters. However, within a couple of weeks of watching Forty-niners return to town with $3,000-$4,000 in gold dust ($95,000 to $125,000 in today’s currency), the collective fell apart, as each man set off on his own for the foothills.

After Wharff earned $300 ($9,500 in today’s currency) working 15 days as a carpenter, he paid a driver with an ox team $80 ($2,500 in today’s currency) to haul him, his equipment and provisions up to Weaver Creek in El Dorado County, where he quickly learned squeezing gold out of rocks was harder work than he imagined. Not only were living conditions primitive and costs high, the work itself—digging, pickaxing, shoveling, clawing, scraping, shifting, and panning—was tedious, with little success. The first piece of gold he found was the size of a pin head.

Prospectors working gold placer, 1850 (photo in public domain)

Teaming up with three other men, Wharff moved on to the South Fork of the American River, where they built a cofferdam of sandbags to divert the water around a small stretch of river bottom. For two days they risked their lives in ice cold water from the snow pack, blocked by a sandbag wall teetering on the verge of collapse, to extract $800 of gold nuggets ($25,000 in today’s currency), which they divided up and then went their separate ways. Wharff traveled to Marysville to pan for gold, and then to Shasta County, where he joined 16 other men on a mining crew.

Finally, after more than two years working the riverbeds and mines, Wharff decided to call it quits. He had witnessed his fair share of casualties, men broken by exhaustion and fatigue, as well as those whose lives were taken by disease, murders, fights, and mining accidents. He returned to San Francisco with a full belt of gold dust strapped to his waist, not enough to make him a wealthy man, but enough to stake a claim in starting a new life. For Wharff, that meant returning to Boston to claim the hand of his sweetheart.

On December 15, 1851, he purchased a $200 ticket ($6,200 in today’s currency) aboard a steamer of 650 passengers departing San Francisco for New York via Nicaragua. The overland route across Nicaragua, similar to the route across the Isthmus of Panama, trimmed 8,000 miles and five months of travel time off the voyage around Cape Horn. The tradeoff was a risk of contracting a deadly tropical disease, such as malaria, yellow fever, or cholera.

1849 ad for Nicaragua route on California Steam Navigation Company (photo in public domain)

After sailing to the port of San Juan del Sur on Nicaragua’s west coast, Wharff and the other passengers were greeted by a long line of mules waiting to take them on an 11-mile trail to Lake Nicaragua. At night they slept on elevated wooden benches to protect them from poisonous centipedes on the ground.

Nicaragua route of the California Steam Navigation Company (map in the public domain)

In the morning, they rode a ferry across the lake, disembarking to walk around a set of rapids down to the San Juan River, where they boarded steamers on a 100-mile river journey through dense forests of mangrove trees, dazzling tropical flowers, and exotic animals such as crocodiles, parrots, and jaguars. At the port of Greytown on the Caribbean coast, they transferred to a steamer bound for New York, arriving on January 15, 1852, only one month after leaving San Francisco.

Wharff, bewhiskered and in rough miner’s garb, was unrecognizable to his family when he showed up in Boston. Only his voice was familiar. After shaving and donning a new suit of clothes, he called on the girl he’d left behind.

Illustration of David Wharff, 1852 (courtesy of Sacramento Bee)

But after two and half years in California, Boston felt tired and slow. Carpenters were still working for $1.25 a day compared to the $20 he was able to earn in Sacramento. Within a few days, he was ready to return to the gold fields. His older sister Mary Jane stepped in, agreeing to go with him, but only on the condition he marry Olive and bring her with them.

Court Street in Boston, 1850 (photo in public domain)

The couple wed on February 19, 1852 and, along with Mary Jane, departed for California on March 1st. The steamers using the Nicaragua and Isthmus of Panama routes were booked through mid-summer, so Wharff paid $900 ($28,500 in today’s currency) for three tickets aboard the Sam Appleton, a large windjammer sailing around the Horn.

A windjammer sailing to San Francisco, 1850s (photo in the public domain)

The ship made only one stop in Valparaiso and arrived in San Francisco on July 22nd. Sailing on to Sacramento, Wharff took the two women to the company house he and his Boston friends built. Only one of the of men was there, the rest were working in the mines.

“My wife and sister,” wrote Wharff, “thought it was a hard-looking place. I had never seen a broom in the house since we put it up in ’49, so you can judge how clean it was.”

Sacramento was experiencing a heat wave so hot the women refused to accompany Wharff to the diggings. Instead, he had to content himself with carpentry work around town, even though the day rate had dropped to $12. That may have been for the best.

By 1852, an estimated 250,000 people had flooded into California, making for the largest migration in U.S. history. With most surface deposits exhausted, the days of the miner with a pick, shovel, and wash pan were ending, replaced by well-capitalized mining companies operating with deep power drills and hydraulic water jets that blasted away mountainsides.

California hydraulic mining, 1850s (photo miningartifacts.org)

Mary Jane and Olive prevailed on Wharff to move them out of the company house into a nearby rental, while he built a new house on the same lot. No sooner had he finished than a fire (later known as the Great Conflagration) swept through Sacramento on November 2, 1852, burning down more than 80 percent of the city’s structures.

A wind-blown ember set fire to the floor joists of the new house, but two men passing by— Sacramento merchants Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington, who a decade later would team up with Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker to form the Central Pacific Railroad as “the Big Four”—extinguished the blaze, saving the house.

Collis P. Huntington, 1860 (photo courtesy of Huntington Library), and Leland Stanford, 184 ( photo courtesy of Stanford Archives)

The following morning, a merchant approached Wharff with an offer to buy his house and move it down the street. Having spent $300 to construct it, he sold the house and some furniture in it for $2,200 ($70,000 in today’s currency). He and Olive, who was four months pregnant with their first child, promptly boarded a steamer for San Francisco, where they rented a small house on Washington Street. Mary Jane, who was making a good living as a dressmaker, stayed behind in Sacramento, where she soon married Frank Green, a Forty-niner from Boston.

After four months in San Francisco, Wharff ran into a Boston man who had returned from the east coast with three large bundles of fruit trees. Having earlier purchased land in Sonoma County, he asked Wharff to accompany him there to help construct the floor and doors of a wall tent he was planning to install as temporary living quarters. Ever adventurous, Wharff boarded a small schooner with the man and sailed up a winding creek to Petaluma.

Established as a trading post two years earlier by meat hunters shipping game down to San Francisco, by early 1853 Petaluma consisted of two hotels, roughly 50 houses, a dry goods store, and a potato warehouse. As Sonoma County’s main shipping port, it found itself at the center of the area’s first agricultural boom—potatoes.

First introduced by an Irish immigrant named John Keyes out at Bodega Head in 1850, potato farming was well-suited to the area’s coastal climate. Quick to grow, easy to transport and store without refrigeration, potatoes became a staple for the burgeoning population of San Francisco.

The Cash Store in Bloomfield, 1850s (photo Sonoma County Library)

Farmers hauled wagonloads of their spuds into Petaluma via Potato Street (renamed Prospect Street in the 1860s), storing them at the warehouse until they could be loaded onto “potato boats” bound for the city. Each planted acre of potatoes generated $1,200 annually ($37,000 in today’s currency). For disappointed Argonauts like Wharff, those seemed like better odds than panning for gold.

After disembarking in Petaluma, Wharff and his friend stayed overnight at the American Hotel on Main Street (site of today’s Putnam Plaza). The hotel’s proprietor, George Williams, a Forty-Niner from Maine and the father-in-law of future Petaluma grain merchant John McNear, also operated a freight service with a wagon and three oxen. In the morning, for $10 ($300 in today’s currency), he hauled the wall tent and lumber out to the new farm six miles north of town.

Illustration of the American Hotel and Wells Fargo Express office, Main Street, Petaluma, 1850s (photo Sonoma County Library)

At the time, there were only two other settlers on the 16-mile stretch between Petaluma and Santa Rosa, Tom Hopper and Almer Clark. Hopper would go on to become one of the wealthiest landowners in the county, and Clark would soon open a popular stagecoach stop, the Valley House along Petaluma Hill Road. Along the way, Williams pointed out to Wharff 160 acres of land for sale in what is today downtown Penngrove.

“I thought I had hit a gold mine,” Wharff wrote.

After helping his friend construct the wall tent, Wharff hurried back to Petaluma to purchase his new farm before sailing back to San Francisco to share the news with Olive, who, during his absence, had given birth on March 31st to a baby daughter, Mary.

David and Olive Wharff (photos courtesy of Lee Torliatt)

Anxious to get his potato crop in, Wharff sailed back to Petaluma with lumber and a wall tent, as well as six dozen laying hens he purchased from a Frenchman in the Presidio for $225 ($7,100 in today’s currency).

George Williams hauled everything out to the new farm, where Wharff built a chicken coop directly onto the tent, to protect his valuable hens from preying coyotes. Returning to San Francisco for Olive and Mary, he once again hired Williams to transport them and their worldly possessions to the farm. As the made their way through the deserted valley, Olive nervously asked where exactly they were going.

“Home,” Wharff said.

After setting up Olive and the baby in the tent, Wharff traveled to Tomales, then a booming shipping port, where he purchased two tons of seed potatoes from Henry McCleave for $400 ($12,000 in today’s currency). That summer, while waiting for the potato crop to come in, the Wharffs made money by selling their eggs in town for $1.50 a dozen ($47 in today’s currency), becoming the first poultry producers in the area.

Illustration of Tomales, 1850s, by Richard Shell (photo Sonoma County Library)

What Olive made of life on the farm, her husband didn’t say, except to note there were only three other women living in Petaluma at the time, and that Olive went for six months without seeing the face of another white woman.

In September 1853, a month before the fall potato harvest, one of Wharff’s neighbors, upset his potato patch was being trampled by grazing cattle from the nearby ranch of Tom Hopper, set fire to the dry grasses on his property. As the wind came up, the fire quickly extended across the valley, and by evening had burned over to the top of Sonoma Mountain. Having earlier cleared the grasses and wild oats from around his tent home and potato patch, Wharff was spared any damage.

The following month, he harvested his potatoes, bagging them in sacks he purchased for $16 per 100, and hauled them to Petaluma’s potato warehouse, to eventually be loaded aboard “potato boats” bound for San Francisco. Unfortunately, the potato buyer at the warehouse had bad news—the market had crashed due to an overabundance of spuds that fall. He advised him to store his 20 tons of potatoes at the warehouse for $200 ($6,300 in today’s currency) until early spring, when prices would hopefully rebound.

By February, as it became clear that the boom was over, a victim of overplanting, soil erosion, and increased competition, the manager of the warehouse asked Wharff to remove his potatoes which were beginning to sprout. Wharff told him to move them himself, which he did, dumping them in the Petaluma Creek.

Disappointed, Wharff sold his ranch for $200 to a man named Brad Baily, and sailed with his family back to San Francisco, where he built a new house on the corner of Pacific and Leavenworth streets.

San Francisco’s Montgomery Street, 1850 (photo in the public domain)

After less than a year in the city however, Wharff was lured back to Sonoma County by the idea of starting a cattle ranch with his new brother-in-law Frank Green. A former neighbor told him 160 acres were for sale adjacent to Wharff’s former potato farm. Wharff paid the owner, Tet Carpenter, $200 for the property, which came with a small two-room house.

Back in San Francisco, he purchased twelve head of cattle from a rancher near the Mission Dolores for $480 ($14,000 in today’s currency), herding them aboard a new steamer Charles Minturn, the Ferryboat King of San Francisco Bay, had recently installed on the Petaluma Creek to Haystack Landing just south of Petaluma.

Ferryboat King Charles Minturn standing in front of his paddle steamer, E.Corning, on San Francisco docks, early 1850s (photo Sonoma County Library)

Wharff wrote he thought the ranch land was in the public domain, allowing him and Green to purchase it without a deed. That belief was rooted in the Preemption Act of 1841, which allowed settlers to purchase from the federal government up to 160 acres of any land in the public domain, assuming they had either lived on it for at least 14 months or made improvements to it for five years. In either case, it wasn’t necessary for a settler to hold actual title to the land while establishing homesteading rights.

California, however, presented a problem for aspiring homesteaders, as most of the desirable farming land was held in Mexican land grants, ownership of which was legally protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 that ended the Mexican-American War. For squatters like Wharff and Green, that would soon become a rude awakening.

The average Mexican land grant measured 17,000 acres. Owners with clear title, like General Mariano Vallejo, whose 66,000-acre grant extended from the east side of the Petaluma Creek all the way to the town of Sonoma, spent the 1850s selling off parcels of their land holdings to newly arriving American settlers. But a number of the land grant had changed hands so many times since the Mexican-American war that their legal trails were cloudy, with competing or even fraudulent claims.

Map of Marin and Southern Sonoma Land Grants, 1860 (excerpted from Map of the Country 40 Miles Around San Francisco by Lelander Ransom, courtesy of BLR Antique Maps)

In response, California created a land commission to review the legal status of the state’s 813 land grants. The reviews, which ran from 1852 until 1856, ultimately confirmed 514 of the 813 claims filed. Almost all of land commission’s decisions were appealed in the courts, creating a bureaucratic quagmire that added to the uncertainty and confusion of grant ownership, opening the door to speculators and land sharks.

Prospective settlers were faced with two choices: either purchase land from a claimant whose claim might be challenged and reversed by the land commission or courts in years to come, or else squat on the land illegally, hoping the land commission would eventually void the claim, placing the land in the public domain for purchase under the Preemption Act.

The extent to which Wharff and Green made this “pre-empt” squatter’s gamble is unknown. Although their land purchase was not recorded with the county, tax records indicate that in 1855 they paid state and county property taxes. By that time, the land commission had already ruled on the claim of the Rancho Cotate land grant they were squatting on.

Totaling 17,000 acres, Rancho Cotate had been originally granted in 1844 to Captain Juan Castenada, a secretary of Mariano Vallejo. At the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846, Castenada sold the grant to Thomas Larkin, the U.S. Consul to Mexico’s Alta California. In 1849, Larkin sold it to an American trader, Joseph S. Ruckle, who held it for only two months before selling it to Dr. Thomas S. Page, an expatriate American physician practicing in Valparaiso, Chile.

Map of Rancho Cotate and adjacent land grants, 1877 (from Thos. Thompson’s Historical Atlas of Sonoma County)

Page remained in Chile after the purchase, making him an absentee landlord and subjecting his land grant, which would one day encompass Cotati, Rohnert Park and Penngrove, to illegal squatters, including Wharff and Green. In 1852, he filed his claim with the new land commission. The claim was approved in August 1854, around the same time Wharff and Green purchased their land from the squatter Carpenter. As with most land grants, the land commission’s ruling was immediately appealed, leaving the land in legal limbo until the courts dismissed the appeal in March, 1857.

As one last formality, a survey of the land was scheduled to be undertaken in August 1857 before Dr. Page could assert his claim. What happened next illustrates the gambling mentality of former gold miners at the time.

Before the surveyors arrived, Wharff and Green sold their 160 acres to a man for $500 ($14,000 in today’s currency) and squatted on an adjacent 161-acre parcel. Whether or not they were looking to make a quick profit is unknown.

Dr. Thomas S. Page, Cotati, 1870 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In February 1858, after a patent was issued to Dr. Page, giving him clear and legal title to Rancho Cotate, he began immediately selling off 160-acre parcels to settlers, beginning with the squatters already in place. The settler who purchased the Wharff and Green ranch the year before for $500 paid Page $1,800 ($50,000 in today’s currency) to obtain legal deed to the property, bringing his total outlay for the land to $2,300 ($70,000 in today’s currency).

Wharff and Green purchased the 161 acres they had recently squatted on from Page for $1,610 ($45,000 in today’s currency). A short while later, they also bought back their former ranch from the man they sold it to, paying him $2,500 ($75,000 in today’s currency).

1858 Land Sale by Thomas S. Page to David Wharff (Sonoma County Deed Records, LDS Family Search Database)

The escalating land values had to do with a flood of new settlers to the area in the late 1850s. By 1860, Sonoma County had 12,000 residents, most of them farmers, living on 756 farms, with more than 200,000 acres under cultivation. The primary driver of that expansion was the California wheat boom.

Wheat schooner sailing down the Petlauma River (photo Sonoma County Library)

After the Crimean War cut off Russian wheat exports in the 1850s, Australia and New Zealand turned to California for wheat supplies, setting off a minor boom. The boom went into overdrive in the 1860s, following the disruption of Midwest wheat exports to Europe during the Civil War. By 1867, 80 percent of the wheat grown in Sonoma County was being shipped around the Horn to Europe’s central grain market in Liverpool, England, making Petaluma not only a thriving river town, but also an international shipping port.

In addition to riding the wheat boom, on their two ranches Wharf and Green also raised barley and oats, and annually produced 600 pounds of butter, 100 tons of hay, 400 pounds of honey, along with poultry and cattle. A tobacco chewer, Wharff was known for nailing the lids of his Star Tobacco tins to his barn, which was covered in them.

In 1871, Mary Jane and Frank Green decided to move to San Francisco. Wharff and Green sold the 161-acre ranch they had been living on, the one they purchased together directly from Page, to James and Lydia Goodwin, owners of a furniture store in San Francisco, who operated it as a second residence. They retained their original ranch, which was located along Old Redwood Highway near where the Green Mill Inn was erected in 1932.

1877 map of Penn’s Grove, Wharff and Goodwin ranches upper left (map from Thos. Thompson’s Historical Atlas of Sonoma County)

In the mid-1870s, the California wheat market began to decline due to an international recession and increasing competition from the Midwest. Like many of his neighbors, Wharff shifted to planting apples and grapes as part of a new fruit boom.

Olive and David Wharff, circa 1910 (photos courtesy of Penngrove Proud)

After the restless Argonaut odyssey of his twenties, Wharff ultimately found his golden fleece in Penngrove, settling with Olive for 55 years on the same ranch, where they raised seven children. Only three of whom survived beyond childhood, the others falling victim to diphtheria and scarlet fever. They were surrounded by family, as two of Olive’s brothers, George and John Densmore from Nova Scotia, joined them to settle in the area, and Mary and Frank Green eventually moved back to Penngrove in 1893, as the area began to experience a new egg boom, filling the countryside with chicken houses.

Wharff house built circa 1858 on ranch sold to the Goodwins in 1871. The house was moved in 1902 from where it had resided at 2368 Goodwin Avenue, to 1291 Elysian Road in Penngrove, where it sits today (photo courtesy of Chuck Lucas)

In 1905, the Wharffs leased their ranch and farmhouse to a neighbor, Antone Ronsheimer, who with his half-brother John Formschlag had purchased in 1865 the farm in downtown Penngrove where Wharff first grew potatoes in 1853. The Wharffs built a small cottage on the ranch for themselves and lived there until 1909, when they left Penngrove to live with their daughter Belinda Hoadley in San Francisco’s Mission District. Olive died there in 1913 at age 85, and David in 1918 at age 89.

By that time, swaggering, opportunistic Argonauts like Wharff had been recast in local lore as Pioneers, a little flamboyant perhaps, but always purposeful in channeling the wild exploitations of the Gold Rush into building California. Wharff’s daughter Belinda maintained that her father was not the adventurous, “harum scarum” type of Argonaut, but a quiet family man of tenacious courage, whose feet, like thousands of others who tilled the land, were firmly placed on the soil.

She clearly hadn’t seen him in his youth.

*****

Thanks to Lee Torliatt, Chuck Lucas, Katherine Rinehart, and Rich Wharff for their research assistance.

SOURCES:

Newspapers & Magazines

Petaluma Argus: “Personal and Social,” May 5, 1883; “A Bit of Penngrove History,” November 28, 1901; “Has Read the Argus for Over Fifty Years,” March 31, 1906; “The Death of Mrs. F. B. Green,” February 5, 1909; “Celebrated 57th Wedding Anniversary,” February 20, 1909; “Celebrate Sixtieth Anniversary of Their Marriage Tuesday,” February 20, 1912; “David Wharff Passes Away,” September 16, 1918.

Petaluma Courier: “Their Golden Anniversary,” February 20, 1902; “Celebrate Anniversary,” February 18, 1909; “Ancient Land History,” November 30, 1912; “Mrs. O. Wharff Enters Rest,” April 20, 1913; “Frank B. Green, Penngrove Pioneer, Found Dead in Kitchen at Country Home,” November 9, 1913.

Sacramento Bee: Harry P. Bagley, “From Sedate Boston to the Wild Gold Country of California,” September 12, 1942.

Sacramento Daily Union: “From the South (Page’s deed),” October 4, 1852.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “A Pioneer Woman of Petaluma Dead,” April 20, 1913.

Scientific American, “Agriculture in California,” November 27, 1852 (price of potatoes). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/agriculture-in-california/

Sonoma Democrat: “Patents Received in Sonoma (Page grant),” April 1, 1858.

Books, Journals, Websites, Other

Paul Bailey, Sam Brannan and the California Mormons (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1943), p. 124.

Christopher Warren Haskins, The Argonauts of California, Being the Reminiscences of Scenes and Incidents that Occurred in California in Early Mining Days (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1890) p. 462.

Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982).

Katherine Johnson, “West Penngrove Historical Resources Survey,” Master of Arts Thesis, Sonoma State University, 1994. https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/g445cg87h?locale=en

John Haskell Kemble, “The Gold Rush by Panama, 1848-1851,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, Rushing for Gold (University of California Press, February, 1949), pp. 45-56.

“Central America: Nicaragua,” The Maritime Heritage Project. https://www.maritimeheritage.org/ports/centralAmericaNicaragua.html

J.P. Munro-Fraser, “George B. Williams,” History of Sonoma County (Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), pp. 604-605.

Thor Severson, Sacramento: An Illustrated History, 1839 to 1874 (California Historical Society, 1973).

Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream 1850-1913 (Oxford University Press USA, 1973), pp. 49-68.

Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch Of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pgs. 18, 24, 55.

Lee Torliatt, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2002) pp. 18-20.

David Wharff letter to William Farrell, dated April 10, 1914. From personal collection of Richard Wharff.

David Wharff letter to A.P. Behrens, dated April 26, 1918. From personal collection of Lee Torliatt.

Rich Warff, “David Wharff,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016) pp. 115-122.

Luzena Stanley Wilson, 49er: Her Memoirs as Taken Down by Her Daughter in 1881 (Mills College, Calif., Eucalyptus Press, 1937). www.digitalhistory.uh.edu.

Featured

Petaluma’s First Movie: The Farmer’s Daughter

A Romantic Story of Political Opposites

Loretta Young and Joseph Cotten in still photo from “The Farmer’s Daughter” (photo courtesy of Gregg Fautley Collection)

In the spring of 1946, Louis Shapero, a Hollywood location scout, spent three days in a chartered plane scouring Sonoma County for a picturesque setting that would pass as a Minnesota dairy ranch. Then he came upon the Bundesen Ranch. Nestled in the green rolling foothills of Sonoma Mountain, the ranch’s setting struck him as the perfect backdrop for what would become the first Hollywood film shot in Petaluma.

A 150-acre dairy, the Bundesen Ranch sat at 4295 Old Adobe Road, two miles south of the Petaluma Adobe on the road to Sonoma. Originally settled by an Irishman named James Sullivan, it was purchased in the late 1880s by Sophus Bundesen, an immigrant from the Isle of Fohr. After his arrival in America in 1873, he adopted the Anglo-Saxon first name Charles in place of his given name, which along with its feminine variation Sophia, stands for wisdom in Greek.

Charles was joined in Petaluma by his brothers Martin and Henry, who settled on chicken ranches west of town. Charles and his wife Marie, another Isle of Fohr immigrant whom he married in San Francisco in 1884, raised five children on the ranch.

The Bundesen Ranch at 4295 Old Adobe Road, with Charles and Marie Bundesen in buggy and sons and daughters standing outside the gate, 1905 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

After Marie’s death in 1912, Bundesen retired from ranching and moved into town, leaving his son Martin to operate the ranch. Following Charles’ death in 1919, and Martin’s subsequent move to Eureka, the family leased the ranch in 1930 to an Irishman named William Scott, who immigrated to Petaluma during Ireland’s civil war in the early 1920s.

Scott was on his deathbed at the ranch, being cared for by his son Bob, when Shapero came calling to secure a release for using the ranch as a movie set. Sophie Bundesen, a Petaluma nurse representing the Bundesen family, also signed off on the release. In early May of 1946, a few days after Scott died, a crew of 100 carpenters, painters, landscapers, location directors, and film crew members descended upon the ranch to spruce it up for the shoot.

Still from the film set of the Bundesen Ranch with new silo and paint job, 1946 (credit: The Farmer’s Daughter)

That included applying a fresh coat of white paint to the two-story farmhouse and painting the barn, chicken coops, and sheds bright red, despite the fact the film would be shot in black and white. A second large barn was erected at the ranch’s entrance with a large mural depicting the rolling countryside, which would play into the movie’s storyline, along with a duck pond and a grain silo to make it look more like a Minnesota farm. The line of eucalyptus trees lining the short lane from Old Adobe Road to the farmhouse were cut down and replaced with pine trees, which were more akin to Minnesota.

Once the stage was set, filming began in mid-May. Each day for ten days, a small fleet of swanky, chauffeured cars delivered the director, producer, and stars Loretta Young and Joseph Cotten, to the ranch from the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, where they were lodged. The rest of the film crew stayed at Hotel Petaluma, which also provided picnic-style meals on the set each day.

Hotel Petaluma with Redwood Room on ground floor, 1954 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

The hotel’s owner, Harold Eckart, had undertaken a major renovation of the hotel the year before, including a makeover of the cocktail lounge. He rechristened it the Redwood Room (current site of the Shuckery restaurant). Decorated with a large photo mural of the redwoods, it quickly became a favorite hangout of Petaluma’s postwar café society, known as “the 400.” They were serenaded most evenings by Earle Bond, a locally renowned organ player.

Members of the 400 looking to catch a glimpse of the movie’s stars at the Redwood Room were disappointed however, as the evenings they were in town they chose to dine at the Golden Gate Grill on Main Street near Western Avenue (current site of the Sake 107 sushi restaurant).

Golden Gate Grill, 107 Main Street, 1947 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

A popular stop for celebrities and tourists traveling the Redwood Highway north to the Russian River resorts, the grill was owned and operated by two Yugoslavian immigrants, Pete Goich and chef “Big Tom” Kasovich. It being Petaluma, the house specialty was chicken.

Both the opening and closing scenes of the film were shot at the Bundesen Ranch. A cheerful comedy-drama originally called “Katie Goes to Congress,” it opens with a convertible driving into the Bundesen Ranch to pick up Young, who plays a Swedish-American farmgirl headed to the big city to attend nursing school.

Filming at Bundesen Ranch (photo courtesy of the Ed Fratini Collection, Petaluma Historical Museum)

While waiting at a bus stop created for the film on the corner of Stage Gulch and Old Adobe roads, Young’s character warily accepts a ride from an itinerant sign painter who just finished painting a mural on the side of her family’s barn.

Bus stop set up at the corner of Old Adobe and Stage Gulch roads (credit: The Farmer’s Daughter)

Taking advantage of her good nature—along with all her savings for school tuition—he leaves her scandalously stranded that night at a roadside motel.

The motel featured in the film was the Pioneer Auto Court on the southeast corner of Fern Avenue and Redwood Highway, just south of Cotati. Opened in 1938 by John Frankfurter, the Pioneer featured 13 small cabins, a cocktail lounge, and a large swimming pool. In its heyday, it catered to travelers headed north along the Redwood Highway.

Loretta Young’s character at the Pioneer (credit: The Farmer’s Daughter)

During the nighttime shoot at the Pioneer, an inebriated local, drawn by the bright studio lights outside the motel, drove up to the set and stumbled into the bar to order a drink. “Nice opening you’re having,” he said to the bartender, “just like in Hollywood.” Turning to Young, who was waiting inside the lounge to shoot a scene outside, he added, “And, baby, you’re a dead ringer for Loretta Young. What won’t they think of next?”

Cocktail Lounge at the Pioneer Auto Court featured in the film (credit: The Farmer’s Daughter)

In the film, Young’s character, broke but determined to stand on her own two feet, hitchhikes from the motel into the big city, where she manages to secure a job as domestic in the home of a prominent congressman played by Cotten.

After Cotten’s right-wing political party decides to back an unscrupulous alderman for Congress, Young, an outspoken progressive just as comfortable discussing politics as she is washing sheets and ironing shirts, stands up at a campaign rally to deride the two-faced alderman, leading to an offer from the opposing party to run against him.

Loretta Young plays Katie Holstrum, addressing a campaign rally in this still shot from the film (credit: The Farmer’s Daughter)

Propelled into the lead in the race thanks to her plainspoken and honest aphorisms, Young is tripped up at the eleventh hour when the sign painter, paid by the opposition, shows up to publicly slander her with false salacious accusations regarding their night together at the Pioneer Auto Club.

Returning to the ranch to console herself with feeding the chickens, Young is encouraged by both her father and Cotten, who’s come to propose to her (in the chicken yard), to fight the smear campaign. With Cotten’s help, she gets the sign painter to confess to his lies and is elected to Congress. She also accepts Cotten’s hand in marriage, despite the fact they are on opposite sides of the political aisle.

Love scene, Petaluma style (credit: The Farmer’s Daughter, courtesy of Rocco Rivetti)

Ironically, Young was dealing with one of Hollywood’s biggest cover-ups at the time. It involved her 10-year-old adopted daughter, who accompanied Young to the Bundesen Ranch during filming. Despite rumors swirling around Hollywood, it wouldn’t be until just before Young’s death in 2000 that it was publicly confirmed the girl was actually her biological daughter. Later came the disclosure that she had become pregnant after being date raped by Clark Gable while the two of them were shooting Call of the Wild in Washington state.

Originally shot as Katie Goes to Congress, Petaluma’s first movie was released in 1947 under the title, The Farmer’s Daughter. It opened that summer to packed houses at Petaluma’s California Theater (the current Phoenix Theater). A popular box office hit, the film earned Young her first and only Oscar.

Ad for “The Farmer’s Daughter” (credit: Pinterest)

After the 101 Freeway opened in 1957, travelers no longer took the Redwood Highway through Petaluma when heading north to the Russian River. That hurt a lot of local businesses.

Casualties included Hotel Petaluma, which was sold to the Elks Club for use as a clubhouse and a single-room occupancy hotel until 2017, when it was restored as a boutique hotel. The Pioneer Auto Court was also forced to become a short-term SRO, although its swimming pool remained a popular attraction for local kids until the early 1970s, when the motel was torn down and replaced by a horse pasture.

Former Bundesen Ranch today, 4295 Old Adobe Road (credit: John Sheehy)

Out on the Bundesen Ranch, the film company tore down the Minnesota silo and barn after the shooting ended. The ranch itself was sold in the 1950s to dairy rancher Frank Flochinni, an Italian immigrant, and later passed down to his descendants. Over the years, the ranch house and original barn were torn down and replaced by a new house and barn.

*****

Thanks to Gregg Fautley for his research assistance on this story, and as always, to Katie Watts for her editing.

Video trailer for The Farmer’s Daughter:

The Farmer’s Daughter is also available for free viewing on youtube:

SOURCES:

Petaluma Argus: “A Mother is Called to Rest,” December 2, 1912; “Barn Dance at Bundesen Home,” September 2, 1922.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Leased Dairy Near Town,” December 15, 1930; “William J. Scott Claimed by Death,” April 19, 1946; “RKO Picture Co. Inc. to Shoot Movie, ‘Katie Goes to Congress,’ on Bundesen Place,” May 14, 1946; “Sunny Skies Hoped for by ‘Katie for Congress’ Artists,” May 23, 1946; “Elizabeth Olga Olberg Meets Loretta Young, Poses with Star for Picture on Lot,” May 25, 1946; “Carl Bundesen Succumbs to Illness,” May 31, 1946; “Katie For Congress Picture Completed at ‘Location,’” June 1, 1946; “Motorist Was Slightly Mixed,” June 10, 1946; “The Farmer’s Daughter Filmed Here; At Cal,” July 28, 1947; “So They Tell Me with Bill Soberanes column,” January 27, 1958; “ Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror column,” April 12, 1962, “Frank Flochinni,” May 25, 1977.

Petaluma Courier: “Arrived from Germany to Remain,” December 6, 1912; “Chas. Bundesen Has Passed into Rest,” July 22, 1919;

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Hollywood Location Party Using Ranch Near Petaluma,” May 15, 1946; Bundesens’ Roots in Ranching,” December 17, 1989.

“Yesterday’s Favorite Spot Just a Memory,” Cotati Historical Society Newsletter, Vol. 8, No. 2, June, 2015, pp.1-2.

Charles Bundesen, U.S. Census, 1880, 1890.

Herman Martin Theodore Bundesen, U.S. Census, 1910.

Helen Petersen, “Clark Gable Accused of Raping Co-Star,” Buzz Feed News, July 12, 2015. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/loretta-young

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Strawberry Mountain

19th Century Frontier Justice on Sonoma Mountain

BY JOHN SHEEHY & LEE TORLIATT

The former Cook Ranch along Lichau Road on Sonoma Mountain (photo public domain)

One June day in 1887, while delivering a wagonload of fresh strawberries to merchants along Petaluma’s Main Street, Frank Roberts ran into a neighbor from Sonoma Mountain, “French Louie” Marion, who was also delivering strawberries. The two got into a heated argument that ended when Roberts grabbed a handheld plowshare and whacked French Louie across the head with it, inflicting a large, bloody gash.

Arrested for assault and battery, Roberts was tried in court twice, with both cases ending in a hung jury. Although Petaluma had grown by the 1880s to a town of more than 3,000, a spirit of frontier justice still prevailed, with people often left to settle scores on their own.

And settle them they did, especially on Sonoma Mountain, where, in addition to physically accosting each other, neighbors were often in court, battling each other over deeds, property boundaries, water rights, livestock, and trespassing. But strawberries?

Illustration of Petlauma, 1877 (illustration courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

First introduced to Sonoma County in the 1850s, strawberry cultivation thrived in Petaluma’s Mediterranean climate. Farmers looking to get a premium price for their berries—25 cents per pound in 1887 ($7 in today’s currency)—relied upon branding, especially in June, when a number of local churches and temperance organizations held annual strawberry festivals, serving up berries and ice cream.

The town’s main influencers were the two newspapers, the Argus and the Courier, whose editors were plied with free baskets of berries by growers looking to have theirs declared the largest, reddest, and most delicious of the season.

The honor, previously held by Roberts, was bestowed upon French Louie in June 1887.

One of only a handful of French immigrants on the west slope of Sonoma Mountain—most early French immigrants settled in either Sonoma Valley or Healdsburg, many of them operating hotels and resorts—French Louie left his native Normandy while still a teenager in the early 1870s, fleeing like many other French immigrants the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Working on a ship bound for America, he befriended a young shipmate named Peter Torliatt who was either escaping the French military draft or running away from his village near the Italian border after being caught throwing rocks at a priest.

Once their steamer docked in San Francisco, the two young men jumped ship, and eventually made their way to Penngrove, where they were hired by Ned McDermott to work on his ranch along Lichau Road atop Sonoma Mountain. Like many of the mountain’s early settlers, McDermott was Irish, Sonoma County’s first large immigrant group.

Evart Produce Company on Penngrove’s Main Street, 1902 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

The Irish were drawn to the mountain by its springs, which provided year-round irrigation, as well as the notion that wheat—California’s first major boom crop in the mid-1800s—would grow better on the mountain’s rolling slopes than on the valley floor below.

In 1882, French Louie married McDermott’s only child, 20-year-old Minnie McDermott. Four years later, not long before French Louie’s brutal encounter with Frank Roberts, Minnie died in childbirth. By that time, both French Louie and Torliatt were leasing their own ranches along Lichau Road on the mountain. With the wheat boom having gone bust by the 1880s, the two men, like most Petaluma ranchers, turned to dairy ranching, supplementing their income with eggs from pastoral chickens and market vegetables and fruits, including strawberries.

1890s dairy ranch outside of Petaluma (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

The attraction of cultivating strawberries was that, unlike grain crops, which were planted and harvested only once a year, strawberries reproduced steadily through spring and summer, providing the highest income per acre of any crop in the area. In 1887, an acre of strawberry plants yielded $400 in annual income ($11,500 in today’s currency).

For growers on Sonoma Mountain the yields were even better. Thanks to the mountain’s year-round springs and freedom from the frosts that plagued the valley floor, they were able to reap a second season, harvesting strawberries in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Losing his crown as the mountain’s strawberry wizard, was no small thing apparently for a wealthy rancher like Frank Roberts. Born to early Santa Rosa settlers, Roberts married Mary Hopper, the youngest daughter of one of Sonoma Mountain’s largest landowners, Tom Hopper.

Tom Hopper (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

Having come to California from Missouri in 1847, Hopper found success in the mines during the gold rush before settling in 1852 on Sonoma Mountain, where he eventually expanded his ranch to 2,360 acres.

In September of 1853, a neighbor of Hopper, looking to keep Hopper’s cattle out of his potato fields, touched off a fire to burn the grasslands on his ranch. The wild oats in the field, which stood six feet tall and were dry as timber in early fall, blazed furiously. By evening time, the fire had burned over the top of Sonoma Mountain, inflicting heavy losses on several neighbors.

Thanks to further real estate investments, Hopper went on to become one of the wealthiest men in the county. After becoming president of the Santa Rosa Bank in 1878, he moved to Santa Rosa, dividing his Sonoma Mountain ranch between his daughters Eliza and Mary.

Eliza married Isaac Fountain “Fount” Cook, who came to the area from Indiana as a child with his parents in 1854. The Cook Ranch sat halfway up the mountain along Lichau Road. Mary married Frank Roberts. Their Roberts Ranch, which included a lucrative rock quarry as well as a strawberry patch, extended from Petaluma Hill at Roberts Road up the mountainside to the Cook Ranch.

View of the former Cook Ranch along Lichau Road atop Sonoma Mountain (photo public domain)

After French Louie recovered from Roberts’ head bashing, he sent for his sister Pauline back in France. To his surprise, Adrienne, his other sister, showed up, having intercepted the money he sent Pauline for ship passage. After being in the country for only two months, she married Peter Torliatt, French Louie’s neighbor. It would be a troubled relationship.

Peter Torliatt (photo courtesy of Lee Torliatt)

In 1889, French Louie married the daughter of another of his Irish neighbors, 19-year-old Nellie Crilly. Nellie’s parents, Ellen and Nicholas Crilly, had established a ranch near the top of Lichau Road in the late 1860s. Like other settlers, they endured a number of bitter disputes with neighbors on the mountain. In 1872, while involved in a lawsuit filed by their neighbor James O’Phelan, the Crillys took a family trip to San Francisco. While they were away, someone burned down their house.

Six months later, Ellen Crilly took out her revenge on O’Phelan in an encounter recounted in the Petaluma Argus:

“There was considerable excitement created on the Sonoma Mountains one day last week, growing out of a dispute on boundaries of the lands of James O’Phelan and Nicholas Crilly. Crilly, it seems, ran a fence through the premises of the neighbor O’Phelan, who after taking counsel in the matter, determined to tear [the] same down.

He was in the act of removing the fence, assisted by a hired man, when Mrs. Crilly appeared from a buckeye bush and with a handful of rocks and the “sprig of shelalah,” commenced a vigorous warfare. One rock struck the hired man on the head, inflicting an ugly scalp wound, which rendered him “hors de combat.” She then directed her attack against O’Phelan, and administered a severe blow upon his “cronk” with her stick. This let [sent] him out and left the woman in possession of the field.

A warrant was sworn out for her arrest, and Deputy Sheriff Hedges was two days scouring the hills in search of the combative Amazon. It appears that after her splendid feat at arms she became frightened and took to the brush, and up to date the place of her retreat remains a mystery.”

In 1881, Nicholas Crilly died unexpectedly, leaving Ellen a widow with ten children to run the dairy. Shortly after French Louie married her daughter Nellie, Ellen was pulled into a new violent dispute on the mountain with a neighbor named Puckett.

An unidentified rancher and his wife heading into Penngrove by buckboard, circa 1900 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

A teetotaler with strongly held opinions, Edward Puckett settled on the mountain in 1854 after coming across the plains from Missouri. In addition to operating a 186-acre dairy, he was known for growing some of the best apples and Picholine olives for making olive oil in the area. In 1867, he married Mary Meany, a Petaluma schoolteacher and poet, originally from Ireland. The couple had one son, Alfred, an inspiring writer, who, under his mother’s tutelage, became known at a young age as the “poet of Sonoma Mountain.”

In 1872, Puckett had provided an easement across his property for Lichau Road, named after one of the mountain’s earliest settlers. Puckett however reserved the right to maintain two gates on the road in order to keep his cows from wandering off the ranch. Neighbors living further up the road—the Crillys, Todds, Jordans, and Duersons—complained to the county for years about the nuisance of Puckett’s gates on a public thoroughfare. Puckett, in turn, offered to take them down if the neighbors would build a wooden fence on his property along both sides of the road.

1898 map of Todd and Puckett ranches (circled) along Lichau Road (map courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

The dispute was still going on in 1890, when James M. Todd, who owned an adjacent ranch, entered Puckett’s farm one evening to retrieve a stray calf that had wandered through a break in the fence. Todd claimed the break had been created by Puckett’s hogs. He brought with him three young stepsons—Willy, Melvin, and Adelbert Cook—and one of Ellen Crilly’s sons, 16-year-old John.

They were met on the property by Puckett and his 21-year-old poet son Alfred. After exchange of some “rough language,” Todd and Puckett began to brawl.

Willy Cook, 19, pulled out a revolver and fired a shot at Puckett, barely missing his head. Puckett’s son Alfred attempted to wrestle the gun away from Willy, while Todd and the other young men ganged up on the elder Puckett. During the tussle with Alfred, Willy fired the gun three times, hitting Alfred in the shoulder and abdomen. While he lay bleeding, John Crilly egged on Willy to shoot Puckett as well. Fortunately for Puckett, Willy’s gun was out of bullets.

Charged with attempted murder, Willy Cook pleaded self-defense and was acquitted in a jury trial. Alfred Puckett eventually recovered from his wounds and went on to become a noted local historian.

In 1894, Frank Roberts made a small fortune when the Southern Pacific Railroad announced they were purchasing the entire inventory of his rock quarry, along with the quarries of four of his neighbors, amounting to 350,000 basalt blocks, to pave the streets of San Francisco’s Potrero District.

The former Roberts Ranch along Petaluma Hill and Roberts roads (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

The deal made Roberts one of the wealthiest men in the county. That however didn’t stop him from battling with a neighbor over a $57 bill for a broken water pipe.

Water rights on them mountain were even more precious than land. In the early 1870s, three of the mountain’s large landowners—Tom Hopper, William Hill, and Henry Hardin—secured water rights to the springs that fed Copeland and Lynch creeks. Forming the Sonoma County Water Company, they piped the water, along with water from Adobe Creek, into Petaluma, serving as the town’s main water source. In exchange for running their pipes across the ranches on the mountain, they provided ranchers with access to the water as well as stock in the company.

The water pipe running across Robert Forsyth’s ranch developed a leak that spilled out onto the adjacent Roberts Ranch. Roberts had the leak repaired, sending the $57 bill to Forsyth, who refused to pay it. Roberts responded by suing Forsyth, making it clear that the money was immaterial, it was the principle that mattered.

Frustrated with the slow pace the lawsuit was taking in the courts, Roberts resorted to fisticuffs, not once but twice. In the first encounter, he wielded a cane at Forsyth, who fought him off with a knife. In the second showdown, Roberts wielded an axe, while Forsyth fought him off with a club. Each man filed charges of assault and battery against the other, all of which were eventually dropped, along with Roberts’ lawsuit for the $57.

Contemporary strawberry farm on Stony Point Road (photo courtesy of Stony Point Strawberry Farm)

By the 1890s, the strawberry competition between Roberts and French Louie had been put to rest by Peter Torliatt, who had ascended to being the area’s strawberry wizard. Torliatt was leasing the 518 acres that remained of the Cook Ranch after Eliza Cook and her husband moved to Santa Rosa. In addition to operating a dairy on the ranch, he maintained a 2-acre strawberry patch.

But Torliatt had domestic problems. In 1898, Adrienne filed for divorce and custody of their four children, before reconciling with her husband.

Peter and Adrienne Torliatt with two of their four children, Marie and Teresa, 1890s (photo courtesy of Lee Torliatt)

A year later however, the couple fell into a raging fight. Two of their children, fearing for their mother’s safety, ran to the adjacent ranch of David Horne for help. Horne, a Scotsman who had been feuding with Torliatt over water rights, went to the Torliatt house with another neighbor, William Duerson.

As they approached the house, a shot rang out. They loudly announced their presence, after which another shot whizzed by their heads. Retreating, they contacted the sheriff, who traveled up tp the mountain to arrest Torliatt for assault with a deadly weapon.

At his court trial, Torliatt maintained that he had been shooting at an owl in a tree that had been disturbing his chickens, and that he wasn’t aware of the presence of Horne and Duerson by the ranch house. As evidence, he introduced a dead owl to the court, the body still suspiciously warm a week after the incident. The case was eventually dropped.

In August of 1900, Adrienne Torliatt once again filed for divorce. That same month, Torliatt received an eviction notice from Eliza Cook, exercising a clause in the lease that allowed her to sell the ranch at any time, assuming it was after the annual harvest. Cook sold the ranch that month to L.L. Cannon, a breeder of champion racehorses, but Torliatt refused to vacate, maintaining that his second strawberry harvest wouldn’t be over until after Christmas.

Cook took Torliatt to court, where a number of experts were called in, including horticulturalist Luther Burbank, to testify on the nature of strawberry cultivation, particularly in regard to the second season on Sonoma Mountain. The judged ultimately ruled in Torliatt’s favor.

