Author: John Patrick Sheehy

John is a history detective who digs beneath the legends, folklore, and myths to learn what’s either been hidden from the common narrative or else lost to time, in hopes of enlarging the collective understanding of our culture and communities.

The Land Scam that Created Petaluma

1855 map of Petaluma (Sonoma County Library)

In the summer of 1851, George H. Keller pulled up to a small encampment near the headwaters of the Petaluma Creek Set on the former site of a Miwok trading village called Lekituit. The camp was little more than a few trading posts, a potato warehouse, and a handful of rustic redwood cabins occupied by meat hunters. Five miles to the east of the creek, the Petaluma Adobe, General Mariano Vallejo’s former hide and tallow factory, was being used as a hostel for disappointed gold miners streaming into the area in search of land.[1]

General Vallejo’s former Petaluma Adobe, 1880 (Sonoma County Library)

With the help of his son Garret and son-in-law A.T. Kyle, Keller quickly assembled a makeshift building along the creek to serve as a combination general store, dining house, and overnight lodge.[2] A 50-year old farmer from Missouri, Keller had come away from the gold fields empty handed but still plagued with gold fever. Within a few months, he was ready to stake a claim to what he surmised to be California’s next gold rush: land speculation. There was just one hitch—the land wasn’t for sale.

By 1851, squatting had become quite common in the American West. Thanks to the Preemption Act of 1841, a squatter had the right to purchase 160 acres in the public domain, assuming he had resided on the land for at least 14 months or made agricultural improvements to it for five years.[3] But in California, aspiring settlers discovered that the land most coveted for farming and ranching was privately held in Mexican land grants.[4] The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which brought an end to the Mexican-American War, protected Mexican ownership of the grants. At least it appeared to.[5]

California’s 813 Mexican land grants encompassed more than 10 million acres, or roughly 10% of the state, averaging 17,000 acres each.[6]

1860 U.S. survey map of Mexican Land Grants in color within 40 miles of San Francisco (map by Lander Ransom, Bancroft Library)

Originally established as an incentive to draw Mexican settlers to the Alta California frontier, the land grants found few takers, and were predominately doled to former Mexican soldiers and government officials. More than half of the grants were issued in the 1840s, as speculation of an imminent American takeover of the territory grew.[7]

The large ranchos were used primarily for raising cattle to supply Alta California’s thriving hide and tallow export business with Europe and New England. As cattle required as much as 30 acres a piece for grazing room, rancheros of 4,000 to 5,000 acres were relatively modest enterprises.[8]

Mexican cattle round-up on open range (Bill Murphy, A Pictorial History of California)

Due to Alta California’s laissez-faire legal system, land grant deeds were often sketchy, incomplete, and in some cases, fraudulent. The land itself was haphazardly surveyed, if surveyed at all.[9] More than half of the grants were issued in the 1840s, as speculation of an imminent American territorial takeover grew.[10]  

In 1850, after surveying the land grants, California’s secretary of state, Henry Halleck, issued a report classifying most of them “very doubtful, if not entirely fraudulent.” That served to support the thinking of many American settlers that, having won the battle with Mexico, the United States was entitled to ignore the terms of Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and instead treat the land grants as spoils of war, there for the taking.[11]

One of California’s first elected senators, William Gwin, was a strong settler advocate. He pushed through Congress the California Land Act in the spring of 1851, subjecting all Mexican land grant claims protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to legal review by an appointed Land Commission, placing the burden on the claimants to prove their ownership. 

California Senator William Gwin, 1850 (Library of Congress)

Ostensibly created to bring clarity to the legal morass, Gwin’s bill effectively putting the grants into play, opening the door to a host of American swindlers and land sharks. The ethos of the time, as David Starr Jordan noted, was simply: “whatever is not nailed down is mine, and whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”

Prospective settlers—an estimated 230,000 flooded into California by the early 1850s—were faced with one of two gambles: either purchase property from someone whose land grant claim might ultimately be nullified by the Land Commission, or else take a chance illegally squatting, in hopes the claim would be rejected and the land placed into the public domain, allowing them to make their own preemptive claim.[12]

Keller exercised a third option. Making a squatter’s illegal claim to 158 acres of a 13,316-acre Mexican land grant known as the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, he subdivided about 40 acres of the claim into a new town he called Petaluma, and began selling off lots to ready buyers.[13]

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 would play out over the next two decades in a series of dramatic twists and turns, leaving a persistent cloud hanging over the booming river town of Petaluma.

The Illegitimate Founding

Born in Kentucky in 1801, George Horine Keller tried his hand at various undertakings before settling down in 1835 on a farm in Weston, Missouri, along the Missouri River, and raising five children with his wife Nancy.

In the spring of 1850, he loaded up a wagon and set out for the Gold Rush with his eldest son, 19-year-old Garret Valentine Keller (mistaken in some early Petaluma histories as the city’s founder under the name “Garrett W. Keller”), and his son-in-law, 19-year old Andrew Thomas Kyle. The three men joined a wagon train of other prospectors departing for California from nearby St. Joseph, Missouri.[14]

After a fruitless year in the mines, the Keller party made its way to Sonoma County, most likely on the recommendation of Lilburn Boggs, Missouri’s former governor. Boggs had emigrated to the area with his family in 1846, after losing his home and mercantile business during an economic recession. Initially taken in by General Vallejo at the Petaluma Adobe just before it was plundered during the Bear Flag Revolt, Boggs soon settled in the town of Sonoma, where he opened a dry goods store and became alcalde, or judicial and administrative officer for the territory of Northern California extending to the Oregon border.[15]

Lilburn Boggs, Sonoma alcalde and former Missouri governor (photo State Historical Society of Missouri)

Boggs’ reports of Sonoma County’s rich farmlands and mild climate circulated among Missourians back home as well in the gold fields. Of the 560 settlers counted in the 1850 Sonoma County census, 108 were from Missouri.[16] 

Keller’s connection to Boggs may have come through Reverend Lorenzo Waugh, his Methodist minister back in Weston, who was well acquainted with the ex-governor. (Waugh himself emigrated to Petaluma in the fall of 1852).[17]

In January 1852, Keller hired a surveyor named J.A. Brewster to plat the town on 40 acres of his claim, extending west from the Petaluma Creek to Liberty and Kent streets, north to West and Bridge streets (today’s Lakeville Street), and south to A Street. After naming the streets—including Keller and Kentucky streets, the latter for his birth state—Keller began selling off property lots at this store for $10 apiece (roughly $300 in today’s currency).[18]