Horticulturalist Luther Burbank, 1901 (photo courtesy of book “The World’s Work,” archive.com)

The next spring, Torliatt purchased a 30-acre ranch on Ely Road east of Petaluma, where he relocated his famed strawberry plants. By the early 1900s, he was earning $5,000 a year ($144,000 today) from three acres of what many considered the finest strawberry patch in the county.

Adrienne, who had dropped her second divorce suit, would file for divorce three more times, citing cruelty as the reason. She eventually separated from her husband and moved into Petaluma with her two daughters, while the couple’s two sons remained with their father on the ranch. The courts denied her divorce suit each time, noting that both parties were in acting in bad faith as the fight was really over dividing up their community property. They remained in a standoff until Torliatt’s death in 1916.

French Louie continued to grow strawberries on Sonoma Mountain until 1911, when he and Nellie decided to move into town due to his declining health. French Louie had just finished moving their furniture into their newly rented house at 23 Post Street, when he died. He was 57.

****

Full disclosure: the author John Sheehy’s Irish great-grandparents settled on Sonoma Mountain in 1863, although thankfully not along Lichau Road, but instead at the bottom of the range outside Lakeville.

SOURCES:

Newspapers

Petaluma Argus: “Strawberries and Cream,” May 17, 1866; “Dwelling Burned,” January 27, 1872; “War on the Sonoma Mountains,” June 1, 1872; “The Festival Last Evening,” May 2, 1873 “Died: Nicholas Crilly,” May 27, 1881; “Notice: Frank G. Roberts to Mary E. Roberts,” August 12, 1881; “That Mountain Nuisance,” October 4, 1884; “Fine Apples,” December 5, 1885; “Strawberries,” April 16, 1887; “Strawberries for Christmas,” December 10, 1887; “Brevities,” April 11, 1899; “Roberts Brings Suit Against Forsyth,” February 20, 1905; “Delicious Strawberries for Easter,” April 14, 1906; “First of the Season,” February 27, 1908; “Denied Divorce,” November 20, 1908; “Third Case is Dismissed,” October 10, 1911; “Strawberries in the Market,” April 13, 1912; “Finest Strawberries on Christmas Day,” December 8, 1912; “Sudden Death of A.J. Puckett,” March 9, 1926.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: Emily H. Kelsey, “Pioneers Bought Vallejo’s Land,” August 17, 1955.

Petaluma Courier: “A Mountain Nuisance,” October 1, 1884; “Courierlets: Roberts and Marion,” July 27, 1887; “Courierlets: Marion,” February 1, 1888; “Petaluma Entire Paving Block Supply Purchased,” September 26, 1894; “Strawberry Culture,” May 27, 1896; “Courierlets: Puckett,” December 7, 1898; “A Penngrove Suit: Horne,” March 30, 1900; “A Letter from Penngrove Way,” August 8, 1900; “Petaluma Case Tried Wednesday,” November 16, 1900; “Peter Torliatt Gets the Decision,” November 22, 1900; “Mary Catherine Puckett,” Courier, July 2, 1901; “Frank Roberts Assaulted,” December 17, 1904; “Another Pioneer Passes: Puckett,” September 11, 1907; “Pioneer of Olden Days Called: McDermott,” October 13, 1909; “Pioneer of Petaluma Dead: Ellen Crilly,” March 29, 1911; “I.F. Cook is Summoned at Santa Rosa,” February 11, 1917; “Contested to Be Filed in Cook Will,” February 28, 1917.

Sacramento Bee: “From Sedate Boston to the Wild Gold Country of California (Wharff profile),” September 12, 1942.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Torliatt Held to Answer,” February 10, 1899; “He Shot at an Owl,” February 11, 1899; Gaye LeBaron, “French Among the Important Early Immigrants,” November 7, 1993.

Sonoma County Journal: Ad for strawberry vines, January 19, 1856; “Strawberries,” May 27, 1859.

Sonoma Democrat: “Another Tragedy: Alfred Puckett is Shot on Sonoma Mountain,” December 13, 1890; “Cook Acquitted,” October 31, 1891; “Same Couple Figure Four Times in Divorce Court,” April 28, 1911.

Books, Journals, Websites, Documents

Thomas Jefferson Gregory, History of Sonoma County, California, With Biographical Sketches of Leading Men and Women (Historical Record Company, Los Angeles, 1911), p. 433.

Scott Hess and John Sheehy, “Sonoma Mountain,” On a River Winding Home (Ensatina Press, 2018), pp. 60-64.

Lee Torliatt, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2001), pp. 22-27.

1881 Copeland Creek Easement between Thomas Hopper and M.J. Miller. Courtesy of Michael Healy personal collection.

Letter from David Wharff to A.P. Behrens, April 26, 1918. Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.

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The Ladies Silk Culture Society

How Chinese Imports Doomed a Women’s Home Industry

Petaluma’s Carlson-Currier Silk Mill, built 1892, supported cheap silk imports over a domestic industry (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

On the evening of July 16, 1892, Ida Belle McNear called the women in her social coterie together for a meeting at Petaluma’s city hall. The topic was silk. Numerous attempts to create a raw silk industry in California over the previous 25 years had come to naught. Now, McNear believed she’d discovered a breakthrough.

Her father-in-law, grain merchant and capitalist John McNear, had recently convinced a San Francisco silk manufacturer to build a new mill in Petaluma. After some arm twisting, the mill’s executives, Edward Carlson and J.P. Currier, agreed to purchase California-grown raw silk from Ida Belle McNear at a 25% premium over the price they paid for imported raw silk from China. The men also warned her that her scheme would never work.

Ida Belle McNear, center pointing, with family members on the Petaluma wharf (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Dauntless, the headstrong 32-year old McNear forged ahead, launching that evening at city hall the Petaluma Women’s Silk Association.

America’s dalliance with sericulture, or silk farming, began in 1825, after Congress approved the import of silk goods from Europe and China, setting off a new fashion fad. A year later, the white mulberry tree, moris multicaulis, was introduced to America from southeast Asia. When eaten by silkworms, the tree’s tender leaves produced silk of the highest quality.

1830s silk fashions (photos LACMA)

A subsequent “Mulberry Craze” soon overtook the country, giving rise to horticulture’s largest speculation bubble since the infamous “tulipmania” in 17th century Holland. Stock companies were formed to finance the plantings and import millions of silkworm eggs from Europe. Silk mills were rapidly constructed in New England and Michigan.

At the height of the market, the price of a young tree start rose from 5¢ to $5, before the bubble burst in 1839. Five years later, a mysterious blight destroyed what was left of America’s mulberry groves, forcing domestic factories to begin importing raw silk from Europe and Asia.

Poster for auction of mulberry trees in Connecticut, 1840 (photo crickethillgarden.com)

Twenty years later, a second American sericulture craze began after disease devastated mulberry groves in France and Italy. This time, the craze’s epicenter was California, whose Mediterranean climate made it ideal for growing mulberry trees.

Led by a French botanist named Louis Prevost, the craze was incentivized for the first two year by bounties from the state legislature of $250 for cultivating at least 5,000 mulberry trees and $300 for each 100,000 silk cocoons produced.

Orchards and vineyards were advised to border their roads and property lines with mulberry trees in preparation for the coming sericulture boom. California’s largest vineyard at that time, Buena Vista Winery in Sonoma, planted 3,000 mulberry trees around its 500 acres of grapes.

Diagram of the various stages of a silkworm (photo Barre Montpelier Times Argus)

Before the new craze could gain significant traction, Prevost died, leaving California sericulture to flounder as Europe recovered from its blight.

In 1880, imported raw silk sales surged to $13 million from a mere $3 million ten years earlier, as American women again became entranced with silk fashion. The sudden rise inspired a circle of influential Philadelphia women interested in promoting a domestic sericulture industry to form the Women’s Silk Culture Association of the United States.

Twelve auxiliary groups sprang up around the country, including in California, where a group of prominent suffragists with political clout formed the California Silk Culture Association.

Led by Elise Wiehe Hittell, wife of state senator and eminent California historian Theodore H. Hittell, the association’s members included Laura de Force Gordon, co-founder of the California Woman Suffrage Association, journalist, and the second female lawyer admitted to the state bar; Ellen Clark Sargent, treasurer of the National Woman Suffrage Association and wife of U.S. Senator Aaron Sargent; and Windsor’s Sarah Myers Latimer, a co-founder of the Sonoma Country Woman Suffrage Association and wife of California Superior Court Judge Lorenzo Latimer.

Portrait of Sarah Myers Latimer of Windsor by her son L.P. Latimer (photo Windsor Museum and Historical Society)

The women promoted sericulture as a home industry, pointing to Italy and France, where raising silk worms and reeling silk from cocoons was managed as a side business by women on family farms. In the five or six weeks it took each year to feed the worms and unreel the raw silk from the cocoons from 100 mulberry trees, a mother and her daughters were able make $300, or $8,500 in today’s currency, providing them with some economic independence.

Women reeling silk from cocoons, 1895 (photo History Museum, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints)

The silk culturists compared the work to that of raising chickens and eggs, which in the early 1880s appeared to defy industrialization, as chickens were still pastoral creatures who ranged about the barnyard and farm, leaving their eggs in mangers or under porches until the farm wife sent the children out to scare up any available eggs to sell for “pin-money” in town.

But industrialization was coming even for the chickens, thanks to innovations in the early 1880s of a Danish immigrant named Christopher Nisson at his Pioneer Hatchery in Two Rock.

Using an efficient new incubator developed in Petaluma by Isaac Dias and Lyman Byce, Nisson designed a poultry assembly line that began with hatching eggs in dozens of incubators, then placing the baby chicks in stove-heated brooder houses that served as surrogate mother hens. Once they were old enough to begin laying eggs themselves, they were moved them to a colony house, where their eggs could be easily collected.

Christopher Nisson’s Pioneer Hatchery, Two Rock, 1920 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Nisson’s industrialized model would eventually give rise to a major egg boom in Petaluma that would last until the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, the women of the California Silk Association pressed forward with their craft-scale model for sericulture, using their political clout to persuaded the California legislature to create a State Board of Silk Culture, with five of its nine appointees drawn from the silk association. The state board distributed subsidies for planting mulberry trees and raising silk cocoons around the state, including in Sonoma County, where the sericulture effort was led by Frances Purrington on the farm she shared with her husband Joseph in Green Valley.

Laura De Force Gordon also convinced the legislature to appropriate $7,500 for funding for two years a free filature, or silk-reeling school, in San Francisco for young girls.

Laura de Force Gordon, 1887 (image Library of Congress)

On the promotional front, the women made a push at agricultural expositions, including the 1882 Philadelphia Silk Exposition, where cocoons raised by Mrs. H.C. Downing of San Rafael won first prize for exceptional quality; the 1884 Sonoma-Marin District Agricultural Fair, where a sericulture exhibit by horticulturalist Dr. Galen Burdell of Novato became the talk of the exposition; and the 1884 California state fair, where Lyman Byce’s new Petaluma Incubator Company displayed a baby incubator to improve the efficiency of hatching silkworm eggs.

The association also worked with the State Board of Silk Culture to promote silk culture in the public schools, distributing mulberry trees, silkworm eggs, and instructions to provide young girls with an elementary knowledge.

For most young women, the only employment available at the time was teaching, which only employed one in ten of them, or factory work. Many reported to having to marry unwisely in order to be supported. Silk culture was intended to teach them to earn money at home, and so provide them with an option to having to marry unwisely in order to be supported.

In 1885, the association helped to secure in the East Bay town of Piedmont one of five silk Experimental Stations established by the U.S. Department of Agricultural across the country to foster sericulture.

Piedmont Experimental Silk Culture Station, 1890s (photo History Room, Oakland Public Library)

Shortly after, Hittell spun off a new organization from the California Silk Association called the Ladies Silk Culture Society to foster sericulture for women in the state. The society’s membership such luminaries as Charles Crocker, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, U.S. Senator Leland Stanford, former state governor George C. Perkins, and a number of professors of agriculture and the sciences at the University of California.

The society assumed operation of the Experimental Silk Station in Piedmont, which consisted of a building for silk reeling and a eucalyptus-covered tract of 15 acres. With $10,000 appropriated from the state legislature, they replaced the eucalyptus with 6,000 mulberry trees and acquired half a million silkworm eggs for annual distribution. Hiring 100 women and girls, they used the station to teach people how to cultivate and handle silkworms, with the expectation they would be sent out as teachers of others in far reaches of the state.

Their efforts however faced an uphill battle with the industrialization overtaking the country. The Carlson-Currier Silk Mill in San Francisco publicly claimed to “have proven itself the fast friend of native-grown silk” by spinning some raw silk from the society’s Piedmont Experimental Station.

Trade card for Carlson & Currier, a subsidiary of Belding Bros. & Co. Silk Manufacturers, 1883 (California Historical Society)

However, as the west coast subsidiary of one of the country’s largest silk manufacturers, Michigan-based Belding Brothers & Company, their business relied upon cheap raw silk imports from Asia, where laborers made between 6 and 15 cents a day, versus $1 a day in California, for the tedious task of reeling raw silk from cocoons by hand. Half a pound represented a good day’s work.

Industrialists argued the solution was in labor-saving filature machinery that would take the silk directly from the cocoon and twist it for the weaver. American inventors set out to develop a reliable automatic reeling machine, but by the late 1880s, all attempts had proved disappointing.

In 1890, as import sales of raw silk rose to $24 million, or roughly $700 million in today’s currency, silk culturists called for tariffs on imported raw silk so as to make domestic sericulture competitive.

Silk dinner or reception dress in the 1880s (photo Frick Pittsburg)

Other industries were also lobbying congress for what came to be called the McKinley Act of 1890, a bill spearheaded by congressman and future president William McKinley, that raised duties of nearly 50% across a range of imported foreign goods to protect American manufacturing. Silk manufacturers, fearing silk tariffs would drive up consumer prices and thus reduce demand for silk goods, fought against the proposal, leading to its exclusion form the bill.

After the tariff battle, the political tide turned against silk culturalists, as government funding dried up at both the state and federal levels on the grounds that past appropriations had yielded poor results. In March of 1892, the Ladies Silk Culture Society purchased the Piedmont Experimental Silk Station from the U.S. government for a only $50, with plans to maintain it privately.

Four months later, Ida Belle McNear and the Petaluma Women’s Silk Association waded into the silk culture morass. Their plan was to set up a filature in Petaluma for reeling silk from cocoons they purchased from women around the state. They would then sell the raw silk to the new Carlson-Currier Silk Mill being constructed in town at an agreed upon 25% premium, making Petaluma the new silk center of California.

Carlson-Currier Silk Mill, Petaluma, 1910 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Carlson-Currier had been lured to Petaluma from San Francisco with incentives provided by John McNear and other capitalists in the local Improvement Club, looking to transition the town into industrial center, the “Oakland of the North Bay.” The incentives included free land for the mill site and a bonus of $12,000, or $300,000 in today’s currency.

The club’s other big selling point was access to cheap labor, specifically girls and young women from town and the surrounding farms. They already filled the factory floors of Nolan-Earl Shoe Factory and Adams Box Factory in McNear’s new Factory District near the railroad depot, as well as the new poultry hatcheries springing up around town.

Ad in Petaluma Argus, September 1, 1909

Of the 200 employees Carlson-Currier ultimately employed after the mill opened in October, 1892, three quarters were female.

Merely three months after the new mill opened, Ida Belle McNear and the Petaluma Women’s Silk Association threw in the towel, realizing Carlson-Currier’s 25% premium for domestic raw silk was woefully insufficient in turning a profit on domestic sericulture. Labor costs alone for the two days it took a  person to reel a pound of raw silk from cocoons by hand far outweighed the $1.40 per pound that Carlson-Currier paid for imported raw silk from Asia.

For largely the same reason, two years later the Ladies Silk Culture Society closed down their Piedmont Experimental Station, formally ending the dream of a home silk industry for women.

Inside Petaluma’s Carlson-Currier silk mill, subsidiary of Belding Bros. (photo Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library)

Meanwhile, Petaluma’s silk mill continued to grow and thrive, doubling in size during the fashion-conscious Roaring Twenties. However, the onset of the Great Depression decimated the luxury fabric market, as did the increasing popularity of cheaper synthetics like rayon and nylon, and the embargo Japan placed on silk exports in the years preceding World War II.

After the silk mill was forced to close down in 1939, the mill was purchased by the Sunset Line & Twine Company, which operated there until 2006, after which the building was converted to a boutique hotel.

Sunset Line & Twine, 1940s (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Sonoma Historian Journal, 2021 No. 1.

SOURCES:

Newspapers and Magazines

Los Angeles Times: David Karo, “The Fruit of Broken Dreams,” July 19, 2000.

Mercury News: Nilda Rego, “Days Gone By: Piedmont Clings to Its Caterpillars as Silkworm Mania Dies Out in California,” March 23, 2012.

Alameda Daily Argus: “Something About Silk,” November 24, 1883.

Petaluma Argus: “Our Fair,” September 1, 1882; “A Plea for Silk Culture,” March 28, 1885; “Eighteenth Annual Fair,” August 30, 1884; “Petaluma,” February 7, 1885; “The Multicaulis Mania,” June 27, 1885 (reprint from Harper’s Magazine, July 1885).

Petaluma Courier: “Silk Worms,” February 14, 1883; “The Petaluma Incubator,” October 8, 1884; “That Silkworm Foolishness,” July 30, 1890; “For a Silk Mill,” August 19, 1891; “Silk Factory Philosophy,” December 19, 1891; “The Silk Factory,” December 18, 1891; “Carlson-Currier Company,” October 19, 1892; “Silk Reeling,” January 24, 1893; “Personal Notes,” March 26, 1893.

San Francisco Call: “Enthusiastic Ladies,” July 17, 1892; Sericulture at Home,” October 2, 1892.

San Francisco Chronicle: “New Silk Mills,” S.F. Chronicle, November 29, 1891.

San Francisco Examiner: “Work for Women,” October 8, 1883; “A Young Industry,” June 23, 1884; “A Silk Culture Society,” June 5, 1885; “The Sericulturists,” October 14, 1887; “Signed by the Governor,” March 22, 1889; “The Culture of Silk,” January 25, 1891; “An Eloquent Arraignment,” March 24, 1891; “Silk Culture,” March 25, 1891; “In a Commercial Arcadia,” March 6, 1892; “Petaluma’s Silk Plant,” June 26, 1892; “To Stimulate Silk Culture,” July 21, 1892; “The Congress for Women,” May 2, 1894; “Horticulture and Agriculture,” January 24, 1894; “On the Wrong Track,” May 10, 1895;

Books, Journals, Websites

William C. Wyckoff, “Report on the Silk Manufacturing Industry of the United States,” 1880 Census. ftp.census.gov › vol-02-manufactures › 1880_v2-18

Annual Report of the Women’s Silk Culture Association of the United States, Volume 3 (Philadelphia, April, 1883).

Stanton, Anthony, Gage, History of Woman’s Suffrage, Vol. 3, p. 762.

Nelson Klose, “Sericulture in the United States,” Agricultural History, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 225-234.

E.O. Essig, “Silk Culture in California,” Agricultural Experiment Station, Circular 363, October 1945, College of Agriculture University of California at Berkeley.

Evelyn Craig Pattiani, “Silk in Piedmont,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 4 (December, 1952), pp. 335-342.

Featured

The Exclusionary Effect of Petaluma’s Growth Controls

A Problem 50 Years in the Making

Petaluma housing development under construction, 2019 (photo courtesy of Getty Images)

On January 19, 1971, the Petaluma City Council, led by Mayor Helen Putnam, did the unthinkable—in the midst of a construction boom, they declared a moratorium on further land annexation and zoning changes within the city, essentially stopping the boom in its tracks. They then hired a consulting firm to convene Petaluma’s first community-wide planning process in developing an Environmental Design Plan to manage growth and curb the suburban sprawl overtaking the city.

Challenged legally by developers all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the council won a landmark decision to preserve the city’s character and open spaces “by growing at an orderly and deliberate pace.” The victory made Petaluma the darling of the so-called “slow growth movement.”

It also gave birth to a chronic problem with affordable housing, one that today has reached epidemic proportions.

Petaluma’s suburban housing boom began immediately after World War II, as developers, armed with government subsidies for returning servicemen, descended upon the area, buying up cheap farmland east of town and building tract homes. The city’s population, which stood at 8,000 in 1945, quickly mushroomed to 25,000 by 1970.

That same year, new housing starts, which averaged 300 per year throughout the 1960s, tripled. When the City Council convened in January, 1971, not only were they facing a population surge to 32,000 by 1972, they were also presented with a new slate of development proposals, that, if approved, would further raise the population to 37,000 by 1973, completely overwhelming the city’s infrastructure, particularly its wastewater treatment plant.

Early 1970s postcard with aerial view of East Petaluma (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

The sudden growth spurt was caused by water. The City Council agreed in 1961 to divert water to Petaluma from the newly constructed Coyote Dam on the Russian River. With the exception of Novato, Marin County refused to follow suit, placing a natural limit on its housing development, which in turn increased land costs. San Francisco commuters looking for affordability turned to Petaluma, where, in 1970, they could purchase the same quality and same-sized home as in Marin for 20% less.

In 1972, Petaluma adopted its growth management plan, limiting new home development to 500 units per year, and allocating those units evenly between the town’s east and west sides in hopes of preserve the vitality of the downtown. To improve the quality and variety of home construction, it placed a 100-unit cap on each developer, seeking to create a field for competition. To protect Petaluma’s agricultural heritage, they imposed a greenbelt around the city.

The quality issue was in response to complaints from homeowner associations of the shoddy construction of their new tract homes, in particular those built by one of the city’s largest builders, Condiotti Enterprises of Santa Rosa, who offered the lowest priced houses in the area.

Art Condiotti, president of Condiotti Enterprises (photo courtesy of Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

Most of the defects were due to poor construction techniques, including squeaky floors that humped and dipped, buckling walls, ineffective heating, cracked and overflowing toilets, defective tubs, broken drain pipes, cracked stucco, and wavy roofs.

The popularity of Condiotti’s poor-quality, cookie-cutter homes spoke to an underlying driver of Petaluma’s housing boom: affordability.

A primary argument in the lawsuits developers waged against the city’s managed growth plan was that it would drive up home prices, excluding lower income buyers. To withstand the legal challenges, the city required each new development to allocate between 8% and 12% of its units to affordable housing. Market forces quickly rendered the allotment woefully insufficient.

By the time the Supreme Court allowed Petaluma’s plan to stand in 1976, the growth tsunami had rolled northward to Rohnert Park, where land was selling for 30% less than in Petaluma. That city’s population, which stood at 7,200 in 1972, quickly tripled to 22,000 by 1978, causing them to impose their own growth management plan.

Petaluma housing construction (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

Meanwhile, construction of small, lower-priced houses almost disappeared from Petaluma. While only 20% of new homes in 1970 sold for more than $30,000, by 1976, almost 70% did (in 1970 dollars). The average home size during that time also expanded from 1,600 to 1,900 square feet.

Some of the price increase was due to higher costs. The 100-unit cap reduced building efficiencies for developers, and construction on the hilly westside proved more costly than on the eastside flats.

But builders also surmised that luxury housing was more likely to get approval from city officials, who placed more weight on quality and amenities than on affordability in assessing development proposals. Luxury housing also played well with nearby residents, who formed housing cartels to protect their property values.

The final kicker was passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which limited property taxes to 1% of a property’s assessed value. To help replace funding the taxes had provided for infrastructure, the city was forced impose new development fees, which raised building costs about 25%.

By 1982, less than 50% of the city’s new homes quota had been built since the growth plan went into place in 1972, delivering a further blow to any meaningful production of affordable housing. The city increased the quota for affordable units to between 10% and 15%, and also offered builders the option of paying a fee in lieu of designating certain units for low or moderate income residents.

However, the ability of even these stronger incentives to overcome the adverse impacts of growth control programs on affordable housing weren’t able to keep pace with housing scarcity that would face Petaluma in years to come, further driving up homes prices, and reducing mixed-income housing.

Linda Del Mar development off of Payran Street, 1960s (photo courtesy of the Sonoma County Library)

Back in 1971, after the City Council declared a moratorium on further land annexation and zoning changes, they hired a San Francisco consulting firm to recommend revisions to the city’s 1962 General Plan. The consultants began by surveying residents.

They found that the majority wanted light industrial growth for jobs, open space of surrounding agricultural land, and a permanent greenbelt between Petaluma and towns to the north and south.

Most importantly, they wanted controlled growth with a target population of no more than 40,000 people, considerably lower than the ultimate population of 77,000 envisioned in the city’s 1962 General Plan.

That became clear in June of 1971, when the mayor and the city council put a $2 million bond issue before voters, to be matched by federal funds, for expanding the sewage plant to accommodate a maximum population of 100,000. It was soundly defeated.

Petaluma’s population growth 1880-2020 (graph courtesy of worldpopulationreview.com)

For the past 50 years, Petaluma’s growth management plan has succeeded in holding the city’s population well below the ultimate target of of 77,000 set in the 1962 General Plan. As of 2020, the population stands at 60,700.

However, the curb on growth has come at the expense of affordability. In December, 2020, Petaluma’s median home price stood at $769,000. Discounting for inflation, that’s the equivalent of $115,000 in 1970 dollars. The median home price for a home in Petaluma in 1970 was only $20,600.

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.

SOURCES:

Newspapers

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Annexation Rejected by Council,” December 8, 1970; “Moratorium on City Rezoning,” January 19, 1971; “Planning Department Pays Key Role in Area Future,” April 24, 1971; “Residents favor Industry, Open Space,” April 13, 1971; “Support the Sewer Bond,” June 1, 1971; “Bind Measure in Close Vote,” June 9, 1971; “Planners Ask that Citizens’ Committees be Established,” September 9, 1971; “Sewage Disposal Problems Council’s Latest Headache,” October 21, 1971; “Environmental Design Plan Report Tuesday,” November 17, 1971; “Sewer Improvement isn’t Answer,” January 12, 1972; “Design Plan Passes, is Effective immediately,” March 28, 1972; “How to Control Growth?” April 11, 1972; “House Builders Meet with Council on 500,” March 23, 1972; “Design Plan Passes; Is Effective at Once,” March 28, 1972; “Petaluma Environmental Play Fails to Get OK,” January 25, 1973; “Controversial Growth Policy Goes on Ballot,” April 4, 1973; “Housing Limit Challenged,” April 25, 1973; “Good Case for Housing Limit,” April 26, 1973;“Owners Itemize Condiotti Homes Complaints,” May 11, 1973; “Growth Case Moves to High Court,” AC, December 31, 1975; “Growth Review Denied,” AC, February 23, 1976; “Disgruntled Homeowners Say Agreement Reached,” June 18, 1976; “Scharer Brings Different Personality to City Manager Post,” October 5, 1981; “Petaluma’s new Housing Element Conforms to State Law,” October 27, 1982; “Council Adopts In-Lieu Fee System,” August 21, 1984.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Census Says Median Value of 78,060 County Homes is $20,900,” March 4, 1971; “No Permits Until Builder Makes Good,” November 24, 1976; “Growth: Tract home, bedroom community has much to offer,” March 14, 1979; “Development Plan Embroils Builder in Political Scrimmage,” October 4, 1992.

Journals, Magazines, Books, Websites

California Planning & Development Report, “Petaluma Marks 30 Years Of Growth Control”
Apr 1, 2002. https://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-962

Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

Bernard J. Frieden, “The Exclusionary Effect of Growth Controls,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 465, Housing America (Jan., 1983), pp. 123-135.

Douglas R. Porter and Elizabeth B. Davison, “Evaluation of In-Lieu Fees and Offsite Construction as Incentives for Affordable Housing Production,” Cityscape, Vol. 11, No. 2, (2009), pp. 27-59.

Benjamin Schneider, “How to Make House Crisis,” Bloomberg Citylab, February 21, 2020. citylab.com.

Seymour I. Schwartz, David E. Hansen, and Richard Green, “The Effect of Growth Control on the Production of Moderate-Priced Housing,” Land Economics, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 110-114.

“Home values in Petaluma, CA,” realtor.com.

“Petaluma, California Population 2020 (Demographics, Maps, Graphs,” worldpopulationreview.com.

Featured

The Mystery of McKinney Livery Stable

David Yearsley River Heritage Center, Steamer Landing Park (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

In 2004, the McKinney Livery Stable was removed from the corner it had occupied for a century at First and D streets, to make way for a parking garage. Relocated to Steamer Landing Park, the false front building was painstakingly restored and reincarnated as the David Yearsley River Heritage Center, a memorial to a time in which the horse was Petaluma’s primary form of transportation.

Yet, a mystery remains. Why was it originally called the McKinney Livery Stable when it was built and operated by a man named Jack Grimes? Who exactly was McKinney?

Local historian Terry Park puts his money on a racehorse.

John Jarr, a German immigrant, who operated a local beer distribution company, atop a wagon of the John Wieland Brewery in San Francisco, outside McKinney Livery Stable, 1st & C streets, circa 1907 (photo Sonoma County Library courtesy of Lee Torliatt)

Horse transportation was already on the wane in 1904 when Grimes opened McKinney Livery. A new era of equine-free travel was dawning, beginning in the 1890s with the craze for the bicycle, a machine embraced by women as “the freedom machine,” as it meant they were no longer dependent upon a man hitching up a buggy to drive them around town.

A similar sense of liberation greeted the 1904 opening of the Petaluma & Santa Rosa Railway, an electric trolley providing service to Petaluma, Sebastopol and Santa Rosa, with numerous stops in between. The railway’s “windsplitter” cars offered farmers a convenient means of getting into town as well as an alternative to hauling their produce, milk, and eggs to market by horse and wagon.

Petaluma & Santa Rosa Railway passengers boarding a “windsplitter” car at the East Washington and Weller streets depot, 1907 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The new P&SRR also purchased the Petaluma Street Railway, a horse-drawn trolley first installed in 1889 that traversed the city’s cobblestone streets on rails from Sunnyslope Avenue down F Street to Sixth, then across Sixth and Liberty streets to Western Avenue and Kentucky Street before heading along Washington Street to the fairgrounds. The P&SRR’s plan was to convert the line to modern electric cars, but after seeing a sudden decline in trolley ridership, they instead shut it down and ripped out its tracks.

Petaluma Street Railway’s horse-drawn trolley on the rails on Kentucky Street as viewed from Western Avenue, 1895 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Declining usage of the horse-trolley coincided with the opening in 1903 of Petaluma’s first local auto dealership at Steiger’s Sportsman Emporium on Main Street, across from today’s Putnam Plaza. Steiger’s initial model was a single cylinder Oldsmobile Runabout with seven horsepower—“horsepower” being a new measure for comparing gas engines with the power of draft horses—for $650, or $18,000 in today’s currency.

In 1904, the same year Grimes opened the McKinney Livery Stable, Steiger’s launched Petaluma’s first “livery auto,” marking the beginning of the end for local horse and buggy taxis, or “hacks” as they were called.

1903 metal sign for the Oldsmobile Runabout (photo walmart.com)

McKinney Livery Stable joined five long-standing local liveries. The oldest, Murphy Stables, established in the 1850s as the Petaluma Livery Stable, was located on Main Street across from today’s Penry Park in what is now known as the Mahoney Building. Buggies were parked upstairs and the horses taken down a ramp to the stables on Water Street. Like the other liveries, Murphy’s was located near a hotel, in this instance the Washington Hotel, whose site is currently occupied by a Bank of America parking lot.

Kamp’s Livery & Feed Stable, Main Street across from Penry Plaza, circa 1900, which became Murphy Livery after Nicholas Kamp sold it to William Murphy in 1902. Three years later, Kamp purchased the former Fashion Livery at the corner of Kentucky and Washington streets, renaming it Kamp & Son. Currently occupied by Buffalo Billiards. (photo Sonoma County Library)

The other four liveries were all established in the 1870s and 1880s. They consisted of Kamp & Son on the southeast corner of Kentucky and Washington streets; the American Livery at 122 Kentucky Street, which backed up to the American Hotel on Main Street, where Putnam Plaza currently sits; the City Livery, on the northeast corner of Western Avenue and Keller Street across from the City Hotel (renamed the Continental Hotel in 1905) on Western Avenue; and the Centennial Livery on Main Street wedged between the Masonic Lodge and the Cosmopolitan Hotel, in the building now occupied by the Lan Mart.

In addition to providing parking for hotel guests, liveries offered saddle horses and horse rigs for hire by the day or week. Rented rigs were especially popular on Sundays, when people liked to dress up and take drives about town, particularly young men courting young ladies.

The other function liveries served was boarding horses, particularly racehorses and stallions rented out for breeding, both of which were Grimes’s primary purposes in opening the McKinney Livery Stable.

Sunday afternoon carriage ride along Petaluma’s Sixth Street, 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Grimes had been in the horse business since immigrating in the early 1880s from Ireland’s County Tipperary, to Lakeville, where he joined his aunt Margaret Mallen and her children on their farm in Lakeville, shortly after Mallen’s husband passed away. At the time, Lakeville was a vibrant center of the local Irish community, Petaluma’s first large group of immigrants.

It was also home to William Bihler, a German immigrant who bred cattle and horses on his 8,000-acre ranch. Bihler was the owner of Young England’s Glory, said to be the finest English Draft stallion in America. Along with Harrison Meacham, who bred Clydesdale draft horses on his 7,000-acre ranch northwest of Petaluma, and Theodore Skillman, California’s main importer and breeder of French Norman draft horses at his Magnolia Ranch north of town, Bihler helped to establish Petaluma’s reputation as the “Big Horse Market” of the Pacific Coast. Draft horses, in addition to working the farms, were also in high demand for pulling carriages and delivery wagons around the growing metropolis of San Francisco.

Illustration of Theodore Skillman’s imported French Norman draft horses (Petaluma Argus, December 20, 1884)

Petaluma was also becoming known in the 1880s for harness racing. In 1882, the Sonoma and Marin Agricultural Society, which had staged an annual fair in Petaluma since 1867, purchased 60 acres of the Payran ranch on the east side of town for a new Agricultural Park, having outgrown its 10-acre site at Fair Street, site of today’s Petaluma High School.

One of the problems with the old fairgrounds was the racetrack, which, in addition to being only a half-mile long, had a rock stratum beneath its surface that many horsemen considered unsafe, deterring racing entries, which served as the fair’s largest source of revenue. The society’s new fairgrounds provided a mile-long track on adobe soil, which, while not ideal for winter racing, made for one of the fastest summer tracks in the state, reviving local harness racing, which since the Civil War had evolved from impromptu heats on country roads, into professional events at county fairs.

Harness race at Petaluma’s Agricultural Park, circa 1885 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The races, in which a horse pulls a driver in a two-wheeled cart, were based on two different gaits, trotting and pacing. Trotters moved their legs forward in diagonal pairs, with right front and left hind legs striking the ground simultaneously, followed by left front and right hind legs. Pacers moved their legs laterally, with the right front and right hind legs moving together, then the left front and left hind legs. By the 1880s, harness races, which had run up to four miles, had been reduced to between half a mile, or four furlongs, and a mile and a half.

The shorter distances favored sprinters and younger horses, leading to changes in breeding practices that resulted in the Standardbred, a horse trained to either trot or pace at the 30 miles per hour required to meet the “standard” 2:30 minute mark around a one-mile track.

As farmers’ demand for draft horses begin dropping in the 1880s with the adoption of steam-powered tractors and threshing machines, many local horsemen shifted to breeding racehorses.

That was the market Grimes targeted when he opened his first livery in 1887, leasing with a partner a stable on East Washington Street across from the train depot. By the 1890s, his horses were winning races and awards, including first prize for his pacing stallion, Location, Jr., at the 1899 state fair.

Harness racing, however, was curtail in the mid-1890s, after California’s governor cut the state’s subsidies for county fairs as part of a tax-reduction initiative. The Sonoma and Marin County Agricultural Society managed to secure private funding for one last fair in 1895, followed by a five-day harness racing meet the following year, after which the Petaluma Savings Bank foreclosed on their fairgrounds. Horse racing in California subsequently shifted entirely to privately owned tracks, where wagering became paramount.

In November of 1902, Harry Stover, a well-known California racehorse owner, purchased Petaluma’s dormant 60-acre Agricultural Park, along with 50 adjacent acres, renaming it Kenilworth Park in honor of his prized thoroughbred racehorse.

Illustration of Harry Stover’s prized thoroughbred Kenilworth, 1901 (from the San Francisco Chronicle)

Born in Kansas and raised in Humboldt County, Stover began buying and racing horses while still a teenager working in a Eureka sawmill. In his youth he also excelled at cross-country racing, instilling in him a drive to win at any cost. It was a trait not always admired by his fellow horsemen at the race track. Accusations of bookmaking and under-the-table dealings led to periodic suspensions for Stover from the racing circuit, earning him a reputation “not of the sweetest order, and especially unsavory in California.”

Based in the Bay Area, Stover raced his thoroughbreds under the colors of one of Kentucky’s prominent breeders, Ketcheman Stables, while traveling the annual racing circuit that started in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the spring, then onto St. Louis, Chicago, and the Midwest in the summer, and finally New York and the East Coast in the fall.

In 1900, he purchased a thoroughbred named Kenilworth who quickly made him one of the top horsemen in the country. Tall and leggy with a swimming stride, the two-year-old colt was said to take to a muddy track like a duck to water, an advantage for rainy meets in the Midwest and East. In Kenilworth’s first year on the turf, he set a California record of nine straight wins, earning Stover more than $25,000 in purses, or $775,000 in today’s currency.

Harness race at Kenilworth Park, early 1900s (photo Sonoma County Library)

California horse racing faced a new challenge by that time from Progressives and evangelists like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union who were engaged in a moral campaign to stamp out vice. Bowing to their influence, in 1899 the city of San Francisco banned gambling, resulting in the closure of its popular Ingleside Race Track. A new track named Tanforan was quickly constructed in nearby San Bruno to circumvent the ban.

Stover saw a similar opportunity in establishing his race track at Kenilworth Park as an alternative to the late spring meets held in Los Angeles, which some horsemen complained were becoming light in the winning purses.

For financial backing he turned to Rudolph Spreckels, a scion of the Spreckels sugar family, who had recently purchased the Sobre Vista Ranch in Glen Ellen as a summer residence. Like many wealthy men of the day, Spreckels maintained a racing stable of thoroughbreds and standardbreds. He boarded them at Petaluma’s former Agriculture Park, which, after shutting down, had been leased to a group of local horsemen, including Grimes, for boarding and training purposes.

Kenilworth being restrained at Kenilworth Park track (photo Sonoma County Library)

Stover quickly set about reworking the racetrack for thoroughbred as well as harness racing, and remodeling the stables to accommodate hundreds of horses for boarding and training. He also created an arena for game chickens, cockfighting being one of his favorite side hobbies.

It wasn’t until 1906 that the state’s governing racing authority, the California Jockey Club, approved Stover’s application for a spring meet. In the meantime, he staged his own harness and thoroughbred races at the track, often featuring his prized stallion Kenilworth, now referred to in racing circles as the “Petaluma Flyer.”

Harness race at Kenilworth Park, 1907 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The renewal of local horse racing inspired Grimes to build his own livery as a training and breeding stable. Local historian Terry Park believes the name, McKinney Livery, was a means of branding the stable for horse breeding, in that McKinney was the name of a legendary California stallion owned by Los Angeles Irishman Charles A. Durfee.

After entering race circuit in 1889 as a two-year-old colt, McKinney won 17 out of his 24 starts, setting a record of 2:11 in a historic mile-long harness race during his final campaign at the age of four.

Standardbred McKinney (photo Harness Racing Museum)

After his retirement from the track, the breeding demand for McKinney was so great that over his lifetime he sired more than 1,400 progeny, creating a bloodline in the making of the American Standardbred. By the early 1900s, McKinney had earned in race purses and stud fees more than $150,000, or $4.5 million in today’s currency.

In setting up his new stable, Grimes acquired two horses sired by McKinney, the more distinguished of which was McMyrtle, a prize-winning standardbred Grimes advertised as “the best bred horse in the county.” Of the horses entered in the harness race meet held at Kenilworth Park in 1907, McMyrtle was among two dozen pacers and trotters who were sired by McKinney.

John Grimes’ prized standardbred stallion McMyrtle (photo Breeder & Sportsman)

The moral crusade to shut down racetracks however was taking its toll on horse racing. In 1904, Petaluma’s mayor, William H. Veale, bowing to the demands of the Good Government League, issued an order to close all gambling within the city limits. As the race track at Kenilworth sat on the eastern boundary line, the boxes for the bookies were simply moved to the east side of the track just over the city limits.

Race tracks in other parts of the country were not so fortunate. Of the 314 tracks operating across the United States in 1897, only 25 remained by 1908, after New York became the first state to officially ban gambling. The California legislature followed suit in February of 1909 with the Walker Otis Anti-Racetrack Gambling Bill, making it impossible for bookmakers to ply their trade, and resulting in the closing of race tracks around the state.

As other states adopted bans on gambling, the Aqua Caliente track in Tijuana, Mexico, just across the California border, became the new betting mecca for horse racing.

Aqua Caliente Race Track, Tijuana, Mexico, circa 1910s (photo Hippostcard.com)

Stover, who had participated earlier in an ill-fated scheme to establish winter racing meets in Mexico City, wasn’t able take advantage of the new Mexican racing boom however. Four months after California passed its gambling bill, he died while attending a race at a track he owned in Salt Lake City. Stover was 45. The cause of death was tuberculosis, which he’d suffered from for some time. He placed his last bet on one of his thoroughbreds, Native Son, who won the first race of the day.

Stover left Kenilworth Park, which he had expanded to 250 acres with more than 100 mares and stallions, making it one of the largest breeding farms in California, to his widow Hattie. In 1911, she sold 65 acres of the property to the city of Petaluma, who converted it into a municipal park for baseball games, gambling-free horse racing, rodeos, and a public campground.

In 1914, Hattie Stover parted with her husband’s favorite horse, Kenilworth, selling him to the John and Louie Bugeia, who continued to show him in expositions and breed him on their horse ranch at Black Point in Marin County.

Auto taxi fleet outside the Continental Hotel on Western Avenue at Kentucky Street, across the street from the City Livery (current site of Chase Bank), 1915 (photo Petaluma Historic Library & Museum)

The Centennial and American Livery stables closed in 1911, victims of the automobile’s increasing popularity. Two years later, Grimes, a lifelong bachelor, decided to take an extended trip back to Ireland. He retained the livery but auctioned off his stock, including his prized standardbred McMyrtle and a draft horse named Duke, which he claimed to be the only remaining Norman stud in Sonoma County.

When Grimes returned to town in 1914, he rebuilt his breeding stock and added a second barn to his livery at First and D streets. A few years later, shortly after America entered World War I, the three remaining liveries in town closed down, leaving Grime’s McKinney Livery the last stable standing.

Four men outside McKinney Livery Stable, circa 1910s (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1920, Grimes was thrown from a hay wagon and seriously injured. Unable to maintain the livery, he auctioned off his stock of more than 100 horses and sold his two barns to grain merchant George P. McNear, who leased them to the Sonoma Express Company. Two years later, Grimes died at the age of 64.

The legendary Kenilworth lived until 1933, just short of his 35th birthday, having won 94 races during his seven-year career on the racing turf. That same year, with the economy crippled by the Great Depression, California voters passed a referendum legalizing pari-mutuel betting at race tracks, which allotted a fixed percentage of the money wagered to racing purses, track operating costs, and state and local taxes, before being divided up among winning betters.

Horse races returned to county fairs, although not at Kenilworth Park, where the Sonoma-Marin District Fair, which began restaging annual fairs at the park in 1936, converted the track to auto racing.

After Grimes’ death, the McKinney Livery Stable was utilized for many purposes over the next century—including as a warehouse, a hide tanning factory, a poultry dealer, a pinochle parlor, an auto and tractor repair shop—until 2004, when thanks to the initiative of Katherine J. Rinehart and other local building preservationists, it was moved to its new home in Steamer Landing Park and rechristened.

The David Yearsley River Heritage Center, Steamer Landing Park (photo courtesy of Dwight Sugioka)

*****

Special thanks to historians Terry Park and Katherine Rinehart for their help.

SOURCES:

Newspapers

Buffalo Review: “Sporting Events of the Day,” October 2, 1900; “Kenilworth Demonstrates His High Class,” October 9, 1900.

Los Angeles Evening Express: “Petaluma Flyer Comes,” September 30, 1903.

Nashville Tennessean, “Live Sporting Notes,” January 17, 1894.

Oakland Tribune: “The Premiums,” September 3, 1890.

Petaluma Argus: “The County Fair,” September 19, 1867; “Norman Stallion Duke de Chartes,” May 25, 1877; “Draft Horses,” August 26, 1881; “Draft Horses,” November 25, 1881; “Agricultural Park,” December 23, 1881; “What Others Think,” January 6, 1882; “Selections,” September 21, 1899; “Agricultural Park is Sold,” November 25, 1902; “Two New Automobiles for Petaluma People,” October 31, 1903; “Bought the Old Street Railway,” November 11, 1903; “Is Building a Big Barn,” November 2, 1904; “Steiger’s New Building a Big Improvement,” July 27, 1905; “Finished Work of Removing the Rails,” July 2, 1906; “Opening of the Races,” August 23, 1907; “Master of Kenilworth is Dead,” June 3, 1909; “Mrs. Stover Presents Cup,” August 13, 1909; “More About the Fine Races,” July 21, 1914; “Mrs. H. Stover Will Dispose of Kenilworth,” August 30, 1914; “Grimes Auction was Underway,” December 6, 1919; “Firemen Stop Serious Fire in City’s Largest Stable Sunday,” December 8, 1919; “Purchased the Grimes Property,” July 12, 1920; “Death Calls Jack Grimes,” October 9, 1922; “W.H. Dado Buys the Jos. Steiger Sporting Goods Store on Tuesday,” December 10, 1924.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Hotel Will Be Called the Continental,” June 9, 1905; “Petaluma Once Had a Street Railway,” May 9, 1941; “Kenilworth, Famous Stallion Dies at Novato,” February 8, 1933; John Anderson, “Early Petaluma Had Horse Drawn Street Cars, Many Livery Stables,” August 5, 1955; “Memories of Petaluma in the early 1900s,” April 24, 1982; “Petaluma’s Hidden Gems,” May 10, 2012.

Petaluma Courier: “East Petaluma,” August 17, 1887; “Petaluma Street Railway,” October 3, 1889; “No Appropriations,” March 28, 1895; “For Our Fair,” April 23, 1895; “A Slight Mistake,” July 29, 1896; “Donahue Dots,” July 22, 1896; “Agricultural Park,” March 9, 1897; “Sobre Vista Purchased,” April 2, 1897; “Street Cars No More,” October 3, 1898; “Local Brevities,” March 29, 1899; Ad for Grimes’ stallion breeding, May 20, 1899; Notice, March 14, 1900; “Spreckels’ Horses Arrive,” April 19, 1902; “Working out at the Track,” November 25, 1902; “Local Brevities,” December 2, 1902; “Jack Grimes’ New Menagerie in East Petaluma Grows,” April 7, 1903; “Transfers of Sonoma County Real Estate,” October 24, 1904; “Mrs. Stover Presents Cup,” August 13, 1909; Ad for Myrtle, April 30, 1910; “Blooded Stock is Sold at Auction,” August 3, 1913; “Mrs. H. Stover Will Dispose of Kenilworth,” August 30, 1914; “Springtime Won Race,” October 27, 1914; “Will Erect a Large Barn,” April 7, 1915; “Jack Grimes Was Severely Injured,” December 2, 1919; “Mrs. M. Mallen Succumbs in San Francisco,” March 6, 1920.

San Francisco Call: “Kenilworth Makes a Great Record,” April 14, 1901; “Last Day of the Running Races,” May 4, 1890; “Kenilworth Park Meeting,” January 24, 1906; “Kinney Lou and Driver Are the Features,” October 11, 1908; “Noted Turfman Passes Under Final Wire,” June 4, 1909.

San Francisco Chronicle: “Gossip of the Turf,” April 6, 1901; “Harry Stover and his Stable Suspended,” May 1, 1902; “Trotters Bring $3,155 at the Petaluma Sale,” August 5, 1913.

Santa Rosa Republican: “Order Made to Stop Gaming,” May 24, 1904; “One Stake is Filled,” February 17, 1908; “News Items from Republican of Twenty Years Ago,” August 3, 1933.

Books, Journals, Magazines, Websites

“The Horse In Sport,” The International Museum of The Horse. http://www.imh.org/imh/his/harness

Paul Roberts, Isabelle Taylor, Laurence Weatherly, “Looking Back: The Lost Tracks of the San Francisco Bay Area,” Thoroughbred Racing Commentary, thoroughbredracing.com.

W. Robertson, The History of Thoroughbred Racing in America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964).

Charlene Wear Simmons, “Gambling in the Golden State 1998 Forward,” California Research Bureau, California State Library, 1998, p. 99. https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/gambling/GS98.pdf

Peter Willet, The Thoroughbred (NY: G.P. Putnam Sons, 1970).

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The Suffragist’s Sex-Crazed Kid Sister

Suffrage and Prohibition: A Tale of Unintended Consequences

Flappers out and about in New York City, 1920s (photo Getty Images)

In June of 1932, Dr. Harry Gossage, Petaluma’s former mayor, signed a resolution along with 41 other Sonoma County physicians calling for the decriminalization of wine and beer. It had been 12 years since Prohibition became the law of the land. With it came many unintended consequences, the most surprising of which was permitting women, previously banned from imbibing in public, to join the party in speakeasies and drink to their hearts’ content.

That taste of personal liberation, along with Margaret Sanger’s recent launch of the Birth Control League and ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the vote, inspired a generation of young women to energetically push against the barriers of economic, political, and sexual freedom. Breaking one law—in this case, the Volstead Act that enforced Prohibition—gave them an unspoken license to break other social mores of their parents’ Victorian generation.

Petaluma’s Main Street, 1922 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Scorned by many at the time as outrageous, immoral, and even downright dangerous—the “sex-crazed kid sister of the suffragist”— they tossed off their corsets, bobbed their hair, shortened their skirts, and, bucking all conventions of acceptable female behavior, became “flappers,” the first generation of truly independent American women, imbibing cocktails and dancing to jazz tunes in speakeasies with an abandon never before seen.

Thanks to the unexpected liberating convergence of suffrage and Prohibition, they were able to step down from the confining Victorian pedestal of moral purity, and enter a new realm of permissibility.

Two women on ferry to San Francisco, 1920s (photo Sonoma County Library)

The 1932 resolution signed by Dr. Gossage and others came during a presidential election year, as the country was entering its third year of the Great Depression. One of the wedge issues that year was Prohibition. Republican president Herbert Hoover, who had designated Prohibition the country’s “noble experiment,” supported its continuance.

His challenger, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose platform called for the government taking a major role in addressing the Depression, favored its repeal, looking to restore to the federal treasury billions of dollars in lost tax revenues alcohol sales had generated prior to Prohibition, money now lining the pockets of bootleggers.

But taxes weren’t the only reason people called for Prohibition’s repeal.

The “drys,” or Prohibition advocates, decried alcohol as the root cause of all societal evils, including laziness, promiscuity, violence, crime, and poverty. Eliminate the drink, they claimed, and Americans will be happier, healthier, and more prosperous.

Pro-Temperance Cartoon from the 1900s (photo Fotosearch/Getty Images)

While acknowledging that giving up booze wouldn’t be easy for many, they contended that after some initial resistance, people would reconcile themselves to a world without alcohol, and quickly come to value its moral impact on life. They also predicted that once drinkers with entrenched habits died off, a new generation of young people would have grown up not even knowing what liquor was.

Sadly, they misjudged American youth, of whom, Mark Twain sagely noted, “it is the prohibition that makes anything precious.” That went for much of the rest of the country as well.

Speakeasy in New York City, 1932 (photo Getty Images)

People like Gossage who signed the resolution calling for legalization of beer and wine saw it as a means of addressing Prohibition’s adverse consequences. That included restoring respect for the law, reducing the health risks of unregulated alcohol, and providing a “great moral benefit to the nation.”

Ironically, morality was supposedly what had brought Prohibition about in the first place.

The temperance movement began in the 1820s and ’30s as part of a religious American revival called the Second Great Awakening. It was led largely by men until the 1870s, when the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was created.

Petaluma women were at the forefront of the WCTU movement, forming California’s first chapter in 1879. They soon after hosted the first statewide convention, and in 1883, welcomed to town the organization’s dynamic national president, Frances E. Willard.

The Sonoma-Marin WCTU, 1910 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Under the slogan “do everything,” Willard energized a sisterhood of 150,000 women across the country by pursuing a range of social reforms in addition to temperance that she referred to as Christian Socialism.

They included children’s education, orphanages for street children, asylums for inebriate women, equal pay for equal work, and raising the age of sexual consent from 10 to 16. She also forged an alliance with the woman’s suffrage movement in hopes that women would one day be able to advance those social reforms at the ballot box, using “the ballot as a bayonet.”

Frances E. Willard, WCTU president 1879-1898 (photo Getty Images)

To appeal to her more timid conservative members, particularly those on the east coast, who believed that a woman’s place should remain in the home and not in the dirty realm of politics, Willard advocated for “home protection” against the tyranny of drinking men, and the belief that woman’s innate morality would cleanse the nation of its sins.

As a wholesome alternative for men looking to quench their thirst in the saloon, the WCTU installed public water fountains in parks and town squares across the country, including, in 1891, upon the street corner beneath the town clock in Petaluma. The town reportedly had 50 saloons at the time, or one for every 60 residents, a number of them within close proximity of the fountain.

Etched into the side of the Petaluma fountain the ladies of the local WCTU wrote, “Total abstinence is the way to handle the alcohol problem.”

WCTU fountain, Petaluma Boulevard & Western Avenue, Petaluma (photo Sonoma County Library)

Following Willard’s death in 1898, the national WCTU dropped its support of suffrage, refocusing its efforts strictly on home protection and maintaining the social purity of women.

In turn, the National American Woman Suffrage Association led by Susan B. Anthony and  Carrie Chapman Catt at the time, sought to distance themselves from the temperance movement, which they feared had created too many enemies for woman suffrage.

Petaluma’s WCTU chapter, however, retained its support of the suffrage movement, right up until 1911, when women won the right to vote in California.

Group of Bay Area women campaigning for state suffrage amendment in 1911 (photo Underwood Archives/Getty Images)

While women nearly doubled the number of voters in the state, state propositions in 1914 and again in 1916 calling for prohibition of liquor were soundly defeated, indicating that California women were not single-issue voters when it came to alcohol.

Despite Willard’s efforts, the temperance movement itself didn’t gain impactful national momentum until the 1890s, when a group of men formed the Anti-Saloon League, effectively pushing the women of the WCTU to the sidelines. Unlike Willard, the League focused on a single goal of getting rid of alcohol.

It would turn out to be the most effective political group in American history, setting a model for the way politics are still practiced today.

National officers of the Anti-Saloon League (photo Library of Congress)

Composed primarily of Methodists and Baptists, the Anti-Saloon League was well funded and highly organized, with a massive printing operation in Ohio that churned out 300 tons of propaganda each month, effectively turning alcohol into a political wedge issue that mobilized supporters across the country. Politicians of either party who opposed Prohibition were met with retribution at the polls from the League’s Christian voter base.

Led by Wayne Wheeler, the League primarily focused their attacks on the beer, wine, and liquor industries, in the belief that alcohol was a drug being pushed upon Americans, and once the pusher was eliminated, people would naturally stop drinking, as temperance, in their view, was the innate state of human beings.

Anti-Saloon League rally with “vote dry” signs (photo courtesy of John Binder Collection)

What they either failed or merely chose not to recognize, was that while excessive drinking was indeed a serious problem, especially among the working class, alcoholism was also symptomatic of deeper underlying conditions arising from the massive industrialization, urbanization, and immigration transforming the country, including overcrowding, harsh working conditions, crime, and poverty.

For all their talk of a moral movement to save people from alcohol by getting rid of the saloon, what the Anti-Saloon League and their temperance allies in the WCTU really worried about was who the saloon catered to: the immigrants flooding the country at the turn of the century.

Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, 1900s (photo courtesy of New York State Archives/Empire State Digital Network)

That was certainly true of the temperance movement in Petaluma. Having been settled in the 1850s and ’60s largely by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants from New England, the town experienced its first wave of immigrants in the 1860s with the arrival of the Irish.

They were followed in the 1880s by Swiss Italians from the Canton of Ticino, in the 1890s by Portuguese from the Azores, Germans from the Isle of Fohr, and Danes from Frisia on the North Sea, and finally, in the early 1900s, Eastern European and Russian Jews escaping the pogroms in their home countries.

Jewish Community Center opening August 1925 (photo courtesy of B’nai B’rith Jewish Center)

While these immigrants were eager to begin new lives in Petaluma, they were not willing to give up their native culture, which included their drinking habits. For most of them, drinking was not a moral vice but an integral part of their culture.

At the turn of the century, Petaluma’s saloons were largely affiliated with specific ethnic groups, which helped to keep their native traditions alive, providing spaces where they could converse in their native tongues, or read in their native language. They also served as headquarters for planning dances, festival, lectures, political rallies, and funerals.

Domenico Pometta’s Swiss Saloon, Main Street, Petaluma (photo courtesy of Margaret Pometta Proctor)

But rather than view these various cultures as part of the great American melting pot, the Anti-Saloon League and WCTU saw them as cauldrons of sin and debauchery. What they feared most was that the immigrants represented large numbers of new voters who were going to change the America they knew.

To stop that from happening, they embarked upon a campaign to “Americanize” the immigrants, beginning with shutting down the one of their primary community hubs, the saloon.

For assistance in that effort, they turned to the Ku Klux Klan, which had seen a revival in 1916 following D.W. Griffith’s sensational blockbuster film Birth of a Nation, originally called The Clansman. The Klan viewed their alliance with the Anti-Saloon League as being consistent with their broader mission of purifying the race of the nation.

Poster by Rollin Kirby of the Anti-Saloon League and KKK alliance, 1923 (photo Library of Congress)

They also formed an alliance with the U.S. government once Prohibition was imposed, serving as a citizen militia to the Federal Prohibition Bureau, which began deputizing volunteers, including members of the Klan, to expand its ranks in enforcing the new law.

Members of the Ku Klux Klan marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC., August 19, 1925 (photo Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

If local law enforcement could not or would not do their duty—largely because they were on the take or else simply looked aside—the Klan stepped in, violently raiding distilleries, speakeasies, and even private homes.

Not surprisingly, they used the laws prohibiting alcohol to wage war against the groups they identified as the enemies of “one hundred percent Americanism”—Catholics, Jews, and Blacks.

Petaluma Argus article on a local Ku Klux Klan rally, June 1, 1925 (Newspaper.com)

In Petaluma, the Klan made its presence well known during the mid-1920s, including staging a cross burning during a rally out near the Petaluma Adobe, a blaze so large it was visible from the downtown.

The Anti-Saloon League had originally launched its campaign to achieve national prohibition through a constitutional amendment in 1913, while celebrating its 20th anniversary at a convention held in Columbus, Ohio. That same year, the League threw their support behind ratification of the 16th Amendment to the constitution, which allowed Congress to begin collecting income taxes.

Up until that time, some 30 to 40 percent of the government’s income since the time of the Civil War had come from alcohol taxes. Passage of the 16th Amendment took away from the alcohol industry one of its major defenses against federal Prohibition, as it eliminated the government’s dependency on alcohol sales taxes.

“The Hun Rule Association,” a political cartoon used by the Anti-Saloon League to vilify the German brewing industry in the U.S. during the 1914-1917 (illustration public archives)

World War I helped the League’s cause as well. Since most beer brewers were of German decent, the Anti-Saloon League used it’s propaganda machine to equate immigrants, and therefore drinking, with being anti-American.

Six years later, in January of 1919, the Anti-Saloon League was finally able to claim victory for its Prohibition campaign when the 18th Amendment was ratified by the states.

Anti-Saloon League paper, The American Issue, with headline, “U.S. Is Voted Dry” (photo Anti-Saloon League Museum)

As drinking supplies dwindled during the first few years of Prohibition, the national level of alcohol consumption dropped 70 percent, raising speculation of a new alcohol-free economy.

Real estate developers and landlords looked forward to rising rents as seedy neighborhoods, formerly anchored by saloons, improved. Theater owners anticipated new crowds looking for ways to entertain themselves without alcohol. Manufacturers of chewing gum, grape juice, and soft drinks began ramping up production to meet anticipated demand.

Sonoma County’s most zealous detective, John Pemberton, right, with federal agents raiding a still (photo Sonoma County Library)

None of it came to pass. Although the overall American economy experienced a boom during the 1920s—including in Petaluma, where the local egg industry provided citizens with one of the highest incomes per capita in the country—Prohibition’s economic impacts were largely negative.

The amusement and entertainment industry saw a decline across the board. Restaurants failed, as they could no longer make a profit without serving beer and wine.

Mystic Movie Theater, 1927 (photo Sonoma Country Library)

Theater revenues declined, including at Petaluma’s Mystic Theater, which ended up selling out, along with the other theater in town, the Hill Opera House, to a large movie chain.

In addition, the closing of breweries, wineries, distilleries, and saloons eliminated thousands of jobs, including at George Griess’ U.S. Brewery on Upham Street near Bodega Avenue in Petaluma.

Petaluma U.S. Brewery, Upham Street near Bodega Avenue (photo Sonoma County Library)

But the Volstead Act, the federal law put into place in 1920 to enforce Prohibition, also contained loopholes and legal exceptions that law-abiding citizens quickly began to take advantage of.

For while the 18th Amendment banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol, it did not ban the possession nor consumption of it. That included alcohol used in medicine.

Prior to Prohibition, the American Medical Association had taken a principled stand against alcohol-based medicines, noting their lacked any proven scientific value. Once Prohibition was imposed however, the medical establishment did an about-face, identifying 27 separate conditions that responded well to alcohol-based medicines, including anxiety, influenza, diabetes, asthma, snake bite, and old age.

Prescription for one pint of medicinal whiskey, 1930 (photo Robert Day Collection, UCSF Library)

Two of the most popular prescriptions were a “hot claret wine gargle” for sore throats and hot toddies for those with colds.

In Petaluma, a plethora of drug stores—Clark, Gossage, Herold, James, Morris, O’Neill, Petaluma Drug, Tuttle—sprang up around town, some reportedly operated by bootleggers who found it easier to start a pharmacy than a speakeasy.

Legitimate drugstore chains also flourished. Walgreens, which had only 20 locations in 1919, grew to more than 600 locations by the early 1930s.

Petaluma drug stores in the 1920s: James Drug, 117 Kentucky Street; Herold Drug, corner of Kentucky and Washington; O’Neill Drug, 9 Main Street (photo Sonoma County Library)

As another exception to the Volstead Act, people were allowed to manufacture up to 200 gallons a year of either cider and wine—an equivalent of 4 gallons a week—for consumption exclusively in the home.

That was good news for Sonoma County grape growers, who, prior to Prohibition, were California’s largest wine producer. While a number of small wineries were forced to close, larger wineries switched to producing sacramental and medicinal wines, and to making chunks of dried grape concentrate called “wine bricks.”

Each brick made a gallon of grape juice, and some came with a “warning” that if left sitting out too long, the juice would ferment and turn into wine. In the first five years of Prohibition, grape acreage in California increased seven-fold, as wine consumption in the U.S. jumped from 70 million gallons to 150 million gallons a year.

Wine brick label (photo Italian Museum of Los Angeles)

Sonoma County was also America’s second-largest hops producer prior to Prohibition, and while a number of breweries had to close down, others transitioned to selling “near beer,” or legal brew that contained no more than the 0.5% of alcohol permitted by the law. Some brewers marketed it as a health drink they called “cereal beverage.”

Others breweries began producing malt syrup, an extract that could be easily made into beer by adding water and yeast and allowing time for fermentation.

While home stills and brewing kits were technically illegal, Petalumans could purchase the parts they need for making stills at places like the original Rex Hardware at Main and B streets across from Center Park.

Rex Hardware, 3 Main Street, 1924 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Despite all of the home brewing and winemaking, what distinguished drinking habits most during Prohibition was the switch from beer and wine to hard liquor as the drink of preference.

By the end of the 1920s, liquor constituted nearly two-thirds of the country’s total alcohol consumption. That was partly because spirits were compact and easier to conceal and transport, and also because of the popularity of the “cocktail.”

Mlle. Rhea of Washington, D.C., demonstrates the garter flask fad, and a woman uses a dummy book bearing the title ‘The Four Swallows’ as a hiding place for liquor, 1920s (photo public archives)

Many people who didn’t like the taste of beer, wine, or straight hard liquor, found cocktails irresistible, particularly women.

The irony was that cocktails, which prior to Prohibition had been virtually non-existent, became popular in speakeasies because they masked the foul taste of bathtub gin and moonshine whiskey.

Regardless, cocktail dinner parties at home soon became all the rage, and the social practice of the five o’clock “cocktail hour” became a tradition for many.

Women at a speakeasy (photo Culver Pictures)

Given the secretive nature of speakeasies, it’s impossible to determine how many operated in Petaluma during Prohibition, but from oral accounts there were many.

A number, like Volpi’s on Washington and Keller streets, had been grocery taverns prior to Prohibition. The owners simply sealed off the bar from the rest of the store and provided customers with a secret entrance.

Many former saloons simply switched to operating as soda fountains, with the added treat for certain customers of mixing a little alcohol in with their sodas. One of them was the Mercantile Grill on Main Street, site today of the Starbucks adjacent to Putnam Plaza, which was run during Prohibition by a group of bootleggers known as the Cree Gang. The gang also operated a rod and gun club on the river near Haystack Landing that served as a front for their speakeasy.

Mercantile Grill, 125 Main Street (photo Sonoma County Library)

Until the Coast Guard stepped up their enforcement efforts, Tomales Bay and the Sonoma coast, with their hidden coves and proximity to San Francisco, served as a smugglers’ paradise for transporting rye whiskey down from Canada.

Rumrunner boat unloading, 1920s (photo public archives)

The Petaluma area, with its rural dairy and chicken ranches, also became a major producer of “jackass brandy,” a bootlegged whiskey that reportedly “bit like a mule and kicked like a horse.”

To disguise their tracks to secret stills on ranches, bootleggers often wore shoes that simulated cow hooves.

The shoe of an alcohol smuggler arrested with wooden soles in the form of cattle hooves to camouflage his footsteps, circa 1924 (photo Library of Congress)

In terms of alcohol production, Prohibition served to shut down a multimillion dollar alcohol industry and put it in the hands of homebrewers and craft distilleries around the country. As a result of their combined efforts, by the mid-1920s national alcohol consumption had rebounded to 70 percent of pre-Prohibition levels.

Only now with that consumption came a major decline in respect for the law.

Gil Hall, a colorful attorney known as Petaluma’s “Perry Mason,” defended most of the local bootleggers apprehended by the law. While representing a bootlegger on trial, Hall asked to see the alleged bottle of liquor found on his client. After opening the bottle, Hall drank it dry, proclaiming it wasn’t whiskey at all. With the evidence gone, the case had to be dropped.

Petaluma attorney Gil Hall, 1924 (photo Sonoma County Library)

A similar case occurred with a jury in Los Angeles, who, asking to see an alleged bottle of moonshine while deliberating in the jury chambers, drained it, resulting in the release of the accused due to lack of evidence.

Apocryphal tales aside, the reality was that during Prohibition alcohol-related crimes overwhelmed both the jails and judicial system, forcing prosecutors to resort for the first time to using mass plea bargains as a means of clearing hundreds of backlogged cases.

The other major problem plaguing Prohibition was the health risk posed unregulated booze. As the black market for bathtub gin and moonshine became more lucrative, bootleggers turned to cheaper sources of alcohol, specifically methanol, or wood alcohol, included in industrial products like fuel and formaldehyde.

Stronger than ethanol, or drinking alcohol, wood alcohol was traditionally “denatured” to make it undrinkable by adding toxic or foul-tasting chemicals to it. Once bootleggers discovered they could hire chemists to re-purify or wash out the noxious chemicals, they began using wood alcohol in their moonshine to cut costs.

A federal chemist at work (photo Library of Congress)

In response, the government doubled the amount of poison additive, making it harder to re-purify. As a result, three drinks of booze made with tainted wood alcohol was capable of causing blindness—giving rise to the phrase “being blind drunk”—or even death. During Prohibition an estimated 10,000 Americans died from poison hooch, and thousands were either struck blind or suffered respiratory paralysis.

Seymour Lowman, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of Prohibition, stated that if a sober America meant people at the fringes of society “dying off from poison hooch, then a good job will have been done.”

Part of what motivated Gossage and physicians around the country to petition for legalizing beer and wine, was the risk that cheap tainted liquor posed to the young, whose consumption of alcohol, contrary to the hopes of the drys, had increased significantly, especially on college campuses, where Prohibition came to be viewed as something to rebel against.

Gertrude Lythgoe, a bootlegging celebrity known as “the Bahama Queen” for the wholesale alcohol operation she established in Nassau during Prohibition., 1920s (photo salljling.org)

The other unintended group of new drinkers Prohibition ushered in were women. Their new willingness to drink in public—or at least in the semipublic atmosphere of the speakeasy—owed much to the death of the saloon, whose masculine culture could no longer govern the norms of public drinking. Unlike saloons, speakeasies were coed.

Public drinking by women and college youth helped bring about what social scientists call a “normalization of drinking,” which rippled into other parts of society.

In cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, a new generation of mixed-gender and mixed-race pacesetters were rebelling in jazz-filled speakeasies with innovative new dance styles like the Charleston.

Flappers dancing while musicians perform during a Charleston dance contest, NYC, 1926 (photo Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Thanks to Hollywood movies, tabloid newspapers, and radio, the new Jazz Age reverberated across the country like a cultural earthquake, shaking the foundations of even small towns like Petaluma.

The common perception of women’s relationship to alcohol perpetuated by the WCTU was largely an adversarial one. In towns like Petaluma, Victorian codes of morality, piety, class structure, and social standing clashed with the image of independent women drinking in public, fostering a stereotype that only dancehall girls and women who sold themselves as prostitutes entered establishments that sold alcohol.

Four women line up along a wall and chug bottles of liquor in 1925 (photo Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis)

But women on the whole were never as teetotaling as the WCTU made them out to be. Many kept bottles of beer, wine, or alcohol with their kitchen supplies for use in cooking, to be served with a meal, or for a quick nip when the urge arose.

The popular cooking and homemaking books of the time, like Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, published in 1861, contained recipes for drinks like Sloe Gin Cocktail, Strawberry Fizz, and Silver Sour.

Other women relied on patent medicines or over-the-counter remedies, such as Lydia Pinkham’s Herb Medicine or Wine of Cardui, marketed as medical panaceas for curing an assortment of ailments. Most of them contained significant levels of alcohol—usually in the range of 20%—leading a number of women to an alcohol addiction.

Ad for Wine of Cardui and Lydia E. Pinkham’s Herb Medicine in Petaluma Argus, October 26, 1912 (Newspaper.com)

Women did in fact purchase alcohol from saloons, but those transactions usually took place at the back door, and the liquor purchased was consumed at home. Around the turn of the century, saloonkeepers looking to expand their market began creating what they called “wine rooms,” either at the back of their saloons or upstairs if they had a second floor, for a mixed clientele of “respectable” men and women.

Posted with a “Family Entrance” or “Ladies’ Entrance” separate from the saloon, the layouts often consisted of a hallway with several rooms, each equipped with a table and chairs, perhaps a sofa, and in some rooms enough space for dancing to a gramophone.

Arcade Saloon, far left, 15 Western Avenue, 1890s (photo Sonoma County Library)

Petaluma’s Arcade Saloon on Western Avenue, site today of the Petaluma Textile & Design store next door to Andresen’s Tavern, was one such place, with wine rooms most likely upstairs.

Working-class women in particular began to frequent wine rooms, sometimes exclusively with other women on a “girls night out.”

Women in a wine room, 1890s (photo Kim Vintage Stock/Getty Images)

While middle-class women who largely consigned strictly to homemaker roles, those from working-class backgrounds were often expected to take care of household duties while also working long shifts in often labor-intensive jobs. In Petaluma, those jobs were primarily at the new factories along the east side of the river, including the Carlson-Currier Silk Mill and the nearby Nolan-Earle Shoe Factory.

Carlson & Currier Silk Mill, Petaluma, 1890s (photo Sonoma County Library)
Nolan-Earle Shoe Factory, 1907 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Authorities eventually grew leery of wine rooms as they tended to foster carousing between men and women, often leading to trysts and violence, the latter usually initiated by married men who discovered their wives in a wine room with another man. Wine rooms in lower-end establishments were often little more than glorified prostitution “cribs” attached to saloons.

That placed wine rooms in the crosshairs of the WCTU’s crusade of social purity for women, leading many cities, including Petaluma, to close them down and initiate laws criminalizing women in spaces designated for drinking.

Couples in a wine room, early 1900s (photo Richard F. Selcer Collection)

In Colorado, one of the first states to grant women the vote in 1893, a Denver saloon owner decided to challenge the law, arguing that since women had been given right of suffrage they were “entitled to the same pursuit of happiness as their brothers,” including drinking in his saloon. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that states had to the right to impose restrictions on whom they sold alcohol sold to, including on the basis of gender and race.

A similar incident occurred in Petaluma in 1913, two years after California women won the vote. John Keller operated a saloon in the Mutual Relief Building at the corner of Western Avenue and Kentucky Street with a side entrance for retail liquor sales.

Mutual Relief Building,f Western Avenue and Kentucky Street, 1966 (photo Sonoma County Library)

One evening he sold a bottle of liquor to a woman who later was found passed out drunk on the grounds of Lincoln Elementary School at Fifth and B streets. Keller was fined the equivalent of $4,000 in today’s currency, and warned that a second charge of selling liquor to women would result in the loss of his liquor license.

Seven years later, the imposition of Prohibition inadvertently opened up new, uncharted territory. Saloons and liquor stores might have legally barred women, but illegal speakeasies had no such rules. They not only changed how women drank, they allowed them to move into spaces previously reserved exclusively for men.

Speakeasy in New York City, 1920s (photo by Margaret Bourke-White/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

For a generation ravaged by the carnage of the Great War and the terrifying influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919, the world had shifted. They no longer viewed life through the rational, moral, and orderly Victorian lens of their parents.

Instead, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” their attitudes shifted to one of irrationality, with humans viewed as neither innately moral nor logical in their behavior, “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.”

Norwegian pole vault champion, Charles Hoff, dances with Tempest Stevens in a Charleston contest, 1920s (photo Bettmann/Getty Images)

For young women especially, the forbidden pleasure of drinking in speakeasies or at private parties with friends represented a way of expressing their independence. Yet such newfound freedoms and redefined roles in a libertine era often came with new challenges. Female alcoholism, for one, became a growing problem.

Women weren’t just on the consumption end of Prohibition, they were involved in the craft production. While it’s not known how many women actually entered the bootlegging trade, of those documented, there were certain demographic patterns. Most were mothers or daughters trying to financially support their families. A majority were immigrants who felt justified in their actions since they had come from cultures that didn’t view the creation or consumption of alcohol as a moral issue.

Women working in the Gausti vineyard in Los Angeles, 1929. (photo Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library)

The great “noble experiment” of Prohibition was based on the theory that personal behavior follows structural change. By changing the law of the land—in this case banning alcohol—one naturally would change human behavior, eliminating the sin of drinking.

But women succeeded in flipping that theory on its head. Taking advantage of the underground culture and social chaos created by Prohibition, they used their personal behaviors to express new freedoms that resulted in structural changes to the long-held roles of women in society.

Dorothy Wentworth, right, is shown with a friend at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, Dec. 5, 1933 to enjoy their first legal cocktail party in many years (photo Associated Press)

And once Prohibition ended, they were no more willing to give up those new freedoms than they were to give up their cocktails.

By 1932, when Gossage and his fellow physicians got around to issuing their appeal for the legalization of beer and wine, it was widely recognized by everyone excerpt for perhaps the most zealous of the drys that, whatever the intentions of Prohibition, the cure was worse than the disease. For more than a decade, the law meant to foster temperance, order, and law-abiding citizens, had instead ushered in an era of intemperance, excess, and lawlessness.

In 1929, one woman decided to do something about it.

Pauline Morton Sabin on the cover of Time magazine , July 18, 1932

Pauline Morton Sabin was a wealthy, blue blood New York socialite. The first woman ever to serve on the Republican National Committee, she was also a temperance supporter, and a major fundraiser for Republican presidential campaigns during the 1920s.

Sabin however found the hypocrisy of Prohibition intolerable. She was especially repelled by Republican politicians who voted dry and then turned up at her dinner table expecting a drink. She also had a special aversion to the WCTU and the way its president, Ella Alexander Boole, claimed to speak for all American women. Sabin believed that Prohibition had failed and it was the responsibility of American women to do something about it.

In 1929, she formed the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform, also known as “The Crusaders.” Within a year the group had more than a million members, three times that of the WCTU.

Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform promotion (photo PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

Sabin and her organization began lobbying politicians, attending political conventions, and campaigning throughout the country to ratify the 21st Amendment repealing Prohibition.

Pauline Morton Sabin at the 1932 Democratic Convention with Al Smith, far left (photo Associated Press)


Her justification, like that of presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt, focused solely on economic recovery. After 12 years, Prohibition had cost the federal government $11 billion in lost tax revenue and more than $300 million in enforcement expenses. With the arrival of the Great Depression, Sabin argued that those costs were too large to bear any longer.

A giant barrel of beer, part of a demonstration against prohibition in America (Photo by Henry Guttmann/Getty Images)

The public largely agreed. In November of 1932, they elected Franklin Roosevelt president. A year later, on December 5th, 1933, a majority of states ratified the 21st Amendment, ending Prohibition. Speakeasies everywhere threw open their doors.

Front page of the Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 5, 1933 (Newspaper.com)

With Prohibition finally ended, the word “saloon” virtually disappeared from America’s vocabulary. New establishments that referred to themselves as “cocktail lounges” and “taverns,” and who welcomed both men and women, sprang up all over.

A speakeasy opens its doors to the public on December 5, 1933 (photo Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho)

In Petaluma, they included Andresen’s Tavern, located within steps of the town clock, below which sits the WCTU water fountain with its engraved message, “Total Abstinence is the Way to Handle the Alcohol Problem.”

Andresen’s Tavern, 19 Western Avenue (photo Petaluma Argus-Courier)

Only now, the water fountain would forever stand as a monument to the surprising unintended consequences of Prohibition.

*************************************************************

A version of this article was delivered as a talk sponsored the Petaluma Historical Library and Museum as part of their 2020 exhibit, Petaluma’s Participation in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, curated by Paula Freund and Katherine Rinehart.

SOURCES:

Books, Journals, , Magazines, Websites

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the film “Prohibition,” 2011, pbs.org. pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/

Jane Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana, IL: U Illinois Press, 1986).

Erin Blakemore, “How Prohibition Encouraged Women to Drink,” JSTORdaily.org.

Jack S. Blocker, Jr., “Did Prohibition Really Work? Alcohol Prohibition as a Public Health Innovation,” American Journal of Public Health, February 2006; 96(2): 233-243.

Kat Eschner, “Why the Ku Klux Klan Flourished Under Prohibition,” December 5, 2017, Smithsonianmag.com.

Nicholas Hines, “Prohibition’s Grape Bricks: How to Not Make Wine,” September 17, 2015. Grapecollective.com.

Michael Lerner, “Prohibition: Unintended Consequences,” 2011, pbs.org.

Sally J. Ling, “Gertrude Lythgoe – Fascinating Women of Prohibition,” Florida’s history Detective blog. Sallyjling.org.

Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (NY: Norton, 2015).

Mary Murphy, “Bootlegging Mothers and Drinking Daughters” American Quarterly, 1994, 46(2), 174-94.

Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (NY: Scribner, 2011).

Tanya Marie Sanchez, “The Feminine Side of Bootlegging,” Louisiana History, Autumn 2000, 41(2), 403-433.

Jim Vorel, “How Progressives, Racists, Xenophobes and Suffragists Teamed up to Give America Prohibition, Paste magazine, February 25, 2019. Pastemagazine.com.

Elaine Weiss, The Woman’s Hour (NY: Viking Press, 2018).

Newspapers

Fresno Morning Republican: “The Saloon’s Wine Room for Women,” July 31, 1902.

New York Times: Jennifer Harlan, “A Splashy Start to Prohibition, 100 Not-so-dry Januaries Ago,” January 3, 2020.

Petaluma Argus: “Local Saloon Man Pays Fine,” September 18, 1913; “Ku Klux Klan Held Outdoor Initiation Saturday,” June 1, 1925.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Hoover Sees No Hope for Wine and Beer,” September 8, 1931; “Medicos for Modification,” June 4, 1932; Chris Samson, “Petaluma Old-timers Share Stories of Smuggling, Stills, Raids and Speakeasies,” October 14, 2011.

Petaluma Courier: “Sold Liquor to Woman¬–Is Fined,” September 19, 1913.

Stockton Daily Evening Record: “Beast and the Jungle,” January 10, 1910.

Featured

Helen Putnam & the Supreme Court

The Woman Who Changed the Future of Petaluma

Helen Putnam, new east side suburban development, 1970 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

In 1970, the idea of Petaluma citizens participating in shaping a path forward for their city was unthinkable. Outside developers were firmly in the driver’s seat, and they used their muscle and pocketbooks to ensure that no one got in their way.

But Helen DuMont Putnam, the city’s first woman mayor, did just that, shutting down all new development in the fall of 1970 to spend a year engaging with citizens in hammering out a new planning policy, one that would curb the urban sprawl overtaking the city.

That planning process not only united a city that had become increasingly split between its east and west sides, but it demonstrated that nothing gives people a sense of belonging more than having a or the chance to shape the community in which they live.

The plan that emerged was revolutionary, leading to a legal battle with developers over the next three years that unfolded in a series of dramatic twists and turns before ending up at the U.S. Supreme Court. The court’s decision would not only have an impact on the future of Petaluma, but on cities facing urban sprawl across the country, making Helen Putnam a torchbearer of the urban slow-growth movement.

Helen Putnam in Walnut Park, 1967 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Surprisingly, it was not a path she ever envisioned for herself. Neither an activist nor a crusader, she was best known in political circles for bringing disparate people together in forging compromises. To most people outside her inner circles, she was the “nice lady with all the bracelets,” a reference to the 25 bracelets she wore on each arm her as her signature look.

But once Putnam committed to a course of action that she believed in, a willful and determined side of her personality kicked in, one best expressed by her favorite motto, “Full speed ahead.”

Stylish, charismatic, and strikingly tall, from the moment Helen DuMont arrived in Petaluma in 1931, she became known for her ability to infuse energy into every room she entered. Born in Bakersfield, raised in Alameda, she came to town at the age of 22, fresh out of UC Berkeley with a degree in education, to teach elementary school, and then junior high.

Putnam in Petaluma Spring Fashion Show, 1951 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

A classically trained pianist, during the 1930s Putnam played in a musical trio that performed at gatherings around town, including those of the Business and Professional Women’s Club, whose message to women at the time—that women needed to assume their share of responsibility for their communities by rendering public service—planted a seed in the mind of the young schoolteacher.

Putnam also began hosting local fashion shows, where she honed her skills as a mistress of ceremonies as well establishing a reputation as a fashion maven.

In 1937, she married Petaluma native Rutherford (Rud) Putnam, a service manager at a local auto dealer, and moved into the family home at B and Fair streets, whose address that became symbolic of another of her mottos: Be Fair. Four years later, she retired from teaching to devote her time to starting a family, giving birth to a daughter and son in short order. As a homemaker, Putnam prided herself on having a place for everything and everything in its place. That sense of order would carry over in her public service.

Putnam home, 900 B Street at Fair (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

An outgoing personality whose conversation crackled with energy, Putnam was naturally drawn to networking among community organizations, beginning with the Gamma Gamma Society, a sorority that gathered for bridge and other amusements. As in almost every organization she joined, she quickly rose through the ranks to become president of the local chapter.

In 1947, she was coaxed by women in her network to run for a seat on the school board. Outpolling the other candidates, she was only the second woman to ever be elected to the board, and among current members, the only one with teaching experience. Recognizing Putnam’s natural leadership ability, her fellow board members chose her to serve as president, a position she would hold for the next 12 years.

1947 Board of Education, l to r: Norman Neal, Hall Weston, Putnam, C.A. Stimson, Charles Bock.

The school system she presided over in the late 1940s was dramatically different than the one she had experienced as a young teacher. Immediately following World War II, California discovered a second gold rush in suburban housing.

In Petaluma, as in other towns on the outskirts of large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, an influx of discharged servicemen from all over the country were moving into town with their young families, creating a housing crisis. To help address the crisis, the federal government subsidized developers in building a cascade of suburban tract homes for the veterans, and also provided the veterans themselves with low-interest home loans requiring no down payment.

To ensure that new suburban communities in places like Petaluma remained largely white, the government required developers to insert clauses into the deeds of the houses they built prohibiting the sale, resale, or even rental to people of color.

Farmland east of downtown Petaluma, 1939 (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

Petaluma’s first suburban development, Madison Square, created by Goheen Construction of Mill Valley, broke ground in 1946 on the farmland east of town. Bounded by East Washington, Payran, and Vallejo streets, and extending north to the Petaluma River, it was the largest housing development the city had ever seen, ultimately comprising 240 homes.

A three-bedroom home in Madison Square sold for $7,000, or $92,000 in today’s currency, with a monthly mortgage of about $44, or about $600 in today’s currency. A similar, though smaller development also went up at that time on the west side near Petaluma High School, extending along Dana Street from Fair to Melvin streets.

Madison Square housing development, looking down Madison Street, early 1950s (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

On the front lines of the sudden flood of young families into Petaluma were the elementary schools. As school board president, Putnam was tasked with mounting a school bond campaign to replace three cramped and outdated elementary schools built in the early 1900s—Lincoln, Washington, and McKinley—that failed to meet new earthquake safety requirements set by California’s recently passed Field Act.

Lincoln, McKinley, and Washington elementary school, late 1940s (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

The bond passed, and in 1949, a new McKinley School, able to accommodate 200 students, opened on Ellis Street. A year later, it was already in double session. In just five years, from 1945 to 1950, Petaluma’s population grew from 8,000, where it had sat at since 1930, to 10,000 residents, a 20% increase.

In addition to raising capacity issues at McKinley, the two new elementary schools planned for the west side, McNear, which was already under construction, and Valley Vista, scheduled to open in 1954, were already in need of expansion, forcing Putnam to campaign for a second school bond as large as the first.

New McKinley Elementary School, Ellis Street, built 1949 (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

As president of the school board, Putnam was provided a seat on the city planning commission, which gave her a bird’s eye view of another post-war tsunami: the dramatic rise in car ownership that set off a massive expansion of state highways. In 1949, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors approved the location of a new freeway east of town, scheduled to open in 1957.

The news set off a land-buying spree of East Petaluma by developers. Two developers in particular, Blackwell Brothers of Santa Rosa and John Novak of Novato, both financed by Chicago and east coast backers, locked up farmland along both sides of the future freeway, and set about building tract homes.

Construction of U.S. 101 viewed from the new East Washington Street overpass looking north, 1955 (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

Novak mapped out the land north of East Washington Street along McDowell Road, including 25 acres slated for the Petaluma Plaza Shopping Center, to construct 295 houses in a development called Novak Meadow.

The Blackwell Brothers were planning 385 houses south of East Washington Street along McDowell Road, in a development called McDowell Village. They also intended to build the Washington Square Shopping Center cater-corner to Novak’s shopping enter.

East Washington Street & McDowell Road, 1952 (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

In 1952, five years before the new freeway opened, both developers began marketing their homes to commuters working in San Francisco, 45 minutes away by car. They were selling out. In exchange for requesting that the city annex their housing tracts, developers agreed to install sidewalks, sewers, street lighting, and fire hydrants, leaving the city on the hook for water, sewage, police, fire, and schools.

By 1954, the city had annexed another 1,800 acres for subdivisions on the east side, and also approved developments on the west side in the hilly neighborhoods of Sunnyslope, La Cresta, and Cherry Hill.

Housing construction on Hill Boulevard and Bassett Street above Petaluma High, 1955 (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

Petaluma’s school population, which stood at 1,600 students in 1950, was projected to double by 1960. That placed Putnam back out on the campaign trail for yet another school bond, matched this time with a long term loan from the state for a combined total $4.2 million, or $40 million in today’s currency.

On the drawing boards this time were building two new schools on the east side—McDowell Elementary and the original Kenilworth Junior High on East Washington Street—and a replacements of the high school on Fair Street, which, having been built in 1915, was at capacity and deemed unsafe for earthquakes.

Petaluma High School, Fair Street, 1915-1959 (photo from 1920s postcard)

During this period, Putnam was also busy raising her profile in the area, especially among women, by making frequent appearances at PTA meetings, giving talks on Petaluma’s early history, and hosting fashion shows throughout the North Bay. In 1949, she became host of a midday talk show on KSRO radio, “Shopper’s Guide with Helen Putnam.” Targeted at homemakers, the show featured local news, shopping suggestions, and homemaking tips and was so popular it ran for five years.

Lillian McIntosh (seated), Putnam, and Eddie Dolan preparing for TV show on education at McNear School, 1952 (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

Putnam also expanded her involvement in educational circles, joining the Sonoma County School Boards Association and rising though its ranks to become president in 1952. She followed a similar path with the California School Boards Association, becoming president in 1958.

By the late ’50s, Putnam was spending considerable time traveling around the state hobnobbing with various school boards and elected officials, including the governor, who appointed her a delegate to the 1955 White House Conference on Education hosted by the vice-president, Richard Nixon. While in Washington, D.C., she took the opportunity to visit the chambers of a former California governor she had worked with, Earl Warren, who had recently been appointed chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

1955 White House Education Conference, l-to-r, Richard Nixon, vice-president, Putnam, Gardiner Johnson, chief of the California delegation (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

But all the travel and hobnobbing increasingly pulled her away from Petaluma, where problems began to surface in the school district. In addition to the city’s increasing population, which jumped 40% from 1950 to 14,000 residents in 1960, the local tax assessment for schools was woefully insufficient, resulting in a group of underpaid, and very disgruntled, teachers.

In May of 1959, Putnam campaigned for increasing the tax assessment as well as for another large school bond to replace the junior high on Fair Street and build a second high school on the east side, which a decade later became Casa Grande High. The tax assessment passed, but the school bond did not, as voters made it clear they wanted to see a change on the school board. A month later, they got it.

Viewing model for new Kenilworth Junior High, 1955, l-to-r, Charles Bock, George Rohda, C.A. Stimson, Hall Weston, Norman Neal, Helen Putnam, Dwight Twist, and Fred Keeble (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

Running for her fourth term as president of the board, Putnam was trounced along with another incumbent up for reelection. Six months later, their elected replacements succeeded in passing a new school bond twice the size of what she had asked for.

After her defeat, Putnam returned to teaching elementary school, first at Marin School and then at Waugh School. She also tried her hand at politics, campaigning for the Democratic nomination to a state assembly seat, where she placed fifth in a field of five.