Despite the fact he had no legal claim to the land, many of Keller’s deed sales were recorded by the county. It may have had something to do with the fact that Bogg’s son William was the county’s first recorder of deeds.[19] 

Sonoma County Recorder of Deeds, William M. Boggs (Sonoma County Library)

In February, Keller’s store also became the new town’s post office, with a mail carrier passing through town on horseback once a week, and Keller’s 19-year old son Garret appointed the town’s first federal postmaster.[20] A political appointment, it was most likely facilitated by ex-Governor Boggs, who had been appointed Sonoma’s first postmaster in 1849, and elected to the California State Assembly in the fall of 1851.[21]

In July, the newly established Kent & Smith dry goods store on Main Street (across from today’s Putnam Plaza) hosted an Independence Day celebration that drew 150 settlers from the surrounding area. By the end of the year, the town hosted roughly 50 houses, two hotels, the dry goods store, a livery, and a blacksmith.

Flat-bottom schooners loaded with potatoes, meat, and grains, plied up and down the Petaluma creek, and The Red Jacket, a paddle-wheel steamer, ferried passengers and cargo as far as Haystack Landing, a relatively deep-water dock a mile and a half south of the downtown.[22]

The steamboat Rambler navigation the Petaluma Creek, 1850s (illustration Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

By the spring of 1853, Keller and his son-in-law Kyle had returned to Missouri with the proceeds of their development. The next year, they were part of a company of developers who founded Leavenworth, the first town to be established in the new Kansas Territory, employing an illegal land grab similar to the one Keller used in Petaluma, only this time on a land owned by Native Americans.[23]

Petaluma’s Land Grant Quagmire

One reason for Keller’s departure from Petaluma may have been commencement of the Land Commission’s reviews in the summer of 1852. By then, at least 42% of California’s 813 land grants had fallen into the hands of either American speculators or settlers who married into Mexican families, where the grants served as dowries.[24]

The new town of Petaluma sat at the northern tip of the 13,316-acre Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, which primarily resided in Marin County. The rancho’s ownership was cloudy. Originally, it was awarded in 1838 to Antonio Ortega, a former priest and Mexican soldier who served as General Vallejo’s major-domo in secularizing the Sonoma mission. Vallejo allegedly made the grant to Ortega—by all accounts a sexual predator and generally reprehensible character—as a consolation prize after firing him.[25]

Vallejo’s nephew, Alta California governor Juan Alvarado, signed Ortega’s land patent in 1840, although it was later charged his signature was postdated to when the grant was filed with the Land Commission in 1852. The sticky point was that Ortega never actually lived on the ranch.[26]

Alta California Governor Juan Alvarado (illustration public domain)

Under Mexican law, a grantee was required to build a primary residence on the rancho within a year, and make use it for grazing or cultivation. It was not to be subdivided nor rented out, nor was the owner to move out of Alta California.[27]

The same year the 58-year old Ortega received the grant, he entered into an apparent arranged marriage with Francisca Miranda, the 18-year old daughter of Vallejo’s livestock foreman at the Petaluma Adobe, Juan Miranda. Ortega left occupation of the ranch to Miranda, who, along with his son Teodoro, built a family house there, cultivating 20 acres of corn and vegetables, and raising a couple thousand head of cattle. Ortega remained for the most part in Sonoma, where he operated a liquor store off the town square.[28]

In 1843, things got messy when Ortega left his pregnant wife, who was having an affair with another man, to join a money-making cattle drive to Oregon led by Sonoma’s alcalde, or mayor. During his absence, Juan Miranda petitioned the new governor of Alta California, Manuel Micheltorena, for ownership of the land grant, claiming his father-in-law had abandoned the property and the territory.[29]

Papers were drawn up transferring the title to Miranda, but before Micheltorena could sign them, he was overthrown in a political revolution. Juan Miranda died soon afterward.[30] His claim however, would live on.

1860 map of land holdings around Petaluma—the Miranda Rancho on the map was part of the original Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio (courtesy of Stanford Libraries)

In 1847, Ortega returned from Oregon and reclaimed the rancho. The next year, at the end of the Mexican-American War, he made a gift of it to a Jesuit priest named Father Abraham Brouillet who was looking for contributions to start a school in Santa Clara. In exchange, Brouillet agreed to educate Ortega’s children. Among those to witness the grant transfer was Juan Miranda’s son Teodoro, who had taken over running the rancho after his father’s death.[31]

Brouillet sold the rancho in 1852 for $5,000 ($158,000 in today’s currency) to an American speculator named Charles White. Shortly after filing his claim with the Land Commission on February 7, 1853, White died. Later that year, his widow, Ellen White, sold the claim to James F. Stuart, a San Francisco merchant, at a loss for $3,000 ($95,000 in today’s currency).[32]

Illustration of James F. Stuart (San Francisco Call, November 18, 1893)

Stuart was well aware of Keller’s new town of Petaluma on the rancho. It was, in fact, part of what attracted him to the claim. He was surprised however to find that a competing claim had been filed with the Land Commission on February 7, 1852, a year before White’s filing. That claim—originally the Miranda claim—had been purchased at public auction on September 20, 1850, by a 22-year old American speculator named Thomas B. Valentine.

Illustration of Thomas B. Valentine (San Francisco Examiner, October 28, 1898)

As it turned out, Juan Miranda’s Teodoro and other heirs had put the claim up for auction after asking the Marin County probate court to liquidate Miranda’s assets in 1850. Valentine bid $9,550 ($300,000 in today’s currency), which 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. [33]

Valentine came to California in 1849 with a group of New York gold-seekers who called themselves the California Company. Led in part by John Woodhouse Audubon, a naturalist and artist like his famous father, the company’s 96 members set off overland from New Orleans in quasi-military uniforms, funded with an $27,000 investment ($850,000 in today’s currency) from a wealthy benefactor. After a tortuous journey through the southwest, during which many members either turned back or died of cholera, 35 remaining members, including Valentine, reached California. By all accounts, they struck out in the gold fields.[34]

John Woodhouse Audubon (photo public domain)

Which is when Valentine turned to land speculation, purchasing the Miranda claim.