Putnam teaching first grade, Two Rock Union School, 1960s (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

In 1963, she was appointed principal and first grade teacher of Two Rock Union School west of town, a position she would hold for the next 15 years, most of them spent in public service as well. After wading back into politics as president of the local Democratic Club, in 1965 she decided to throw her hat in the ring as a candidate for mayor.

Mayors had traditionally been men drawn from the local business community. When her opponent pointed to her lack of business experience, Putnam demonstrated a graceful ability to reduce a political peer to a schoolboy, pointing out that “school business was big business.” In terms of budget and staff, it was in fact larger than most of the businesses in town.

Her mayoral campaign focused on three primary issues: generating new jobs by attracting clean, light industry to town; developing the Petaluma River into the business and recreational heart of the city, including rebranding Petaluma a river town as opposed to a chicken town, given that the local poultry business collapsed after World War II; and maintaining the city’s identity in the face of encroaching suburbia.

Putnam at the Petlauma Turning Basin, 1965 (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

“The type of growth I’m interested in,” Putnam said, “is growth that retains Petaluma’s rank as a first-class city, not as a bedroom.”

That played well with many voters, among whom the watchword in the mid-1960s was “Let’s not become another San Jose,” referring to the south bay city that had been swallowed up by urban sprawl.

Elected Petaluma’s first woman mayor—or “electric mayor” as a second grader dubbed her, mispronouncing the word “elected”—Putnam was often showcased in the national press with a handful of other trailblazing women mayors. An informal survey conducted at the time by the Associated Press, found that the typical woman mayor was energetic but calm, outspoken but objective, and never lost her cool in public.

Ladies Home Journal, February 1973, featuring Putnam (Petlauma History Room)

Many had backgrounds as teachers, which imbued them with talents of fierce dedication, idealism, organizational ability, and a human concern for the “people” side of problems. Typically the first woman elected mayor of their city, they made a point of asserting their femininity and maintaining a ladylike dignity. As one woman mayor said, the trick to holding the respect of your colleagues and citizens was to, “Think like a man and act like a lady.”

Yet, their very presence made them reformers in a political system where decisions were largely made by men in smoke-filled back rooms, who then came out to announce them to women.

El Sombrero Restaurant, 215 Petaluma Boulevard North, 1965

Two of the favorite “back rooms” in Petaluma at the time were the morning coffee klatch at the U.S. Bakery on Petaluma Boulevard, where Della Fattoria is located today, followed by a two-martini lunch at El Sombrero restaurant on Petaluma Boulevard beside Penry Park.

But Putnam had no time for back room meetings, as her most immediate challenge as mayor was saving the downtown, and she chose to do so in a very public manner.

Helen Putnam meeting President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966 (photo Petaluma Argus-Courier)

The new shopping centers on the east side were drawing foot traffic away from the downtown, throwing merchants into a financial tailspin. Commercial landlords, no longer able to command premium rents, were letting their buildings slowly deteriorate. East Washington Street, the sole, two-lane thoroughfare connecting the east and west sides of town, was chronically congested.

Wickersham Building, 170 Petaluma Boulevard North, 1973 (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

To alleviate the congestion and hopefully draw more people downtown, Putnam spearheaded an initiative in 1967 to widen Washington Street to four lanes, including installing a new four-lane bridge over the river. She then began championing a federally sponsored redesign of the downtown called the Core Area Plan.

The plan centered on converting Kentucky Street between Western Avenue and Washington Street into a closed-off mall, a common solution for federally funded, urban renewal programs around the country at the time. Parking for the mall would be provided by demolishing all the buildings along the east side of Keller Street between Washington Street and Western Avenue.

Sketch of proposed Kentucky Street Mall, 1968 (Petaluma Argus-Courier)

The plan also called for demolishing all of the buildings along the east side of Petaluma Boulevard from D Street, where the Theater District sits today, to Oak Street, and installing a six-lane thoroughfare running adjacent to the Petaluma River, with a pedestrian walkway between river and thoroughfare.

Sketch of proposed Esplanade, 1968 (Petaluma Argus-Courier)

In June of 1969, the Core Area Plan was submitted to voters in the form of a bond issue, and rejected. In that same election, Putnam was reelected to a second term as mayor by a very slim margin.

During her second term, Putnam changed her stance on downtown development from destruction to restoration, embracing the local Heritage Homes movement, which had been born in 1968 out of a beautification project inspired by Putnam, and then spirited following the demolition of the Healey Mansion at the corner of Washington and Keokuk streets in 1969 to make way for a gas station.

Healey Mansion, corner of Washington and Keokuk Streets, built 1909 and demolished 1969 (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

She also brought to town restoration developer Skip Sommer to begin reviving the historic downtown by converting the Petaluma Mill into specialty shops, as well as relocating to the Turning Basin two Victorian homes slated for demolition, one to make way for a Wendy’s restaurant and the other for a 7-11 convenience store.

The Great Petaluma Mill, Turning Basin (Sonoma Country Genealogy & History Library)

Meanwhile, development on the east side, which had continued apace at an average of 300 new homes a year during the ’60s, suddenly accelerated in 1970, when builders erected almost 600 homes, bringing the town’s population, which stood at 14,000 in 1960, to 27,000 by 1970.

With 900 additional homes having been approved for construction, another 5,000 residents were projected by the end of 1971, raising the town’s total population to 32,000. In the fall of 1970, the city council was presented with a slate of additional proposals, which, if approved, would increase the city’s population by the end 1972 to 37,000.

Why the sudden acceleration in development? The short answer was water.

Petaluma postcard, early 1970s (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Prior to 1960, Petaluma’s main water supply was drawn from wells and the headwaters of Adobe Creek on Lafferty Ranch atop Sonoma Mountain. In 1961, the city council agreed to build an underground aqueduct that diverted water to town from the Russian River via the newly constructed Coyote Dam on Lake Mendocino. Substantial water capacity was added in 1962 with the approval of the Warm Springs Dam west of Geyserville, although it was delayed by challenges from environmentalists and slow growth advocates from opening until 1982.

The Russian River aqueduct extended to Novato, but no further into Marin County. That served as a natural limit on suburban development in southern Marin, which in turn, raised the cost of land there, meaning that a homebuyer could get the same quality and same sized home in Petaluma for 20% less than they would have to pay in Marin. With new tract homes selling in Petaluma in 1970 for between $25,000 and $35,000, or $150,000 to $200,000 in today’s currency, that represented a significant savings.

Hopper Street Sewage Treatment plant, built 1937 (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

But while Petaluma had plenty of water thanks to the diversion of Russian River, it didn’t have adequate sewage treatment. The sewage plant, originally constructed in 1937, was expanded in 1965 to accommodate a maximum population of 32,000, a level the city wasn’t expected to hit until at least 1980, and certainly not in 1971. The soonest an expansion could be made to the plant was three years and half years away.

Putnam and the city council suddenly found themselves between a rock and a hard place. In January of 1971, they declared a moratorium on further land annexation and zoning changes. They also hired San Francisco consulting firm Williams and Mocine, to recommend revisions to the city’s 1962 General Plan. The consultants began by surveying residents. At the time, 76% of residents on the east side commuted to work outside of town, while 61% of residents on the west side worked in town.

Petaluma City Council, 1973. Seated l-to-r: Bill Perry, Mayor Helen Putnam, Jim Harberson; standing l-to-r, Bob Brunner, Jack Cavanagh, Bob Daly, Fred Mattei

They found that the majority wanted light industrial growth for jobs, open space of surrounding agricultural land, and a permanent greenbelt between Petaluma and towns to the north and south. Most importantly, they wanted controlled growth with a target population of no more than 40,000 people, considerably lower than the ultimate population of 77,000 envisioned in the city’s 1962 General Plan.

That became clear in June of 1971, when the mayor and the city council put a $2 million bond issue before voters, to be matched by federal funds, for expanding the sewage plant to accommodate a maximum population of 100,000. It was soundly defeated. As a stopgap measure, the city decided to fund a $3.8 million enhancement to the sewage plant from revenue bonds, with federal and state funds picking up 80% of the price tag. But it remained a temporary measure, as the enhanced plant fell short of meeting state standards.

Meanwhile, on the planning front, the city’s consultants convened a panel of six citizen committees to work on what came to be called the Environmental Design Plan. The draft plan was then subjected to a number of public hearings.

On the eve of the plan’s adoption, Putnam and the city council met with developers. At the meeting, Putnam pointed out there was a trend toward limiting growth in California communities, and the city’s proposed plan had the support of the state’s commission on city annexations, of which she was a member. It was in the best interests of all, she offered, that developers find a way which to work with the city on administering the plan, rather than opposing it.

Putnam at CALAFCO meeting, Sonoma County, 1974 (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

The developers were not receptive. They wanted a more flexible plan, one that didn’t limit the number of new houses built per year, as they believed it would lead to an inequity in how permits were allotted among builders, especially since the city was planning to limit individual developers to no more than 100 units per year, and exert more influence over design and construction quality.

Such restrictions, they argued, would not only drive up land costs, as water restrictions had previously done in Marin, but also construction costs, as the 100-unit cap per developer reduced cost efficiencies. Those inefficiencies would be compounded if developers were required to build on the west side of town, as the city was proposing, where hills made development more costly than building in the flats on the east side.

The bottom line for developers was that the city’s restrictions were going to out price lower income buyers, who represented a large part of their market. One developer jokingly warned Putnam that if the plan was adopted, builders might “haul off and give you a good suing.”

A week later, on March 28, 1972, the city council approved the Environmental Design Plan. The plan limited new development to 500 units per year for the next five years; 250 on the east side and 250 on the west side. It also included a greenbelt around the city.

Front page of the Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 28, 1972

Given the plan’s impact on unincorporated areas adjacent to the city, Putnam and the city council sought out the approval and support of the county board of supervisors. But the supervisors withheld their endorsement, voicing concerns the plan was unfair to rural landowners, in particular dairy ranchers—many of them struggling to stay afloat at the time—who were denied the right to sell their property to developers at market value.

The supervisors were also concerned about legal challenges to the plan, which everyone knew was coming.

On April 24, 1973, a coalition of Bay Area construction interests filed suit against the plan in federal court, seeking to have it declared illegal on the basis that it infringed upon people’s constitutional rights to live where they wanted. The backdrop for the legal challenge was lawsuits being waged across the country against cities using redlining as a means of maintaining racial segregation.

Two months later Putnam was reelected to her third term as mayor on a platform of “orderly progress and prosperity,” as opposed to the helter-skelter approach the city had been hostage to. Also on the ballot was a measure asking residents to approve the new growth limits. Largely advisory, it passed by a margin of 5-to-1.

Putnam with architect Dick Lieb (r) at opening of new Petlauma Library, 1976 (Sonoma County Genealogy & History Library)

In January of 1974, Judge Lloyd Burke of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco issued a verbal ruling striking down Petaluma’s growth plan. The following April, he went further in his written ruling, demanding that Petaluma maintain its city services to meet “market demand” and not use measures designed to “limit growth,” which he contended served to raise property values to the point that constructing low-cost housing was no longer economically feasible.

The city immediately requested a stay of the order while they appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Burke quickly denied their request. The city then appealed to the Ninth Circuit for a stay, which they also denied.

At this point, many would have thrown in the towel. But not Putnam. She carried on in her usual “full speed ahead” mode, asking the city’s outside legal counsel to make a last resort request for a stay order to Justice William O. Douglas on the U.S. Supreme Court, which he granted.

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, San Francisco

On Valentine’s Day, 1975, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard Petaluma’s case. Attorneys representing the city argued that Petaluma was under unsustainable growth pressure by market forces, growing at a rate of 5% a year, versus 1.7% for the rest of the Bay Area, and 1.1% for the state. They held that the city should not have to provide services dictated by the whims of the housing market; nor plan the city’s development based on what developers wanted; nor be forced to annex land.

On August 23, 1975, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the city was within its rights “to preserve its small town character, its open spaces, and low density of population, and to grow at an orderly and deliberate pace.”

Now it was the builders’ turn to appeal the ruling, which they did, petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case.

Up to that point, the city had spent $48,000, or roughly $250,000 in today’s currency, on legal fees. Of that amount, $11,000 had been covered by donations from other cities, in average donations of $250. The developers had spent $75,000, or the equivalent of $360,000 in today’s currency. Going to the Supreme Court was expected to cost each side another $20,000, or roughly $100,000 in today’s currency.

On February 23, 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, letting stand the ruling of the lower court.

Front page of the Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 23, 1976

Later that year, a new majority was elected to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. They soon followed Petaluma’s lead in approving a new general plan that called for concentrated growth in the cities, limited development in rural areas, preservation of agricultural lands, and greenbelts between urban areas.

The new plan was timely, as right after Petaluma adopted its growth limits in 1972, the development tsunami moved on to Rohnert Park to the north of town, where a standard building lot sold for $10,000 less than in Petaluma, and $20,000 less than in southern Marin.

As developers descended upon Rohnert Park, the city’s population, which stood at 7,200 in 1972, tripled within six years to 22,000. In 1978, the city resorted to implementing its own growth management plan of 650 units a year, placing a hold on land annexation.

Meanwhile, Petaluma had become the darling of the “slow growth movement,” with Putnam receiving invitations to speak around the state and across the county. The second wave of feminism was happening all around her, and as one of only handful of women mayors in the country, she was asked to speak before women’s organizations, including the inaugural meetings of the Sonoma County chapters of NOW and the National Women’s Political Caucus.

But Putnam never served as a spokesperson for the feminist movement, nor even made public references to it. Instead, she was something more important than a mouthpiece: she was a model.

Putnam speaking at League of California Cities convention in San Diego, 1976 (Sonoma County Genealogy and History Library)

In 1976, Putnam was elected the first woman president of the League of California Cities. Later, in 1982, the league created the Helen Putnam Award for Excellence in her honor that continues to this date, bestowed upon city governments that demonstrate innovative problem solving.

In 1978,Putnam successfully ran for a seat on the county board of supervisors, representing Petaluma, Penngrove, and Cotati. Sadly, becoming a supervisor required that Putnam step down as principal and first grade teacher of Two Rock Union School.

As only the second woman elected to the board, she served alongside Helen Rudee, the first woman elected two years before. Much of the board’s focus in Putnam’s first four years was devoted to implementing the new general plan which imposed controlled growth upon the county. She was reelected to a second four-year term in 1982.

Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, 1982. Seated l-to-r, Helen Rudee, Bob Adams, Helen Putnam; standing Nick Esposti, Ernie Carpenter

Two years later, Putnam entered the Petaluma hospital for cancer surgery. She unexpectedly died following the surgery of a blood clot at the age of 75.

A few months before, she had addressed a black-tie fundraiser in Petaluma for California Lt. Governor Leo McCarthy, sponsored by the Petaluma branch of the American Association of University Women.

“I’m proud,” she told the gathering, “very proud, that everything I’ve done in my adult life, no matter how it turned out, I’ve done right here in this town.”

It was, McCarthy later remarked, like witnessing a real-life character from Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town.”

Helen Putnam dancing in the aisles with Petaluma grocer Bob Mallot, 1955 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

*****

SOURCES

Newspapers 1930-1946

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Annual Dinner of Commerce Chamber,” March 13, 1934; “Elks Will Hold Memorial Service Sunday Night,” November 30, 1934; “B.P.W. Hold Spring Fashion Show,” February 27, 1937; “Petaluma’s Baby Service Club Receives Charter,” AC, May 21, 1937; “Miss Helen Du Mont is Bride at Oakland,” July 19, 1937; “Easter Bonnet Parade is Scheduled for Tonight at Woman’s Club,” March 9, 1939; “N. Thompson Again Heads School Board,” July 10, 1941; “$500,000 Housing Program Here,” April 2, 1946; “Style and Color Feature Fashions on Display at Show Given by Silver Spray Lodge,” April 6, 1946.

Newspapers 1947-1964

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “18 New Homes to Be Built In Petaluma,” January 11, 1947; “Alice Burmester Installed as New Gamma Gamma President by Helen Putnam,” March 13, 1947; “W.J. Minogue Holds Lead in Election,” June 17, 1947; “Helen Putnam Heads School Board,” July 2, 1947; “All Out Vote Urged in Special School Bond Election,” June 21, 1948; “Petaluma Gets Plan for New Freeway,” August 31, 1948; “Mrs. H. Putnam Represents School Boards at Trustees Convention at Long Beach,” October 16, 1948; “The Schools of Today,” April 26, 1949; “First of 1949 Fashion Series,” May 25, 1949; “Early Petaluma is Subject of Talk by Mrs. Helen Putnam,” October 21, 1949; Ad for “Shopper’s Guide with Helen Putnam,” December 12, 1949; “City Council,” December 20, 1949; “Helen Putnam in Demand as Fashion Show Commentator,” October 11, 1950; “Great Changes Are Expected Here Due to the Residence Area,” January 5, 1952; “Sonoma County School Trustees Association,” May 26, 1952; “Mrs. Putnam Quits City Planning Commission,” December 8, 1953; “Mrs. Putnam Reports NSBA Convention, Atlantic City,” March 9, 1954; “Board President Writes, A Look at Area’s Schools: with New Money, Without,” December 4, 1954; “Bond Issue, State Loan Both Carry,” December 8, 1954; “Shopping Center, More Homes Due,” January 27, 1955; “Novak Expands Plan for East Petaluma,” August 19, 1955; “Education Chief Returns; Opposes U.S. Education Aid,” December 6, 1955; “Another Big Subdivision Planned,” February 22, 1956; “Kenilworth School Dedication Sunday,” September 14, 1957; “Mrs. Putnam Speaks Against Tenure Plan,” April 16, 1959; “Immediate need is Solved; Later Need is Postponed,” May 21, 1959; “Voters Drop Two From School Board,” June 10, 1959; “High School District Can Now Play New Schools,” November 5, 1959.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “$150,000 Special Bond Issue for Schools is Called,” September 21, 1950; “Bay Area Population Wave Rolls Toward Lower Sonoma County,” October 21, 1956; “Hope of the Future Is in Our Schools,” October 21, 1956.

Newspapers 1965-2010

Long Beach Independent: “Mayors Predict More Women in Government,” July 25, 1977.

Los Angeles Times: “Petaluma Doing ‘Just Fine’ After 17 Years of Controls,” April, 11, 1988.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Helen Putnam, First Woman Ever to Seek Office of Mayor,” Argus-Courier, May 25, 1965; “Group Formed Here to Restore Older Homes,” February 8, 1968; “Probe City Sewer Future,” October 16, 1970; “Annexation Rejected by Council,” December 8, 1970; “Planning Department Pays Key Role in Area Future,” April 24, 1971; “Residents favor Industry, Open Space,” April 13, 1971; “Support the Sewer Bond,” June 1, 1971; “Bind Measure in Close Vote,” June 9, 1971; “Planners Ask that Citizens’ Committees be Established,” September 9, 1971; “Sewage Disposal Problems Council’s Latest Headache,” October 21, 1971; “Environmental Design Plan Report Tuesday,” November 17, 1971; “Sewer Improvement isn’t Answer,” January 12, 1972; “How to Control Growth?” April 11, 1972; “House Builders Meet with Council on 500,” March 23, 1972; “Design Plan Passes; Is Effective at Once,” March 28, 1972; “Petaluma Environmental Play Fails to Get OK,” January 25, 1973; “Housing Limit Challenged,” April 25, 1973; “Good Case for Housing Limit,” April 26, 1973; “Putnam Traces Deeds for City,” June 8, 1973; “Measure A,” June 11, 1973; “Putnam, Mattei, Brunner, Harberson Elected to Petaluma Council Positions,” June 13, 1973; “City Loses Growth Suit,” January 18, 1974; “City Growth Ordinance Outlawed,” April 29, 1974; “Judge Burke Denies Stay in Petaluma Growth Case,” May 25, 1974; “Stay Requested on Growth Judgment,” July 11, 1974; “Growth Ruling Stay Ordered by Douglas,” July 15, 1974; “Growth Plan Upheld,” August 13, 1975; “Growth Case Moves to High Court,” AC, December 31, 1975; “Growth Review Denied,” AC, February 23, 1976; “Mayor Putnam Voices Excitement for Future,” October 19, 1976; “Putnam Elected Supervisor,” November 8, 1978; “Madame Mayor” Begins New Career,” December 25, 1978; “Helen Putnam Dies,” July 3, 1984; Don Bennett, “A Look back at Petaluma’s First Shopping Center,” August 20, 2010.

San Antonio Express: “More Females Go Into Politics,” April 14, 1968; “The Maternal Mayors?” March 10, 1968.

San Francisco Examiner: “The Lady is a Mayor,” June 27, 1965.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Mrs. Putnam to Run for Mayor’s Post,” April 12, 1965; “County Supervisor Race: Growth is Key Issue to Putnam, Cavanagh,” October 3, 1978; “Putnam Elected Supervisor,” November 8, 1978.

Magazines, Books, Journals, Websites

California Planning & Development Report, “Petaluma Marks 30 Years Of Growth Control,” Apr 1, 2002. https://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-962

City of Petaluma: General Plan 2025 (May 2008). https://cityofpetaluma.org/general-plan/

Bernard J. Frieden, “The Exclusionary Effect of Growth Controls,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 465, Housing America (Jan., 1983), pp. 123-135.

Marisa Kendal, “For Whites Only: Shocking Language Found in Property Docs Throughout Bay Area,” Bay Area News Group, February 26, 2019. Bayareanewsgroup.com.

Ladies Home Journal: “The Mayor’s a Lady,” February, 1973.

Andrew Martin, Petaluma Memories Video Series, “Helen Putnam,” 2012, archive.org https://archive.org/details/cstr_vid_000248/cstr_vid_000248_04.mp4

“Helen Putnam, Papers and Correspondence, 1947 – 1984,” History Room, Petaluma Public Library.

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Money: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright Publishing, reprint edition), 2017.

Seymour I. Schwartz et al., “The Effect of Growth Control on the Production of Moderate-Priced Housing,” Land Economics, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 110-114.

Featured

The Rise of Women Voters

San Francisco women campaigning for passage of the 1911 amendment granting California women the right to vote (Underwood Archives/Getty Images)

As Election Day approaches, both political parties are jockeying for a constituency that may determine the outcome, especially in swing states—women voters. It was the same in 1912, the first year California women had the right to vote in a presidential election.

Then, as today, American politics were fractured, not only by polarization between the two major parties, but by divisions within them. The main election issue was that the economy had run amok with corporate monopolies protected by high tariffs. The cost of living was high, the gap between rich and poor was widening, jobs were being eliminated by new technologies, immigrants were streaming into the country, and Jim Crow was rampant.

The American Socialist Party, traditionally associated with organized labor, was gaining support from middle class voters by calling for reforms that returned power to the people, including enacting a minimum wage scale, banning child labor, adopting the ballot initiative, imposing federal management of the banking system, and federal inspections of workshops, factories, and food producers. As models of socialism, they pointed to public schools, highways, and the postal service.

Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs and vice-presidential candidated Emil Seidel, 1912

In Petaluma, the local Socialist party was led by two painting contractors, Lewis H. Hall and David Gutemute, and a shoe factory worker, William Boyd. In addition to working at the shoe factory, Boyd also operated a three-acre chicken ranch on Webster Street across from the Petaluma High football field. In 1911, after crushing two of his fingers in a feeding machine accident, Boyd quit the factory and launched a socialist newspaper called the Pacific Leader.

The Leader was printed by a fellow socialists, Anna Morrison Reed and her son Jack, whose print shop on Main and Martha streets beside Hill Plaza (today’s Penry Park) also printed Reed’s Sonoma County Independent newspaper and Northern Crown literary magazine. A well-known poet and journalist, Reed canvassed California in 1911 on behalf of the Equal Suffrage Association for the state’s amendment granting women the vote, which passed by a narrow margin of 50.7 percent.

The Anti-Suffrage Society (A.S.S.) satirized as behind the times in a suffrage postcard, c. 1909-1912 (Museum of London Collections)

Anti-suffragists claimed the amendment would have little impact on the 1912 election, as the majority of women were not interested in politics, then a dirty business of men in smoke-filled back rooms, and would vote as their husbands did. It was certainly no place for a lady, they contended, and definitely not a lady uneducated in political matters.

Boyd set out to help change that by hosting women speakers at the Petaluma Woman’s Club and the Socialist Hall to school women on the different parties and their platforms. He also traveled throughout Sonoma and Marin counties lecturing on the need for “humanitarian measures,” such as compassion for the poor, prohibition of child labor, equal pay and lower hours for women workers, “white slavery” or prostitution, and protection of the home against sickness, irregular employment, and old age through the adoption of a social insurance.

Recent passage of suffrage amendments in California and Washington state increased the number of states in which women could vote to six. That meant 1.3 million women of voting age were now eligible to participate in a national election that would ultimately draw 15 million voters. Initially, only the Socialists courted women, making suffrage part of their platform, and fielding a number of female candidates in state races, including governor of Washington. They were largely ignored by Republicans and Democrats, for whom a woman’s place remained in the home.

1912 political cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt trying to appeal to all constituencies (Karl K. Knecht, Evansville Courier, October 1912)

That changed once Theodore Roosevelt, after losing the Republican nomination to William Howard Taft, formed a third party called the Progressives. Looking to block the rising popularity of the Socialists, Roosevelt offered reforms designed to retool capitalism by restoring competition and minimizing exploitation of the working class, but at the same time drawing the line at fundamentally changing the economic power structure.

The Democrats, then the party of states’ rights and Jim Crow, adopted a similar platform after nominating reform-minded Woodrow Wilson. Neither party had any intention of letting socialism spread throughout America.

With his new Progressive Party, Roosevelt had a sudden change of heart regarding women. Embracing suffrage and adopting “social legislation” as the Progressives’ mantra, he appealed to women with many of the Socialists’ “humanitarian measures.”

Front page of the Woman’s Journal in 1912, depicting views of Taft, Wilson, and Roosevelt toward women voters (The Woman’s Journal, August 10, 1912)

In California cities like Petaluma, where Roosevelt clinched the nomination of both the Progressive and Republican parties, making Taft a non-presence in the state election, Boyd battled toe-to-toe with Roosevelt backers. The jostling resulted in drawing out more women voters, as it meant that for the first time in history, presidential candidates were treating women as important to victory.

In 1912, women nearly doubled the total number of registered Petaluma voters, making up 44 percent of the electorate. Election Day was marked by a torrential downpour. Local Socialists and Progressive party members organized fleets of automobiles to carry women voters to the polling stations, which themselves had been transformed thanks to having women appointed members of the elections board for the first time in the city. Men could be seen removing their hats as they entered polling places, and many left their cigars and cigarettes outside.

Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs speaking to a crowd (Fotosearch/Getty)

In Petaluma, a strong turnout of women voters is attributed to both Roosevelt’s close win over Wilson with 43 percent of the vote, and to Socialist candidate Eugene Debs capturing 14 percent, the largest percentage ever for a Socialist presidential candidate. Statewide, the results were much the same, with a Roosevelt win, and Debs drawing 12 percent of the vote.

Nationally however, Roosevelt’s Progressive Party resulted in both splitting the Republican Party and Wilson winning the election with only 42 percent of the vote.

Following the 1912 election, William Boyd and other local socialists continued to press their cause, running a Socialist ticket for local elections in 1913. But the 1912 election in many ways represented a high-water mark for the Socialist Party, in that it had managed to reform the two major parties. Not to mention that, going forward, political parties would no longer take the vote of women for granted.

***

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 29, 2020

SOURCES:

Books, Journals, Magazines, and Websites

Jo Freeman, We Will Be Heard: Women’s Struggles for Political Power in the United States (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008).

Jill Lepore, “Eugene V. Debs and he Endurance of Socialism,” The New Yorker, February 11, 2019.

Robert Tuttle, “The Appeal to Reason and the Failure of the Socialist Party in 1912,” Mid-American Review of Sociology, 1983, Vol. VIII, No. 1:51-81.

Index to Registration Affidavits of the Election Precincts of Sonoma County, California, General Election, November 5, 1912. Ancestory.com.

Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, 13th Census of the U.S. Taken in the Year 1910, Vol II, Population, California, Table IV (Gov’t Printing Office, 1913). Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.

Newspapers

Petaluma Argus: “Woodmen Convention,” Mary 19, 1910; “W.M. Boyd Has Accident,” May 23, 1911; W.G. Henry to Lecture (at Socialist Hall),” August 17, 1911; “To Start a New Paper Soon,” November 18, 1911; “Bessie Beatty’s, Splendid Effort,” January 17, 1912; “Miss Maley at the Hill,” March 7, 1912; “The Adjutant General Did Not Order Arrangements for Debate,” March 13, 1912; “Was Arrested on Charge of Criminal Libel on Saturday,” March 16, 1912; “Indictment Dismissed,” April 27, 1912; “Was Endorsed by Marin County Organizations,” June 17, 1912; “Pacific Leader Now the Name of Labor Journal,” July 12, 1912; “W.M. Boyd Leases the Reed Job Printing Office,” October 10, 1912; “Quiet Election and Full Voting Strength Will Not Be Polled,” November 5, 1912; “The Socialist Vote Here,” November 6, 1912.

Petaluma Courier: Boyd ad for pullets at Pearce Street farm, October 16, 1909; “Socialist Club Elects Officers”, January 10, 1910; “Elected Officers,” March 30, 1910; “W. Boyd Will Open Discussion,” November 3, 1911; “Will Give Series of Lectures,” July 20, 1912; “Local Delegates Elected,” August 17, 1912; “Attended Meeting at Santa Rosa,” August 25, 1912; “Socialist Candidate for President,” August 26, 1912; Boyd Speaks at San Anselmo Woman’s Club, August 28, 1912; “A Challenge,” October 28, 1912; “Roosevelt Bait for Suffragists,” October 29, 1912.

Featured

Petaluma’s Renaissance Man

Good and evil, smart but ignorant, compassionate yet unsympathetic, honorable as well as ignoble, a man of many professions and passions.

Edward S. Lippitt at his office in the Mutual Relief Building, Kentucky Street and Western Avenue, 1910 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

As farmers, merchants, stock breeders, and ministers descended upon the newly established city of Petaluma in the 1860s, the one thing missing from the growing metropolis was a Renaissance Man—a knowledgeable, educated polymath proficient in a range of different fields, who could help bring Petaluma’s various economic, civic, and religious threads together into a cohesive whole.

In 1863, such a man arrived: Edward Spaulding Lippitt. A theologian, lawyer, educator, newspaper editor, gardener, and politician, he would have a major influence on the town’s moral, educational, and political development, for better or worse, over the next half century.

Born in 1824 on a farm in Woodstock, Connecticut, Lippitt descended from English Puritans who settled Rhode Island in 1630. He exhibited at an early age both the ambition and restlessness that marked the many twists and turns of his adult life. At sixteen he left school to apprentice for two years with a Yale-educated carpenter before entering Yale himself. After one semester, he transferred to Wesleyan University, an all-male Methodist college in Connecticut, lured by a scholarship he received from a family friend.

Lippitt graduated with a Master of Arts degree in 1847. He initially took a job as a school principal in New Hampshire for a year before entering Harvard Law School. He remained at Harvard only one semester before heading to Ohio, where he took a summer job as a surveyor on a new rail line from Cincinnati to Columbus. At the end of the summer, he settled in Cincinnati, accepting a job teaching mathematics and science at Wesleyan Female College.

Wesleyan Female College, Cincinnati, founded 1843 (photo Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library)

Lippitt also married in 1848, but lost his wife to cholera less than a year after the wedding. In 1851, he married a second time to Sarah Lewis, daughter of a prominent physician in Monroe, Louisiana, and stepdaughter of H.H. Kavanaugh, a prominent bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, which had spilt from the main church over objections to church’s support of abolition. The couple would go on to have nine children, four of whom died in childhood.

In 1853, Lippitt left Wesleyan Female College to open his own school in Cincinnati, which he called Professor Lippitt’s Scientific and Classical Institute. It closed within a year. In 1854, after being ordained a deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church, he was appointed principal of the Boys Classical School in Cincinnati, as well as board secretary of the newly established Methodist Spring Mountain Seminary.

After immersing himself in an independent study of law books, he was admitted to the bar in Ohio, a common practice for many lawyers at the time. He followed up with an apprenticeship as a junior partner at the Cincinnati law firm of Probasco, Lippitt & Ward. In 1859, after the law firm’s senior partner died, he was hired by Cincinnati’s city solicitor, Rutherford B. Hayes, as assistant city solicitor. A strident reformer, Lippitt also became politically active in the abolitionist wing of Ohio’s newly established Republican Party.

Hayes, who would later be elected Ohio governor in 1868 and U.S. president in 1876, was voted out of office as city solicitor in the spring of 1861 just as the Civil War was starting, and soon after joined the Union Army. Lippitt chose to stay in Cincinnati, securing a new position with the post office.

Rutherford B. Hayes, Cincinnati City Solicitor, 1850s

In 1862, he was indicted for embezzlement after allegedly opening letters in the post and stealing money from them. Lippitt posted a $1,500 bail, but forfeited it, fleeing Cincinnati with his wife and children before the trial. He was reportedly seen making his way to Oregon, but instead, after a wagon train ride across the country, ended up in Sacramento, California, where, at the local Methodist Episcopal church, he ran into a minister he knew from college who offered him a job teaching mathematics at the University of the Pacific, a Methodist college in Santa Clara.

After a year in Santa Clara, Lippitt was hired in July 1863 as the second superintendent of the newly established public school system in Petaluma. Tax-funded since 1859, the school district consisted of four primary and grammar schools. The main campus was the recently constructed Brick School at the northeast corner of B and Fifth streets. Tasked in part with creating a high school curriculum for students in the growing city, one of the initial controversial issues Lippitt faced was educating Black students.

Petaluma Brick School, northeast corner of B and Sixth streets, built 1860 (photo Sonoma County Historical & Genealogy Library)

In 1864, a new California state law required that public school districts provide funding for “separate but equal” schools for children of color. Working with the school trustees and leaders of the local Black community, Reverend Peter Killingsworth of the local African Methodist Episcopal Church and George W. Miller, a barbershop owner, Lippitt hired a young Black teacher from San Francisco named Rachel Coursey, and rented out a house on Washington Street as a school for Black students.

A skilled and forceful orator, Lippitt also played a prominent role in Petaluma’s early religious community. Shortly after his arrival, he was appointed superintendent of the Sunday School program at the Methodist Episcopal Church, the city’s largest Protestant congregation, then located at the northwest corner of A and Fourth streets. He also served as the interim minister at the Congregational Church for ten months.

In 1864, in addition to his job as school superintendent, Lippitt was appointed to a two-year term as pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church. During his tenure, Rev. Lippitt oversaw the construction of a new church at the northwest corner of Keller Street and Western Avenue. After his term as pastor ended, he continued to serve as one of the congregation’s elders for decades, teaching Sunday school, giving occasional Sunday sermons, and officiating over weddings and funerals.

Petaluma Methodist Episcopal Church, northwest corner of Keller Street and Western Avenue, built 1867 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Lippitt also became politically active in the Radical Republican Party, including serving as chairman of the Sonoma County Republican Party. Nationally, the Radical Republicans, led by Christian reformers like Lippitt, had focused largely on abolishing slavery and establishing civil rights for former slaves. Following the Civil War they dominated Congress, setting the terms for Reconstruction of the South, as well as securing the presidential election of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868.

In March 1867, Lippitt announced plans to run for State Superintendent of Public Schools, challenging the Republican incumbent, John Swett. He lined up as backers two powerful state Republicans, George Gorham, who was running for governor that year, and U.S. Congressman Cornelius Cole, a former classmate from Wesleyan University who was running for the U.S. Senate.

At the annual conference of the Sonoma County teachers that summer, Lippitt, in his sometimes haughty manner, announced that, if elected state school superintendent, he would use his influence to adopt the Protestant Bible as a textbook in public schools. His announcement was met with an outcry from attendees. Some opposed using such a holy text in a secular setting. Others objected to the use of a Protestant Bible in schools attended by Catholic and Jewish students.

In response, Lippitt lashed out at Catholics at the conference, specifically Irish Catholics, then California’s largest immigrant body, alleging that statistics showed crime to be more rife in Catholic countries due, in his opinion, to their lack of access to “a free and open bible.” After being publicly rebuked by Sonoma County’s School Superintendent Rev. C.G. Ames, Lippitt lost the backing of Gorham and Cole in his campaign for the state race, and withdrew his bid.

Professor Lippitt’s Scientific and Classical Institute, D Street, built 1868 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

A month later, Lippitt resigned from his position as Petaluma Public School Superintendent and announced plans to build a new private high school in town. Professor Lippitt’s Scientific and Classical Institute he stated, would be Christian in nature, but not sectarian, and designed to prepare students for universities, the ministry, and other professions. Lippitt opened the school in the fall of 1867 in the temporary quarters of Brier’s Church on Third Street (now Petaluma Boulevard South) near C Street.

A year later, he trumpeted the grand opening of a handsome new Gothic Revival Style schoolhouse on D Street between Sixth and Seventh streets, then at the edge of town. Debt-financed, the school cost $7,000 ($126,000 in early 21st century currency). It extended from D to E streets, and sat only half a block from the Gothic Revival Style house Lippitt had recently built for his own family at the southwest corner of D and Sixth streets.

Lippitt home, southwest corner of Sixth & D streets, built 1860s; just before being demolished in 1966 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

In February of 1870, Lippitt was invited to deliver the keynote address at a gathering celebrating the ratification of the 15th Amendment that provided Black men with the right to vote. The event was hosted by Petaluma’s Black militia, the Colfax Guard, named for the abolitionist and U.S. vice-president Schuyler Colfax, and led by local Black leader Captain George W. Miller. A few months after the celebration, Miller led a delegation of Black residents to Lippitt’s home, where after serenading him in gratitude for his advocacy of civil rights, they presented him with two silver tablespoons featuring a medallion of Lady Liberty with his inscribed initials.

A month later, in June of 1870, Lippitt was forced to closed down his private high school due to under enrollment. That fall, the school was taken over by Petaluma’s former school principal Abigail Haskell and her teaching colleague Tracy Mott, who renamed it the Petaluma Home Institute. Their institute only lasted a year before it too closed its doors. In 1873, the Petaluma School District purchased the building in a foreclosure sale for $3,800 to use as its first public high school campus. As they set about remodeling it, they incurred bitter criticism from Lippitt for “turning a tolerably fine building into a mongrel” at an unnecessary cost to taxpayers.

The Petaluma Argus office, McCune Building, northeast corner of Main and Washington streets, 1877 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

With his bank account drained, Lippitt took a part time job as associate editor of the Petaluma Argus, a weekly Republican newspaper run by Henry L. Weston. He also opened up a legal practice on the side at the Argus building at Washington and Main streets. Soon after hiring Lippitt, Weston departed on a six-month sojourn to the East Coast with his family, leaving Lippitt in charge of the newspaper. He wasted no time employing the pages of the Argus to settle old scores with his Republican friends, including Cornelius Cole, who had been elected to the Senate in 1867, and George Gorham, who, after losing the governor’s race that year, took a job in Washington as secretary of the U.S. Senate.

Lippitt’s quarrel with the men extended back to the fall of 1869. Then chairman of the Sonoma County Republican Party, Lippitt lobbied Senator Cole to nominate a local candidate to what was then a federal appointment as attorney general of California. When word came that Cole was instead planning to nominate Santa Rosa attorney L.D. Latimer, Lippitt wrote to Cole, accusing Latimer of being someone who spent his earnings at the bar and the gambling table. After an initial public flurry, during which Lippitt’s charge was widely disputed, Latimer was appointed state attorney general and Lippitt’s “dirty trick” became the subject of an expose by the Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, a Republican newspaper.

Livid, Lippitt went after Cole and Gorham in his Argus editorials, accusing them of being “pot house politicians” who were misrepresenting the Republican Party in Washington. He also accused the Chronicle’s correspondent of slander. The correspondent in turn sued Lippitt and the Argus, asking for $5,000 ($100,000 in early 21st century currency) in damages to his reputation. When Weston returned from his East Coast journey, he promptly published an apology to the Chronicle’s correspondent and asked for Lippitt’s resignation from the newspaper, after which the lawsuit was dropped.

Henry L. Weston, editor and owner of the Petaluma Argus, 1869 to 1887 (photo Petlauma Argus-Courier)

After being fired from the Argus, Lippitt focused his attention on building a law practice specialized in deeds, mortgages, and leases. In 1873, he was appointed both the city’s notary public and its legal solicitor, two positions he held concurrently with his private practice until 1881.

To help restore his finances and expand his business network, he joined the boards of a number of local business enterprises, including the Mutual Relief Association, Petaluma’s largest insurance company; the Sonoma and Marin Railroad Company, a venture originally formed by a group of wealthy Petaluma capitalists that was sold to Peter Donahue, owner of the San Francisco and North Pacific Railway, who finished laying the tracks to San Rafael and Tiburon; and the Sonoma Marin District Agricultural Society, established in 1867 to promote advances in farming and sponsor the annual county fair, where Lippitt’s roses, fuchsias, and fruits were regular contest winners.

Fairgrounds of the Sonoma Marin Agricultural Society on Fair Street, 1873 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

In a demonstration of his broad talents, Lippitt was also commissioned by the city in 1876 to create a landscape design of trees and flowers for the newly established D Street Plaza, later renamed Walnut Park, which they never implemented, leaving the site a grazing lot for livestock for another two decades. A bibliophile with reportedly the largest private book collection in the area, he was a strong advocate of public libraries. In 1867, he helped create a library in the Odd Fellows Lodge that was open to the public for a membership fee.

After San Francisco passed an act in 1867 allowing the city to levy taxes for a public library, Lippitt submitted a proposed amendment to the state legislature that would extend the act to all incorporated California cities. After the amendment known as the Roger’s Act passed, a public library was established in Petaluma’s city hall, using books donated from the Odd Fellows library. Appointed a lifetime director and trustee of the library, Lippitt became a regular speaker in their annual lecture series, and in 1904 was given the honor of laying of the cornerstone of the new Carnegie Free Public Library at B and Fourth streets.

Petaluma Carnegie Library, 4th and B streets, built 1904 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

But it was in the political realm that he sought to make his biggest impact. Following the onset of a financial recession in 1873 and a number of financial scandals in the Grant administration, the Republican Party began to splinter, and in 1874 lost control of Congress to the Democrats. Despite his fallout with Senator Cole and Senate Secretary Gorham, Lippitt remained actively engaged in the Republican Party as a member of the State Central Committee, and ran in the 1875 Republican primary for country district attorney, but lost.

After his defeat, he underwent a political conversion to the Democratic Party, denouncing the Republicans as having “degenerated into a vast machine for the manufacture of all that is evil.” Joining the Democratic State Central Committee chaired by railroad baron Peter Donahue, he barnstormed the state for the Democrats during the 1876 presidential election, speaking in his usual fiery style as a former Republican insider who now regarded Reconstruction “the greatest crime of the nineteenth century.”

Renouncing his abolition beliefs, Lippitt called former slaves in the South the “lowest in scale of civilization and intelligence of any race on this continent . . . cruel and barbarous, whose respect for life is about that of the Chinese.” He accused northern carpetbaggers of subjecting the South to “the rule of the most ignorant races of servile men” by giving Blacks the vote while denying the same right to former Confederate officers, arguing that Blacks should not be given the vote until they were educated to execute it properly, a process he expected might take generations.

As the November presidential election of 1876 drew nearer, Lippitt signed on as the founding editor of the Petaluma Courier, a weekly Democratic newspaper launched by printer William F. Shattuck, whose father, Judge Frank W. Shattuck, was a prominent leader of the Sonoma County Democratic Party. Lippitt wasted no time discrediting Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, claiming to have inside knowledge as Hayes’ former “law partner” in Cincinnati, a claim that Republicans quickly exposed as a lie, noting that he had merely been an assistant solicitor.

Petaluma Courier office, Main Street across from Mary Street, c. 1880s (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

One of the most contentious and controversial presidential elections in American history, the 1876 election was marred by massive fraud, voter suppression, and illegalities on both sides, in the end leaving the deciding electoral votes of four states—Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon—unresolved. With Democrats controlling the House and Republicans the Senate, a congressional commission ended the impasse by crafting an informal deal known as the Compromise of 1877, which awarded the disputed four electoral votes to Hayes, making him president. In return, Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction, which allowed Democrats to impose a series of “Jim Crow” laws, legalizing discrimination and disenfranchising Black voters for the better part of a century.

While Lippitt praised the new Southern policy that President Hayes was forced to implement, he denounced the means by which Hayes came to power as “rotten, low, mean, and sneaking.” It was somewhat surprising then, that when President Hayes and his delegation came to Petaluma in 1880 to visit the agricultural fair, he attended a luncheon reception at Lippitt’s house.

With the end of Reconstruction, Lippitt used the Courier to launch a newspaper war with Henry Weston’s Argus over Petaluma’s “colored school.” The Argus had joined in a Republican campaign of questioning the cost efficiency of maintaining California’s segregated school policy for a relatively small number of Black students, as opposed to integrating those students into the white schools.

The campaign, spearheaded by a group of state Black leaders, including Petaluman George Miller, who convened annually as the Colored Convention, succeeded in convincing the school boards of other cities, including San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland, and Vallejo, to abolish their “colored schools.” Petaluma, in what the San Francisco Chronicle described as “spirit of caste still alive and dominant,” remained a prominent holdout.

The local newspaper war intensified when it was revealed that a Black barbershop owner named Henry Jones had asked the principal of the white Brick School, Martin E. Cooke Munday, to admit his son, complaining that the boy was receiving a substandard level of instruction at the “colored school.” Lippitt’s Courier reported that Munday, a young leader of the local Democratic Party, had found Jones’ son unqualified for entry to the all-white Brick School. Alternatively, the Argus reported that Munday had privately told Jones that “no colored child” would be admitted as long as he was principal of the school.