Valentine’s ad in the July 23, 1852, edition of the Daily Alta California newspaper, laying claim to the Miranda land grant

By the time Stuart sought him out about his competing claim in 1853, Valentine was working for a commercial printer in San Francisco.[35] The next year, he replaced one of the partners in the firm, which, as Francis, Valentine & Co., would go on to reign as one of the city’s top printing shops for the remainder of the 1800s.[36]

After comparing notes, Stuart and Valentine became aware of the weaknesses of their respective claims. The Miranda claim lacked a governor’s signature and the Ortega claim a proof of residency. Concerned their rival claims might cancel each other out, the two men cut a deal. Valentine agreed to withdraw his claim in exchange for a percentage of the subdivision sales Stuart made from the land grant—50% for property in the upper half of the land grant where the town of Petaluma sat, and 33% for sales in the lower half extending into Marin County.[37]

In June 1855, four months after Valentine withdrew his competing claim, the Land Commission confirmed the legitimacy of Stuart’s claim.[38] Stuart quickly opened an real estate office in Petaluma, placing ads in the Sonoma County Journal newspaper to inform residents they had a legal obligation to purchase their property deeds from him, regardless of whatever bogus deeds they held from Keller or any other seller.[39]

James Stuart’s ad in Petaluma’s Sonoma County Journal, 1855

More than 200 residents paid Stuart an average $350 ($10,000 in today’s currency) to purchase a deed, generating a total of $70,000 ($2 million in today’s currency), half of which Stuart split with Valentine.[40](The side of town east of the Petaluma Creek was not included in Stuart’s demand, as it was part of the undisputed 66,000-acre Rancho Petaluma land grant held by General Mariano Vallejo, who in 1853 sold 267 acres that came to comprise East Petaluma to the settler Tom Hopper).[41]

General Mariano Vallejo (Sonoma County Library)

Valentine, however, soured on their division of spoils. When Stuart’s claim went before the U.S District Court on appeal— almost all of the decisions of the Land Commission were appealed as a matter of course—Valentine invoked an obscure clause in the Land Act that allowed him to refile his original Miranda claim, along with new depositions stating that Ortega had never resided on the property and had abandoned ownership when he moved to Oregon Territory. He also provided depositions claiming the governor’s signature of Ortega’s claim was postdated back to 1840 (the original filing of the claim was missing from the government archives).[42]

In August 1857, the Ninth District Court upheld the Land Commission’s ruling of Stuart’s claim, after which Valentine filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.[43]

Meanwhile, Petaluma, having grown to a population of 1,300, moved ahead in 1858 to officially incorporate as a city, accepting Stuart’s assurances that his legal ownership of the land grant would withstand Valentine’s court appeal.[44] It would prove to be wishful thinking.

1857 illustration of Petaluma (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

The Settler Wars

As the Ortega-Miranda land grant battle unfolded, waves of settlers continued to pour into California. By 1860, Sonoma County’s non-native population, which stood at 560 in 1850, had grown to 12,000, consisting largely of farmers, with more than 200,000 acres under cultivation.[45] The primary driver of that growth was California’s wheat boom.

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 during the Civil War, which disrupted Midwest wheat exports to Europe. By the mid-1860s, 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.[46]

Between 1852 and 1856, the Land Commission confirmed 514 of the 813 claims filed. The problem was, most of their decisions were appealed in federal district court, and then, in about 100 cases, the U.S. Supreme Court. Although 75% of the commission’s decisions were upheld on appeal, claimants had to wait on average 17 years to receive their final patents.[47]

This bureaucratic quagmire worked to the detriment of many Mexican claimants who were land rich but relatively cash poor. In addition to being thrust into a costly, protracted maze of hearings and appeals, they also faced California’s predatory property taxes, which served as an incentive to monetize the land through either intensive cultivation or subdivision sales.

As a result, many original claimants were forced to sell or mortgage their property to their Yankee lawyers—a swarm of whom descended upon California following passage of the Land Act—or American land sharks, at prices well below the land’s true value.[48]

With so many land grants tied up in appeals, the wheat boom led to clashes between claimants and settlers, turning in some cases into small-scale warfare, especially when claimants resorted to trying to eject large holdings of “squatters.” In 1857, frustrated settlers formed a statewide Settlers’ League to lobby elected official for their rights as homesteaders. Some members formed secret societies devoted to defying government authority and terrorizing land grant claimants.[49]

In 1853, Antonio Piña, owner of the 13,000-acre Rancho Tzabaco, the largest in the Russian River Valley, was shot to death by squatters, after he drove a herd of horses over a wheat field they had planted on his land. With the rancho in debt, his siblings signed it over after a five-year holding period to their American lawyer, John Frisbie, a real estate speculator and the son-in-law of General Vallejo.[50] The claim was confirmed by the Land Commission just before Frisbie took possession in 1858, and a mandatory survey ordered.

John Frisbee, Vallejo’s son-in-law (illustration public domain)

The fact that Mexican land grants lacked clearly specified boundaries, provided owners with the ability to influence government surveyors in drawing their property lines so as to exclude barren and mountain waste and include desirable valley acreage. In the case of the Rancho Tzabaco, that included acreage improved by settlers that was allegedly adjacent to the original land grant. Settlers responded by mobbing the surveyors and destroying their field notes. Mass meetings followed, with angry denunciations of “pestilential land thieves” and appeals for a new survey.[51]

In the spring of 1859, the Land Commission disclosed they had uncovered at least 200 fraudulent land grant claims, or a quarter of the claims filed. A Sonoma County chapter of the Settlers’ League, led by Petaluma minister Reverend Lorenzo Waugh (Keller’s former minister from Missouri), pledged to not purchase property held in any of the county’s 24 land grants until they had ferreted out the crooked land sharks and determined which claims were legally “settled and reliable.”[52]

Rev. Lorenzo Waugh (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

That led within a few months to the “Bodega War.”

The claimant of the Bodega Rancho land grant, an ambitious, young San Francisco swindler named Tyler Curtis, requested that the county sheriff, L. Green, evict 48 squatters on his rancho. To assist the sheriff, Curtis sent along 40 armed “hirelings” from San Francisco. They were met in Bodega by 80 armed members of the Settlers’ League. After some mediation by Sheriff Green, Curtis agreed to stand down. The Settlers’ League escorted him and his hirelings back to Petaluma, where a local crowd gathered to send them off on the ferry to San Francisco with a cannon salute.[53]

Tensions between squatters and land grant claimants further intensified during the Civil War, as Sonoma County split into two factions, with Union loyalists centered around Petaluma and Copperheads on the Santa Rosa plain.

In June 1862, a newly appointed sheriff, Joseph M. Bowles of Petaluma, was dispatched to Healdsburg to serve eviction notices to five farms of squatters on Henry Fitch’s Rancho Sotoyome land grant. Prior to the sheriff’s arrival, a “settlers army” of 80 armed men gathered in Healdsburg’s town square to the cheers of a crowd of onlookers, before riding off to successfully block the sheriff’s efforts.

Sonoma County Sheriff Joseph M. Bowles (Sonoma County Library)

In mid-July, Bowles returned to Healdsburg with a posse comitatus of 250 lightly armed men. He was met by 50 armed members of the Settlers’ League, with an estimated 200 armed men hiding in the nearby woods. After it became clear the eviction would not proceed without bloodshed, the sheriff and his men withdrew, leaving the Settlers’ League to throw a barbecue for the large crowd of supporters who had gathered to watch the showdown.[54] 

In September, Bowles went back upon orders from the governor, this time accompanied by two Union militias from Petaluma, the Petaluma Guard, formed in 1854, and a newly formed unit of Irish immigrants, the Emmet Rifles.[55] They were confronted by a band of armed men with blackened faces, who, upon seeing the militia units, “skedaddled” away, allowing Bowles to peacefully evict the squatters.[56]

Emmet Rifles and Petaluma Guard gathered in front of the Phoenix Building on Main Street in Petaluma, 1862 (Sonoma County Library)

Act of Congress

It was against this contentious backdrop that Valentine’s appeal of his land grant claim made it way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1860, the court remanded the case back to the District Court, which ruled again in favor of Stuart. Not to be deterred, Valentine appealed once again to Supreme Court, which, in April 1864, ruled both the Ortega and Miranda claims invalid, releasing the land into the public domain.[57]

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).[58] For early settlers, it would be the third payment they had to make for their property, having first paid Keller and then Stuart.

Stuart, who by that time had used his experience in the case to become a prominent land rights attorney and real estate agent, specializing in disputed land grants, supported the court’s decision.[59] Valentine did not. Well before the ruling, he had begun hedging his bets by lobbying Congress for the right to prove his claim in court.

In 1863, before the Supreme Court’s ruling, he persuaded California’s outgoing U.S. senator, Milton Latham, a pro-Southern Democrat, to introduce a bill in Congress reopening review of his claim.

Senator Milton Latham (Bancroft Library)

Members of California’s state legislature took a vote to protest Latham’s bill, but were defeated. Although technically a Union state, California was politically split between Unionist and secessionists. The secessionists—heavily concentrated in Southern California—embraced Latham’s bill as a political means of instilling chaos in the state, as it would signal ripping up other land titles throughout the agricultural regions of California, creating anarchy and confusion.

Latham’s bill died in committee, but Valentine wasted no time increasing his lobbying of Congress once the Supreme Court’s ruling came down.[60] His persistence left Petaluma with an underlying sense of uncertainty.

“If the Congress revives the claim,” wrote the Sonoma County Journal, “it will be the worst blight that ever cursed Petaluma. It will be like rust upon a field of wheat, destroying every source of life and vitality. It will reduce the value of property by rendering it unsaleable.”[61]

In March 1865, California’s first elected Republican senator, John Conness, shepherded through Congress the General Townsite Bill, which provided for the government surveying and plotting Petaluma, after which land patents could be easily obtained by citizens for their property.[62]A group of local residents raised $3,000 ($50,000 in today’s currency) to have the government survey the rancho.[63]

1865 map of Petaluma (Sonoma County Library)

A year later, after Conness announced Valentine’s latest request to Congress had been rejected, Petaluma celebrated by adorning the town with banners and the firing off a cannon while the Petaluma Brass band played.

By that time, roughly 2,500 people had purchased preemptive claims on the 13,316-acre Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio.[64] On March 1, 1867, Congress strengthened the city’s position by passing a bill ceding all government-owned land within Petaluma to the city.[65]

Still Valentine persisted. In coming years, two bills for reopening his claim passed in the House of Representatives, but died in the Senate. In 1871, a bill passed the Senate, but stalled in the House before they adjourned for the season.[66]

Finally, in 1872, Congress passed an act to have Valentine’s appeal reviewed by the Ninth District Court, with the option of appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a contingency, the bill stipulated that in the event the case was decided in Valentine’s favor, he would accept land scrip in lieu of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, which he could apply to acquiring unclaimed public land elsewhere in the U.S. Thanks largely to vibrant growth of Petaluma, the property value of the 13,316-acre rancho at the time was estimated at $2 million ($44 million in today’s currency). [67]

Illustration of Petaluma’s Main Street, 1882 (Sonoma County Library)

To the surprise of many, the Ninth District Court ruled in Valentine’s favor, and in January 1874, their ruling was affirmed by the Supreme Court. Valentine was compensated with his land scrip, which he put to notorious use in 17 different states over the next 20 years, gaining fame for selling off portions of the scrip to land speculators around the country, who then laid claim to prominent pockets of properties still in the public domain.[68]

For the first time in the 22 years since George Keller founded the town, Petaluma was out from under the cloud of uncertainty.[69]As for Keller, after returning to Missouri, he helped to engineer an even larger illegal development scheme in co-founding Leavenworth, the first town in the new Kansas Territory, on land held by the Delaware Indians. He died in in Kansas in 1876, at the age of 75, never to return to Petaluma.[70]

Gravesite of Petaluma founder George H.
Keller, Lansing, Kansas (photo public domain)

*****

Special thanks to Dana Keller Jones Schaffer for her assistance with research of George H. Keller.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pp. 54-55; J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 131, pp. 259-262; Thos. Thompson, Historical Atlas Map of Sonoma County (Oakland, CA: Thos. Thompson & Co, 1877), p. 20.

[2] Munro-Fraser, pgs. 131, 259.

[3] The Preemption Act of 1841, 27th Congress, Ch. 16, 5 Stat. 453 (1841), accessed from www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org; Paul W. Gates, The California Land Act of 1851, California Historical Society, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Dec., 1971), pp. 395–430.

[4] David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (October., 1979), p. 437.

[5] Hornbeck, p. 437.

[6] Hornbeck, pgs. 438, 443.