Lippitt and the Courier continued to support Petaluma’s “separate but equal” policy until the California legislature finally outlawed such policies in 1880. By that time, most of Petaluma’s Black population had left the city for safer Black communities in Vallejo and Oakland.

Lippitt remained editor of the Courier into the 1880s, employing it as a mouthpiece of the Sonoma Country Democratic Party. He also barnstormed the state on behalf of Democratic candidates, sometimes alongside former school principal Munday, who, after replacing Lippitt as city attorney in 1882, was elected to the state assembly in 1885 before making an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor.

Lippitt’s son Edward (center), with members of the Lippitt Temperance Club, 1903 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Temperance was another cause Lippitt promoted in the Courier. A member of the Petaluma Temperance Reform Club, he ran a weekly column in the paper called “The WCTU Corner.” Along with his son Edward L. Lippitt, a music teacher, he also formed the Lippitt Temperance Club to teach moral and social values to young men and women in town. Lippitt however drew the line at the WCTU’s early campaign for woman suffrage, writing in the Courier that women petitioning for the right to vote should be “lynched.”

Likewise, when local wheat farmers, many of them former Republican colleagues, formed cooperatives in the mid-1870s as a means of collectively negotiating with grain brokers and railroad monopolies, Lippitt denounced them in the Courier for embracing “communism and socialism.”

Mutual Relief Building, southwest corner of Kentucky Street and Western Avenue, built 1886; pictured in 1966 (photo Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library)

After relinquishing editorship of the Courier, Lippitt moved his law office in 1886 into the new Mutual Relief Building at the southwest corner of Kentucky Street and Western Avenue, and welcomed his second son Frank to join him in his practice, now called Lippitt and Lippitt. For the first five years, Frank operated a branch office for the firm in San Francisco. He was subsequently appointed to his father’s old position as Petaluma city attorney in 1896, while still continuing to work with his father in their private practice.

Frank Lippitt in the offices of Lippitt & Lippitt, Mutual Relief Building, 1910 (Photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

By the turn of the century, Lippitt was a fixture around town, bestowed with the title of Petaluma’s “Grand Old Man.” He reported regularly to his office until 1911, when a series of apoplexy attacks left him housebound. Just months before he died at the age of eighty-seven in 1912, he wrote that the most valuable advice he had received in life was from the father of a classmate at Harvard, who as a physician treated Lippitt for a cold in his freshman year.

“Young man,” the physician told him, “God made man with a beard, and placed him in a garden. I will give you a prescription, which if you follow, will ensure you a long life: Let your beard grow, and work in a garden.”

“I have shaved but once since,” Lippitt wrote, “and have always had a garden to work in and to take great delight in its flowers and fruits.”

***

SOURCES SUMMARY

Newspapers

Cadiz Sentinel: “Young and Pure—More of it,” April 2, 1862.

Cincinnati Daily Press: June 2, 1859; June 18, 1859.

Cincinnati Enquirer: Advertisement, September 3, 1853; “Professor Lippitt,” April 21, 1862.

Cloverdale Reveille: “In the Superior Court,” September 28, 1889.

Daily Ohio Statesman: “The Grand Jury,” April 26, 1862.

The Elevator: “Petaluma,” November 1, 1867; “Correspondence of the Elevator,” February 19, 1869.

The Highland Weekly News: “Political Meetings,” September 15, 1859.

Los Angeles Herald: “Prof. Lippitt Speaks,” October 25, 1888.

McArthur Democrat: “You have Tears to Shed,” August 3, 1855.

Petaluma Argus: “The School Festival (J.M. Littlefield superintendent), April 24, 1863; “District School,” July 1, 1863; “M.E. Sabbath School,” October 9, 1863; “Public School,” January 13, 1864; “Resigned,” July 18, 1867; Ad for “High School,” September 26, 1867; “Prof. Lippitt’s Scientific and Classical Institute,” February 6, 1868; “Commencement,” August 20, 1868; “Grand Union Meeting,” September 10, 1868; “Republican County Convention” July 8, 1869; “Appointed,” December 18, 1869; “An Unprovoked Slander,” January 1, 1870; “Flag Presentation,” January 1, 1870; “Celebration,” February 28, 1870; “We Bow,” April 16, 1870; “Going East,” May 23, 1870; “Personal,” October 8, 1870; “We Bow,” April 16, 1870; “Two Dead Ducks,” April 23, 1870; “Going East,” May 23, 1870; “The Levee,” June 4, 1870; “A Splendid Testimony,” June 25, 1870; “Personal,” October 8, 1870; Ad for “E.S. Lippitt, Attorney and Counselor at Law,” October 8, 1870; “Petaluma Home Institute,” December 17, 1870; Advertisement for E.S. Lippitt, Notary Public, February 10, 1873; “Farmers Club,” April 1, 1873; “City Attorney,” May 13, 1873; “The Fair,” October 11, 1873; “To Be or Not to Be,” June 26, 1874; “The Fair,” September 18, 1874; “Board of Directors,” November 20, 1874; “Temperance Convention,” July 9, 1875; “Our Plazas,” January 28, 1876; “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877; “Personalities,” August 31, 1877; “How is This?” August 24, 1877; “The Election,” April 11, 1878; “Sonoma and Marin Railroad,” July 5, 1878; “Temperance Lecture,” June 6, 1879; “Who Has Lied,” October 25, 1884; “The Public Schools,” November 7, 1893; “History of the Local Library,” June 10, 1904; “Eighty Candles Adorn His Birthday Cake,” September 14, 1904; “Petaluma’s Grand Old Man Passes Another Milestone,” September 17, 1909; “Reminiscences of a Long Life”: May 13, 1910, September 2, 1910, October 3, 1910, October 29, 1910, June 10, 1911, June 17, 1911.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Newspaper Completes Century,” August 17, 1955; “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” December 17, 1960; “Argus-Courier Celebrates 160 years of Chronicling Petaluma’s History,” September 24, 2015;

Petaluma Courier: “The Tilden Troopers,” November 9, 1876; “Petition for Woman Suffrage,” December 28, 1876; “The Result Secured,” December 28, 1876; “The Colored School,” April, 12, 1877; “Letter from a Citizen,” April 19, 1877; “The Election,” September 6, 1877; “President Hayes in Petaluma,” September 15, 1880; “Death of Bishop Kavanaugh,” March 19, 1884; Lippitt Attorney at Law advertisement, January 20, 1886; “A Lively Meeting,” October 19, 1896; “The L.T.C. held . . .” January 23, 1897; “Organized a New Chapter,” January 18, 1902; “The L.T.C.” January 29, 1903; “Prof. E.L. Lippitt and his L.T.C. . . .” August 14, 1907; “E.S. Lippitt Again Ill,” November 22, 1911; “E.S. Lippitt Better,” July 24, 1911; “Death of E.S. Lippitt,” May 3, 1912.

San Francisco Chronicle: “How Latimer’s Appointment Came,” December 24, 1869; “Another of His Public Statements Proved False,” November 6, 1873;

San Francisco Examiner: “In the Assembly,” January 28, 1884

Sonoma Democrat: “Teacher’s Institute,” June 1, 1867; “The Bible in the Public Schools,” June 8, 1867; “Schoolmasters Abroad,” June 8, 1867; “Sunday Laws,” August 24, 1867; “A Bigot,” October 2, 1867; April 23, 1870; “Two Dead Ducks,” April 30, 1870; “Law Suit,” August 27, 1870; “Law Suit Dismissed,” October 29, 1870; “Apology,” November 5, 1870; “E.S. Lippitt Resigns,” November 12, 1870; “Democratic Meeting,” August 18, 1877;

Books, Journals, Websites, Archival Records

“Alumni Record of Wesleyan University,” Middleton, Conn, 1883, p. 83-84.

Michael Les Benedict, “Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876-1877: A Reconsideration of Reunion and Reaction.” Journal of Southern History (1980): 489-524.

D. Michael Bottoms, An Aristocracy of Color: Race and Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850-1890 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), pp. 55–59.

Tom Gregory, “Biography of Edward S. Lippitt,” History of Sonoma County, California (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1911.

History of the Bench and Bar: Being Biographies of Many Remarkable Men . . ., edited by Oscar Tully Shuck (Commercial Printing House, 1901), p. 533-534.

Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995), p. 114.

E.S. Lippitt, Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), pp. 1, 41, 43.

J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (Allen, Bowen, & Co., 1880), p. 328. “Petaluma Township, Part 3 1880.”

Catherine Coffin Phillips, Cornelius Cole, California Pioneer (San Francisco, 1929)

Katherine Rinehart, Petaluma: A History in Architecture (Arcadia Publishing, 2005); Petaluma Argus: An

Willoughby Rodman, History of the Bench and Bar of Southern California (California, W.J. Porter, 1909) p. 208.

“Woman Suffrage Petition, 1870,” Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.
.

Featured

Petaluma’s Social Justice Farmer

Freeman Parker, 1822-1914 (photo by George Ross, courtesy of the Bancroft Library)

Freeman Parker set out in late 1877 to gather signatures around town for a constitutional amendment granting women the vote. It was perhaps an unusual undertaking for a farmer, but Parker was not the sort content with merely sowing grain and milking cows; he also enjoyed cultivating social justice reforms, including women’s rights, Black rights, monopoly busting, labor organizing, and agricultural co-operatives. His iconoclastic nature was most noticeably displayed in his adoption of phonetic spelling, where words are spelled by the way they sound.

“I yuz a variety ov speling,” Parker wrote, “to draw atenshun tou speling reform.”

Such idiosyncrasies aside, many of the reforms Parker championed—along with scurrilous charges of communism and socialism waged against him and his allies—remain relevant today, pointing to some of the perennial fault lines in American society, and the persistent role played by progressive activists like Parker.

Tall, handsome, and adventuresome, Freeman Parker sailed to California in 1849 to join his brother Wilder, who had gone west the year before for the gold rush. Twenty-eight years old, he left behind in his native Vermont his wife Cynthia and infant son Pitman. Arriving in San Francisco, he spent four months recovering from the yellow fever he contracted on the trip, before setting out for the Yuba River, where he found modest success in the mines. After a short time working at his brother’s hotel in San Francisco, and then farming in Marin County, he settled in 1853 on a 160-acre farm near Haystack Landing south of Petaluma, returning to Vermont to retrieve his wife and son.

Parker farm, 4555 Redwood Highway (Thos. H. Thompson, Atlas of Sonoma County, 1877)

During their first six years in Petaluma, the Parkers welcomed four more children to the family, and eventually expanded their farm to 430 acres of rolling hills and river marsh. Cultivating wheat and barley, they also maintained a herd of dairy cows for making butter and soft cheese to export down river to San Francisco. A lover of literature and philosophy, Parker schooled his children in as broad an education as possible. That included procuring a printing press and establishing a family newspaper, which the children took part in writing, as well as providing music lessons. An accomplished musician, he enjoyed playing fiddle at county dances and entertaining fellow passengers aboard ferry trips he took to San Francisco.

In addition to his farm duties, Parker devoted ample time to civic affairs. With his chinstrap beard—a popular fashion during the first half of the 19th century—he conveyed both the rugged manliness of the pioneer and the fresh-faced mien of the businessman, a perfect combination for Petaluma’s transition from river trading post to bustling city.

An abolitionist, Parker participated in the formation of the Sonoma County Republican Party in 1856, during a time of growing political polarization in the county. Although California was admitted as a free, non-slave state to the Union, white slave owners emigrating into the state were permitted to keep the slaves they brought with them as long as they eventually transported them back to the South.

Of the slaves that remained in California, some were able to earn their way to freedom working for their masters in the mines, and others were granted their freedom but remained servants to their former masters. A number of southern slave owners settled on the Santa Rosa Plain, and during the Civil War sided with the Confederacy. Petaluma, largely settled by New Englanders and Irish immigrants, sided with the Union, making the town a relatively safe community for Black residents.

South Barracks, Norwich Military Academy, Norwich, Vermont (photo The Norwich Times)

The other civic arena Parker engaged in was education. While growing up in Vermont, he attended college at the Norwich Military Institute. Considered today the birthplace of the ROTC, Norwich at the time was a controversial private academy. Founded by Alden Partridge, a former superintendent of West Point, it was intended to be an egalitarian alternative to West Point, which Partridge feared was creating an elite aristocracy within the military. He focused on educating citizen soldiers for state militias, instructing them not only in military science and engineering, but also in a traditional liberal arts curriculum.

Parker paid his way through Norwich by offering music lessons and teaching cadets phonetic spelling, a new form of shorthand developed by an Englishman named Isaac Pitman, of whom Parker became an early evangelist (even naming his first son Pitman).

Parker’s experience at Norwich made him a strong advocate of public education, which was viewed as critical for extending school access to the working class. In 1862, he was elected a trustee of Petaluma’s first publicly funded elementary school, the Brick School, at Sixth and B streets. Working closely with school principal Abigail Goodwin Haskell, Parker became a regular attendee of county and state teachers’ conventions, where he lectured extensively on the benefits of phonetic spelling. He was later elected trustee of the rural San Antonio School District south of town, where his farm was located.

Brick School, B and 5th streets, opened 1860 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

As Petaluma’s school district rapidly expanded to four schoolhouses, Parker and his two fellow trustees hired Rev. Edward S. Lippitt, a teacher, minister, and lawyer originally from Connecticut, to serve as the new school superintendent. Lippitt was also appointed minister of the local Methodist Episcopal Church and, for a short time, the interim minister of the Congregational Church, which Parker attended. Parker later converted to Universalism, a Christian theology whose main doctrine, that all human beings will universally be reconciled with God, was better suited to his disposition as a free thinker.

As both the Methodist Episcopal and Congregational churches were centers of the local abolitionist movement, Parker and Lippitt became allies in many of the reforms of the Radical Republican Party, including the three Reconstruction Amendments intended to ensure equality for recently emancipated slaves, with Lippitt serving as president of the county Republican Party, and Parker as one of the vice presidents. After the California Supreme Court ruled in 1864 that public school districts were required to provide “separate but equal” education for Black students, Parker’s board of trustees made Petaluma one of the first school districts to fund a so-called “colored school” for the town’s Black community.

Like many abolitionists, Parker was also an early supporter of the woman suffrage movement. In 1869, after it became clear that the 15th Amendment drafted by Congress was not going to grant the vote to women as well as Black men, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton created the National Woman Suffrage Association to advocate for women’s suffrage. At the encouragement of California suffragists like Laura de Force Gordon, Haskell called a meeting in December, 1869, to form the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association, of which Parker became a vice president.

Abigail Goodwin Haskell, Brick School principal (photo courtesy of Ann Nisson)

The local association’s first task was to gather signatures for a petition calling for a state amendment to grant women the vote. In late January, 1870, 3,000 signatures—424 of them from Petaluma—were amassed at the inaugural convention of the California Woman Suffrage Association held in San Francisco. At the gathering, Haskell was elected the state association’s first president, and in March, she presented the suffrage petition to the state assembly in Sacramento which, then dominated by the conservative, southern-affiliated Democratic Party, voted overwhelmingly against acting on it.

After the defeat, the California Woman Suffrage Association split into two factions due to the demands of more radical members in San Francisco, who sought a variety of social, economic, and political reforms for women in addition to the vote. Haskell and the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association split off with the moderate wing to form the Pacific Coast Woman Suffrage Association, of which Parker served as a delegate.

As the suffrage movement became stymied during the 1870s by internal schisms and adverse rulings of the courts, Parker turned his attention to agricultural reforms. Like a majority of California farmers, he had benefitted from the state’s wheat boom, which began when the Crimean War disrupted Russian grain exports, creating a wheat shortage in Australia and New Zealand. International demand for California wheat further skyrocketed when the Civil War impeded Midwest grain production and export. By the late 1860s, 80 percent of California’s wheat crop was being shipped to the European grain exchange in Liverpool, England.

Wheat schooner on the Petaluma River (photo Petaluma Historic Museum & Library)

In 1867, as soil exhaustion began to manifest from monocrop farming of wheat, a group of Petaluma’s wealthy farm elite who owned thousands of acres—among them William Hill, Harrison Mecham, Ezekiel Denman, J.R. Rose, and Albion Whitney—joined with leading Petaluma merchants to form a chapter of the State Agricultural Society. California’s oldest and most prestigious farm organization, the society had originally been created in 1854 to promote farming at a time when people were still preoccupied with mining. Following the Civil War, the society began to champion progressive, scientific-based farming techniques, including diversifying grains, rotating crops, deep-plowing fields, fertilizing, intermixing breeds of stock, and systemizing operations.

The new Sonoma and Marin Agricultural Society purchased ten acres along Fair Street to install a half-mile horseracing track and a pavilion for an annual agricultural fair. At the fair they awarded prizes for the best fruits, vegetables, livestock, and farm machinery, and sought to educate farmers on new farming techniques and the science of agriculture. Most of those initiatives were met with indifference, as small-scale farmers relied largely upon experience as a teacher and were deficient in technical education. Instead, they maintained a blind adherence to “King Wheat,” the most easily and cheaply produced frontier crop. Lippett, now a lawyer and secretary of county agricultural society, was blunt in addressing them in his keynote speech at the 1870 fair.

“With our old mining habits,” he said, “we sought to farm, and where a few won, many toiled. There was no thought about the future, no care indeed. ‘Let us make our pile and go home,’ said they.”

Sonoma and Marin District Agricultural Society Fairgrounds, Fair Street, 1877 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

For all farmers, the two most common concerns were the price of wheat on the Liverpool exchange, and the cost of shipping it there. As wheat prices in Liverpool began to uncontrollably fluctuate in the early 1870s, California farmers turned their displeasure on the middlemen in the market, including the wheat brokers, railroad monopolies, shipping companies, and bankers charging exorbitant fees and interest.

In Petaluma, the primary middlemen were the McNear brothers, John and George. John operated the largest grain brokerage in town, as well as a fleet of scow schooners that shipped grain down river to San Francisco, where George brokered it for shipment to Liverpool. John McNear also ran one of the four banks in town—the other three operated by fellow wealthy capitalists Isaac Wickersham, William Hill, and Hiram Fairbanks—which provided credit to local farmers at anywhere from 12 to 20 percent interest.

The McNears’ grain monopoly faced new competition with the opening of the San Francisco & North Pacific Railroad in 1870. Operated by Peter Donahue, a ruthless San Francisco businessman, the new rail line extended from the Petaluma River to Santa Rosa, but bypassed Petaluma as its southern terminus, creating instead a new river port near Lakeville called Donahue Landing, where he docked his own fleet of steamships. Once the train started running, the agricultural hub of Sonoma County abruptly shifted from Petaluma to Santa Rosa, which experienced a growth boom in the next few decades, while Petaluma’s growth stagnated.

Paddle steamer “Antelope” moored at Donahue’s Landing, 1878 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

As instability in the wheat market increased, members of California’s farm elite created the Farmers’ Union in 1872, both to push for more scientific innovations to farming and to try to maximize their profits by collectively negotiating reductions in freight and supply costs. In Petaluma, the local gentry, led by Hill, Mecham, and Rose, formed the affiliated Petaluma Farmers’ Club. Their first order of business was an attempt to cooperatively purchase grain sacks.

In April, 1873, the state Farmers’ Union held its first convention. As a speaker they invited Napa farmer W.H. Baxter, who represented a national group called the Grange. A secret fraternal organization modeled on the Masons, the Grange, or Order of Patrons of Husbandry, was launched in Washington, D.C. in 1867. Its original intention was to provide social and intellectual benefits to isolated farm communities. When they realized financial incentives were better inducements for attracting members, the Grange began offering members collective buying of supplies, insurance, and farming implements, as well as the collective selling of their farm products.

At the convention, Baxter made such a compelling case for joining the Grange that soon after the Farmers’ Union was formally dissolved. That June, L.W. Walker and Theodore Skillman established an order of the Grange in Petaluma that grew to 147 members. By the following October, when the California Grange held its first convention, the number of Grange orders in the state had grown to 104. Within two years, that number climbed to 252, most in the northern wheat-growing counties, boasting a total of nearly 20,000 members.

The Grange’s rapid growth was spurred in part by a national financial panic that fall. Triggered by overspeculation in railroads and a drop in European demand for U.S. farm goods, the panic led to a major, five-year recession. During that time, grain prices took a precipitous drop, forcing farmers to dispose of their crops at little or no profit.

A number of small farms were swallowed up by wealthy neighbors or so-called “bonanza farms.” Owned by capitalists, bonanza farms employed gangs of hired laborers and new farming machinery like steam-powered threshers and eventually grain combines. The new technology allowed one man to do the work formerly done by many in cultivating crops like wheat, minimizing the cost of production. Along with negotiating lower bulk rates with the railroads for transportation, the bonanza farmers were able to drive down the price of grain while still turning a profit. A bushel of wheat, which averaged $1.52 in 1866, was worth only $.86 by 1874.

Harvesting wheat harvest, c. 1880s (photo Charles Wieder, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

In 1874, Freeman Parker was elected secretary of the Petaluma Grange, a role that was essentially manager and communications director for the order. His daughter Alma was elected to the position of Flora, one of three offices, along with Ceres and Pomona, that were reserved for women. Named for the ancient mythical goddesses of flowers, grain, and fruit, the offices demonstrated the Grange’s inclusion of women, which had been a distinguishing feature since its founding. Unlike other secret fraternal orders where women were relegated to being members of a female auxiliary, the Grange provided women with central roles and full equality, recognizing the “refinement, gentle influence, and good taste and propriety” they brought to farm life.

Farmwomen in turn found in the Grange an outlet for community and self-improvement, as well as development of writing and leadership skills. While Grange sisters worked on projects of mutual interest with their Grange brothers, they also cooperated with each other in promoting “women’s issues” such as suffrage and home economics.

The Grange itself was largely silent on the issue of woman suffrage however, until 1877, when the California State Grange, looking to increase its numbers at the ballot box, formally called upon Grangers to support a petition drive for an amendment granting women the vote. Freeman Parker answered the call by leading the Petaluma Grange in gathering 212 local signatures. Speaking on behalf of the Grange, he wrote in the local newspaper, “We don’t claim perfection either in our work or play, but I think we come as near it as any similar society ever has; one reason is because we recognize woman’s influence and complete equality.”

Grange meeting in a rural schoolhouse, 1874 (Joseph E. Beale, artist, Pixel.com)

Copies of the signatures, along with signatures gathered from 15 other California cities, were forwarded in January 1878, to state Senator Albion Whitney, a grain wholesaler and dry goods merchant in Petaluma, who presented them to the California legislature. A copy was also sent to U.S. Senator A.A. Sargent of California, a longtime champion of woman suffrage, who presented them to the Senate along with 30,000 other signatures collected nationwide. Both proposals disappeared into the legislative morass, after which leaders of the national suffrage movement formulated a state-by-state strategy to win the ballot for women. That effort came to fruition in California in 1911, when the state’s rural voters, many of them Grange members, determined the narrow passage of an amendment to the state constitution granting women the vote.

George W. McNear (photo public domain)

With the grain market in continued turmoil, in 1874 the McNear brothers ended their partnership. While John continued to run the Petaluma grain brokerage, George set out to corner the state’s export business by shifting operations away from San Francisco’s costly ports to the less expensive Port Costa on the Carquinez Strait. After building warehouses capable of storing 60,000 tons of grain, opening branch offices in Liverpool and London, and acquiring a fleet of ocean steamers for transport, McNear made Port Costa the west coast’s leading grain port, earning himself the crown of California’s “Wheat King” in the process. But instead of passing the cost savings onto farmers, he pocketed them, further deepening the plight of small farmers.

While the wealthy farm gentry publicly denounced the “wheat-bag trust” of usurious interest rates, railroad abuses, and exploitive middlemen like the McNears, they disapproved of the Grangers’ schemes to aggressively reform monopoly capitalism, arguing that such reforms would undermine the American tenets of self-help and free enterprise. Thanks to the ineptitude of the Grange, they had little to fear.

A Grange co-op brokerage established in San Francisco drove up the price of members’ wheat to levels unwarranted on the world market, resulting in ruin for many Grangers and bankruptcy for the brokerage. In its place the Grange created a co-op to purchase discounted supplies for members. It was so underfunded and poorly managed that farmers withdrew from the Grange by the thousands. By 1876, membership in the California Grange had dropped to under 8,000. Compounding this, the following year a crop failure hit California.

In response, the Grange turned to political action, looking for allies from the working class, which by the summer of 1877 was getting hit by the full brunt of the recession. San Francisco in particular found itself filled with jobhunters of every kind, including unemployed miners, farmhands, and laborers.

On July 23, 1877, a mass meeting of workingmen was called in San Francisco in support of a group of railroad strikers in Pittsburgh. Speakers spoke out against rich capitalists, accusing them of taking jobs away from white workingmen to give to Chinese immigrants, who were willing to work for lower pay. The gathering soon turned into a violent riot for two days. In the weeks that followed, Anti-Chinese Clubs sprang up across the state, calling for a boycott of cheap Chinese labor.

Cartoon by Edward Keller in San Francisco Illustrated Wasp, December 8, 1877 (Bancroft Library)

Roughly 500 Chinese lived in the Petaluma area at the time, working as railroad laborers, quarry miners, stone fence builders, laundry proprietors, household servants, and on river dredging crews. Petaluma’s Anti-Chinese Club, led by Barnabus Haskell, a dry goods merchant and the husband of suffrage leader Abigail Haskell, quickly grew to more than 300 members.

Anti-Chinese Club Leader and Petaluma merchant, Barnabus Haskell (photo courtesy Ann Nisson)

Local capitalists like John McNear, who employed a large number of Chinese at his brickyard and shrimp fishery on San Pedro Bay, opposed the boycott. He was later singled out by the Anti-Chinese Club “to be subjected to the inquisitorial thumbscrews.” Many upper and middle class women also were concerned about the boycott, at least as it applied to domestics, since white working-class women tended to avoid household employment, especially laundry work. For these women, the prospect of losing Chinese workers raised a “servant problem.”

In the fall of 1877, labor protestors in San Francisco formed a group called the Workingmen’s Party (also known as the “sand-lotters,” as they initially met in a vacant sand lot opposite city hall). Led by charismatic young Irish immigrant and drayman Denis Kearney, their slogan was “The Chinese must go.” Their broader objective was to unite workingmen into one political party for the purpose of removing government from the hands of a rich oligarchy of corporate and banking interests.

By chance, California voters that fall approved a proposal to hold a convention to update California’s state constitution, originally drawn up in 1850. The Workingmen’s Party turned their attention to capturing a majority of the 152 convention delegates that would be publicly elected in June, 1878. The floundering Grange, seeing an opportunity to secure both constitutional and legislative relief for farmers, rallied members to form an alliance with the Workingmen’s Party.

Denis Kearney, leader of the Workingmen’s Party (photo San Francisco Chronicle)

In the spring of 1878, Kearney held a mass rally in Petaluma’s Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park), after which Haskell and other members of the local Anti-Chinese Club joined Kearney’s movement, forming the Sonoma County Workingmen’s Club. Local Grange members, including Parker, also joined the new club.

Worried Sonoma County Republicans and Democrats, as in many counties around the state, combined forces to form a Non-Partisan Party for nominating slates of county delegates for the constitutional convention, hoping to thwart the election of Workingmen’s Party candidates. Parker, in a testament to the respect he commanded as both a Republican and a Granger, was selected to attend the county nominating conventions of both the Non-Partisan Party and the Workingmen’s Party. He was also selected as a polling judge in the June election.

Not everyone in Petaluma was as open-minded toward Parker and the Grange however. Lippitt, his one-time political colleague, had switched his party affiliation in the mid-1870s, joining the Democratic State Central Committee chaired by Peter Donahue. In 1876, along with printer William Shattuck, he launched the Petaluma Courier newspaper to serve as a mouthpiece for Democrats in the upcoming election. The presidential election that year was a contested race, with no clear winner, until the Democrats agreed to allow the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, to assume the presidency in exchange for ending Reconstruction and withdrawing Union troops from the South, allowing them to impose the racial apartheid known as Jim Crow.

Lippitt had worked as a young lawyer with Hayes in Cincinnati, where Hayes served as city solicitor. After Hayes joined the Union army at the start of the Civil War, Lippitt secured a position at the local post office. A year later, he was indicted for embezzlement after discovered stealing money from letters in the post. Rather than stand trial, Lippitt fled with his wife and children to California, where Parker and his fellow trustees, unaware of his crime, hired him as school superintendent. In his political attacks as editor of the Courier, Lippitt showed neither Hayes—who lunched at his house during a presidential visit to Petaluma—nor Parker any favors. The Courier denounced the populist movements of the Grange and the Workingmen’s Party as communism and socialism.

Edward S. Lippitt, at his office in the Mutual Relief Building, 1880s (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

As the June election approached, the Workingmen’s Party held a statewide convention to finalize their platform. For both Workingmen and Grangers, the three primary issues were taxes, which they believed to be especially oppressive to workingmen and farmers; the Chinese labor issue, which they claimed threatened the livelihoods of the working class; and the state legislature, which they viewed as being in the pocket of corporate monopolies like the railroads.

At the convention however, the party split into two factions. The Kearney wing from San Francisco advocated for reforms like restricting land holdings to one square mile, or 640 acres, and taxing millionaires out of existence. A smaller, more moderate wing, based in rural counties like Sonoma, denounced these schemes as too radical. After Haskell and other members of the Sonoma County delegation criticized “Kearneyism and communism” as dangerous elements of the party, Kearney had them expelled from the convention as party traitors.

In the election, Sonoma County was allotted four slots for the constitutional convention. Voters chose three Non-Partisan Party candidates and a candidate endorsed by both \ Non-Partisan and Workingmen’s parties, Petaluma city trustee (councilman) James Charles. Across the state, the Non-Partisan Party prevailed with 81 of the total 152 delegates. However, in San Francisco the Workingmen’s Party captured 42 delegates, making them a viable force. The remaining 19 slots were a mix of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.

Although the Grange had sided with the Workingmen, more important to their cause was that 37 of the delegates represented rural farming communities, which proved in many cases more important than party affiliation. During the constitutional convention, which convened from September 1878 through March of 1879, the farming group held the balance of power between the radical Workingmen’s Party and the conservative block of Non-Partisans. This played out in a series of compromises.

For example, one of the convention’s wedge issues was woman suffrage. Although the Workingmen’s Party did not support it, prominent suffrage lobbyists like Laura de Force Gordon embraced the party’s anti-Chinese rhetoric in hopes of gaining their support. While proposals at the convention for woman suffrage were voted down, Gordon succeeded in getting two important clauses added to the new constitution—one that protected women from being denied entry to state universities, and the other that protected women from being barred from any vocation or profession. (Gordon, who was previously rejected from attending Hastings Law School on the grounds that women, “particularly their rustling skirts, were bothering to the other scholars,” subsequently went on to become a lawyer.)

Laura de Force Gordon, along with Susan B. Anthony, take the stage at 1872 Republican Convention held in Cincinnati (drawing by Matt Morgan, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, May 18, 1872)

The final proposed constitution embodied many of the relatively moderate objectives of the Workingmen’s Party and the Grange. The Chinese were forbidden to hold property or engage in certain occupations; taxation was shifted to the wealthy; growing crops was made tax exempt; a railroad commission was set up to regulate the railroads; an eight-hour working day was adopted; a state school fund was established exclusively for primary elementary schools; and home rule was extend to cities, emancipating them from the control of the corrupt state legislature. The new constitution passed 77,959 to 67,134, with the victory margin attributed to the large turnout of farmers.

The victory for the Grange and Workingmen’s Party was short-lived however. Many of the new constitutional clauses, including the anti-Chinese provision, were held by the courts to be null and void. The railroads quickly captured the commission set up to regulate them. Amendment after amendment was submitted and adopted in the state legislature until the difference between the revolutionary 1879 California constitution and other state constitutions was comparatively insignificant.

Grange celebration at Turn Verein Hall, 4th and C streets in Petaluma, c. 1890s (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

After the Recession ended and prosperity returned to California, the Workingmen’s Party dissipated, and membership in the California Grange declined to less than 3,000. (During the years that followed, the state Grange became nearly extinct until 1913, when membership began to rebound after the Grange reorganized itself as a cooperative fire insurance association). The hatred of the Chinese on the West Coast however did not fade. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was adopted by Congress, prohibiting further immigration of Chinese laborers.

Freeman Parker continued to attend Grange meetings, as well as meetings of a new workingmen’s group, the Knights of Labor, but in the early 1880s, he pulled back from the political arena. Some of that may have been due to personal tragedy. In the summer of 1877, at the height of his involvement in local politics, his wife Cynthia died. In 1879, he remarried a widow originally from Vermont, Mrs. Eliza Jones, but the couple separated after a year.

As the wheat market continued to decline, and Petaluma farmers began to shift to dairy farming and growing fruit and grapes, Parker leased 160 acres of his grain fields in 1880 to Danish immigrant Nelson Mastrup, who eventually purchased them. With his youngest son George, Parker maintained the dairy operation on his remaining 270 acres. His daughter Alma lived on the farm adjacent to his, having married its widowed owner, Captain James Hynes. After Hynes’ death in 1887, she had married another widower, David Walls, who operated Haystack Landing for a steamboat company.

Parker farmhouse (photo courtesy Janet Talamantes)

During the 1880s, Parker took numerous trips to the seaport town of Astoria, Oregon, where his brother Wilder settled after leaving San Francisco in the early 1850s. Wilder, who became the town’s mayor and customs officer, had been joined in Astoria by their three other brothers from Vermont, as well as Parker’s two oldest sons, Pitman, who ran the local newspaper, and Gelo, a surveyor. In 1889, Parker moved to Astoria, leaving his farm in George’s hands. Over the next 25 years, he made regular extended visits to Petaluma, usually during Oregon’s rainy winter season. In 1905, he leased 200 acres of marshlands on his farm to a group of San Francisco duck hunters who called themselves The Parker Home Club.

While on an extended stay at the farm in the spring of 1914, Parker passed away at the age of 94. The farmhouse he built in 1854, reportedly from prefabricated panels he had shipped around Cape Horn, stood until 2008, when, after being denied placement on the National Register of Historic Places because Freeman and Cynthia Parker were “not such important figures in local history,” it was torn down to clear the land.

Freeman Parker with violin; note his phonetic spelling of his first name (photo Petaluma Historic Museum & Library)

SOURCES:

Special thanks to Paula Freund and Katherine Rinehart for research assistance and, as always, Katie Watts for copyediting.

Books & Journals

Solon Justus Buck, The Granger Movement, 1870-1880 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913).

California Law Review , Jan., 1918, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Jan., 1918), pp. 114-133.

Clarke Chambers, California Farm Organizations (University of California, 1952), pp. 10-11.

Sue Doherty, “Sonoma Stories and The Song Wong Bourbeau Collection, Masters Thesis, Sonoma State University, 2005. http://sonoma-dspace.calstate.edu/handle/10211.1/1531

William Arba Ellis, Norwich University, 1819-1911; Her History, Her Graduates, Her Roll of Honor, Volume 2 (Capital City Press, 1911), pp. 415-416.

James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-22532010000200002

Tom Gregory, “Biography of Edward S. Lippitt,” “Biography of Freeman Parker,” History of Sonoma County, California (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1911).

Jean F. Hankins, “Women in the Grange,” The Courier, Vol. 34, No. 1, Bethel Historical Society.

John D. Hicks, The American Nation: History of the United States from 1865 to the Present,
(Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937).

Theodore Henry Hittell, History of California, Volume 4 (San Francisco: N.J. Stone & Co., 1898), p. 436.

“Petaluma Township, Part 3 1880.” History of Sonoma County (Sonoma County CA Archives History).

Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995), p. 114.

Ralph Kauer, “The Workingmen’s Party of California,” Pacific Historical Review (1944) 13 (3): 278–291.

Kris Kobach, “Rethinking Article V: Term Limits and the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Amendments,” 103 Yale Law Journal (1994).

Adair Lara, History of Petaluma (Petaluma: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pp. 65-67.

E.S. Lippitt, An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p. 43.

Donald B. Marti, Women of the Grange: Mutuality and Sisterhood in Rural America, 1866-1920 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991) .

Donald B. Marti, “Sisters of the Grange: Rural Feminism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Agricultural History, Vol. 58, No. 3, Symposium on the History of Rural Life in America (Published by: Agricultural History Society, 1984), pp. 247-261.

Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), pp. 36-42.

Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “A History of California Agriculture,” University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (Giannini Foundation Publications, December, 2017). http://giannini.ucop.edu/publications.htm.

Captain Alden Partridge, “West Point—Military Academy,” Citizen Soldier, Windsor, Vermont, March 12, 1841.

Rodman Wilson Paul, “The Great California Grange War: The Grangers Challenge the Wheat King,” Pacific Historical Review, Vo. 27, No. 4, (Nov., 1958) pp. 331-349.

Gerald L. Prescott, “Farm Gentry vs. the Grangers: Conflict in Rural America,” California Historical Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter, 1977/1978), pp. 328-345.

Gerald L. Prescott, “Review of Thomas A. Woods, Knights of the Plow: Oliver H. Kelley and the Origins of the Grange in Republican Ideology,Agricultural History Vol. 66, No. 2, (Spring, 1992), pp. 376-377.

W.L. Robinson, First Century of Service and Evolution – The Grange 1867 – 1967 (National Grange, 1967).

Noel Sargent, “The California Constitutional Convention of 1878-1879,” California Law Review, Nov., 1917, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Jan., 1918), pp. 6-7, 17-19, 114-115, 118-120, 123, 128-129, 131.

Sonoma County Dept of Parks & Recreation Primary Record, DPR 523, Office of Historical Preservation, Freeman Parker Farm – 4555 Redwood Highway, Diana Painter, Recorder. September 19, 2009; Dept of Parks & Recreation Primary Record, DPR 523, Office of Historical Preservation, Freeman Parker Farm – 4555 Redwood Highway, Andrew Hope, Caltrans, recorder. Sept. 2004.

J.T. White, “George W. McNear,” National Cyclopedia of American Biography, V.1, Volume 7, 1897.

Thomas A. Woods, Knights of the Plow: Oliver H. Kelley and the Origins of the Grange in Republican Ideology (Iowa State University Press, 1991).

Newspapers, Websites, Archives

The Cadiz Sentinel: “Young and Pure—More of it,” April 2, 1862.

“China Camp State Park” video, Marin History Museum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8tZpz1YAlE

Cincinnati Daily Press: (Lippitt) June 2, 1859; June 18, 1859.

The Cincinnati Enquirer: “Professor Lippitt,” April 21, 1862.

Coast Banker: “Sonoma County National Bank, Petaluma, 50th Anniversary,” Volume 16, Coast Banker Publishing Company, 1916.

Daily Ohio Statesman: “The Grand Jury,” April 26, 1862.

The Elevator: “Petaluma,” November 1, 1867; “Correspondence of the Elevator,” February 19, 1869.

Los Angeles Evening Express: “Last Night’s Dispatches, Legislative Matters,” January 22, 1878.

New York Times: “Overlooked No More: Laura DeForce Gordon,” January 9, 2019.

Pacific Bee: “Congress in Session,” January 12, 1878.

Petaluma Argus: “District School,” July 1, 1863; “Agricultural Circular,” January 31, 1867; “List of Premiums,” June 27, 1867; “Sonoma County Industrial Society,” June 13, 1867; “Located,” July 18, 1867; “Our County Fair,” September 9, 1867; “The County Fair,” September 19, 1867; “County Fair,” May 21, 1868; “Grand Union Meeting,” September 10, 1868; “Agricultural Society—Election of Officers,” May 20, 1869; “Special Notice,” December 25, 1869; “Card to the Public,” July 2, 1870; “Opening Address,” October 8, 1870; “School Election Notice,”May 6, 1871; “Let Us have a Farmer’s Club,” November 29, 1872; “Farmers’ Club,” February 7, 1873; “Farmers’ Club,” June 2, 1873; “Granges,” October 15, 1875; “Organization of a Grange,” June 20, 1873; “Grange Election,” October 30, 1874; “Local Brevities,” February 4, 1876; “Twenty Years Ago,” August 11, 1876; “Petaluma Grange,” August 18, 1876; “News and Other Items,” January 28, 1878;“Local Brevities,” February 15, 1878; “The Workingmen’s Movement,” March 15, 1878; “Kearney, Wellock, and Knight,” March 22, 1878; “Workingmen’s Meeting Saturday,” March 29, 1878; “The Workingmen’s Meeting,” April 11, 1878; “Notice,” May 3, 1878. “The Non-Partisan Convention,” May 7, 1878; “Kearney Ignored,” May 24, 1878; “Convention Notes,” May 27, 1878. “The Candidates,” June 14, 1878; “The Vote in Petaluma,” June 21,1878; “Woman Suffrage,” June 28, 1878; “Official Vote,” July 5, 1878; “The Constitutional Convention,” July 12, 1878; “The Boycott,” March 13, 1886; “Celebration in Petaluma,” July 9, 1887; “Local Notes,” June 3, 1905; “Freeman Parker on Reform Spelling, ”December 20, 1906. “E.S. Lippitt, Reminiscences of a Long Life,” September 2, October 3, October 29, 1910.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Mrs. Alma Walls, One of the City’s Oldest Pioneers, Dies After Short Pneumonia Siege,” February 12, 1938; “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” December 17, 1960; Katherine Rinehart, “Remembering the Parker House,” May 8, 2008.

Petaluma Courier: “The Result Secured,” December 28, 1876; “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877; “Anti-Coolie Meeting,” December 27, 1877; “The Workingmen’s Meeting,” April 11, 1878; “The Election,” April 11, 1878; “Fired Out,” May 22, 1878; “Judge Thomas,” June 5, 1878; The Election,” June 26, 1878; “Freeman Parker Arrives from Astoria,” November 4, 1903; “Death of N. Mastrup,” December 30, 1909; F. Parker Dies In His 92nd Year,” Petaluma Courier, April 10, 1914.

Sacramento Bee: “Woman Suffrage,” October 11, 1878; The Suffrage Question,” March 19, 1870.

San Francisco Call:“McNear is a Miller,” July 28, 1895.

San Francisco Chronicle: “Woman State Convention of Female Suffragists” January 28, 1870;“Woman Suffrage, Third Day of the State Convention,” January 29, 1870; “Woman Suffrage,” January 20, 1871; “Anti-Kearneyites,” May 18, 1878; “The Workingmen,” May 18, 1878.

San Francisco Examiner: “Woman Suffrage Convention,” January 10, 1878;

 “California Legislature, Senate,” January 23, 1878; “Ticks of the Telegraph,” June 14, 1878.

Sonoma County Journal: “Phonntic Type,” (sic) September 24, 1858; “Petaluma Institute,” July 27, 1860; “The Exhibition,” June 14, 1861; “Election of School Trustees,” April 11, 1862;  “School Notice,” July 1, 1863.

History,” Sebastopol Grange #306, http://sebastopolgrange.org/history/

Featured

Petaluma’s Days as a Porn Capital

The jury in Petaluma’s Deep Throat obscenity trial, entering the State Theater to view the film, September 17, 1973 (photo courtesy of the Petaluma Argus-Courier)

Filmmakers often use the flashback to render a coming-of-age story, dipping into the whirlpool of memories that mark any rite of passage. For those who grew up with drive-in movies—first as pajama-clad kids plied with snacks and soda pop in the family station wagon, and then as adolescents making out in the back seat—the re-emergence of outdoor theaters during the current pandemic stirs up its own flashback whirlpools of childhood innocence and teenage initiation. If you came of age in Petaluma during the 1970s and early 1980s, those flashbacks inevitably include the X-rated movies displayed on the big screens at either end of town.

I was nine years old when Petaluma’s first drive-in, the Parkway Auto Movies, opened in the summer of 1964. My mother made up a bed in the back of our Ford station wagon, knowing that not long after the cartoon shorts played, my sister and I would be off to dreamland, leaving her and my father to watch the main feature in peace.

That summer was the last for the family station wagon. In a fit of midlife crisis, my father traded it in for a sporty, two-door Pontiac LeMans coupe. Once I was old enough to get my driver’s license, I drove the LeMans to the Parkway on dates. Couples wooing in the “passion pit” rarely saw more than the first 20 minutes of any movie, which at the Parkway was just as well. Built in the lowlands of Denman Flats north of town, the drive-in was plagued in summer with creeping ground fog and flooded in winter during heavy rainstorms.

Night time photo of the Parkway Auto Movies, Denman Flats , 1980 (photo courtesy of Petaluma Argus-Courier)

I started high school in the fall of 1970. My next-door neighbor Kenny, who was a few years older, got a job changing the marquee at the Parkway, and hired me to help. We also changed the marquee at the State Theater downtown (today’s Mystic Theater). Both theaters were owned by Alan Finlay, a small, friendly man, who also owned a theater in Boyes Hot Springs.

Finlay purchased them in 1967 from Dan Tocchini, Jr., a second-generation, small town theater mogul. The next year, Tocchini bought the only other theater in town, the California, changing its name to the Showcase (today’s Phoenix Theater). Over the next two decades, Toccini and Finlay swapped theaters back and forth, dominating the movie business in town.

California Theater (today’s Phoenix) before its conversion to the Showcase in 1968, 201 Washington Street, late 1950s (Sonoma County Library)

A second drive-in, the Midway, also opened alongside the freeway south of town in 1967, offering wired speakers that sat on the car roof instead of hooking onto the driver’s window. That not only saved speakers from being ripped off their poles by customers absent-mindedly driving away, it also provided stereo sound.

Such technological innovations were important, as moviegoers were declining in the ’60s due to the rising popularity of television. Hollywood studios, which had dominated moviemaking for decades, were being replaced by business conglomerates who shifted to financing and distributing independently produced pictures. That opened the door to the “Hollywood Renaissance” of the late 60s and early 70s, allowing young filmmakers to appeal to younger countercultural audiences with movies like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Easy Rider.