[7] Hornbeck, p. 438; Donald J. Pisani, “Squatter Law in California, 1850-1858,” Western Historical Quarterly, Autumn, 1994, Vol. 25, No. 3, pgs. 286, 290.

[8] Pisani, p. 286.

[9] Pisani, p. 286; Hornbeck, pgs. 435, 438.

[10] Hornbeck, p. 438; Pisani, pgs. 286, 290.

[11] Pisani, p. 289-290.

[12] Pisani, pp. 291-292.

[13] 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.

[14] “Territorial Legislature of 1857-58: George Horine Keller,” Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, p. 211.

[15] 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.

[16] “Donald Edwards, pp. 15-18; “Gaye Lebaron’s Notebook,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 1, 1990.

[17] Lorenzo Waugh, Autobiography of Lorenzo Waugh (San Francisco: S.P. Taylor & Co., 1885), p. 135, 189; “A Long Life: Short Historical Sketch of Rev. Lorenzo Waugh,” Daily Commonwealth, August 27, 1884.

[18] “Historical: Petaluma’s Birth and Growth,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1892; Heig, p. 29.

[19] “Deeds of Sonoma County, 1847-1901,” film #008117705, LDS FamilySearch database. familysearch.org.

[20] Sacramento Daily Union: “Post Offices in California,” November 15, 1852; “Lillian Boggs,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016), pp. 19; A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United States, 1853, United States, Department of State; “Historical: Petaluma’s Birth and Growth,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1892.

[21] Claire Prechtel-Kluskaens, “The Nineteenth-century Postmaster and his Duties,” NGS Magazine, National Genealogical Society, January, 2007; William Boggs, “Lillian Boggs,” F.A. Sampson, ed., Missouri Historical Review, Vol. IV (October 1909-July 1910), pp. 109; “First Postmasters,” Petaluma Argus, April 6, 1926; Heig, p. 30.

[22] Thos. Thompson, Historical Atlas map of Sonoma County (Oakland, CA: Thos. Thompson & Co, 1877), p. 20; “Historical: Petaluma’s Birth and Growth,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1892; Robert Allan Thompson, pp. 54-55; Munro-Fraser, pgs. 131, 259-262.

[23] Henry Miles Moore, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the City and County of Leavenworth,” Western Life (Leavenworth, KS), August 3, 1900.

[24] Paul Gates, “The California Land Act of 1851,” California Historical Quarterly, December 1971, Vol. 50, No. 4. Pgs. 402, 408, 410; Hornbeck, pgs. 440, 442.

[25] Heig, p. 15; George Tays, “Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Sonoma: A Biography and History,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sep., 1937), pp. 237, 240, 241; 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.html.

[26] White vs. The United States, 1863 transcript; U.S. Supreme Court; United States v. White, 64 U.S. 23 How. 249 (1859).

[27] Pisani, p. 291; “White vs. The United States” transcript, pgs. 1, 9.

[28] White vs. The United States, 1863 transcript.

[29] White vs. The United States, 1863 transcript.

[30] White vs. The United States, 1863 transcript.

[31] White vs. The United States, 1863 transcript.

[32] California Supreme Court, Reports of Cases Determined in the Supreme Court of the State of California, Volume 16, 1861, pp. 473-504. Google/com.books.

[33] “Report in the Matter of Juan Miranda,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 2, 1865; Robert Lee, “Valentine Scrip: The Saga of Land Locations in Southern Dakota Territory Originating from a Mexican Land Grant,” South Dakota History Journal, Vol 2, No. 3, 1972, pp. 263-264; Judge James A. Short, order by probate court. Marin County, Calif., 19 Aug. 1850. 24 Jan. 1851, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

[34] Jeanne Skinner Van Nostrand and J. H. Bachman, “Audubon’s Ill-Fated Western Journey: Recalled by the Diary of J. H. Bachman,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Dec., 1942), pp. 289-310; John W. Audubon, Audubon’s Western Journal, 1849-1850 (Cleveland, OH: A H. Clark Company, 1906), p. 195.

[35] “San Francisco City Directory 1852-53, 1852: Monson, Haswell & Co., Printers, 159 Montgomery St.

[36] “Lesson of a Busy Life: T.B. Valentine, the Pioneer Printer, Passes to His Rest,” San Francisco Call, October 28, 1896; Henry R. Wanger, “Commercial Printers of San Francisco from 1851 to 1880,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. 33 (1939), pp. 73-74; “The Francis-Valentine Company, San Francisco,” The Inland Printer, Volume XVIII, October 1896 to March, 1897. p. 679.

[37] Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County, pp. 154, 256-58; “After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863; “Supreme Court Decisions, Sacramento Daily Union, April 4, 1860.

[38] Robert Lee, p. 266.

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

[40] “The Miranda Resolutions,” Sonoma County Journal, February 27, 1863.

[41] “Ancient Land History,” Petaluma Courier, November 30, 1912.

[42] “After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863; White vs. The United States, 1863 transcript.

[43] “After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863; Robert Lee, p. 266.

[44] Thos. Thompson, p.20.

[45] “Population of Sonoma County,” Sonoma Democrat, September 27, 1860; “1860 Census: Agriculture of the United States,” United States Census Bureau, p. 10. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/agriculture/1860b-05.pdf

[46] “Varieties: The Sonoma Bulletin Says,” Placer Herald, June 8, 1853; Donald Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness (Berkeley: UC Press, 1984), p. 5-10;

James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” December 2010,

America Latina en la Historia Economica 17(34):37-66; James Gerber, “Gold Rushes and the Trans-pacific Wheat Trade, California and Australia, 1848-57,” Pacific and Pacific Rim Economic History Since the 16th Century, edited by Dennis O. Flynn, A.J. H. Lathan, and Lionell Frost (NJ: Routledge, 1999)

[47] “Gaye LeBaron,” column, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 7, 1981; Hornbeck, pp. 439-440; Pisani, p. 287.

[48] Paul W. Gates, “California’s Embattled Settlers,” p. 124; Hornbeck, p. 440.

[49] “Settlers’ League,” Sonoma County Journal, May 15, 1857; Colonel L. A. Norton, “The Squatter Wars,” Life and Adventures of Colonel Norton (Big Byte Books, 2014),pp. 258-275; Paul W. Gates, Land and Law in California: Essays on Land Policies (Iowa State University Press, 1991), pp. 307-308.

[50] “Shooting in Sonoma,” Los Angeles Star, May 7, 1853.