Lost in the transition to New Hollywood was the predictability theater owners had come to depend upon from the studios. In their heyday, movie factories pumped out enough new releases to supply a schedule of double features that changed three times a week at theaters. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday usually screened musicals; Wednesday and Thursday, B-movies (low budget films); and Friday and Saturday, westerns.

But while in 1950, 12.3 per cent of American’s recreational budget was spent on movie tickets, by 1965, it was 3.3. per cent. As audiences diminished, theaters cut back, rotating movies only once a week, usually pairing a new release with a B-movie or a second-run hit from prior years. Even then, many big budget films were flopping at the box office.

There was, however, a glimmer of hope on the horizon. The sexual liberation of the swinging ’60s brought an end to the “Hays Code,” a set of strict moral guidelines imposed upon filmmakers. The code was originally adopted during the Depression after studios, struggling with dwindling audiences during cash-strapped times, resorted to making films touching on sex, violence, and other less-than-wholesome topics. Dropping the code in 1968, the movie industry shifted to alerting audiences about film content, adopting the film-ratings system we know today.

The new ratings proved a boon for movie theaters, providing them with a exclusive niche of R- and X-rated films that network television couldn’t broadcast. It took only a year for an X-rated movie—Midnight Cowboy, the story of a friendship between a male prostitute and an ailing con man—to win an Oscar for Best Picture. Two years later, Midnight Cowboy was re-rated from X to R, without a single frame being altered. The change was due in large part to the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow).

Movie poster for I Am Curious Yellow, 1969 (in public domain)

Initially banned in the United States for its explicit nudity and sex, the film depicted a 20-year old female college student experimenting with relationships, political activism, and meditation. After U.S. courts ruled it not obscene in 1969, the film became the highest grossing foreign film of all time, helping to usher in the “Golden Age of Porn.”

I Am Curious (Yellow) came to the State Theater in January, 1970, where it ran for an unprecedented six weeks. Prior to its arrival, blue movies, or stag films, were largely restricted to old, whirling, reel-to-reel projectors set up in the back room of the Moose Lodge or the Elks Club on select evenings. Cheaply produced in grainy black-and-white, the films accorded with the public yet strangely private nature of fraternal orders, a characteristic they shared with drive-ins theaters.

By the time Kenny and I began changing marquees in the fall of 1970, Finlay was screening a double or triple bill of X-rated films one week out of every month at both the Parkway and the State. Our first X-rated marquee was Russ Meyers’ crossover hit, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, at the Parkway. Like most of Finlay’s X-rated films at the time, it was soft porn, meaning that the focus of the films were more on the erotic setup, with only simulated sex.

Parkway Theater Ad (Petlauma Argus Courier, September 25, 1970)

After finishing the marquees every Tuesday night, Kenny and I stopped in the Parkway’s projection booth to get paid. Finlay, who maintained a small living room there, was usually watching television with his mother between changing reels.

The Midway drive-in south of town also added adult films to its rotation at that time. While the drive-ins were popular with customers seeking anonymity, they also drew public attention. The Midway’s screen faced the freeway, which meant drivers got a full view of the movies as they passed by. The Parkway’s screen had its back to the freeway, but looked out upon Stony Point Road, a rural lane that was often lined with parked cars during X-rated showings.

Outraged parents and religious leaders appealed to city hall to shut down adult films at the drive-ins on the grounds that they were creating safety hazards for distracted drivers. They also complained that underaged teenagers were not being carded for X-rated films, or else were sneaking in, hidden in car trunks. In response, police increased their patrols of the drive-ins during the showing of adult films.

The Showcase remained the only theater in town showing family fare. That was important to me, as the theater served as a clubhouse for my clique of high school friends. One of our classmates, Tom Gaffey, was assistant manager, and since the Showcase’s manager was off most evenings playing cards, Tom was in charge, allowing us the run of the place.

In September, 1971, Finlay began screening the country’s first hardcore hit movie, Mona. Unlike the soft porn he had been running, the sex in Mona was not simulated. The film ran at the State for five continuous weeks, packing in audiences. By the fall of 1972, the State, Parkway, and Midway theaters were running adult films almost exclusively, both hard and soft porn, drawing customers from hours away by car, and earning Petaluma a reputation as the Hardcore Capital of the North Bay.

That Christmas, Finlay upped the ante, screening the film Deep Throat at the State. Classified as hardcore due to its graphic enactments of oral, vaginal and anal sex, group sex, and masturbation in a dozen and a half sex scenes, it was among the first pornographic films to feature relatively high production values with both plot and character development. Drawing half of its audience from middle class married couples and single couples on dates, Deep Throat ushered in a new acceptability for X-rated films that The New York Times dubbed “porno chic.”

Poster for Deep Throat at State Theater, December, 1972 (photo in public domain)

In the early spring of 1973, Tocchini leased the Showcase to Finlay, providing him with a monopoly on Petaluma’s three theaters. Finlay brought in his own staff at the theater, putting an end to our teen clubhouse. With the State and Parkway showing adult films, he maintained the Showcase as the only venue in town for family fare. Meanwhile, Deep Throat became the most popular movie ever to play in Petaluma, running 28 consecutive weeks until Petaluma’s city council decided in late May to shut it down.

At the time, the film faced obscenity charges in at least a dozen American cities. However, as Sonoma County’s district attorney warned the city council, getting a conviction would prove difficult, as there was no common legal definition of pornography to cite.

State Theater showing Behind the Green Door in 1973, next door to Christian bookstore (Sonoma County Library)

Kenny was working as a projectionist at the State when the Petaluma police showed up to confiscate Deep Throat. Finlay immediately substituted it with another hardcore hit film, Behind the Green Door. A few days later, the police came back with a warrant for that film. Finlay replaced it with another copy he was running simultaneously at his theater in Boyes Hot Springs. Having just turned 18, I was hired to shuttle the film reels between the two theaters each evening in my father’s LeMans, until police also confiscated that copy of the film.

At his arraignment before Petaluma judge Alexander McMahon, Finlay was charged with exhibiting obscene matter and “assisting persons (actors) to expose themselves.” In the district attorney’s filing of the charges, he cited a related case in New York where a judge had denounced Deep Throat as “a nadir of decadence and a Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild before the fire.”

The second copy of Behind the Green Door was returned to Finlay at the arraignment, as the original warrant only specified one copy. He immediately began re-screening it at the State until he was able to replaced it a few weeks later with another copy of Deep Throat.

On June 4, 1973, a few days before my high school graduation, the city council, passed an ordinance prohibiting films with “explicit sexual materials” from being shown at drive-in theaters. At the recommendation of legal counsel, they avoided use of the word pornography. That put an end to X-rated films at the Parkway, but not the Midway, which was outside city limits. County supervisors later passed a similar ordinance a few months later, targeted specifically at the Midway.

In late June of 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling defining obscenity as based in part on community standards. Intended to give local communities more agency in applying their own moral standards, the ruling actually served to undermine Petaluma’s case. Judge McMahon dismissed the charges against Finlay on the grounds that the prosecution failed to present evidence of a community standard of obscenity.

Elevated to a symbol of free speech and free sex thanks to the trial’s publicity, Deep Throat continued to draw audiences to the State, where it ran continuously until June 1974, and then episodically until the summer of 1976, almost four years after its Petaluma premiere. Finlay also acquired the Midway during that time and, in defiance of the county ordinance, began screening adult-only films there again.

As cable television and video rentals further eroded theater attendance, theater operators shifted to multiplexes, placing many screens under one roof to provide customers with more simultaneous viewing options. Petaluma’s first multi-plex theater, Washington Square Cinemas, opened at the shopping mall of the same name in 1976.

State Theater, mid-1970s (photo source unknown)

In the late 1970s, as home video began to cut into pornography ticket sales, Finlay exited the theater business in Petaluma. The new owners of the State transformed it into a repertory theater they called the Plaza, featuring art-house and foreign films. The Showcase was purchased by a group that renovated it into a performing arts center renamed the Phoenix.

Tocchini took back the Parkway, continuing to screen largely second-run family features. He also purchased the Midway, renaming it the Sonomarin Drive-in and maintaining its roster of hardcore adult films, which by that time movie producers were rating on their own as “XX” or“XXX” to distinguish them from soft porn (the X-rating itself was changed in 1990 to NC-17).

The Sonomarin Drive-in (formerly the Midway) along Highway 101, south of town, early 1980s (photo in the public domain)

“We like the X-rated movies,” Toccini said at the time, “because it eliminates competition for commercial films in our immediate area.”

Rising land prices and the continued transition to home video brought an end to the Parkway in 1986, taking with it what had once been a way of life for families and teenagers in Petaluma. The site was eventually converted into a golf driving range. The Sonomarin (Midway) followed in 1988, the property later purchased by the state of California for use as a flood control reservoir.

Closure of the Parkway Auto Movies, 1986 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

For those like Kenny and me, who came of age during the Golden Age of Porn, Petaluma’s reign as the Hard Core Capital of the North Bay left an indelible mark. As our former boss Finlay proudly noted, “Deep Throat put this city on the map.”

SOURCES:

Newspapers

Los Angeles Times: David J. Fox, “X Film Rating Dropped and Replaced by NC-17,” September 27, 1990.

The New York Times Magazine: Ralph Blumenthal, “Porno chic; ‘Hard-core’ grows fashionable—and very profitable,” January 21, 1973.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Sale is Finalized,” June 8, 1967; “Mad Hatters at Spa,” Bill Soberanes column, November 24, 1967; “New Drive-in to Open Here Friday,” December 14, 1967; “California Theater Sold,” September 25, 1968; “Filmmakers Becoming New Breed,” December 27, 1969; Midway film ad for X-rated Paranoia, November 21, 1969; “In Defense of New Rating System,” December 6, 1969; film ads for the State and Parkway theaters, January, 1969 – March 15, 1970; film ads for the State Theaters, September 1-October 6, 1970; “Group Campaigns for Family Movies,” February 3, 1972; ad for State Theater featuring Deep Throat, December 13, 1972; “Showcase Movie Theater Leased,” February 8, 1973; “Sex Movie Measure O.K.’d,” May 22, 1973; “City Asks Help on X-Rated Movies,” May 19, 1973; “City Police Seize Sex Film,” May 24, 1973; “Second Sex Film Seized at Movie Theater Here,” June 5, 1973; “Duplicated Sex Film Seized by Police,” June 6. 1973; “X-Rated Movies Charges Filed,” June 11, 1973; “Plea Scheduled on Sex Movies Charges,” June 12, 1973; “Should Tackle Real Problems,” September 5, 1973; “Civil Offense for Drive-in X-Rated Films,” September 25, 1973; “Controversial Film Ends Long Run Here,” June 6, 1974; ad for Deep Throat at Midway, September 29, 1976; Final ad for Deep Throat, May 20, 1976 (The record for a continuous run of Deep Throat was ten years at the Pussycat Theater in Hollywood, “Hologram USA Hollywood Theater,” http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/2364); “Opening Set for New Firms,” July 15, 1976; “X-rated Movies Leave the Downtown,” February 1, 1977; “New Owners to Reopen Theater,” May 25, 1977; “Rejuvenated Theater to Return as Performing Arts Center,” May 23, 1979; “Drive-in Theaters A Dying Breed,” January 25, 1980; “Adult Films Are Not Appreciated,” April 14, 1983; “Parkway Closure Ends An Era,” January 24, 1986; “Drive-in a ‘Headache,’” December 17, 1986; “Washington Square Mixes Movies, Videos,” June 12, 1987; “X-rated Drive-in to be Sold,” August 13, 1988; Harlan Osborne, “Tocchini Family Builds Legacy with Sonoma County Theaters,” December 8, 2016.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Showcase Theater Leased,” February 7, 1973; “Hard Core Capital of North Bay,” May 25, 1973; Porno Trial Begins,” September 12, 1973.

Books and Websites

Film History of the 1970s, filmsite.org.

Alison M. Parker, “Mothering the Movies,” Movies Censorship and American Culture, Francis G. Couvares, ed. (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).

Susanna Paasonen and Laura Saarenmaa, “The Golden Age of Porn: Nostalgia and History in Cinema,” Pornification (Oxford: Berg Publishing), pp. 23-32.

Scott Tobias, “Midnight Cowboy at 50: Why the X-rated Best Picture Winner Endures,” The Guardian, May 24, 2019.

Interview with Aaron Sizemore, who worked as a projectionist at the Sonomarin and the Parkway: “The Sonomarin from 1983 until its closure in 1989 was operated by the late Allan ‘Duck Dumont’ Shustak, who also operated a couple of hardtop porn houses in the Bay Area. The screen came down in 1989 and the building was demolished in 1991. The property was sold to the state for use as a flood control lake (it was cheaper than elevating the freeway at that spot.”

Featured

Petaluma’s First Woman Voter

By Katherine J. Rinehart & John Sheehy

Three San Francisco women casting their ballots in the first election California women were able to vote in, April, 1912—Elizabeth Gerberding, Mary Sperry, and Nellie Eyester (photo by Hamilton Henry Dobbin, California State Library Collection)

One unexpected victim of the COVID-19 pandemic may be voting rights. Given the opposition in some quarters to voting by mail, efforts to politicize the U.S. Post Office, and a likely shortage of poll workers, especially those over the age of 60 at heightened risk from the virus, many Americans are wondering if they will be able to exercise their vote this fall, including those who have never had to face systemic voter suppression.

It’s an ironic twist to a year commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment which extended nationally to women the right to vote, a right that until this year many may have come to take for granted.

In California, woman suffrage actually occurred nine years before ratification of the 19th Amendment. On October 13, 1911, three days after passage of the state proposition granting women the vote, the first woman to register in Sonoma County was twenty-four year old Agatha Starke of Petaluma. An ardent suffragist, she represented a new, upcoming generation of working women.

A third-generation Petaluman—Agatha’s grandfather Augustus Starke was of one of the town’s earliest settlers in 1850 after finding success in the gold fields—Agatha attended Santa Rosa Business College, graduating in 1910. Her first job out of college was as a cub reporter for the Petaluma Argus, where one of her older sisters, Isabel, ran the business office.

Petaluma Argus office at 146 Main Street, 1934 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

At the turn of the century, journalism increasingly offered career paths to women, as publishers learned that news or features written from a feminine perspective—not merely mimicking male journalists—sold newspapers. After a year as a reporter, Agatha took over her sister’s position as office accountant when Isabel left for another job, finding office work preferable to covering the town news beat.

After California’s Proposition 4 narrowly passed with 50.7% of the vote on October 10th, women across the state scrambled to become the first in their city or county to register to vote. On October 12th, the Argus staff learned that a lawyer named Estelle Kirk had been the first woman to register in San Diego County and perhaps the state.

Spotswood & Lovejoy Cigar store at 145 Main Street, 1913, renamed Lovejoy & Schluneggar following Spotswood’s death (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

The next day, the staff, led by editor James Olmsted, persuaded Agatha, whom the Argus described as “plucky,” to take up the challenge. Across the street from the newspaper’s Main Street office, Spotswood & Lovejoy, a cigar store (site of Della Fattoria today), served as an agent for voter registration. Escorted into the establishment by a reporter—cigar stores at the time were male lairs—Agatha walked up to proprietor Robert Spotswood and “meekly” said, “I would like to register.”

Spotswood pulled out a blank registration form and began asking Agatha for her pertinent details. Unmarried, she was living with her widowed mother and eight of her nine siblings at 610 E Street, which her father had purchased shortly before his death in 1902. When the question of age came up, Agatha answered promptly, although the reporter noted, “the popular accountant at the Argus is not very aged.”

The sort of setting Agatha had to register in—Scuhler’s Cigar Store at 108 Main Street, across from Spotswood & Lovejoy.

Returning to the Argus office, Agatha reported there had been nothing horrible about the experience, and that she was pleased with having been persuaded to make history. The Argus staff then went about documenting the event, asking the linotype operator to work late to get the item into the next day’s edition.

However, it turns out that Agatha jumped the gun on her registration. Although passed on October 10th, Proposition 4 did not go into effect until January 1, 1912. That meant Agatha’s initial registration was invalid, and she would have to re-register once the cigar store opened after New Year’s Day. Unfortunately, she took an extended leave from her job at that time, possibly due to illness, leaving Jennie Colvin, a woman from Santa Rosa who operated the Alpha Rooming House with her husband, Reverend Peter Colvin, to officially lay claim to being Sonoma County’s first registered woman voter.

Four months later, in April, 1912, California women went to the polls for the first time.

In 1916, Agatha Starke hired her younger sister Marguerite to replace her at the Argus because she was quitting to secretly marry William Kaiser of San Francisco.

Marguerite leaked the news to reporters, who adorned the Argus’ official automobile as “Cupid’s chariot,” and intercepted the newlyweds on their way to the train station after a private wedding at St. Vincent de Paul church. The couple were whisked to the newspaper’s office for a brief celebration before being conveyed in Cupid’s chariot to the train station, where they set out for their honeymoon in Santa Cruz.

Starke family home, 610 E Street, Petaluma

Agatha moved back to Petaluma in 1964 to be with her extended family. She died at the age of 84 on October 21, 1971, almost sixty years to the day that she first registered to vote, and just a week after the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Equal Rights Amendment for ratification by the states, an initiative originally launched by suffragists in 1923 that remains ongoing.

A version of this article appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.

SOURCES:

Petaluma Argus: “The Death of Augustus Starke at San Bernardino,” May 29, 1900; “Local Notes,” April 27, 1910; “Changes in the Argus Staff,” March 22, 1911; “First Woman to Register,” October 13, 1911; “First Lady to Register in Sonoma County,” October 14, 1911; “Local Notes,” January 9, 1912; “Were Wedded at St. Vincent’s,” September 2, 1916.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Starke is Called to Eternal Rest,” August 27, 1927; “Agatha Starke Kaiser,” October 22, 1971.

Petaluma Courier: “Father of F.J. Starke is Dead,” May 19, 1900; “Answered the Last Call,” October 31, 1902; “First Woman Candidate for Assembly,” July 18, 1914; “Re-elected Secretary of W.C.T.U.,” October 3, 1914.

“Many Were Called, But Few Were Chosen,” Oakland Tribune, August 25, 1914.

“The Santa Rosa Business College,” Santa Rosa Republican, August 7, 1900.

“Gaye LeBaron’s Notebook,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 5, 1995.

Featured

Petaluma’s “California Girl”

Anna Morrison Reed dressed in a Greco-Roman tunic for the Circus Maximus event at the State Agricultural Society Fair, 1893 (Petaluma Historical Museum & Library)

A charismatic poet and journalist, Anna Morrison Reed captivated the nation as a young woman with her electrifying lectures on temperance and a woman’s place in the home. By the time she reached middle age however, Reed had become one of California’s leading suffragists as well as a spokesperson for beer and wine industry.

Anna Moreda Morrison was born in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1849. Shortly after her birth, her father departed with a wagon train bound for the California and the gold rush, leaving behind his wife and child. In 1854, four-year-old Anna and her mother boarded a ship in New York for California, where they reunited with her father, who was working the mines in remote Butte County.

Homeschooled by her mother, Anna demonstrated an early talent for poetry, publishing her first poems in local newspapers when she was fifteen. At seventeen, she began teaching in a rural school and writing articles for the local press. At nineteen, she gained entry to Mrs. Perry’s Seminary in Sacramento, but had to withdraw after two months and return home to take care of her parents and three younger siblings, who were all afflicted with malaria.

To support her family, Anna joined the temperance lecture circuit as the opening act for her mother’s cousin, Col. E.Z.C. Judson, a recovering alcoholic and the originator of the western “dime novel,” who later started Buffalo Bill Cody on the path to fame. Anna learned from Judson the formula for an entertaining presentation, combining speaking, poetry recitations, music, and dancing.

Reed performing as a young woman on the temperance speakers circuit, c. 1870 (public domain)

After learning the ropes, Anna went on the road as a solo act, speaking to small-town residents in every Northern California county except Modoc, traveling either on horseback or by stagecoach, accompanied by only her younger brother Eddie. Espousing traditional roles for women in the home, she quickly gained notoriety for her opposition to the women suffragists working the temperance circuit, many of whom were Spiritualists originally from the east coast. She drew large crowds and the attention of prominent politicians as well as the national press, who dubbed her the “California Girl.”

One newspaper described her as “an unusually attractive personality with sparkling brown eyes, finely molded features, and luxuriant dark hair … a striking illustration of what pluck and native talent can do in spite of adverse circumstances in early life.”

Anna’s speaking tour, which continued non-stop for two-and-a-half years, generated enough money for her to purchase a house for her family. Her events usually ended with a community dance that she happily participated in, garnering her several suitors and marriage proposals. In 1872, after a whirlwind romance that began at a dance, she married John Smith Reed, a successful miner twenty years her senior.

The Reeds made their home in Ukiah, where John became involved in ranching as one of the largest landholders in Mendocino County, as well as politics and founding the Bank of Ukiah, where he served as president for many years. Anna, following the message of her lectures, became a stay-at-home mother, giving birth to five children in her first eight years of marriage.

Reed at the family ranch in Laytonville (Mendocino County Historical Society)

She remained active in the local and state temperance movement, using her political connections in Sacramento to draft California’s first local option law in 1874, which proposed allowing communities to determine whether they would be wet or dry when it came to selling alcohol. After passing the legislature, the law was quickly struck down by the state high court.

Anna also continued to write. Deemed the “Poetess of the North” by the San Francisco press, she published her first book of poetry in 1880, followed by two more well-received volumes in the 1890s. She also became a founding member of the Pacific Coast Women’s Press Association, which provided support to women writers and journalists.

After a large fire destroyed their Ukiah home in 1889, the Reeds bought a sheep ranch near Laytonville in Mendocino County. Anna returned to the public eye as a rancher, becoming the first woman to deliver the annual address before the State Agricultural Society of California, as well as at Cloverdale’s Citrus Fair and Petaluma’s Sonoma-Marin Agricultural Fair. In 1892, the California legislature appointed her to the Board of Lady Managers for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. To raise money for the exposition’s California exhibits, Anna returned to the speaking circuit of Northern California, sometimes with a child in tow.

Reed on the circuit in the 1890s (public domain)

In the 1890s, a financial downturn in the sheep business led to repossession of the family’s ranch by John’s former colleagues at the Bank of Ukiah. The action, which Anna complained was part of a property swindle by the bank, broke John, and in 1900 he died of a heart aneurism, leaving his family penniless. To make money, she began selling ads and subscriptions to a Ukiah newspaper, as well as writing a weekly column. She also remained active in the California Women’s Press Association.

By 1904, she had made enough money to purchase a house for her extended family, and to fund a magazine, The Northern Crown, which covered the people, politics, arts, and travel of Northern California. In the first issue she made it clear that life had made her a staunch supporter of suffrage and social justice reform for women. In the years that followed, she became a prominent advocate for the California suffragist movement.

In 1908, Anna moved her family from Ukiah to Petaluma, where she continued to publish The Northern Crown, while launching her own daily newspaper, The Sonoma County Independent, which she declared to be the “paper of the people.” In 1911, she was chosen to serve as one of the official speakers of California’s Equal Suffrage Association’s campaign for passage of the state suffrage amendment, Proposition 4, which passed that year by a narrow margin of 50.7%.

After selling The Sonoma County Independent in 1912, she returned to the California lecture circuit to spearheaded fundraising for the erection of the Pioneer Mother monument, a testament to early women settlers at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (it can be seen today in Golden Gate Park).

Reed advocating for the Grape Growers Association, 1915

Anna also became a paid spokesperson for both the United Brewery Workers and the Grape Growers of Northern California, arguing that while she remained a supporter of temperance in terms of drinking in moderation—she herself enjoyed an evening glass of port—she opposed the “warped and Puritanical minds” intent upon suppressing individual liberty and stealing the livelihoods of the thousands who labored in California vineyards, hopyards, wineries, and breweries through prohibition, noting that “the professional good” have the habit of believing evil of all who differ with them.

In 1916, due to the health of her son Jack, who contracted TB from the carbon-based inks he used operating his mother’s printing presses, Anna and her family left foggy Petaluma to return to Ukiah, where she took a job editing the Ukiah Times Journal while continuing to publish The Northern Crown.

In 1918, she ran on an anti-prohibition platform as a Democratic nominee for a seat in the California State Assembly, losing by only a few hundred votes. Having witnessed passage of the 19th Amendment extending to women the right to vote in 1920, she died at her daughter’s home in San Francisco on May 23, 1921, and was buried in Laytonville.

******

SOURCES:

Thanks to Simone Kremkau of the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library for her research assistance on this article.

Books
John E. Keller, Anna Morrison Reed 1849-1921 (California Historical Society, 1978)

Richard Mendelson, From Demon to Darling: A Legal History of Wine in America (University of California, 2010), p. 32

Richard B. Rice, William A. Bullough, Richard J. Orsi, Mary Ann Irwin, “The California Girl,” The Elusive Eden: A New History of California, Fourth Edition (Long Grove, IL: Waveland press, 2017). p. 317-318.

Pauline C. Thompson (1993). A ‘California Girl’: The Life and Times of Anna Morrison Reed, 1849-1921 (Unpublished master’s thesis). California State University, Hayward.

Nan Towle Yamane, Women’s Press Organizations, 1881-1999, edited by Elizabeth V. Burt, (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000).

Newspapers & Blogs

“For the Ladies,” syndicated in: Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1870; Vermont Journal, August 13, 1870; Daily Commonwealth (Topeka, KS), August 14, 1870; Brooklyn Eagle, August 11, 1870; Hartford Courant, August 23, 1870.

The Golden Coast,” Akron Daily Democrat, December 29, 1892.

“’Prohibition is Piracy’ says Mrs. Reed,” Cloverdale Reveille, February 19, 1916.

Petaluma Argus: “Jack Reed is Home Again,” June 4, 1914; “Will Soon Move the Plant up to Ukiah,” June 14, 1916.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: Mrs. Anna M. Reed Gave Address,” February 15, 1916; “Rear-View Mirror Column,” August 20, 1960; “Anna Medora Morrison Reed,” March 4, 1987.

Petaluma Courier: “Peggy’s Penciling” column, August 25, 1891; “Installed New Press,” May 14, 1909; “Mrs. Anna Reed Will Speak on Monument,” June 19, 1914.

“Wet Speaker Shows Endorsement of Prohibition Woman,” Sacramento Bee, September 10, 1914.

“Suffragette Appeals to Workers,” San Francisco Examiner, August 31, 1911.

“Mrs. Reed to Take Platform,” Santa Rosa Republican, July 25, 1911.

Joanna Kolosov, “A Northern California ‘Pioneer’ in Her Own Right,” Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library, March 28, 2018. https://sonomalibrary.org/blogs/history/a-northern-california-pioneer-in-her-own-right

Ad for Anna and Col. E.Z.C. Judson, Stockton Independent, December 9, 1868.

Ukiah Daily Journal: “The Petaluma Fair,” September 4, 1891; “World’s Fair Lecture,” March 31, 1893.

“A Wise Appointment,” Ukiah Republican Press, February 12, 1892.

“Inter Poenia,” Weekly Butte Record, June 9, 1866.

Featured

Blackface, Rodeos, and the Egg City Minstrels

Jesse Stahl and his signature “backward ride” at the rodeo (photo Oakland Black Cowboy Association)

The sight of Jesse Stahl whirling atop a bucking bronc surprised the crowd of 4,000 gathered at the 1912 Salinas rodeo, where Stahl was featured as its first Black contestant. Despite his first place performance, he was awarded second place. After the judge announced his decision, Stahl jumped on an exhibition horse and, either out of protest or merely mockery, set off on a victory lap around the arena, riding backwards to the thrill of the crowd.

Stahl’s backward exhibition became a popular spectacle in subsequent competitions, where he continued to place second or third, but never first, until the day he competed in a rodeo judged by Tommy Caulfield, Jr.

“Regardless of nationality or color,” Caulfield announced in awarding Stahl his first place winnings, “the man who makes the most points deserves the most money.” Glancing at the other contestants, some of whom had refused to compete against Stahl because he was Black, Caulfield added, “If there is anybody looking for an argument, I’ll be glad to meet him right after the show.”

No one took him up on his offer, probably because, in addition to judging rodeos, the redheaded Caulfield also judged boxing matches, having spent time as a prizefighter himself.

After the rodeo, Stahl became a regular visitor to Petaluma, either breaking wild horses shipped in from Nevada to Caulfield’s corral beside the trainyard, or competing in rodeos at Kenilworth Park (now the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds). He made it clear he considered Caulfield not only one of the best rodeo judges, but also the fairest, an opinion shared by many.

But there was another side to Caulfield, one that clouds this image of him as a principled man without prejudice: he liked to perform in blackface at minstrel shows. In one review, a Petaluma newspaper reported that “as a coon, Tommy is in a class all by himself.”

Petaluma’s minstrel troupe and their band and chorus, 1931. Tom Caulfield in blackface, far right. (photo Sonoma County Library)

Like most white performers who donned blackface’s coal-black makeup, woolly wigs, and outlandishly red lips, Caulfield grew up far from the racial prejudice of the South. The sixth child of a fiery Irish immigrant who became Petaluma’s largest cattle dealer, Caulfield did his best after high school to escape the confines of his hometown.

Following a failed attempt at medical school, he knocked around railroading, playing semi-pro baseball, boxing, and touring the country with a vaudeville theater troupe, before finally returning to Petaluma and the family cattle business.

Tommy Caulfield, second row, far right, with the 1903 Petaluma Alerts baseball team (photo Sonoma County Library)

The consummate Irish storyteller, he continued to perform in local vaudeville shows, often in blackface.Following one of his performances, the author Jack London invited Caulfield and his fellow cast members to dinner. Throughout the evening, London made many offers of whiskey and wine, all of which Caulfield, a lifelong teetotaler, politely declined. “Son,” London finally said, “you’re the first man I’ve ever met who stands by his principles.”

Caulfield subsequently became a good friend of London’s and his personal cattle buyer. He also served as the basis of a character in Valley of the Moon, London’s 1913 novel that expresses the happiness he found at his Glen Ellen ranch, as well as his xenophobia and white supremacy.

Jack London’s 1913 novel, Valley of the Moon

By the time Caulfield and his brother Will inherited their father’s cattle business, he had become one of the Petaluma’s best liked and most illustrious citizens, known for making generous loans of livestock, acreage, and cash to new ranchers, and also for providing an annual Christmas dinner to the migrant workers who lived in camps near the train yards. Petaluma’s annual cattle drive, which extended from the Caulfield Stockyards on Lakeville Street to the Caulfield’s slaughterhouse on McDowell Road east of town, was a revered tradition for ranchers. But for the broader public, Caulfield’s popularity stemmed primarily from his role in Petaluma’s minstrel troupe.

Champion riders who competed in Petaluma rodeos, posing at a Northern California roundup rodeo in the early 1920s. Left to right: Don Tate, Hippy Burmister, Bill Errbone, Perry Ivory (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Minstrelsy—comedic performances in which white men blackened their faces, adopted heavy dialects, and performed what they claimed to be Black songs, dances, and jokes—began in 1830 when a white performer in New York City named Thomas Dartmouth Rice created a blackface character called “Jumping Jim Crow.”

Minstrel shows quickly became a national sensation, influencing white composers of the day like Stephen Foster, who wrote “Camptown Races,” “Oh, Susanna,” and other popular songs for the shows, and eventually leading to the development of vaudeville.

Blacks also performed in minstrel shows, forced ironically to don blackface, as it was often their only way to break into the entertainment business. Some subverted blackface’s primitive representations with political commentary in their comedic minstrel routines, while others blended cultural influences, like William Henry Lane—better known as “Master Juba”—who set an Irish jig and reel dance to syncopated African rhythms, giving birth to tap dancing.

Although intended to be light, meaningless entertainment, minstrel shows also perpetuated negative stereotypes of Blacks as being lazy, ignorant, superstitious, hypersexual, criminal, and cowardly. They depicted the South as a genteel land of benevolent planters and happy servants, the most popular of whom were the caricatures of the mammy and the old uncle. The underlying message was that Blacks belonged on Southern plantations. Even after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, minstrels still sang of pining for the old plantation.

The shows were most popular outside the South. By providing a means of looking down upon and laughing at Blacks, blackface helped ease the discomfort and fear many whites felt toward them, while at the same time allowing them to enjoy and appreciate Black culture.

Many of the early blackface actors were working-class Irish from the Northeast. As Catholic immigrants, they were consigned to a low social, political, and economic status. Blackface became their means of Americanization, authenticating their whiteness by comically dehumanizing those who were not white.

The Egg City Minstrels and their band and chorus, 1931. Tommy Caulfield in blackface, seated far left; George Ott in white tuxedo, seated in center (photo Sonoma County Library)

Petaluma’s first blackface minstrel troupe, the Petaluma Ethiopian Minstrels, was formed by a group of white amateurs for a Christmas benefit in 1875, just as Reconstruction was coming to an end and many of the 44 members of Petaluma’s small Black community were moving on to friendlier enclaves in Oakland and Vallejo.

The troupe followed the traditional three-act format of the minstrel show, opening with a band and chorus followed by the grand entrance of fourteen minstrels strutting, singing, waving their arms, banging tambourines, and prancing around a semicircle of chairs, until the interlocutor, a white man not in blackface dressed in formal attire, finally called out, “Gentlemen, be seated!”

Occupying his place in the middle of the semicircle, the interlocutor moved the first act along by asking questions of the “end” men at either edge of the semicircle—Mr. Tambo, who played the tambourine, and Mr. Bones, who rattled a pair of clappers known as “the bones.”

“Mr. Bones, I understand you went to the ball game yesterday afternoon. You told me you wanted to go to your mother-in-law’s funeral.” “I did want to,” Bones answered back, “but she ain’t dead yet.”

These fast-moving exchanges were interspersed with ballads, comic songs, and instrumental numbers, chiefly on banjo and violin. The second and third acts usually consisted of a series of individual performances—the Petaluma Ethiopians premiered with “Rascal Billy,” “The Stage-Struck Darkey,” “Uncle Tom’s Visit,” and “Woman’s Rights”—concluding with a hoedown or walk-around, in which every member did a specialty number while the others sang and clapped.

The immense popularity of minstrel shows during the late 19th century paralleled the passage of “black codes” meant to restrict Black behavior by southern state legislators, who, in a nod to minstrelsy, referred to them as “Jim Crow laws.” In parts of the country that had small Black populations like Sonoma County, blackface caricatures took on semblances of truth, with older Black men commonly designated with the title “uncle.”

The Petaluma Ethiopian Minstrels reigned as the most popular entertainment troupe in town until the turn of the 20th century, when local minstrel shows were displaced by nickelodeons, which featured silent short films interspaced with vaudeville acts, many of which included blackface routines.

As society modernized, so did the ways in which blackface was portrayed, particularly in the film industry. In 1915, “The Birth of a Nation,” the epic silent film about the Civil War and Reconstruction that glorified white supremacism, featured white actors in blackface portraying Blacks as sexual predators and simpletons. The film became a box office blockbuster, inspiring a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which by the 1920s grew to more than two million members across the country.

Still photo from the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation,” directed by D.W. Griffin (photo Alamy.com)

Petaluma’s chapter, established in 1924, staged a night time cross-burning beside the Petaluma Adobe for the initiation of new members. Given that Petaluma’s Black population in 1920 consisted of just six individuals, the local KKK largely focused their nativist attention on Sonoma Country’s Mexican, Mexican-American, and Japanese-American field laborers.

That same year, George Ott, owner of a Petaluma stationery store and president of the local Chamber of Commerce, decided to revive the Petaluma Minstrels as a means of raising money for charitable organizations. For help, he called upon his best friend and the town’s most popular blackface performer, Tom Caulfield. With Ott serving as the interlocutor and Caulfield as an end man, they recruited 14 local merchants to the group, including businesswomen, and adopted as their motto “to scatter sunshine.”

In 1926, the Petaluma Minstrels made their radio debut on an Oakland broadcasting station, after which they were inundated with booking requests from all over California. Playing on Petaluma’s egg boom at the time, they changed their name to the Egg City Minstrels, and began performing at benefits around the state for hospitals, orphanages, fire departments, military bases, and prisons.

The Egg City Minstrels’ popularity coincided with a minstrelsy craze on radio and film, most notably 1927’s “The Jazz Singer,” which ushered in the talkies. Featuring a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant named Al Jolson performing as an aspiring singer in blackface, it became a huge hit.

Although Jolson positioned himself as an ally of Blacks in helping to popularize Black jazz, his designation as the “king of blackface” echoed for cinematic historian Nic Sammond the Americanization that Irish blackface performers before him had sought with the white Protestant majority.

Poster for 1927’s “The Jazz Singer” (photo Pinterest)

After Petaluma’s egg boom foundered during the Depression, the Egg City Minstrels changed their name to the Redwood Empire Minstrels. They continued to stage benefit performances until the start of World War II, by which time minstrel shows had fallen out of favor. Ott estimated that during their seventeen years together the troupe had raised $44,000 for charity ($750,000 in today’s currency), none of which they pocketed themselves.

In 1948, Petaluma’s minstrel troupe reunited for one final benefit performance at the local Masonic Lodge, giving 60-year old Caulfield his last opportunity to perform in blackface. That same year, Caulfield led local ranchers on the last annual cattle drive across the flat prairie east of town. Beginning in 1950, the prairie began to fill up with new suburban homes as Petaluma transformed into a bedroom community for San Francisco. Caulfield’s roundups became the fodder of local legend, as did Jesse Stahl, the Black cowboy who had once ridden broncs in Caulfield’s corrals.

Stories about Stahl usually underscored the lack of prejudice Petaluma had toward the cowboy. Henry Howe, a cousin of Caulfield’s who competed against Stahl on the rodeo circuit and later worked as a horse wrangler for Hollywood filmmakers, recalled that he and Stahl were drinking at a bar with other cowboys after a particular rodeo in Texas, when a group of local Ku Klux Klan members walked in. “If you don’t want a fight,” they said, “hand us that n—– cowboy.” Instead of handing over Stahl, Howe and the rodeo cowboys beat the daylights out of the Klan members.

Or, so the legend goes. The sad truth is that Stahl, having retired from the rodeo circuit in 1929, died poor and alone in Sacramento in 1935, at the age of 55. He was destined for a pauper’s grave until old rodeo friends chipped in to give him a proper burial. In 1979, he was posthumously inducted into Oklahoma City’s Rodeo Hall of Fame, only the second Black cowboy to receive that honor.

Rodeo Hall of Fame member Jesse Stahl, 1879-1935 (photo Oakland Black Cowboy Association)

Caulfield, the man who had once bravely stood up for Stahl on the rodeo circuit, died in 1960, twelve years after his last blackface performance and his last cattle drive. Not long afterward, the Caulfield Stockyards were converted into a shopping mall.

Tom Caulfield at his stockyard (photo Petaluma Argus-Courier)

********************************************************

Video features:

“Camptown Races,” sung by Al Jolson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tuu5YtkPIo

California Rodeo at Salinas, 1935:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=197222941224193

SOURCES:

Publications & Websites

Edwin S. Grosvenor, Robert C. Toll, “Blackface: the Sad History of Minstrel Shows,” American Heritage, Winter 2019, Vol. 64, Issue 1.

The Atlantic: Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, “New Racism Museum Reveals the Ugly Truth Behind Aunt Jemima,” April 23, 2012; Tony Horowitz, “The Mammy Washington Almost Had,” May 31, 2013.

Tricia Wagner, “Jesse Stahl (CA. 1879-1935),” Blackpast.org, September 7, 2010. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/jesse-stahl-c-1879-1935/

“Minstrel Show, American Theater,” Encyclopedia Britannica, May 19, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/art/minstrel-show

Johann Hari, “Jack London: Not Just the Voice of the Wild,” The Independent, August 23, 2010.

New York Times: Holland Cotter, “We Don’t Have to Like Them, We Just Need to Understand Them,” June 25, 2020; Riché Richardson, “Can We Please, Finally, Get Rid of ‘Aunt Jemima?” June 24, 2015.

Susan J.P. O’Hara, Alex Service, “Champions of the Rodeo,” North Coast Journal, July 19, 2018.

Petaluma Argus: Petaluma Minstrels Ad, December 17, 1875; “The Vaudeville At the Hi School,” October 18, 1923; “Klan Principles Disclosed to Large Assemblage,” October 24, 1924;

Petaluma Courier: “Will Study Medicine,” July 23, 1902; “Native Sons Vaudeville Show a Great Success,” April 17, 1912; “Petalumans Give Minstrel Show at Kenwood,” February 8, 1924; “Initiation of KKK Before Guests,” June 2, 1925.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Ku Klux Klan Visit Petaluma,” April 21, 1930; “Noonie, Mike Monroy Train Hard for Bout,” May 15, 1930; “Remember Petaluma’s First Theater?” April 15, 1954; “Tom Caulfield is Packed with Stories,” October 27, 1955; “Tom Caulfield—His Story,” So They Tell Me column, May 3, 1960; “Ex-Petaluma Horse Trainer Hangs Up His Spurs,” February 3, 1972; “The Last Round-up,” Bill Soberanes column, April 16, 1980; “Tom Caulfield, Livestock Yard Owner,” December 29, 1990; “Petaluma’s Fabulous and Versatile Tom Caulfield,” December 8, 1998.

Sacramento Bee: “Jesse Stahl Will Be Given a Decent Burial,” April 20, 1935.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: Lou Leal, “Let the Public Speak: Jack London’s Evolution,” June 29, 2020.

“Blackface: The Birth of An American Stereotype,” Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/blackface-birth-american-stereotype

U.S. Census Data, 1870 and 1820, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.

Books

William Courtright, The Complete Minstrel Guide: Containing Gags, Jokes, Parodies, Speeches, Farces, and Full Directions for a Complete Minstrel Show (Dramatic Publishing Company, 1901)

William Loren Katz, The Black West (New York: Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996)

Jack London, Valley of the Moon, 1913 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 17.

Gina M. Rosetti, Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), p. 36.

Nic Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Duke University Press Books, 2015).

Yuval Taylor, Jake Austin, Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).

Featured

Christo’s Trojan Horse

How the Running Fence tipped the political balance in Sonoma County

The Running Fence , September 8-22, 1976 (photo Wolfgang Volz)

Given the traditional symbolism of fences with divisiveness, it should have come as no surprise that when an artist showed up in Petaluma in early 1974 with a proposed exhibit called the Running Fence, he would have his work cut out for him.

Bulgarian-born artist Christo asserted that his installation—a 18-foot high nylon fence stretching 24.5 miles across Sonoma and Marin counties from Highway 101 in Cotati to the Pacific Ocean in Bodega Bay—would foster a sense of “togetherness” by creating with a new, shared vision of the area’s rolling pastureland.

Instead, Christo’s proposal quickly became a lightning rod in a turf war between local environmentalists and outside developers that would impact the region for decades to come.

That, of course, is not the common story of how the Running Fence saga unfolds in documentaries and tributes to Christo, who died in 2020 at the age of 84. Those narratives commonly borrow from the storybook narrative of the hero’s journey, with Christo cast in a Sisyphean struggle against incredible opposition as he persistently pursues his artistic vision, the manifestation of which ultimately brings about the transformation of hearts and minds he sought, thanks to the mind-changing epiphany that only beauty can inspire.

One problem with this storyline is it buries the subversive manner with which Christo ultimately undermined the coalition of pro-development supporters who welcomed him to town, effectively tipping the political balance in favor of the environmentalists, who did not, in preserving the pastures he showcased in his exhibit.

The artist Christo (photo Morrie Camhi)

Held aloft by steel poles and cables, the Running Fence exhibit opened for two weeks in September 1976to an estimated two million visitors. This brief exhibit however was preceded by four years of planning and drama, during which the proposal was subjected to 18 public hearings, three sessions in California superior courts, and a 465-page environmental impact report.

For much of that time, Christo and his exhibit partner and spouse Jeanne-Claude operated out of their headquarters at the Petaluma Inn, commuting back and forth from their home in New York City. As the legal battles dragged on, Christo made it clear didn’t consider the physical Running Fence itself to be the art of the exhibit, but rather the process of the fence coming into being.

“You are all part of my work,” Christo explained in his Bulgarian accent to supporters and distractors alike.

Yet, despite his pledge to foster a sense of togetherness with the project, his focus quickly turned to assembling a partisan coalition in helping to get it approved. Whether he went about it as the “arrogant, wheeler-dealer egomaniac” local artist Mary McChesney accused him of being, or merely a pragmatic opportunist, the coalition of developers, anti-tax proponents, and ranchers Christo assembled, was, like most coalitions, a mixed bag. The one thing uniting them was a common desire to eliminate government restrictions on land use, including restrictions on absurd art installations like the Running Fence, which none of them confessed to understanding.

The most enchanting part of project’s storybook narrative is the charm offensive Christo and Jeanne-Claude mounted over coffee and fresh-baked pie around the kitchen tables of local dairy ranchers upon whose land they wished to erect the fence.

Sheepdog trainer and former rancher, Lester Bruhn (photo Gianfranco Gorgoni)

In reality, the couple, with their foreign accents, New York avant-garde airs, and free-spirited hippie looks, were an oddball mismatch to the conservative, no-nonsense personalities of the ranchers and their wives, many of them direct descendants of Swiss-Italian, Danish, and German immigrants. They received a cold shoulder until a former sheep rancher and sheepdog trainer, Lester Bruhn, recognized in the couple’s harebrained scheme a money-making opportunity for cash-strapped ranchers.

With Bruhn opening doors, Christo and Jeanne-Claude made the opening pitch to 59 ranchers around their kitchen tables, followed up by a battery of nine lawyers who negotiated leases for the fence to run across their properties. The opening lease offer for a modest size ranch was $200 ($1,000 in today’s currency). Some ranchers held out for more, including one large ranch that received $5,500 ($28,000 in today’s currency). The ranchers were also promised the fence’s nylon curtains, posts, and cabling once the exhibit came down.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude employed a similar approach in gaining the support of the conservative Sonoma County Taxpayers Association. “They came to us, hat in hand, money in pocket,” said the group’s president Jim Groom. “We like that.”