[51] “The Healdsburg Outage,” Alta California, May 10, 1858; Gates, pp. 119-120.

[52] Daily Commonwealth: “A Long Life: Short Historical Sketch of Rev. Lorenzo Waugh,” August 27, 1884.

[53] “Gaye LeBaron,” column, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 7, 1981.

[54] Sonoma County Journal: “The Healdsburg War,” June 25, 1862; “Letter from the Seat of War,” “The Settler War Again,” “Healdsburg War,” July 16, 1862; “The Healdsburg Ware, Sonoma County Journal, July 18, 1862.

[55] “History of the Petaluma City Guard (Petaluma Union Mounted Rifles), California Militia/National Guard of California 1864-1868.” militarymuseum.org; “California Militia and National Guard Unit Histories: Emmet Rifles, Petaluma Guard,” February 8, 2016. militarymuseum.org. 

[56] “Settler Troubles,” Sonoma County Journal, September 24, 1862; “Settlers’ Troubles Happily Terminated,” Petaluma Argus, October 1, 1862; Munro-Fraser, pp. 83-85; Historic California Militia and National Guard Units Emmet Guard: Adjutant General Report 1862, Page 20, http://www.militarymuseum.org/EmmetRifles.html

[57] Robert 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

[58] “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

[59] “His Last Call: Death of Attorney James F. Stuart,” San Francisco Call, November 19, 1893.

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

[61] “The Miranda Claim,” Sonoma County Journal, December 31, 1862.

[62] “Legislation for California,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 16, 1865; “The Miranda Case Defeated,” Argus, April 3, 1865.

[63] “Settler’s Meeting, Petaluma Weekly Argus, June 23, 1864; Citizen’s Lookout,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, December 7, 1865.

[64] “Cause for Rejoicing,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, May 17, 1866; “Opposed to Miranda,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, April 26, 1866.

[65] Thirty-Ninth Congress Records, Session 2, 1867, page 418. www.loc.gov/law.

[66] Robert Lee, pp. 266-267.

[67] U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Congressional Globe, 42nd Congress, 2nd Session, 1872, pp. 1186-1187.

[68] W.W. Robinson, Land in California: The Story of Mission Lands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), pp. 178-179.

[69] “Our Homes Secure,” Petaluma Argus, January 9, 1874.

[70] William Connelley, editor, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, Volume 14 (Chicago: Lewis, 1918), pp. 1209-1210

The Phoenix Theater’s 120 Years of Creative Expression

Hill Opera House, Washington and Keller streets, 1910 (Sonoma County Library)

In 1999, Petaluma’s Phoenix Theater faced an existential threat. Northern California’s oldest continuously operating showhouse, the venue had witnessed nearly a century of entertainment ranging from stage plays and vaudeville acts to silent films, CinemaScope and rock concerts. Now, it had been purchased by a developer with plans to convert it into an office complex.[1]

To some, that came as welcome news. While fans viewed the theater as a juggernaut of Sonoma County’s alternative music scene and a creative hangout for teens, critics saw a dangerous and disreputable den of iniquity.

The disparity was nothing new. The theater had been the center of heated debates over artistic freedom and morality since its opening in 1904 as the Hill Opera House.

Josie Hill (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

The vision of Josie Hill, wealthy widow of Petaluma banker William Hill, the Hill Opera House was initially hailed as one of the finest playhouses in the Bay Area. Its opulent interior and first-rate musicals and stage plays found immediate favor among Petaluma’s crème de la crème.[2]

Prof J. Lawrence Elmquist and orchestra at Hill Opera House, 1908 (photo courtesy of Dan Brown collection)

However, their patronage was not enough to turn a profit, leaving Hill to book a stream of traveling vaudeville acts.

Evenings of vaudeville were interspersed with short, 10-minute silent films, in a nod to the nickelodeons just hitting town in 1907. Called by some “the true theater of the people,” the “shorts” drew from Wild West shows, melodramas and comic strips. Many of them were laced with salacious sexual imagery and risqué humor, poking fun at bumbling cops, corrupt politicians and intrusive upper-class reformers.[3]

Hill Opera House vaudeville program, 1907 (Petaluma Argus)

Their popularity with immigrants and working-class men and women, thanks in large part to their cheap admission fees, soon drew the ire of anti-immigrant groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), of which Josie Hill was a prominent member. In 1909, the Hill theater switched to featuring longer educational and entertaining films that met the standards of middle class taste.[4]

By 1912, the nickelodeons had been eclipsed by feature-length films. That year, Dr. John A. McNear, Jr., son of Petaluma’s most prominent capitalist, and his sister-in-law, Lulu Egan, opened the Mystic Theater in the new McNear Building on Main Street.

Dr. John A. McNear, Jr. (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

A few months later, they also assumed management of the Hill Opera House, running it as a live performance theater with limited film showings, and the Mystic as a cinema with occasional vaudeville acts.[5]

Mystic Theater, McNear Building, 1927 (Sonoma County Library)

Motion picture critics like the WCTU, who referred to their efforts as “mothering the movies,” continued to call for judging movies on moral, not aesthetic, grounds, as they were luring young people into dark, crowded theaters to engage in “illicit lovemaking and iniquity.” In 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, ruling films commercial endeavors excluded from First Amendment protection.[6]

To avoid legal censorship, the movie industry responded by agreeing to rigorously censor their films. McNear boasted he only showed family-oriented, censored films at his theaters, but with the arrival of the Roaring Twenties, that became a slippery slope.