The one constituency Christo and Jeanne-Claude did not seek to court were local artists. Instead, they snubbed them. In turn, many artists condemned the Running Fence as a silly gimmick and a form of “fascist art,” seeking to dominate the landscape instead of complement it.

“We later realized,” said Jeanne-Claude, “the local artists saw us as an invasion of their turf.”

Jeanne-Claude (photo Morrie Camhi)

The dustup over artistic integrity may have also been part of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s strategy, as it allowed them to shift the media’s focus from the relatively tedious machinations of negotiating land use policy, to a theatrical sideshow over the nature of public art itself.

Yet, while Christo commonly referred to the Running Fence as “public art,” technically there was nothing public about it. Mounted on private land, it’s $3 million price tag ($13.5 million in today’s currency) was money Christo raised through the sale of his art works, not public monies. Despite Christo’s claims of everyone being part of the aesthetic process, no members of the public were formally involved in its physical creation or procurement, nor were any government-appointed public art commissions engaged in its review and approval.

Like a visiting carnival, the only official review of the Running Fence’s installation by the public or public agencies was restricted to its land use.

Christo at Sonoma County public hearing, 1975 (photo Gianfranco Gorgoni)

Concurrent with Christo’s four-year campaign to secure land use approval, the city of Petaluma was enmeshed in a legal battle of its own, fighting outside developers over limiting the city’s growth to 500 new houses per year. The developers maintained that imposing such a restriction was an infringement of the right of people to live where they wanted.

In February 1976, just two months before Christo received the final go-ahead from Sonoma County for his installation, Petaluma was granted a landmark decision when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected reviewing a lower appellate court ruling that upheld the city’s growth limits. The ruling had national consequences, and made Petaluma the darling of the slow growth movement.

By that time, savvy housing developers had already shifted their focus to subdividing the unregulated rural countryside surrounding Petaluma. One of their most contentious proposals was a 994-unit housing development slated for the Watson Ranch, a 1,000-area property north of town on Pepper Road between Stony Point and Mecham roads. The ranch sat just a mile south of Cotati’s Meacham Hill where Christo intended to launch his Running Fence installation from.

Like many local ranchers, John Watson was a second-generation dairyman, his family having leased the one-time Mecham family ranch since 1926, before purchasing it in 1965. Five years later, faced with rising property taxes, Watson sold a majority interest in the property to developers from Palo Alto.

It wasn’t Watson’s only option. Thanks to the Williamson Act, a California land conservation bill passed in 1965, ranchers could reduce their taxes by legally restricting their land to agricultural or open space use. Some, like Watson, were reluctant to do so given the instability of the local dairy industry, which, by the early 1970s, was facing the perfect storm in terms of financial sustainability.

In addition to being financially squeezed by rising feed prices while the state kept a lid on milk prices, national milk consumption was declining due to new dietary concerns about cholesterol. At the same time, dairy competition was increasing due to large factory farms in California’s central valley, where feed was cheaper and property taxes lower. To make matters worse, a historic two-year drought hit the area in the mid-1970s, forcing many ranchers to pay for trucking in water for their cows, each of whom drank an average of 50 gallons a day.

Barbara and Wilbur Volkerts at their Pepper Road ranch that the Running Fence ran across (photo Gianfranco Gorgoni)

The largest existential threat facing dairymen however was California’s new waste treatment regulations.

Most local dairies were situated near streams into which they washed the waste from their milking operations. With the rise of the environmental movement in the late 1960s, new regulations were adopted to stop dairy waste from polluting waterways. Ranchers were given until 1977 to install closed waste disposal systems and open-stall barns. The cost of doing so ranged between $100,000 for a medium-sized dairy to $300,000 for a large dairy ($500,000 to $1,500,00 in today’s currency).

For many ranchers, the waste regulations were the final nail in the coffin. Beginning in the early 1970s, “dairy for sale” became a sign of the times in Sonoma and Marin counties. Larger dairies resorted to swallowing up their smaller neighbors in an effort to remain competitive with the larger farms in the central valley. For some ranchers, the only viable alternative was the choice Watson made to subdivide the ranch with outside developers.

Between World War II and the early 1970s, Petaluma’s population surged from 8,000 to 30,000 residents, as the area became an attractive bedroom community for commuters working in San Francisco, a forty-five minute drive away.

To keep up with developer demand, the city was forced to periodically annex surrounding farmland. With new subdivisions butting up against farmland, ranchers became besieged with complaints from new suburban residents of the smells, flies, and noise coming from the ranches. In addition to the increased scrutiny of county health inspectors, ranchers were adversely impacted by rising property tax assessments as their land value substantially increased when a subdivision moved in next door.

The opposition to the encroaching housing developments in the rural area was led in part by Dr. Bill Kortum, a Petaluma rancher and large animal veterinarian. elected to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors in 1974 on a platform of growth control and agricultural preservation, Kortum fought to prevent wall-to-wall subdivisions stretching across his district in Southern Sonoma County by creating greenbelt zones between the incorporated cities.

Sonoma County Supervisor Dr. Bill Kortum (photo Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

In 1975, his proposal became part of a new interim general plan to manage growth that the board began developing. The planning process would ultimately take three years to complete. In the meantime, Kortum and the board’s other environmentalist, Chuck Hinkle, requested a moratorium on new property lot divisions. Developers immediately went on the offensive, working behind the scenes to launch a recall campaign against Kortum and Hinkle.

As a proxy attack dog, they enlisted Jim Groom, president of the Sonoma County Taxpayers Association. A Rohnert Park developer and former Santa Rosa city councilman, Groom had invested heavily in coastal lands for subdivision following the Sea Ranch housing development in the 1960s, which stretched along ten miles of Sonoma County’s coastline. In 1972, before Groom could begin his own coastal housing development, voters approved a ballot initiative Kortum had helped to launch, establishing a California Coastal Commission to reign in coastal developments. The new initiative left Groom’s investment under water.

In retaliation, Groom crafted the recall against Kortum and Hinkle ostensibly as a protest of the Board of Supervisors’ decision in 1975 to increase property taxes. He enlisted the support of local ranchers, pointing out to them that Kortum’s proposed greenbelt zones would not only diminish their land value, but also eliminate their retirement or rainy-day options of selling their land to developers.

While Groom’s contentious recall campaign was underway, Christo appeared before the Board of Supervisors for approval of the Running Fence exhibit. Kortum was the only board member to vote against it.

As it turned out, most of the 59 ranchers who signed leases for Christo’s installation had also previously agreed to restrict their land to agricultural use or open space in exchange for lower taxes under the Williamson Act. Like other environmentalists, Kortum was concerned that, in approving Christo’s project, the county would be potentially opening the door to more exclusions to the Williamson Act in the farmlands, such as commercial billboards, outdoor concert arenas, carnivals, and motorcycle raceways.

Pro-growth supervisors on the board dismissed Kortum’s concern. One member pointed out that a fence, “running or not,” was technically agricultural by nature.

Running Fence installation (photo from the film Running Fence by by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin)

In April 1976, Christo and Jeanne-Claude broke ground for their installation on Bruhn’s Valley Ford property. A month later, Kortum and Hinkle were recalled in a special election engineered by Groom. In August, developers of the Watson Ranch’s 994-unit subdivision on Pepper Road, apparently hoping for a quick approval given the recent recall of Kortum and Hinkle, presented their plans to the Sonoma County Planning Commission.

On September 8th, Christo and Jeanne-Claude opened their two-week exhibit of the Running Fence by unfurling the nylon panels on the same day with one final, dramatic twist.

A few months before the opening, the Coastal Commission rescinded its approval the fence’s final 1,000 yards that were slated to run across protected coastal land into the Pacific Ocean. That particular patch of land at Bodega Bay belonged to developers who originally purchased it for a subdivision, only to be thwarted by creation of the Coastal Commission. Christo’s lawyers appealed the decision, and a new hearing was negotiated for September 23rd, a day after the Running Fence exhibit was scheduled to come down.

The Running Fence’s “illegal leap” into the Pacific Ocean at Bodega Bay (photo Wolfgang Volz)

Christo didn’t wait for the near hearing, but instead defiantly extended his fence the final 1,000 yards into the sea.

Alfred Frankenstein, a prominent San Francisco art critic, who had watched Christo work patiently and diligently over the years to secure the necessary approvals, called his “illegal leap” into the ocean not only a violation of the law, but a violation of the spirit of the artwork. Christo disagreed.

“Illegality is essential to [the] American system, don’t you see?” he told the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins. “I completely work within [the] American system by being illegal, like everyone else—if there is no illegal part, the project is less reflective of the system. It’s the subversive character of the system that makes it so exciting to live here.”

The day after Christo’s opening, 700 developers, anti-tax proponents, and regional Republican leaders gathered at Santa Rosa’s Veterans Memorial Building to honor Groom as citizen of the year for his leadership in the recall campaign of Kortum and Hinkle. A telegram of appreciation for his good work was read to the assembly from U.S. President Gerald Ford.

For the next two weeks, the Running Fence turned the Sonoma-Marin dairylands into the world’s largest museum, drawing large, appreciative crowds. The installation was far more beautiful than anyone anticipated, even Christo himself, who dubbed it “a ribbon of light” as he watched its billowing nylon panels move with the wind. For many local viewers, it helped them to see the landscape they were so familiar with in an entirely new way.

The Running Fence (photo Wolfgang Volz)

Christo didn’t wait for the near hearing, but instead defiantly extended his fence the final 1,000 yards into the sea.

Alfred Frankenstein, a prominent San Francisco art critic, who had watched Christo work patiently and diligently over the years to secure the necessary approvals, called his “illegal leap” into the ocean not only a violation of the law, but a violation of the spirit of the artwork. Christo disagreed.

“Illegality is essential to [the] American system, don’t you see?” he told the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins. “I completely work within [the] American system by being illegal, like everyone else—if there is no illegal part, the project is less reflective of the system. It’s the subversive character of the system that makes it so exciting to live here.”

The day after Christo’s opening, 700 developers, anti-tax proponents, and regional Republican leaders gathered at Santa Rosa’s Veterans Memorial Building to honor Groom as citizen of the year for his leadership in the recall campaign of Kortum and Hinkle. A telegram of appreciation for his good work was read to the assembly from U.S. President Gerald Ford.

For the next two weeks, the Running Fence turned the Sonoma-Marin dairylands into the world’s largest museum, drawing large, appreciative crowds. The installation was far more beautiful than anyone anticipated, even Christo himself, who dubbed it “a ribbon of light” as he watched its billowing nylon panels move with the wind. For many local viewers, it helped them to see the landscape they were so familiar with in an entirely new way.

Christo and the Running Fence (photo Morrie Camhi)

On May 31, 2020, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran a headline that most likely would have pleased Christo’s subversive character. It read, “Famed environmental artist behind the Running Fence dies at 84.

********************************************************

Thanks to Katie Watts for her editing assistance.

SOURCES:

Artforum: Colby Chamberlain, “The Politics of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence,” April 2017.

Coastwalk California: “Bill Kortum—His Story,” December, 2014, https://coastwalk.org/bill-kortum-his-story/

Los Angeles Times: “Petaluma is Doing ‘Just Fine’ After 17 Years of Controls,” April 11, 1988.

Eric Stanley, “Christo: Legacy Remembered,” Museum of Sonoma County, June 9, 2020. https://museumsc.org/christo-legacy-remembered/

New York Times: “Christo, Artist Known for Massive, Fleeting Displays, Dies,” May 31, 2020.

The New Yorker: Calvin Tompkins, “Onward and Upward with the Arts: Running Fence,” March 28, 1977.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Christo’s Fence Now Under Construction,” May 4, 1976; “Planners: House Report Had Holes,” August 25, 1976; “Late Housing Report Draws Criticism,” August 18, 1976; “Petaluma Farms Draws Criticism at Hearing,” September 3, 1976; “Fence Triggers Debate,” September 11, 1976; “Opposition Defeats Subdivision,” September 17, 1976; “Fence Artist is Gone,” September 30, 1976; “Open Space, Park EDP Changes Studied,” July 13, 1978; “Watson Ranch Remains Open Land Under Trust,” December 10, 1979; “Environmental Icon’s Legacy Remembered,” December 25, 2014.

San Francisco Examiner, “Good for Business, But is it Art?” September 9, 1976.

San Rafael Daily Independent Journal: “Christo’s Fence Granted Sonoma Board’s Approval,” May 19, 1975.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Supervisors Clear Christo’s Fence,” March 19, 1975; “Christo’s Fence Clears Coast Committee,” April 25, 1975; “Groom, SCTA Supported,” September 17, 1975; “Kortum Vows to Defeat Recall,” December 17, 1975; “Second District,” May 26, 1976; “Kortum: An Opportunist’s Copout,” June 2, 1976; “Christo’s $2 Million Fence Almost Reader for Sept. 8 Hanging,” August 30, 1976; “Christo’s Fence Takes Illegal Dip,” September 8, 1976; Gaye LeBaron column, September 12, 1976; “Ford Praises Groom as Citizen of Year,” September 12, 1976; “Delong Bitter Blast at General Plan, Kahn,” January 11, 1978; “Jim Groom Still Packs a Mean Punch,” June 23, 1993; “Christo, Famed Environmental Artist Behind ‘Running Fence’ in Sonoma and Marin counties, Dies at 84,” (pick up from Washington Post), May 31, 2020.

Smithsonian magazine: “Q&A: Christo and Jeanne-Claude,” December, 2008; “Christo’s California Dreamin’,” June 2010.

Sonoma Magazine: Glen Martin, “Christo’s Running Fence: Photos, Stories, and Memories,” June, 2020.

Sonoma West Times and News: “Running Fence Has its Problems,” July 26, 1976; “Artists Speak from Both Sides of the Fence,” July 26, 1976; “Recall Elections, New Faces Were Part of the County’s First General Plan Debates,” August 15, 2007.

Caitlin O’Hara, “The Journey to the Running Fence,” UC Press Blog, https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/9847/the-journey-to-running-fence/

Brian Doherty, et al, Remembering the Running Fence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

Anne Schuhart, “Keeping Dairy Waste Under Control,” Soil Conservation, Volume 43; Volumes 1977-1978 (Information Division, Soil Conservation Service, 1977), pp. 15-17.

Running Fence, film documentary by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, 1977.

Featured

Lessons from the 1918 Pandemic

(l to r) Bernice, Roy, Vernon, and Doris Casarotti at the family farm on Magnolia Avenue, Petaluma, 1918. Their uncle, Henry Casarotti, died from the influenza on November 19, 1918. (Courtesy of Kris Rossi)

The Friday before Christmas of 1918, Gladys Goodwin came down with a cold while commuting home on the electric train from Sebastopol, where she worked as a secretary for the Western Apple Vinegar Company. Disembarking at the Petaluma train depot, she walked the two blocks to her family’s home at East D and Edith streets. It was the last time she would leave the house. Within days her cold developed into pneumonia, and in a week she was dead, a victim of the influenza pandemic.

It had been two months since the pandemic hit Petaluma, and just one month since the mandatory mask order and social distancing restrictions shuttering all theaters, dance halls, libraries, schools, and churches, had been lifted. Like many others, with the steep decline in the infection rate, Gladys Goodwin was looking forward to a relatively normal Christmas, especially in the aftermath of Armistice Day, which had marked the official end of World War I on November 11th.

According to records kept by the California Board of Health, the two-month influenza outbreak had been devasting to Sonoma County, with 18,635 report cases and 258 related deaths. Twenty-four of those deaths occurred in Petaluma, whose population stood at 7,550. California as a whole reported 230,845 cases and 13,340 deaths. Pneumonia, which became the largest secondary infection of the influenza, killed another 5,285. Together, the two diseases resulted in a 37 percent increase in the state’s mortality rate in 1918.

Gladys Goodwin, 1893-1918 (courtesy of Suzanne Miller)

Gladys Goodwin was a bright, attractive, 25-year old with a sunny disposition. Born in Petaluma, she was one of 12 children of Captain Billy Goodwin, who piloted scow schooners up and down the Petaluma River, and his wife Jennie. After local officials lifted social distancing restrictions just before Thanksgiving, she undoubtedly joined others afflicted with cabin fever in packing the city’s movie houses, theaters, parks, and churches.

It turned out to be a temporary reprieve. A second wave of influenza came at Christmas, claiming Goodwin as one of its first victims. It spiked in January with 69,053 cases in California, leading to 3,500 deaths. Petaluma health officials reinstated social distancing protocols, rescinding them once the second infection wave plunged at the end of February. Then came a third, relatively minor wave in April, forcing the closure of Petaluma schools for the remainder of the school year.

By the time summer arrived, California had experienced another 99,058 cases of influenza and pneumonia since January, resulting in 5,465 deaths, 24 of them in Petaluma. Gladys Goodwin was among those most vulnerable, as Californians most ravaged by the influenza were in the 25-to-34 age group. Their deaths dramatically lowered the state’s average life expectancy from 52 years in 1917 to 40.6 years in 1918.  

State health officials reported feeling impotent in the face of the rapidly spreading infection, resulting in confusion and a lack of proper utilization of the scanty means of control they had available. Their efforts were further complicated by “slackers” practicing civil disobedience or merely adopting a lax attitude toward social distancing and wearing masks.

Health officials also deplored the useless and misguided efforts to check the pandemic, including the use of dubious tonics, whiskey prescribed by doctors, and snake oil concoctions. California historian Brendan Riley cited accounts of mothers telling their children to stuff salt up their noses and wear bags of camphor around their necks, and of a four-year-old girl in Oregon said to have recovered after being dosed by her mother with onion syrup and then covered in raw onions for three days.

The winter of 1920 brought with it a fourth and final wave of the disease. Although its mortality rate was half that of the previous winter’s wave, Petaluma was harder hit than other cities its size, reporting 319 cases and five deaths by February of 1920. The city health board issued another ban on social gatherings, once again closing theaters, dance halls, schools, and churches. But by the time the wave subsided, local influenza deaths in 1920 totaled 17.

Petaluma General Hospital, 619 Sixth Street, established 1912 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Although a vaccine was discovered that reduced pneumonia as a secondary infection, no vaccine for the influenza itself was ever found. Instead, the pandemic eventually trailed off. Between 1918 and 1920, California experienced 20,801 influenza deaths, and another 10,424 related pneumonia deaths. Petaluma’s combined total was 66.

Like most small town hospitals at the time, Petaluma General at Sixth and I streets lacked intensive care doctors who really understood how to treat the very sickest patients. In the case of Gladys Goodwin, the rapid pace at which her infection was such that she never made it to the hospital. She died at her family’s home on East D Street.

**********

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.

SOURCES:

Twenty-sixth Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, For the Fiscal Years from July 1, 1918 to June 30, 1920, California State Printing Office, 1921.

Twenty-seventh Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, For the Fiscal Years from July 1, 1920 to June 30, 1922, California State Printing Office, 1923.

Petaluma Argus: “Petaluma Theaters Close Until Further Notice,” October 19, 1918; “Mask Order is Issued,” October 22, 1918; “An Appeal to the Women of Petaluma,” October 28, 1918; “Still Reasons for Concern On Endemic Says County Doctor,” October 30, 1918; “Masks Afford Much Merriment,” November 6, 1918; “Mask Slackers Are Fined,” November 9, 1918; “You Can Take Off Your Mask,” November 22, 1918; “The Programs at the Theaters,” November 25, 1918; “Says Cold Weather Brings Return of Influenza,” January 10, 1919; “School Closes for a Week,” April, 13, 1919; “Board Decides to Keep Schools Closed,” April 19, 1919; “Ban Will Soon Be Lifted,” February 24, 1920; “Somebody Will Get into Trouble,” February 24, 1920.

Petaluma Courier: “Many Cases of Influenza,” October 15, 1918; “Death at Lytton Home,” October 17, 1918; “Discuss Closing of Theaters,” October 19, 1918; “Precaution Taken by Board of Health,” October 20, 1918; “Funeral of J. Biaggi,” October 30, 1918; “Everyone Must Wear Masks in Petaluma,” November 2, 1918; “Petaluma’s Joyful Peace Parade,” November 12, 1918; “Many Masks Were Burned by Crowds,” November 23, 1918; “Health Board in Session,” February 14, 1920; “Ban Will be Lifted,” February 27, 1920.

Santa Rosa Republican: “Keeping Influenza Down,” February 3, 1919; “Influenza Ban May Not Lift Monday in Petaluma,” February 26, 1920.

Brendan Riley, “Old Reports Show Pandemic Impact in Solano
County,” Vallejo Times-Herald, May 10, 2020.

Gaye LeBaron column, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 28, 2020.

Jeff Elliott, Someone You Know Died Today, and Likewise Tomorrow,” Santa Rosa History, October 7, 2018, santarosahistory.com

Featured

Gary Snyder’s Vision of Petaluma

Gary Snyder (Image via Listen)

I first became acquainted with Gary Snyder like millions of others—through a novel written by Jack Kerouac called Dharma Bums, which features a thinly fictionalized snapshot of Gary in the 1950s, five years out of Reed College, whole-heartedly engaged in many of the pursuits that he had cultivated while a student here—poetry, mountaineering, countercultural politics, Native American animism, and Zen Buddhism.

We also see a young man on the quest for self-authenticity, involved in what Gary has described as a process of “de-educating” himself after descending from the pinnacle of elite education at Reed College:

Hanging out in the bohemias and underworlds of San Francisco, returning to his working-class roots as a lumberjack, trail maker, and fire lookout in the Cascades, preparing for a sojourn to Japan, where he would spend 12 years studying Zen and writing poetry, returning home to the States to establish a farmstead with a community of family and friends on the San Juan Ridge of the Sierras foothills.

We also get a glimpse in the novel of Gary’s knack for combining the intellectual and the experiential; a knack that, through exploration of a wide range of social, ecological, and spiritual matters in both poetry and prose, he would weave into a new social mythology, one grounded in the most archaic values on earth, and shaped by his literary talent for synthesizing precise observations of nature with a deep insight of reality.

Of course, as a 17-year old reading Dharma Bums, I knew little of this. Sitting out on the porch of the house my great-grandmother built in my hometown of Petaluma, California, renowned as the one-time chicken Egg Basket of the World, I only knew that wherever Gary Snyder was, had to be better than the hell hole I was stuck in.

Gary’s message was simple: On the trail laid out before us, others have already picked all the berries. If you want your own berries, you have to carve out your own trail.

And so, a few months after finishing high school, I pulled together my meager savings and bought a one-way ticket to Europe—my first time on an airplane—and like millions before me joined the so-called “rucksack revolution” that had been inspired by Gary’s character in Dharma Bums.

I spent the next four years hitchhiking the world, working odd jobs, and, in what I took to be the Snyder model, studying everything that crossed my path.

Then I came to Reed. It was the only college I applied to. I wanted training in the skills Gary said that he had received there—the independent thinking, the rigorous discipline, the fearlessness required for holding your ground in any territory you choose to enter.

Reed College Library (Reed College Special Collections Library)

In the classical hero’s journey, after venturing out in search of adventure and self-exploration, the hero returns back home with what Joseph Campbell called the “boons” of his or her travels.

I wasn’t sure what boons I had acquired, but twenty-five years after leaving my hometown of Petaluma, I returned, seeking to recapture something of my roots in a place my family had resided for 150 years. About six months into my return, I was having a difficult time of it, wondering if it was in fact possible to go home again.

Then one evening I went to a book signing by a local author who had written a book entitled Empty Shells: The Story of Petaluma, America’s Chicken City. There were a number of old chicken ranchers I recognized there, sitting around with their prized hens on their laps. As the author signed my book, I noticed that she used a calligraphic style of writing.

“That’s Chancery Cursive,” I said.

“Yes, it is.” she said, “Where I went to school we all had to learn it.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Reed College?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, if you went to Reed, you must know my brother,” she said. “We called him ‘Mr. Reed College,’ and he’s standing right behind you.”

I turned around, and lo and behold, there was Gary Snyder, standing amidst the ranchers and their chickens . . . in my hometown.

The book author turned out to be Thea Snyder Lowry, Reed class of ‘53. Gary explained to me that their father had retired to Petaluma for a spell, and that, at about the time I was in high school, sitting out on the family porch reading Dharma Bums and thinking I was stuck in a hell hole, Gary was riding up to town on his motorcycle on the weekends to visit with his father.

He told me that sitting out on his old man’s front porch—a mere few blocks away from my family’s house—he would think to himself that he had found a bit of heaven.

Which goes to show that sometimes, a turning word from a poet is all it takes to bring us home.

The Snyder family home, 6 Sixth Street, Petaluma, built 1865 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

A version of this story was first delivered as an introduction for Gary Snyder at a ceremony held on the Reed College campus in which Snyder was presented with a lifetime achievement award by the college.

Featured

Fascists in Petaluma’s Past

Hermann Sons Hall, 860 Western Street, erected 1931 (Photo courtesy of John Chu)

By John Sheehy & Jack Withington

In June of 1938, with local newspapers reporting that Jews were being persecuted by fascists in Europe, news came that Petaluma’s Hermann Sons Hall on Western Avenue had been rented out to the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi group, who planned to feature a political appearance by their West Coast leader, Hermann Schwinn of Los Angeles.

Jerome Koch, a 27-year old Petaluma educator and member of a progressive group called California Federation for Political Unity, wrote an open letter in the Petaluma Argus-Courier to the Hermann Sons Lodge, denouncing the Bund as a front for terrorism, espionage, and propaganda in Hitler’s attempt to undermine American democracy. Koch demanded that the lodge cancel the event.

The letter set off a wave of protest in town, from both individuals and groups such as the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, the AFL and CIO labor unions, the Communist Party (then a legal political party), and various Jewish organizations. In response, John Olmsted, owner and editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier, accused Koch in an editorial of attempting to suppress free speech.

Koch responded that while he was an advocate of free speech and a free press, when it came to a Nazi organization like the Bund, he felt it Olmsted’s duty as a journalist to expose that their appeals to prejudice and ignorance were intended to instill violence and civil chaos as a means of ultimately undermining the very civil liberties Americans treasured.

Jerome Koch’s protest had a familial aspect—his father, Valentine Koch, an immigrant from Odessa who had fought for the U.S. in World War I and was foreman of the Petaluma Poultry Producers Cooperative in town, served as financial secretary of the local Hermann Sons Lodge. The elder Koch was left to publicly defend the lodge’s decision to rent out the hall, telling the Argus-Courier the Bund had requested it “supposedly for the presentation of a motion picture program.”

Members of the German American Bund marching near Camp Siegfried in New York, 1937 (Rex Hardy Jr./The LIFE Picture Collection, Getty Images)

Lodge members quickly held an emergency meeting to discuss the Bund’s hall rental. Part of the national fraternal Order of Hermann Sons, the Petaluma lodge had been established in 1901, following a large influx of German immigrants to the area, particularly from the Isle of Fohr region in the North Sea. Dedicated to preserving German culture, traditions, and language, the order took its name from Arminius-Hermann, a German chieftain who united the German tribes against the Romans in the ninth century, ending the Roman domination of Germany.

The Petaluma lodge members decided to let the event proceed on the grounds that the rental agreement was already made. Since the lodge did not allow either religion or politics to enter into their discussions, to cancel it on political grounds would violate their political neutrality.

Their response was somewhat disingenuous, as their members were familiar with the leader of the local Bund, Fritz Kuehn, who had staged similar pro-Nazi events at the hall over the preceding three years. Just months before, Kuehn had held a rally at the Germania Hall in Santa Rosa which was advertised as a “concert and artists’ evening,” but actually featured Schwinn and his attendants dressed in full military uniform with a large swastika flag draped over the stage.

Bund leader Hermann Schwinn, speaking at Washington’s Birthday celebration in Los Angeles

Schwinn had also appeared four weeks earlier at a Bund event in San Francisco, which generated headlines in the Argus-Courier for having attracted 2,000 anti-Nazi protestors. Finally, it was no secret to the members of the lodge that Kuehn’s Petaluma Bund chapter was one of the organization’s most active chapters on the West Coast.

Thirty-seven year old Fred “Fritz” Kuehn was controversial for other reasons as well. Having immigrated to America from Germany in 1921, he was drawn to Petaluma because his older sister Greta had settled in Cotati a decade before after marrying Otto Diestel, a chicken and dairy rancher. Kuehn set up a horsemeat slaughterhouse on a ranch he leased on Lakeville Highway, with an onsite hammer mill for crushing horse bones into bone meal for chicken feed. His operation regularly ran afoul with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). An athlete, Kuehn also boxed as a welterweight for the Petaluma Spartan team, and served as team captain for a local polo team.

In the mid-thirties, Kuehn sold his slaughterhouse to Morris Cader, head of the B’nai B’rith Jewish Center and owner of Cader Brothers Hide Company, and moved into town, where he launched a new business, the Independent Ice and Supply Company. He also partnered in a new slaughterhouse plant, the Petaluma Poultry and Dog Food Company, on Lakeville Highway, which soon came under investigation by the SPCA.

In 1935, Kuehn became leader of the local chapter of Friends of New Germany, an American organization of ethnic Germans formed in 1933 to extol “German virtues” and promote the goals of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi party, in particular its anti-Semitism. Guided by Germany’s deputy fuhrer Rudolph Hess, members of the group were required to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler and swear they were of pure Aryan blood with no Jewish ancestry. They were also instructed to become American citizens, which Kuehn did in 1935, to demonstrate they weren’t foreign operatives.

That same year, Kuehn hosted a Christmas dinner for the Friends of New Germany at Penngrove’s Green Mill Inn, featuring a Christmas tree and a large block of ice carved in the shape of a swastika. He also staged events for the group at Hermann Sons Hall, including a birthday celebration for George Washington, whom the Nazis considered America’s “first Fascist,” maintaining that he was not a true believer in democracy. Promoted as musical performances with dancing, the events also featured lectures on Nazi developments in Germany and German propaganda films.

In 1936, the national Friends of New Germany organization dissolved in a flurry of infighting. It was replaced by a new pro-Nazi group, the German American Bund, launched by a man named Fritz Kuhn (no relation to Petaluma’s Fritz Kuehn). Aligned with the Silver Shirts, a white-supremacist, anti-Semitic group of 15,000 clustered primarily in the American South, the Bund was a paramilitary organization that dressed in the fashion of Hitler’s stormtroopers, with uniforms of black pants, gray shirts, blue overseas caps, and a black military-style Sam Browne belt.

Of the twelve million citizens of German blood in the United States at the time, the Bund could only claim 25,000 members, but they professed to have a much larger “whisper campaign” of financial donors. To indoctrinate new members, they quickly established twenty youth and training camps, as well as sixty-nine local chapters across the country. Frtiz Kuehn became leader of the Petaluma chapter.

Friends of New Germany Meeting, Los Angeles, 1935

Oral histories collected by Kenneth Kann for his book Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, which chronicles Petaluma’s robust community of Jewish chicken ranchers, many of them socialists who came to America escaping the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, offer testimonies of Kuehn’s local Bund chapter parading down Western Avenue from Hermann Sons Hall to the B’nai B’rith Jewish Center two blocks away.

They marched behind American and Nazi flags in their stormtrooper uniforms with swastika armbands, yelling out “Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil” as they offered the Nazi salute, right arms extended in the air. Other first-hand accounts describe barn gatherings of the Bund on farms west of town, and military training by the Silver Shirts in the hills surrounding Santa Rosa on Sunday mornings.

With the approval of the Hermann Sons Hall lodge members, the Bund’s events went ahead as planned on the evening of June 29, 1938, marked by protestors with placards picketing outside the hall. Unlike earlier Bund gatherings at the hall, attendance was low, as the bulk of lodge members stayed away. Among the films presented that night were “Rhoenwheel Sport,” a newsreel showing the takeover of the Austrian government by Hitler’s troops, and “The Aryan Bookstore,” which showcased the printing and distribution of anti-Semitic literature and German propaganda in America.

In his address at the hall that evening, Hermann Schwinn was blunt. “We have as little ill feeling against the Jews as we have against a flea,” he said. “But it takes only one mosquito to spread malaria, and when such a mosquito settles on our body we do not intend to spend much time wondering whether it is a good one or a bad one.”

In the months that followed, the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee intensified their investigation into links between the American Bund organization and Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, Nazi leaders unleashed an unprecedented wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, culminating on November 9th and 10th with Kristallnacht, or “night of broken glass,” a reign of terror by paramilitary forces that destroyed 267 synagogues and more than 7,000 Jewish businesses, killed hundreds of Jews, and led to the arrest and incarceration of 30,000 Jewish men in concentration camps.

The event sent shockwaves around the world. However, in Los Angeles, Schwinn threw a celebration. Surrounded by his stormtroopers, he blamed Jews for causing the massacre. “Americans are finally waking up,” Schwinn declared, “to the Jewish menace.” He predicted that within less than five years, “we will see Jews dangling from telephone posts and trees.”

On February 20, 1939, the Bund held an “Americanization” rally for Washington’s birthday in New York’s Madison Square Garden, denouncing, among others, Jewish conspiracies and President Roosevelt. The rally, attended by 20,000 supporters and members, drew large crowds of anti-Nazi protestors on the streets outside the Garden.

German American Bund’s Washington Birthday Day Rally, Madison Square Garden, February 20, 1939

Shortly after World War II officially began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the German-American Bund fell apart. The U.S. government seized many of its assets, and Fritz Kuhn was imprisoned as an enemy alien for embezzlement until the war ended, after which he was deported to Germany.

Deportation proceedings were also initiated against Schwinn for providing fraudulent information on his citizens application. On December 9, 1941, two days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor officially drew America into the war, he was jailed by the FBI as an enemy alien suspected of anti-government activities.

Koch, who ignited the 1938 Petaluma protest of the Bund, led a successful workers strike against Petaluma Poultry Producers before leaving Petaluma to become a successful magazine writer. In 1943, he joined the Poultry Producers and was assigned to manage their operation in Auburn, California. Five of his brothers enlisted in the U.S. military to fight in World War Two. One of them was shot down over Poland, and held in a prisoner of war camp until the end of the war.

As for Kuehn, his life began to unravel after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Designated in the local newspapers as Sonoma County’s Bund “Fuhrer,” he was stripped of his citizenship for having made a “false oath of allegiance” in his citizens application. Deemed a danger to military security on the Pacific Coast, Kuehn was banished to restricted quarters in Chicago. After the war, he returned to Petaluma, and appealed to have his American citizenship reinstated. In a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, his appeal was denied.

The Rathskeller Restaurant in the Teutonic California Hall, San Francisco

In the 1950s Kuehn became part owner of the Rathskeller Restaurant, a popular German eatery in the basement of San Francisco’s Teutonic California Hall, which had been built at the corner of Polk and Turk streets when the city’s Tenderloin District was occupied primarily by German immigrants. Kuehn’s two partners in the Rathskeller, John Pauls and Fritz Schmidt, were both past national presidents of Hermann Sons Lodge. Pauls, a former chicken rancher, had also been president of the lodge in Petaluma when Kuehn was banished to Chicago.

Fritz Kuehn quietly passed away in Petaluma in 1984.

SOURCES:

Press Democrat: “Let Inquiry Be Thorough,” Press Democrat, September 11, 1937; “U.S. Opens Quiz of Nazi Activities,” September 10, 1937’ “County Fuehrer on Stand in Bund Trial,” September 24, 1943;

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Humane Officer is Investigating, June 5, 1934; “Friends of New Germany Meet at Dinner,” December 21, 1935; “German Films Enjoyed Here,” January 24, 1936; “Friends of New Germany in Fete,” February 26, 1936; “Germans ‘Heil’ Swastika at Meeting of Nazi Bund,” November 23, 1937; Jerome Koch Letter to the Editor, June 27, 1938; “Bund Conclave at S.F. Hits Discord,” May 27, 1938; “Intolerance Met by Intolerance,” June 28, 1938; “Protests may Balk Petaluma Bund Meet,” June 29, 1938; “Bund Meeting to be Held as Scheduled,” June 29, 1938; “Picketing Fails to Halt Meeting of German Bund,” June 30, 1938; “M. Cader Retires as Head of Synagogue,” October 27, 1938; “Petaluman Order to Leave Coast,” October 15, 1942; “County ‘Fueher’ On Stand in Bund Trial,” September 24, 1943; “Mothers of Prisoners of War Meet,” July 29, 1944; “Fritz Kuehn Loses Appeal,” July 29, 1947; “F. Kuehn is Denied Review by High Court,” December 8, 1947; “Valentine Koch,” February 17, 1958; “Golden Wedding Observed with Diner at Cotati,” March 7, 1963.

Petaluma Morning Courier: “Order Hermann Sons,” September 16, 1901.

Oakland Tribune: “Deckhoff Denies Envoys Aid Bund,” September 30, 1938; “S.F. Police Ordered to Guard Bund Rally,” May 30, 1938.

Salinas Morning Press: “Coast Bund Leader May be Deported,” December 15, 1938.

Los Angeles Times: “Bund Leader Schwinn’s Citizenship Cancelled,” June 23, 1939.

Jack Withington, “Dark Days of the 1930s,” Sonoma Historian, 2019 #2, pgs. 8-9.

Correspondence from Barbara Scoles, niece of Jerome Koch, February 2, 2021.

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts Release, German American Bund, October 15, 1941.

Thanks to Katie Watts for editing assistance.

Featured

Petaluma’s 1918-1920 Pandemic Battle

Staff of G.P. McNear’s Grain Hay & Grain Mill at B and Main streets, November 18, 1918. Top row, left to right: Miss M. George , Miss V. Elfring, Miss A. Turner, M. Madeira, Miss N. Doss, Mrs. C. Parr, Mrs. F. Frasier, Mrs. C. Barkin, Miss M. Wessela, Mr. C. N. Behrens, Mr. M. L. Hunt, Mr. Hiram Hopkins, Mr. A. H. Askill, Mr. Elmer Starke.
 

In June of 1918, the government deployed Petaluma’s mayor, a saddle maker named A.W. Horwege, to Portland, Oregon, to run a large saddle plant for the U.S. Cavalry fighting in World War I. Chosen to fill his remaining term was city councilman Dr. Harry S. Gossage, a prominent local surgeon. Aside from a minor deficit in the city’s budget, Gossage’s mayoral challenges appeared relatively routine.

The main news that summer was that American forces fighting in Europe had achieved their first major victory, marking a turning point in the war. However, on the horizon signs of a larger threat loomed, one, it turned out, Mayor Gossage was uniquely qualified for.

It began with word from Spain that a deadly influenza was spreading across the continent. American media, mistakenly assuming the disease had originated in Spain, tagged it the Spanish Flu. The influenza soon spread to U.S. military bases, and by midsummer Petaluma newspapers were running obituaries of local enlisted men stationed in army camps out East and in the Midwest.

In mid-September, as allied forces began their final offense of the war in Europe, a San Francisco man returning from a visit to Chicago brought back the disease. Although he was immediately quarantined in a hospital, by the first week of October influenza had spread to a couple hundred people in San Francisco. A week later, the pandemic reached Sonoma County, where it claimed its first victim, Helen Groul, a young girl living at the Salvation Army orphanage in Lytton, north of Healdsburg. She was among 153 children at the orphanage stricken with influenza.

As local newspapers began running obituaries of former Petaluma residents killed by the disease in other parts of the Bay Area, Dr. Gossage, who also chaired the city’s board of health, held a special meeting of the city council on the epidemic. Although no cases of influenza had been reported in Petaluma, the mayor raised the issue of a general closure to get ahead of it.

Many feared such an order would do more harm than good, inducing panic and crippling the economy, and ultimately proving ineffective. Others argued it was probably too late to take such action, as Santa Rosa already had sixty reported cases, and California overall 19,000 cases.

On October 19th, California’s State Board of Health ordered the closure of all theaters, dance halls, and schools, along with a ban on public gatherings. Churches were exempted, although it was strongly recommended they either cancel services or hold them in the open air, which is what St. Vincent’s Catholic Church did two days later.

Despite the closures and gatherings ban, the centerpiece of the state’s crusade against the influenza was the face mask. Initially, a mandatory mask order was issued only to health care workers and members of households where there were cases of influenza.

But within days of the closure order, nearly everyone on the streets of Petaluma was wearing a mask. “Sewsters” at the Red Cross were busy making them for anyone who wanted one, with prices capped at ten cents each ($2 in today’s currency) to hinder profiteering. People were advised to boil their masks once a day for sanitary purposes, and detailed instructions were issued in the newspapers for those who wished to sew their own masks.

The influenza arrived in Petaluma the third week of October, quickly claiming the life of Joseph Biaggi, a Swiss-Italian farmworker, as its first casualty. On November 1st, Mayor Gossage issued a mandatory mask order for anyone venturing outside, as well as to merchants and their clerks, and people working in offices.

Petaluma Courier, October 25, 1918; photo above of employees of George P. McNear’s Feed Mill, B Street and Petlauma Boulevard South, 1918, including Ada Fay Turner, top row, third from left (Petaluma Historical Museum & Library)

Wearing a mask immediately became of a symbol of wartime patriotism. The Red Cross bluntly declared that “the man or woman or child who will not wear a mask now is a dangerous slacker.” It worked for most residents, but there were still many slackers who flaunted the order by wearing their masks beneath their noses or else around their neck while smoking. Petaluma police began arresting and fining slackers $1 for the first offense, and $5 for the second ($20 and $100 in today’s currency).

Due to a shortage of nurses—many of them were away, serving in the war effort—the health system was quickly overwhelmed, as was the telephone system, which doctors, nurses, and druggists depended upon for communicating with patients. Things became worse when a number of women operators at the local switchboard came down with the flu. The Petaluma Argus issued an appeal to women to refrain from “gossiping on the line,” so as to reserve the phone system for those critically ill.

The declaration of Armistice Day on November 11th, marking the end of World War I, sent a record number of people wearing masks into the streets of Petaluma for a celebratory parade. Two weeks later, as the local epidemic subsided, Mayor Gossage suspended the mandatory mask order, authorizing the opening of schools, theaters, dance halls, and churches just in time for Thanksgiving. The next day, a large crowd gathered on Main Street near the town clock and celebrated by burning their masks in a large metal tub.

Armistice Day Parade, November 11, 1918, at corner of B Street and Petaluma Boulevard South (Petaluma Historical Museum & Library)

The reprieve proved to be only temporary. A second wave of influenza came roaring back at Christmas, with 243 new cases and 35 deaths reported in San Francisco.

People were again warned to avoid crowds, and for a few weeks Santa Rosa reinstated its mask order. A third but relatively milder wave followed in April of 1919, forcing the closure of Petaluma schools for the remainder of the school year.

By that time, 305,856 cases of influenza had been reported in California, and 20,904 deaths, making for a ratio of 68 deaths per thousand cases. 175 of the deaths had occurred in Sonoma County. The Petaluma Box Factory, which made wooden boxes and crates for the shipping of fruit and eggs—including in 1918 a government order for half a million wood fruit baskets to be sent to war-torn France— was issued a government commission to make emergency caskets.

Tom Garside (far right) and fellow carpenters at Petaluma Box Factory, H and First streets, commissioned to make emergency caskets in 1919. (photo courtesy of Deneane Glazier Ashcraft)

In May, with the influenza appearing to be over, an exhausted Dr. Gossage, who had balanced his mayoral duties with those of treating his patients, announced he would not run for reelection that summer, but instead devote his time to his family and medical practice.

The following winter however, the cold weather brought a fourth and final wave of the disease. Although its mortality rate was half that of the previous winter’s influenza, Petaluma was hit harder than other cities its size, reporting 319 cases and 5 deaths by February of 1920. The city health board issued another ban on gatherings and closed all theaters, dance halls, schools, and churches.

To the board’s dismay, slackers continued to hold dinners, card parties, and social gatherings in defiance of the ban, apparently not willing to let the many tragedies the town had experienced over the past year infringe on their sense of independence.

SOURCES:

Petaluma Argus: “Dr. Gossage Resumes his Practice,” May 11, 1918; “H.S. Gossage Chosen Mayor to Succeed A. W. Horwege Who Has Resigned,” June 4, 1918; “Petaluma Theaters Close Until Further Notice,” October 19, 1918; “Mask Order is Issued,” October 22, 1918; “An Appeal to the Women of Petaluma,” October 28, 1918; “Still Reasons for Concern On Endemic Says County Doctor,” October 30, 1918; “Masks Afford Much Merriment,” November 6, 1918; “Mask Slackers Are Fined,” November 9, 1918; “You Can Take Off Your Mask,” November 22, 1918; “The Programs at the Theaters,” November 25, 1918; “Says Cold Weather Brings Return of Influenza,” January 10, 1919; “School Closes for a Week,” April, 13, 1919; “Board Decides to Keep Schools Closed,” April 19, 1919; “Ban Will Soon Be Lifted,” February 24, 1920; “Somebody Will Get into Trouble,” February 24, 1920.

Petaluma Courier: “Many Cases of Influenza,” October 15, 1918; “Death at Lytton Home,” October 17, 1918; “Discuss Closing of Theaters,” October 19, 1918; “Precaution Taken by Board of Health,” October 20, 1918; “Funeral of J. Biaggi,” October 30, 1918; “Everyone Must Wear Masks in Petaluma,” November 2, 1918; “Petaluma’s Joyful Peace Parade,” November 12, 1918; “Many Masks Were Burned by Crowds,” November 23, 1918; “Health Board in Session,” February 14, 1920; “Ban Will be Lifted,” February 27, 1920.

Santa Rosa Republican: “Keeping Influenza Down,” February 3, 1919; “Influenza Ban May Not Lift Monday in Petaluma,” February 26, 1920.