As films became more popular and theater attendance soared, new theater chains began building lavish movie palaces equipped with the latest in film and sound technology. In 1924, Josie Hill’s heirs sold the Hill Opera House to one such chain, T&D Jr. Enterprises, operated by a Syrian immigrant named Mike Naify.[7]

Stage of the new California Theater, 1925 (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

Naify demolished everything in the opulent playhouse except its original four walls, creating a 1,078-seat movie house he rechristened the California Theater. He assigned management to his brother, Sergius “Doc” Naify, a physician from Syria. Doc operated the theater for the next 34 years. A no-nonsense guardian of the theater, he committed himself to making sure everyone felt welcomed.[8]

Doc Naify, far right, with usherettes and projectionist Don Burns who held that job from 1928 to 1968, 1936 (Sonoma County Library)

The arrival of “talkies” in 1929 set off another spike in theater attendance, only to be reversed by the Great Depression. To lure audiences back, movie studios resorted to making films with adult themes touching on sex, violence and other less-than-wholesome topics. That sparked theater boycotts from religious groups, forcing the movie industry to adopt a new set of decency standards known as the “Hays Code.” Banned from films were profanity, explicit adultery, sympathetic treatment of criminals and dancing with “indecent” moves.[9]

California Theater, 1954 (Sonoma County Library)

Through the 1950s, the California Theater served as Petaluma’s premier movie palace, introducing wide-angle CinemaScope in 1954, and undergoing a complete remodel in 1957 after a major fire in the building. In 1968, the growing popularity of television having undermined the movie business, the Naifys sold the theater to Dan Tocchini, a second-generation theater operator from Santa Rosa. He changed its name to the Showcase.[10]

Installing new Showcase marquee, 1968 (Petaluma Argus-Courier)

His timing was fortuitous, as in 1968 movie industry also dropped the Hays Code, replacing it with a new system of film ratings that allowed moviegoers to choose their desired level of censorship. This time they were protected by the Supreme Court, which in 1952 reversed its earlier decision, recognizing movies as a form of artistic expression protected by the First Amendment.[11]

Freed from the shackles of censorship, a new wave of young directors emerged in Hollywood, rekindling a film renaissance. With television heavily censored, cinemas suddenly had a new leg up. By the early 1970s, sexually explicit films with R- and X-ratings began showing in mainstream cinemas, including the Showcase. “Movies do not corrupt a society,” Tocchini, the Showcase’s owner, said, “they only reflect a society.”[12]

X-rated and R-rated films at the Showcase, 1969-1971 (Petaluma Argus-Courier)

By the late 1970s, with video rentals eroding theater attendance, Hollywood turned to large multiplex theaters offering film choices, sidelining single-screen theaters like the Showcase. In 1979, a group of investors purchased the Showcase, renovating it into a performing arts center they renamed the Phoenix. Unable to turn a profit, in 1981, they sold the theater to Ken Frankel, a Marin County musician and real estate broker.[13]

Frankel restored the Phoenix to being both a cinema and a live music hall. When that didn’t work, he turned it into a $1 discount house, featuring second-run films. In 1984, he hired Tom Gaffey, Jr. as the Phoenix’s manager. Gaffey began his theater career in junior high, working behind the concession stand at the Showcase before moving up to assistant manager in high school. He took the job after selling a movie theater he operated in Cloverdale.[14]

Ken Frankel, center, and Tom Gaffey, Jr., far left, Phoenix Theater, 1987 (Petaluma Argus-Courier)

In an effort to turn a profit, in 1987 the Phoenix introduced weekend teen dances set to music videos. The sudden influx of 1,000 teenagers downtown on a Saturday night led to complaints of traffic and loitering, and the exposure of drugs and underage drinking, echoing censorship advocates at the turn of the century who focused on the vulnerability of youths.

Petaluma’s city council moved to shut the theater down on the grounds it lacked a permit for the dances. The Phoenix argued that as a historic entertainment venue, it didn’t need one.[15]

After a year of legal battles, during which the theater was shuttered, the two parties settled out of court, allowing the dances to proceed with adequate security. Shortly after the Phoenix reopened, Frankel turned the operation over to Gaffey and sold the building to his mother, Florence Bower.[16]

Tom Gaffey, Jr. at the Phoenix Theater office, 1987 (photo public domain)

Gaffey embraced Doc Naify’s credo of making everyone feel welcomed. He moved the theater away from film and back to being a live music venue, featuring a broad soundscape from rock, metal, jazz and blues, to ska, reggae and hip hop. The Phoenix became not only an incubator for local garage bands, but also a springboard for rising big-name bands like Primus and Green Day.[17]

Green Day performing at the Phoenix Theater, 1993 (Arica Pelino Collection)

Gaffey also opened the doors of the theater to teens after school, providing a gritty, post-grunge sanctuary replete with skateboard ramps, a video arcade, and a place to practice music, do homework or just hang out. Many teens also received on the job training in ticket sales, facility operation, light and sound operation and concert set-up, giving them a sense of responsibility and empowerment.[18]

For the community at large, the Phoenix offered art programs, musical instruction, AA meetings, a teen health center, poetry readings, seances, holiday concerts, wrestling matches and special dress-up showings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.[19]

Teens hanging out at Phoenix Theater after school (photo Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

In doing so, Gaffey says he merely unleashed the liberating creative spirit inherent in the building since its early days, and then stepped out of the way.[20]

Preserving that creative spirit is what drew supporters together in 1999 to save the building from being converted into an office complex. Their efforts resulted in four local telecom engineers generously buying out the developer’s position, and helping convert the Phoenix Center into a nonprofit organization, which it has remained for the past 25 years.[21]

Tom Gaffey outside the Phoenix, 1999 (Petaluma Argus-Courier)

Those years have not passed without the Phoenix drawing the episodic wrath of parts of the community. But, as the theater’s 120-year history demonstrates, creative freedom is not without its risks. Generations of Petaluma teens will no doubt testify that those risks have been well worth the gains.[22]

Phoenix Theater (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

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

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Phoenix to Close Dec. 1st,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 10, 1999.

[2] “Hill Opera House is Finest in the State,” Petaluma Argus, October 6, 1904; “Dedication Grand Event,” Petaluma Argus,  December 6, 1904; “Wednesday Night’s Big Vaudeville Show,” Petaluma Courier, March 3, 1905; “Hill Opera House Now in Vaudeville,” Petaluma Argus, July 26, 1907: Note: during this time there are three nickelodeons in Petaluma—the Gem, the Star, and the American, and the Unique Theater on Fourth street is also showing vaudeville and shorts.

[3] Hill Opera House ad, Petaluma Courier, July 26, 1907; Hill Opera House ad, Petaluma Courier, August, 1907; Nancy Rosenbloom, “Progressive Reform, Censorship, and the Motion Picture Industry 1909-1917,” Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America, Ronald Edsforth and Larry Bennett, eds. (NY: SUNY Press, 1991), p. 44; Alison M. Parker, “Mothering the Movies,” Movies Censorship and American Culture, Francis G. Couvares, ed. (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), p. 75; Desirée J. Garcia, “Subversive Sounds: Ethnic Spectatorship and Boston’s Nickelodeon Theatres, 1907-1914,” Movie Business Journal, (Indiana Press), Vol. 19, No. 3, (2007), pp. 213-227.