Gaye LeBaron column, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 28, 2020.

Jeff Elliott, Someone You Know Died Today, and Likewise Tomorrow,” Santa Rosa History, October 7, 2018, santarosahistory.com

“Over 300,000 Case of Influenza in California,” Riverside Daily Press, June 11, 1919.
“San Francisco 1918 Pandemic History”
https://www.influenzaarchive.org/cities/city-sanfrancisco.html#

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The Petaluma Adobe’s First Pandemic

by Arthur Dawson & John Sheehy

In March of 1828, three years after leaving Missouri, mountain man James Pattie found himself locked in a Mexican prison cell in San Diego. He and his father were charged with being illegal immigrants. As the months ticked by, Alta California’s first smallpox epidemic began sweeping through the territory. James’ father also died that year while incarcerated, though of other causes. To his son’s good fortune, he left behind a valuable inheritance—a vial of smallpox vaccine.

Learning that Pattie knew how to administer the serum, California Governor Echeandia offered to release him on condition that he vaccinate the inhabitants of California. Accepting the offer, Pattie began traveling from mission to mission, treating thousands of Hispanic settlers and indigenous people on the way. His original supply was augmented by vaccine the Mexicans acquired from Russian ships calling at San Diego and Monterey. From San Francisco he made his way across the bay and overland to the Russian settlement at Fort Ross, where he also administered the vaccine. On his return to San Francisco, Pattie was officially freed. There is no mention in his first-hand account of visiting either the San Rafael or Sonoma missions.

Up until Pattie’s time, California had escaped serious epidemics. This was partly due to its remoteness. The onset of human pandemics has been attributed to the shift from hunting and gathering societies to more settled agricultural communities and cities. Living in closer quarters set the stage for outbreaks of tuberculosis, influenza, measles and other infectious diseases, which over the course of human history have killed as many as a billion people. Like coronavirus, smallpox is an airborne disease that spreads quickly. Coughing, sneezing, and sharing clothing can all lead to infection. In the Old World, smallpox killed three out of ten people it infected and left the rest scarred and sometimes blind.

As Europeans settled the New World, their diseases readily infected the native people, who had no previous exposure or immunity. Over fifty million perished of smallpox and other diseases after European contact; about ninety percent of the original population of the Americas. In the 1790s, back in England, British doctor Edward Jenner tested the idea that milkmaids infected with cowpox, a milder disease, were immune to smallpox. He proved it by inoculating a 9-year-old boy with cowpox and then exposing him to smallpox with no ill effect.
Although the Spanish did their best to screen those they sent to settle

California, international travel remained a primary avenue for the spread of disease. The smallpox outbreak of 1828 was introduced by a foreign vessel that docked in San Francisco. Seven years later, smallpox appeared in Sitka, Alaska, the capital of Russian America, likely arriving on a ship from across the Pacific.

What followed fits a pattern that has been noted since Roman times—epidemics begin in ports of entry and spread from there. Within a year, it had reached hundreds of miles north over much of modern-day Alaska and south into British territory around Puget Sound. The British managed to vaccinate people ahead of the outbreak and stalled the spread of the virus in the summer of 1837. Whatever efforts the Russians made, on the other hand, were not successful in containing it.

Map by Arthur Dawson

Smallpox soon arrived by Russian ship at Fort Ross. By then, California missions had been disbanded by the Mexican government. General Vallejo had taken possession of the Sonoma mission property and established a military presence. In late 1837, before the virus was detected, he sent a cavalry unit led by corporal Ignacio Miramontes and accompanied by Indian auxiliaries, to Fort Ross to bring back supplies for the troops at Sonoma.

Whole villages were struck down without a single survivor. Platon Vallejo, the General’s son and a doctor, described how: “long trenches were dug, none too deep; great numbers of bodies were hastily thrown in and the earth, with equal haste, replaced.” In other cases the dead were cremated. Sometimes the toll was beyond the abilities of the living to handle at all. For years after, the bones of thousands “often left unburied, bleached the hills” of Sonoma and Napa Counties. Chief Solano, Vallejo’s friend, estimated that his tribe, which had numbered in many thousands, was reduced to just 200 survivors. The death toll may have exceeded ninety percent, on par with other places in the Americas.

The epidemic in the North Bay continued into 1839. Pattie’s efforts ten years earlier seem to have given some protection to those tribes to the south. According to Platon, most Mexicans were vaccinated and did not suffer the same fate as the indigenous people. Chief Solano, one of the few natives vaccinated by Vallejo, survived. No one knows why Vallejo never vaccinated his native laborers or native soldiers. Was it prejudice or a lack of vaccine or expertise? As with the coronavirus, an inability to grasp the situation before it was too late, may have also played a role.

Today, we’re all hoping for a modern James Pattie to deliver a vaccine for the current pandemic. After hearing stories from New York and Italy, we can appreciate the terror of those earlier times. Pestilence no longer sounds like an old-fashioned word. But perhaps we can also take heart from the fact that, nearly two centuries after the smallpox pandemic of 1838, Sonoma County’s native peoples are still here. In spite of everything, they have quietly achieved a cultural renewal in recent years—an encouraging sign of how deeply hope and resilience dwell within the human spirit.

A version of this story appeared in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 5, 2020.

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Petaluma’s First Pandemic

Chinatown, 3rd St between C & D, ca. 1900

On the evening of March 20, 1900, Ellen Button was on her way to teach at the Chinese Mission School when she spotted one of her students, Wong Qued, emerging from the Mutual Relief Building on the corner of Western Avenue and Kentucky Street. No sooner had Qued stepped onto the sidewalk than two men walked up, grabbed him, and to Button’s horror, threw him into the street. Qued was not the only student of Button’s attacked. Dong Tong, a strawberry grower, was chased for blocks and then stoned.

The attacks were sparked by news that the federal government had placed San Francisco’s Chinatown under quarantine after a newly arrived pandemic killed a Chinese laborer and infected dozens of others. Joseph Kinyoun, a federal bacteriologist, identified it as the same plague that was isolated in Hong Kong six years earlier. Transmitted by rat fleas, it made its way into San Francisco via a rat-infested ship from Australia.

Fearful that the news would negatively impact California’s economy, California’s governor, Henry Gage, vilified Kinyoun for fabricating the virus. Supportive newspapers and business leaders echoed the governor’s denial, as did state medical officials, many of whom considered bacteriology a lot of mumbo jumbo.

After a federal medical commission confirmed Kinyoun’s findings, Governor Gage, who was in the pocket of the powerful Southern Pacific Railroad, continued to deny the pandemic’s existence, silencing state medical authorities with a gag order, accusing federal authorities of injecting the virus into cadavers, and cynically joining Chinatown residents in suing the federal government to lift the quarantine on the basis of having violated their civil rights— a case they won.

As rumors of the pandemic circulated, fearmongering of the Chinese spread to Petaluma, which had its own Chinatown clustered along Petaluma Boulevard South between C and D streets. The Petaluma Courier sought to reignite racial prejudices by dubbing the virus the “yellow plague.”

Ad for rat poison, ca. 1880s

On June 18th, Ellen Button hosted a 25th anniversary celebration of the Chinese Mission School at the Congregational Church on Fourth and B streets. Two blocks away, a group of drunken men set out to clean up Chinatown, engaging the Chinese there in a “battle royal.” Shortly afterward, the windows of the Chinese laundry on Washington Street were smashed in.

Widespread hostility toward the Chinese had been common in Sonoma County for decades, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which restricted further Chinese immigration. Four years later, dissatisfied that the act was serving as more of a sieve than a barrier, Petalumans formed an Anti-Chinese League, one of many in the county, seeking to drive the Chinese out of town by boycotting their businesses and labor.

The effort intensified after a former Petaluma couple, Captain Jesse Wickersham and his wife Sarah, were found murdered on their ranch outside of Cloverdale, allegedly by their Chinese cook. Stirred up by newspaper editorials depicting the Chinese as being possessed of “pestilential vapors, threatening disease, and death,” two thousand people rallied in Petaluma for the boycott. A sudden exodus of Chinese from Sonoma County followed, creating a labor shortage, especially on the farms and vineyards, which whites would not fill. By summer, the boycott had fizzled, and the Chinese began returning to the county in larger numbers than before.

Sonoma County Chinese family, early 1900s

Still, an underlying racist divide remained. The Chinese Mission School, one of 16 in the state co-founded by Petaluma pastor William C. Pond, sat a block away from Chinatown’s joss-house, or Taoist-Buddhist temple. Offering evening instruction in English and Christianity, the school’s primary purpose, as Button made clear, was not to help acclimate the Chinese but rather to send them, as Christian evangelists, back to the “heathens” in their native land.

Due to Governor Gage’s obstruction of federal efforts to mitigate the virus, the pandemic worsened in 1901 and 1902, infecting a growing number of white victims, and leading other states to pass quarantines and economic boycotts of California goods. It was only after the election in 1902 of a new governor—a German-trained physician—that an intensified control program was implemented, bringing the pandemic to an end.

Although the 1900-1904 pandemic pales in comparison to the impact of today’s COVID-19, the parallels are clear. The global spread of a disease tends to increase prejudice as societies circle their wagons in fear. That’s especially true when leaders conceal or suppress the facts, delay mitigation in order to protect economic interests or assign discriminatory names to the virus for political gain. The fact is, pandemics don’t discriminate: only scared, ill-informed people do.

A version of this article appeared in the petaluma Argus-Courier, April 2, 2020.

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Petaluma’s “Colored School”

109 Howard Street, site of the African Methodist Episcopal Church 1867-1885 (photo by Scott Hess)

On the afternoon of May 10, 1871, Constable Frank Adel was scouring the streets of Petaluma for registered voters to call to jury duty. Passing by the barbershop of George W. Miller, he noticed Miller taking a break. On his voter rolls, Adel saw that Miller was one of the fifteen local African American men who, thanks to ratification of the 15th Amendment the year before, had registered to vote. Deciding to put the new amendment to the test, Adel summoned Miller to jury duty.

Upon entering the courtroom, Miller was greeted by gasps from fellow jurors. “N— in the pit,” one of them shouted, “put him out!” After a few preliminary questions from the deputy district attorney, Miller was issued a peremptory challenge and sent back to his barbershop.

For those hoping the 15th Amendment would fully enfranchise African Americans, Miller’s experience was an early wake-up call, one that continues to resonate to this day, as a number of states prepare for the upcoming 2020 election by purging their voter rolls in order to whittle down members of groups like African Americans. Such purges have become common since 2013, when the Supreme Court rolled back many of the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 meant to protect African Americans from the sort of deterrents George Miller faced on his day in court.

In selecting Miller for his jury test, Constable Adel undoubtedly knew he was choosing one of the leaders of Petaluma’s small Black community. A native of New Jersey, Miller moved to town with his wife and two infant children in 1855, opening up the Humboldt Shaving & Hair Dressing Saloon on Main Street for a white clientele. The shop thrived, but Miller was interested in more than just providing a close shave and a good haircut.

In the fall of 1855, he set off for Sacramento as Sonoma County’s sole representative at the first state Convention of Colored Citizens. Although California had entered the Union as a free, non-slave state, California’s early legislature enacted a number restrictions against people of color, including the rights to vote and to attend publicly-funded schools. With mixed success, members of the California Colored Convention—a who’s who of prominent African Americans—lobbied elected officials over the years to rescind the restrictions.

The California legislature voted against ratifying the 14th Amendment, which granted African Americans citizenship, and also against the 15th Amendment, which granted them voting rights. These rights were not extended in California until the two amendments were ratified nationwide, the 14th in 1868 and the 15th in 1870. (California, in fact, didn’t ratify either amendment until the civil rights era of the 1960s).

As public schools were prohibited from admitting “Negroes and Mongolians” under the threat of losing their funding, Blacks were forced to establish their own schools, which is what George Miller did in January, 1864, pooling resources with other Blacks living in Petaluma to rent out a small house on Washington Street, furnish it with seats and desks, and hire a young Black teacher from San Francisco named Mrs. Rachel Coursey. Half of the eight students attending the school were children of George Miller.

Richard “Hoodie” Miller, son of George Miller, who attended the “Colored School”

Two months after Miller’s school opened, California’s Supreme Court ruled that public school districts were required to provide “separate but equal” schools for Blacks. After Miller secured funding from Rev. Edward S. Lippitt, Petaluma’s Superintendent of Public Schools, Petaluma joined six other cities—San Francisco, Sacramento, Marysville, San Jose, and Stockton—in having a publicly-funded “colored school.”

The “colored schools” provided limited and inferior education by design. Members of the Colored Convention succeeded by 1875 in convincing five of the cities to integrate their white schools. The lone holdout was Petaluma, which refused school integration until the state legislature finally mandated it in 1880. Sadly, George Miller did not live to see that day, having died unexpectedly in 1873.

Before his death, Miller celebrated the nation’s ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870 by leading the Colfax Guard, a local Black militia he had formed, in a public 30-gun salute—one gun for each state ratifying the amendment—followed by an address from Rev. Edward S. Lippitt. Years later, Lippitt retracted his support of the 15th Amendment, contending that African Americans shouldn’t have been granted the vote until they had been properly educated to execute it, a process he believed would take generations.

Such racist attitudes remind us why, on the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment’s ratification this month, the fight George Miller and other Petaluma Blacks waged for full enfranchisement continues, generations later.

A version of this article appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier January 16, 2020.

Petaluma’s Hotel Déjà Vu

HOW CITIZENS GOT PLAYED 100 YEARS AGO

Stock rally celebration for Hotel Petaluma at corner of Washington & Kentucky streets, 1922 (Sonoma County Library)

The new hotel was touted to be Petaluma’s saving grace, a means of reviving the downtown economy after a four-year pandemic and a national recession. With tourists increasingly drawn to Sonoma County, the city needed something to hook in those just passing through. What better lure than a high-rise, luxury hotel, the likes of which Petaluma had never seen, positioned at the corner of B Street and Petaluma Boulevard?

The year was 1922.

The economic recession following World War I was beginning to lift. The deadly influenza afflicting the country since the war had mutated into a less deadly seasonal flu. The town’s last livery stable had closed, motorcars having replaced horse-driven buggies. Auto tourism was suddenly all the rage in Northern California.[1]

Members of the Save the Redwoods League, 1920s (Humboldt County Historical Society Collection)

It began in 1918 with the Save the Redwoods League who set out in to preserve what remained of California’s old growth redwood groves by making them state parks.[2] Their call of the wild spoke to the new wave of automobility sweeping the country. No longer hampered by the limited speed and endurance of horses pulling wagons and stages, motor-savvy tourists were setting out on excursions to the most remote natural settings.[3]

Trailblazing auto tourists on the new Redwood Highway, 1920 (public domain)

In 1921, a group of promoters created the Redwood Empire Association to capitalize on the new craze. Their plan was to rechristen the route from Sausalito through Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt, and Del Norte counties as the Redwood Highway.[4] Petaluma, having recently declared itself “The Egg Basket of the World,” was quick to jump on the bandwagon, becoming one of the first cities to declare its Main Street (today’s Petaluma Boulevard) part of the Redwood Highway.[5]

Proposed map of the Redwood Highway, 1921 (San Francisco Examiner)

Now, all the city needed was an eye-catching attraction to ensnare the gas-powered, tree huggers passing through town.

The idea of a new downtown hotel had been kicking around for a decade. Petaluma’s existing hotels—small, outdated, and shabby—were patronized mostly by traveling salesmen and itinerant workers. In 1912, a group of local businessmen formed the Petaluma Development Company to promote building a grand new hotel. After ten years, they were still struggling to make it happen.[6]

The breakthrough came in the spring of 1922, when Sophie Hammell, chair of the Chamber of Commerce’s publicity campaign, brought to town the Hockenbury System, a Pennsylvania outfit who specialized in raising local capital to build landmark hotels.[7]  

Hockenbury recommended erecting a hotel along the promising new Redwood Highway, close to the downtown commercial district. They estimated the hotel would generate annual revenues of $100,000, with a net profit of $40,000 ($1.9 million and $750,000 respectively in today’s currency). That didn’t include the indirect return from what guests spent around the city, which they projected to be as much, if not more.[8]

Their speculative projections generated considerable excitement around town. Launching a time-limited stock rally, they pulled in $258,000 from 855 local investors ($5.3 million in today’s currency. The money, less Hockenbury’s commission, was deposited in the Petaluma Hotel Company Trust under the purview of a board of local business leaders.[9]

Sophie Hammell (center beneath sign) and fellow hotel stock sale boosters, 1922 (Sonoma County Library)

Site selection quickly coalesced around an empty lot at the northwest corner of Washington and Kentucky streets. The site of the Brooklyn Hotel from the 1850s until it burned down in 1900, the property had recently gone on the market. A San Francisco movie theater syndicate had purchased it earlier with plans to build a new motion picture theater, but instead sold it to a local speculator.[10]

Empty corner lot at Washington & Kentucky streets, 1920 (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

The speculator already had two bids for the property from outside developers, but offered the hotel board first preference. The board’s vice-president and largest stockholder, George P. McNear, objected that the site was too far away from the new Redwood Highway. As an alternative, he offered a lot he owned at the southwest corner of B and Main streets, kitty-corner to his grain and feed mill (today’s Great Petaluma Mill).[11] 

The site was occupied by a gas station and two brick commercial buildings McNear had constructed just six months before. He told the board he was willing to tear down the buildings at his own expense, and sell the lot for the same price the speculator was asking for the Washington Street site.[12]

Public opinion quickly shifted in favor of McNear’s proposal. A four-story, 100-room hotel at B and Main streets would be visible for blocks in every direction. Most importantly, it had parking—McNear owned a garage on the adjacent corner of C and Third streets—which the Washington Street site lacked. There was just one hitch. Demolition couldn’t begin at the site for a year, until the leases held by McNear’s tenants expired.[13]

The hotel board couldn’t wait that long. They moved forward with the purchase of the Washington Street lot, along with two adjacent buildings slated for demolition. Within weeks of closing the deal, they hired a San Francisco architect to begin designing the hotel.[14]

Hotel Petaluma soon after opening in 1924 (public domain)

In April 1924, the Hotel Petaluma opened to great fanfare, California’s governor serving as a guest of honor. Rising five stories above street level, the new hotel offered 96 guest rooms, with an additional 12 rooms for staff lodging. The ground floor featured a spacious lobby, a state-of-the-art kitchen, and an ornate dining room that seated 200.[15]

The hotel’s opening coincided with an economic upswing for Petaluma thanks to the city’s egg boom, the Roaring Twenties’ bull stock market, and the increasing popularity of the Redwood Highway. The hotel quickly became a valuable community hub for luncheons and conventions of local service clubs and civic organizations. It struggled however to fill beds, passing through a rotation of hotel operators.

Hotel Petaluma postcard, 1928 (Sonoma County Library)

The arrival of the Great Depression only made matters worse. The opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937 had little effect, despite an immediate surge of tourist traffic that forced Petaluma to expand Main Street from two to four lanes. The final death knell came with the 1957 opening of the 101 Freeway, which became the new Redwood Highway, putting an end to downtown tourist traffic. In hopes of luring in travelers, Petaluma changed the name of Main Street to Petaluma Boulevard.[16]

As motels sprang up along the freeway, the Hotel Petaluma was converted to a residential hotel, or SRO. In 1959, the Elks Club, seeking more space for their member gatherings, purchased the hotel from the Petaluma Hotel Company trust for $91,160. Adjusted for inflation, that represented only a fifth of the $285,000 locals invested in the hotel 25 years before.[17]

Entrance to restored Hotel Petaluma (Photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

In 2015, new owners undertook a full-scale historical restoration of the building, returning it to a hotel for overnight guests. As such, it asserted a new prominence as an anchor landmark in the city’s downtown historic district.[18]

Historical preservation became the economic engine for revitalizing the downtown in the mid-1970s. It began when Petaluma’s visionary mayor, Helen Putnam, enlisted developer Skip Sommer to convert George P. McNear’s abandoned grain mill at B Street and Petaluma Boulevard into a historically-themed center of boutique shops and eateries called the Great Petaluma Mill. A restoration fever soon overtook the downtown, drawing developers of adaptive reuse to town.[19]

B Street entrance to the Great Petaluma Mill, 1978 (Sonoma County Library)

Today, 100 years after the Hotel Petaluma’s grand opening, a new six-story, luxury hotel is being proposed for the empty lot at southwest corner of B Street and Petaluma Boulevard—the same site George P. McNear offered for the Hotel Petaluma in 1922.

The proposed new high rise will require an overlay to amend the building height limit for parts of the historic district from 45 feet to 75 feet, changing the current character and human scale of the downtown. Proponents say the trade-off is worth it. They expect the new hotel to lure in tourists and developers, revitalizing local businesses and generating needed tax revenues for the city’s coffers.

It sounds a lot like the stock rally Hockenbury pitched 100 years ago to raise money for the Hotel Petaluma. That turned out to be what Wall Street calls a “sucker rally.”

Rendering of the proposed EKN Appellation Hotel at B Street & Petaluma Boulevard (City of Petaluma)

******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 11, 2024.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] J.R.  Vernon, “The 1920-21 Deflation: The Role of Aggregate Supply,” Economic Inquiry, July 1991, Issue 29, Volume 3, pps. 572–580; “Why the 1918 Flu Pandemic Never Really Ended,” History.com. https://www.history.com/news/1918-flu-pandemic-never-ended; “Will Close Stable on May 1st,” Petaluma Argus, April 19, 1919.

[2] “Redwood Highway Opens Vast Scenic World to Autoist,” San Francisco Examiner, July 21, 1921; Save the Redwoods League website, https://www.savetheredwoods.org/about-us/mission -history/

[3] Peter J. Blodgett, “How Americans Fell in Love With Taking Road Trips,” Time magazine, August 15, 2015. https://time.com/3998949/road-trip-history/

[4] “Redwood Highway Suggested for Hiway,” Petaluma Courier, July 11, 1921; “Redwood Highway Opens Vast Scenic World to Autoist,” San Francisco Examiner, July 21, 1921; “Redwood Highway to Traverse Scenic Wonderland,” Cloverdale Reveille, January 27, 1922.

[5] “Petaluma, the World’s Egg Basket,” Petaluma Courier, June 25, 1918; “Redwood Highway Suggested for Hiway,” Petaluma Courier, July 11, 1921; “Redwood Highway Opens Vast Scenic World to Autoist,” San Francisco Examiner, July 21, 1921; “C.C. Endorses Naming of State Highway and Boulevard Road District,” Petaluma Courier, September 9, 1921; “Great North of Bay Development Program Outlined at S.R. Session,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 6, 1921; “North of Bay Association is Formed,” Weekly Calistogan, November 18, 1921; “Petaluma C. of C. Urge Highway Completion,” Petaluma Courier, February 19, 1922.

[6] “The New Hotel Project is Being Well Received,” Petaluma Argus, December 27, 1912; “Development Co. Officers,” Petaluma Courier, June 21, 1917.

[7] “Definite Plans Made for New Hotel Campaign” Petaluma Argus, April 12, 1922; “Mrs. L.B. Hammell Has Resigned,” Petaluma Argus, February 23, 1923.

[8] “Definite Plans Made for New Hotel Campaign,” Petaluma Argus, April 12, 1922.

[9] “Enthusiasm Shown at C.C. Banquet,” Petaluma Courier, April 19, 1922; “Legal Notice for Petaluma Hotel Company,” Petaluma Courier, February 7, 1923; “Petaluma Realizes a Dream of Years Today as the Doors of the Hotel Petaluma Swing Open,” Petaluma Argus, April 10, 1924.

[10] “A Warm Old Time,” Petaluma Argus, April 10, 1900; “Turner & Dahnke Buy Brown Lot; Build Theater,” Petaluma Courier, May 18. 1921; “T&D Co. Theater Lot is Sold,” Petaluma Argus, June 8, 1922; Classified ads, Petaluma Argus, December 28, 1921; “Free Market Moves to Old Fire House,” Petaluma Argus, March 10, 1922.

[11] “Hotel Committee Confer with L.W. Clark for Purchase of Brown Lot,” Petaluma Courier, June 11, 1922; “The Largest Stockholder,” Petaluma Argus, April 10, 1924.

[12] “Brick Layers Complete Work,” Petaluma Argus, April 20, 1922; “Offers Site at Third and B Street for the New Hotel,” Petaluma Argus, July 31, 1922.

[13] “Council Votes Parking Place on Lower Main,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1920; “Beautify Main Street,” Petaluma Courier, October 20, 1920; “The Lower Main Street Park Will Remain as Originally Planned,” Petaluma Argus, November 2, 1920; “Offers Site at Third and B Street for the New Hotel,” Petaluma Argus, July 31, 1922.

[14] “Site for New Hotel Selected by Board of Hotel Trustees,” Petaluma Courier, August 8, 1922; “New Hotel Committee Buys Site,” Petaluma Courier, November 9, 1922; “Frederic Whitton Named as Architect of New Hotel,” Petaluma Argus, December 16, 1922.

[15] “How This City Made its New Hotel a Fact,” Petaluma Argus, April 10, 1924; “Unique Opening of Hotel Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, April 11, 1924; “Dazzling Gayety at First Formal Banquet at Hotel Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, April 23, 1924; “Argus Scribe Tours Hotel Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, April 10, 1924.

[16] “Improved Highway Facilities,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1937; “Petaluma Bottlenecks Doomed,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 11, 1938; “Active Council Works for Petaluma Progress,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 15, 1938; “Comments in Brief: Main Street Traffic,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 9, 1957; “Old Redwood Highway Renaming,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 23, 1958; “Supervisors Vote to Change Name of Old U.S. 101,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 9, 1958; “Comments in Brief: New Hotel Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 6, 1959.

[17] “Soon-to-be Elks Property, Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 10, 1959.

[18] “Historic Hotel is Sold,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 5, 1994; “Hotel Petaluma Sold Again,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 19, 2015.

[19] Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives; “He’s Not Your Typical Developer,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 28, 1975; “Ambitious New Business Owners See Potential in Old Buildings,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1977; “Mill Played a Key Role in Downtown Revitalization,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 9, 1980.

The History of Center Park

Center Park, 1930 (photo Petaluma Historical Museum & Library)

The history of Petaluma’s Center Park stretches back to the original founding of Petaluma.  Located on Petaluma Boulevard between Western Avenue and B Street, the pocket park was created by Columbus Tustin, whose development, Tustin’s Addition, followed a year after George H. Keller founded the town in 1852.[1] 

Keller’s original street grid was laid out parallel to the Petaluma River, with Main Street ending just south of Western Avenue, where the river took a bend toward the east (today’s Turning Basin). The next year, Tustin’s Addition was created abutting Keller’s grid at that bend in the river. Extending from A to F streets and First to Eighth streets, it also ran parallel to the river in its layout, but at a different angle than Keller’s.

Keller’s founding development in green (Brewster’s Survey), beside Tustin’s Addition in yellow, on 1877 Thos. Thompson map (Petaluma Historical Museum & Library)

The juncture where the two grids met created an angle of roughly 140 degrees. In the case of where Keller’s Main Street met Tustin’s Third Street, Tustin created an open rectangular space in the street between the juncture and B Street. That block between Western Avenue and B Street soon became known as Lower Main Street. (In 1958, Main and Third streets were combined into Petaluma Boulevard North and South).[2]

Arrow pointing to space created by Tustin at Main and Third Streets (1865 Jas. T. Stratton map, Petlauma Historical Museum & Library)

Throughout the 1860s, the rectangular space on Lower Main Street served as a makeshift parking lot for farmers with horse-drawn wagons bringing their goods to town. In 1871, the city’s board of trustees (predecessors to today’s city council) allowed merchants in the area to install hitching posts and a horse trough with a well in the space, which came to be called Lower Main Street Plaza.[3]

A decade later the city removed the hitching posts and horse trough, reportedly to build a shed for sheltering horses from sun and rain. Instead, the site reverted to its former makeshift parking lot until 1886, when members of the city’s Board of Trustees personally funded the installation of new hitching posts, a water trough, cobblestone paving, and shade trees. [4]

Lower Main Street Plaza, c. 1892 (Sonoma County Library)

These improvements coincided with a wave of new commercial development along Lower Main Street, beginning in 1882 with the construction of the Masonic Building at the corner of Main Street and Western Avenue.[5]

At the time, Lower Main Street was the commercial hub of Petaluma’s German and Chinese immigrant populations. The German district extended along the west side of the block from Western Avenue to the plaza. German merchants owned and operated two hotels, the Union and the Cosmopolitan, as well as the Centennial Building which housed a horse stable, shops, and the Druid’s Lodge, home to gatherings of the German community (today’s Lan Mart Building).[6]

Cosmopolitan Hotel and Centennial Building to its right, c. 1900 (courtesy of Dan Brown Collection)

The rest of Lower Main Street was the heart of Petaluma’s Chinatown, which extended from Western Avenue down Main and Third streets to D Street. Lower Main Street Plaza was surrounded by both Chinese dwellings and businesses, including laundries, groceries, tobacco shops, boarding houses, and restaurants. On the east side of the block, there were interspersed with grain and produce warehouses.[7]

In 1886, the Chinese were temporarily driven from Petaluma during a surge in anti-Chinese sentiment in Sonoma County. During their absence, local capitalist John A. McNear replaced a group of their dwellings he owned on the block with the first McNear Building. The commercial gentrification of Lower Main Street soon followed, pushing the Chinese community further south along Third Street to between B and D streets.[8]

John A. McNear with horse and carriage outside new McNear Building, 1886 (Petaluma Historical Museum & Library)

During the 1890s, Lower Main Street Plaza became a popular gathering place for public events. With the street to the west side of the plaza roped off, the site hosted political orators, concerts, parade stands, National Guard drills, street vendors, estate auctions, horse sales, and the city’s Fourth of July fireworks.[9]

Lower Main Street Plaza, c. 1908 (Sonoma County Library)

In 1920, with automobiles having replaced horse-drawn wagons and carriages in town, Petaluma’s city council voted to replace Lower Main Street Plaza with additional parking spaces for surrounding merchants. Outraged residents petitioned against the destruction of the plaza, calling instead for its beautification as a gateway to the downtown for auto tourists. The city council quickly reversed their decision, and set about beautifying the plaza with grass and plantings.[10]

This work effort coincided with the efforts of the newly-formed Redwood Highway Association. Seeking to direct the new wave of auto tourists to what remained of California’s old-growth redwood groves, the association promoted rechristening the thoroughfare between Sausalito and the Oregon border as a scenic route called the Redwood Highway.[11] In 1921, the Petaluma Chamber of Commerce made Petaluma the first city in Sonoma County to officially designate its Main Street as part of the Redwood Highway.[12]

Map of the proposed Redwood Highway, 1921 (San Francisco Examiner)

During Petaluma’s Egg Day Celebration in 1921, the newly-beautified Lower Main Street Plaza became the setting for a chicken rodeo, an egg rolling contest, a game of egg baseball, and an egg laying display. Two of the city’s banks sponsored a contest to rename the plaza. Out of 200 submissions, “Mainway”—a combination of Main Street and highway—was chosen as the winner. The name “Center Park,” signifying the plaza’s location between Walnut Park and Hill Plaza Park (today’s Penry Park), came in third.[13]

Renaming of the plaza was postponed until 1925, when, thanks to the lobbying of Park Commissioner Hiram “Hoppy” Hopkins, Center Park was chosen as the plaza’s new name.[14]

Sonoma-Marin Fair pre-breakfast, Center Park, 1950s (Petlauma Historical Museum & Library)

Over the past 100 years, Center Park has served many functions as a community hub, including serving for many decades as the focus of the city’s annual holiday festivities with bands, choirs, tree lightings, and the arrival of Santa Claus. In 1930, the large Christmas tree the city had annually erected in the park was replaced with a living Norway spruce courtesy of the Petaluma Garden Club. By 1933, there were two living trees in the park.[15] Over the years, redwoods were added to the park, until their numbers were reduced to just three trees in 1964 to allow more room for upward growth.[16]

Center Park with planted redwood trees, 1955 (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

In 1985, Hospice of Petaluma launched an annual holiday tradition at the park called “light up a life.” In exchange for a donation, one could dedicate one bulb on the string of lights draped around a redwood tree in the park to the memory of someone deceased. In 2017, the event was moved to Walnut Park.[17]

In 1976, the city council approved erecting a facsimile of the El Camino Real Bell in Center Park. One of more than 585 such bells displayed along California’s mission trail from San Diego to Sonoma, it was created in the early 1900s to promote auto tourism and visitation of the missions. Petaluma obtained their bell from the Redwood Empire Association, who had stored it for decades. Although Petaluma was not on the mission trail, the city laid claim to the bell on the grounds that Padre Jose Altamira had passed through the Petaluma area while searching for a suitable location for the mission in Sonoma.[18]

Mayor Helen Putnam, right, unveiling of the El Camino Real Bell, 1977 (Sonoma County Library)

Over the years, Center Park has also been the topic of proposed repurposing. In 1957, Petaluma’s Chamber of Commerce petitioned the city to build their new headquarters on the park. Legal challenges and opposition from merchants on the west side of the park defeated the effort.[19]

Drawing of proposed Chamber of Commerce Building in Center Park, 1957 (Petaluma Argus Courier)

In 1984, four years after investing in a major facelift to the park, the city council approved making Center Park a memorial site to honor former mayor Helen Putnam, who died that year.  They set aside $85,000 ($257,000 in today’s currency) for a dome fountain, stone seating, additional walkways, permanent lighting, and a memorial plaque. The next year, the city decided instead to purchase the empty lot on Petaluma Boulevard at the end of Golden Concourse to create the memorial site known as Putnam Plaza.[20]

Drawing of proposed Helen Putnam memorial at Center Park, 1984 (Petlauma Argus-Courier)

Today, Center Park remains a landmark pocket park in the city, largely dominated by three towering redwood trees, all of which began showing signs of sickness and distress in the 2010s, resulting in the removal and replacement of the worst afflicted, the redwood at the north end. The park still has hitching posts, only now for bicycles.[21]

Center Park, 2024 (photo John Sheehy)

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] Sonoma County Deed Records, show two grants in 1853 from Columbus Tustin, one to Edward S, Jones, May 16, 1853, and the other to Fred Starkey, August 12, 1853, indicating that he was selling lots.

[2] The boundaries of Tustin’s Addition and Keller development, entitled Brewster’s Survey, are specified in Thos. H. Thompson’s Map of Sonoma County, 1877, Sonoma County Library; “Supervisors Vote to Change Name of Old U.S. 101,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 9, 1958.

[3] “Board of Trustees,” Petaluma Argus, August 19, 1871.

[4] “Will Be Restored,” Petaluma Argus, December 2, 1881; “Should Be Replaced,” Petaluma Courier, January 4, 1882; “Hitching Posts,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1885; “Improvement,” Petaluma Argus, January 28, 1886;  “Good,” Petaluma Courier, June 1, 1887; “About Streets,” Petaluma Courier, July 6, 1887; “Humane Society Holds a Meeting,” Petaluma Argus, October 4, 1905; “Planted New Trees on Main Street,” Petaluma Argus, March 12, 1909.

[5] Dedication of Masonic Temple,” Petaluma Argus, April 21, 1882.

[6] Ad for Pfau’s purchase of livery, Petaluma Argus, April 13, 1865; Ad, Petaluma Argus, October 1873; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, July 23, 1875; “Pfau’s Centennial Building,” Petaluma Argus, March 3, 1876 “Centennial Headquarters,” Petaluma Argus, July 14, 1876; Ad for Centennial Saloon and Music Hall,” Petaluma Courier, March 7, 1878; Ad for Eureka horse, Petaluma Courier, May 31, 1877; Ad, Petaluma Courier, March 24, 1880; “The Druids,” Petaluma Courier, December 22, 1880; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 143.

[7] Chinese stores and shanties are listed in the 1883 Sanborn map of Petaluma extending along Western Avenue from Kentucky to Main Street, and from there down Main and Third streets to D Street, as well as along B Street from Main Street to Fourth Street.

[8] “A Terrible Crime,” Petaluma Courier, January 27, 1886; “Ah Ti, the Murderer,” Petaluma Argus, January 30, 1886; Anti-Coolie Meeting,” Sonoma Democrat, February 6, 1886; “Going Below,” Petaluma Argus, February 13, 1866; “Sebastopol Anti-Chinese League,” Sonoma Democrat, February 27, 1886; “Blew Them Up,” Petaluma Argus, March 10, 1886; Chinatown fires (no headline) Petaluma Courier, September 21, 1887; “An Additional Story,” Petaluma Argus, April 3, 1886; Jeff Elliot examines holes in the accusations against the Wickersham’s cook: “The Wickersham Murders,” “Who Killed the Wickershams,” Santarosahistory.com, http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2017/05/the-wickersham-murders/.

[9] “Town Topics,” Petaluma Courier, May 21, 1893; “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, October 8, 1895; “Independent Foresters,” Petaluma Courier, October 9, 1896; “Salvation Meeting,” Petaluma Courier, November 13, 1896; “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, July 19, 1897; “Socialist Speaker,” Petaluma Courier, October 12, 1897; “The Day,” Petaluma Courier, July 3, 1901; “The Day Fireworks,” Petaluma Courier, July 5, 1902; “Tonight’s Band Concert,” Petaluma Courier, July 5, 1902; “Local Notes, Petaluma Argus, May 23, 1903; “City Trustees,” Petaluma Courier, August 16, 1904; “Congressman D.E. McKinlay,” Petaluma Argus, August 6, 1910; “Opening Band Concert,” Petaluma Courier, May 13, 1915; “G.W. Hoyle Will Be Speaker at Saturday’s Demonstration,” Petaluma Argus, April 15, 1918; “Band Concert Here Tonight,” Petaluma Argus, August 22, 1925; “Armistice Day Parade,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 8, 1930; “1934 Parade of Witches,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 17, 1934.

[10] “Council Votes Parking Place on Lower Main,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1920; “Beautify Main Street,” Petaluma Courier, October 20, 1920; “The Lower Main Street Park Will Remain as Originally Planned,” Petaluma Argus, November 2, 1920.

[11] The seven counties officially formed the North of Bay Counties Association to promote the highway, of which the Redwood Highway Association appears to have been a subsidiary, referenced as early as February 1922; “Redwood Highway Opens Vast Scenic World to Autoist,” San Francisco Examiner, July 21, 1921; “Great North of Bay Development Program Outlined at S.R. Session,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 6, 1921; “North of Bay Association is Formed,” Weekly Calistogan, November 18, 1921; “Redwood Highway to Traverse Scenic Wonderland,” Cloverdale Reveille, January 27, 1922; “Petaluma C. of C. Urge Highway Completion,” Petaluma Courier, February 19, 1922; Peter J. Blodgett, “How Americans Fell in Love With Taking Road Trips,” Time magazine, August 15, 2015. https://time.com/3998949/road-trip-history/

[12] “Redwood Highway Suggested for Hiway,” Petaluma Courier, July 11, 1921; “C.C. Endorses Naming of State Highway and Boulevard Road District,” Petaluma Courier, September 9, 1921; “Santa Rosa Has Prominent Place on Map of Route of U.S. Highway,” Santa Rosa Republican, February 20, 1926.

[13] “Official Program for the Great Egg Day Celebration,” Petaluma Argus, April 19, 1921; “Prize Winners For Park Name,” Petaluma Argus, July 1, 1921; “Park Name is Debated by Council,” Petaluma Argus, July 6, 1921; “City Council Takes First Steps for Street Improvements and Repairs,” Petaluma Argus, July 19, 1921; “City Council Staged Forum on City Rezoning and the Type of Street Pavement to Be Used on Three Thoroughfares,” Petaluma Argus, August 4, 1925.

[14] “Hiram Hopkins Rounds Out 50 Years at G.P. McNears,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 1, 1951.

[15] “News Notes,” Petaluma Argus, December 13, 1916; “Living Yuletide Tree Planted,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 10, 1930; Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 8, 1930; “Santa Claus Will Arrive Here Tonight for the Big Christmas Festival,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 2, 1933; “Grand Xmas Opening Here to Take Place Tonight; Band Concert at Center Park,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 3, 1938; “Yuletide Street Decorations Dedication Here Tonight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 30, 1946.

[16] “McDowell Park Work Urged by Recreation Unit,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 18, 1963.

[17] “Hospice of Petaluma Plans Tree Lighting Campaign,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 20, 1985; “Out and About in Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 30, 2017.

[18] “Petaluma May Soon Receive El Camino Real Mission Bell,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 1976; “Council Rejects Zoning for Apartment Complex,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 17, 1976; “Bell Marks Visit by Mission Priests,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 2, 1977.

[19] “Chamber May Build an Office,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 23, 1957; “Chamber Members Favor Center Park Site, 3 to 1,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 23, 1957; “C of C Office Move Runs into Opposition,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 8, 1957.

[20] “Center Park Facelift,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 30, 1980; “Center Park at Tribute to Helen Putnam,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 20, 1984; “Reconsider Tribute to Putnam,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 21, 1985; “New Location for Putnam Tribute,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 13, 1985; “Downtown Lot Could Become Park,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 22, 1985.

[21] “Iconic Redwood Cutdown,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 17, 2013.

Henry Chenault

PETALUMA BUSINESSMAN, CIVIC BOOSTER, AND CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST

Henry Chenault ran the local shoeshine stand in downtown Petaluma from the 1930s through the 1960s. Thanks to his friendly, engaging charm, his sidewalk stand quickly became a popular local crossroads for a wide range of discussions and camaraderie.

In this video presentation, Petaluma historian John Sheehy remembers many of those days and shares Henry’s history alongside many stories that highlight his influence on Petaluma. He also shares the history Henry kept to himself of his involvement as a Buffalo Soldier in the 1917 Houston uprising, one of the worse examples of racial injustice in U.S. military history, and how he channeled that experience into civil rights activism in Petaluma.

Julia Moriarty Casey

Julia Moriarty Casey, ca. 1900 (Sheehy family collection)

Born in County Kerry, Ireland, Julia was only 14 when she boarded a ship in 1866 called The City of Dublin bound for New York City accompanied by her Aunt Mary Moriarty, who had taken her in after she lost her mother at age 10. Also along on the journey were Mary’s three daughters, all under 18.

The women comprised part of the second wave of Irish emigration, the first wave having peaked during the 1850s in the wake of the Great Famine that devasted Ireland following the potato crop failure in 1845. Unlike the first wave, the second wave was predominately made up of single females, the majority of them under the age of 25.

Irish immigrants approach New York aboard ship in 1893 (photo Museum of the City of New York)

From New York City, the Moriarty women sailed via the Isthmus of Panama for San Francisco, where Julia was briefly reunited with her father, who had left Ireland for America soon after his wife’s death.

Like more than three quarters of Irish female immigrants, Julia found ready employment for five years as a domestic for a liquor merchant and his family in San Francisco. It was grueling employment that most working-class American girls avoided, as domestic service bore a social stigma, preferring jobs as shop girls, mill hands, and seamstresses.

Illustration of a St. Patrick’s Day dance (State Library of New South Wales)

While attending a St. Patrick’s Day dance, 19-year old Julia met a 30-year old Irish bachelor from Petaluma’s Lakeville area named John Casey. Casey had emigrated to America from County Kerry in 1863 with an older brother, Jeremiah, and two sisters, Mary and Catherine. Jeremiah and John established a 120-acre wheat farm on the northern end of Tolay Lake. Mary married a neighboring farmer named George Eades, and Catherine another neighboring farmer named John Gregory.

Site of the Casey Ranch in Lakeville (photo Scott Hess)

After their marriage, John and Julia leased a 160-acre ranch in Lakeville from J.B. Lewis for raising dairy cows. Julia gave birth to seven children, who all attended St. Vincent’s Academy on Howard Street. Soon after the birth of her sixth child in 1887, John Casey died unexpectedly from a bad case of the measles.

With the help of her sons, Julia operated the dairy ranch until 1898, when she moved into Petaluma, purchasing a house at 322 Bassett Street and adjacent empty lot. On the lot she built a two story house at 326 Bassett Street, renting it out to boarders for income before eventually selling it to fellow Irish immigrants Charles and Hannah Sheehy. Sheehy established a painting business on Main Street in 1973. Julia’s youngest daughter Mary married the Sheehy’s oldest son Charles, Jr.

326 and 322 Bassett Street, both built by Julia Casey (Sheehy family collection)

Julia was very involved with her parish at St. Vincent’s Catholic Church, and a founding member and longtime officer of Catholic Ladies Aid Society, established in 1891. In 1922, she replaced her house at 322 Bassett Street with a new modern home built by local contractor Stewart Scott. By that time, three other houses she had purchased on the block were occupied by members of her extended family.

Of Julia’s seven children, none of her fiv e sons married, only her two daughters. Catherine (1874-1925) married John Bennett, a prominent Molino nurseryman during Sebastopol’s apple boom; Jeremiah Casey (1875-1893) died at 19 from lung disease; John (Jack) Casey (1877-1951) was a teamster for the Golden Eagle Mill; William (1878-1968) was general manager of A. Kahn Grocery and grain distribution; James (1886-1928) operated meat markets, including King’s Corner Grocery on Bodega Avenue; George (1881-1972) was ranch manager for Joe Redding in Rancho Nicasio and Shellville; Mary (1887-1969) married Charles Sheehy, Jr., who operated Sheehy Brothers Painting at 128 Kentucky Street until his unexpected death in 1929. Mary supported her two children working for Newburg department store, Tomasini’s Hardware, and for ten years in the office of the Petaluma Creamery.

Julia Casey with granddaughter Betty Sheehy, 1922 (Sheehy family collection)

Julia died at her home surrounded by family members in 1934 at the age of 82. Through hard work, persistence, community engagement, and family devotion, she overcame poverty and adversity to reign as the matriarch of a thriving Irish clan in Petaluma.

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Julia Moriarty Casey was the great-grandmother of the author.