[4] Parker, p. 74; “The W.C.T.U.,” Petaluma Courier, September 19, 1904; “Met at Hill Home,” Petaluma Courier, March 17, 1905; Hill Opera House ad, Petaluma Courier, September 5, 1908; Note: beginning in 1908, the Hill only advertises longer moving pictures, many of them educational documentaries.

[5] “Tonight the Mystic Theater Will Be Formally Thrown Open,” Petaluma Argus, January 25, 1912; “Dr. John A. McNear Has Leased the Hill Opera House,” Petaluma Argus, April 4, 1912; “Compliment for Local Lady,” Petaluma Argus, December 4, 1914; “The Vaudeville at the Hill,” Petaluma Argus, August 4, 1915; Rosenbloom, p. 57.

[6] Rosenbloom, p. 55; Parker, p. 82.

[7] “Tonight the Mystic Theater Will Be Formally Thrown Open,” Petaluma Argus, January 25, 1912; “T&D Junior Syndicate Buys the Hill Opera House,” Petaluma Argus, July 8, 1924; Kristin Hunt, “The End of American Film Censorship,” The Jstor Daily, February 28, 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/end-american-film-censorship/; Parker, p. 82.

[8] “California Theater Formally Opened Tomorrow,” Petaluma Argus, January 22, 1925; “Left for Martinez to Make Home,” Petaluma Argus, July 6, 1926; “Is Transferred to Santa Rosa,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 1, 1927; Maggie Valentine, The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie Theatre, Starring S. Charles Lee. (Yale University Press), 1994; “C.V. Taylor Promoted to Position at San Francisco,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 31, 1929; “Cal Theater Joins in Chain Birthday,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 19, 1960; “So They Tell Me” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 7, 1967; “Funeral Notice,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 2, 1985; Note: the first manager was C.V. Taylor of San Francisco, with Lee Naify as associate manager. In July 1926, Lee Naify left to manage another of his brother’s theaters in Martinez. He was replaced by his brother Sergius Naify, who took over from Taylor as manager when he left in 1929. Naify remained until his retirement in 1960; Ed Peoples on Doc Naify’s personality: “He spoke quickly with a slight accent, and was all business, a no-nonsense guy. He always seemed to think that someone was out to cause a problem in the theater. A friend of mine, Bob Green, worked there, and said that the Doc would walk through the seats after a showing and gather up the empty popcorn boxes to reuse again.”

[9] “The Talkies on Sunday,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 30, 1929; Kristin Hunt, “The End of American Film Censorship,” The Jstor Daily, February 28, 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/end-american-film-censorship/

[10] “Audience Applauds Robe at First Petaluma Showing,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 9, 1954; “Hundreds See Blaze Damage Theater Here,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 5, 1957; 1958: “Cal Theater to Re-open Next Week,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 10, 1958; “California Theater Sold,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 25, 1968.

[11] “In Defense of New Rating System,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 6, 1969; Hunt.

[12] Hunt; “Letter to the Editor: Theater Owner Questions Letter,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, February 1, 1971.

[13] “Opening Set for New Firms,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 15, 1976: Petaluma’s first twin-plex theater was Washington Square Cinemas that opened at 219 South McDowell Boulevard in 1976, later expanding to a five-plex; “Curtain Rises on New Movie Theater,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 15, 1990: Pacific Theaters, a large theater chain, opened Petaluma Cinemas, an eight-plex theater with first-run films at the intersection of Old Redwood Highway and North McDowell Boulevard; “Rejuvenated Theater to Return to Life as Performing Arts Center,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 23, 1979; “New Owner Plans to Remodel Phoenix Theater,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 1981.

[14] Interview with Tom Gaffey by John Sheehy, November 28, 2024; Email from Aaron Sizemore, former Phoenix projectionist; “Phoenix Theater Goes Discount,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 31, 1983; “Houdini a No-Show at Séance,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 1, 1984 (first newspaper mention of Gaffey as manager); “Bill Soberanes” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 30, 1984; “Clover Cinema to Open Friday,” Cloverdale Reveille, July 1, 1981; Gaffey’s start date is erroneously reported in some later newspaper accounts as being 1983.

[15] “Lights Out for Phoenix Screen?” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 16, 1986; “Video Dance Hall for Teenagers,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 6, 1987; “City Seeks Restraining Order on Phoenix Theater Dances,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 4, 1987; “Video Dances Can Continue—For Now,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 4, 1987; “Phoenix Owner Claims City Wants to Close Him,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 12, 1987; “Phoenix Theater to Close,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 6, 1987; Parker, p. 89.

[16] “Phoenix Controversy Ends,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 31, 1988; “Teen Hangout Phoenix Theater Up for Sale,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 30, 1995; “Phoenix Holds On—Thanks to Benefit,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, July 12, 1995; Interview with Tom Gaffey by John Sheehy, November 28, 2024.

[17] Interview with Tom Gaffey by John Sheehy, November 28, 2024; “Bill Soberanes” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 29, 1988; “Old Theaters Trying to Survive,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 26, 1991.

[18] Interview with Tom Gaffey by John Sheehy, November 28, 2024; “Older Theaters Gird for Battle,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 15, 1990; “Phoenix to Attract More Teens,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 21, 1993.

[19] “Healthy hangout: A New Teen Clinic at the Phoenix Theater Offers Sale Anonymous Reproductive Health Care,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 27, 2002; “It’s a Birthday Party and You’re Invited,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 3, 2009; Interview with Tom Gaffey by John Sheehy, November 28, 2024.

[20] Interview with Tom Gaffey by John Sheehy, November 28, 2024.

[21] “Phoenix Theater’s ‘Angels’ are Telecom Millionaires,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 15, 1999; “Sales of Phoenix is Final,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 19, 2000; “Non-profit to Assume Phoenix Ownership,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 31, 2001.

[22] “Editorial: Is the Phoenix Theater a Public Nuisance?” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 27, 2010;

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)

******

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.

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]

831 D St & Brown Court
15 Brown Court
28 Brown Court
25 Brown Court

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.

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.

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 Heaven, edited 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.

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.

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]

Mary Jane Camron Purvine (public domain)
Charles Purvine (public domain)
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, 1870 (Sonoma County Library)
Minturn standing on San Francisco wharf , 1852(Sonoma County Library)

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.

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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.