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.

Ripe for the Taking: Petaluma’s Fruit Canning Days

Illustration of the Petaluma Fruit Packing Co. Plant, 1887 (courtesy of Jim Bower Collection)

In 1882, a serial entrepreneur named Joseph J. Groom came to Petaluma with a juicy proposition to open a fruit cannery. Not only would it be an instant money maker, he claimed it would also transform the city into a major fruit basket of the world.[1]  

Petaluma was ripe for the taking. Growth in the once thriving river port had stagnated since 1870, when the new San Francisco & Northern Pacific Railroad shifted the region’s main agricultural shipping hub to Santa Rosa. A five-year national recession that followed in the mid-1870s, along with the collapse of California’s wheat boom—an engine of local prosperity since the late 1850s, further stymied Petaluma’s growth.[2]

Canning offered the attractive aroma of industrialization. No longer would fruit and vegetables be left to rot in the fields due to market fluctuations in supply and demand. Processed into canned fruit, jams, jellies, preserves, pickles, catsups, and sauces, they would be profitably exported around the world in tins.

The first west coast cannery factories—the San Jose Fruit Packing Company and the Golden Gate Cannery—opened in the Santa Clara Valley during the early 1870s.[3]

Golden Gate Cannery label (courtesy of History San Jose.com)

A co-founder of the Golden Gate Cannery, Groom became a tin-can evangelist in the early 1880s, leading the launch of new canneries in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.[4] He came to Petaluma at the invitation of two of the area’s leading fruit growers, John W. Cassidy and Francis DeLong.

Both Cassidy and DeLong made their way to California during the gold rush. In 1853, Cassidy co-founded the state’s first nursery in Oakland, importing 50,000 fruit trees from the east coast. In 1858, he moved to Petaluma, creating a 20-acre orchard at the northwestern outskirts of the city. He planted 4,000 fruit trees, the majority of them cherries, after which his orchard became known as Cherry Hill.[5] In 1874, he invented a new fruit dryer and opened a fruit drying plant in town, only to watch it burn down within a month.[6]

John W. Cassidy’s Cherry Hill orchard (Sonoma County Atlas, Thompson & Co., 1877)

Francis DeLong was a land baron. After operating a hardware store in San Francisco, in 1856 he and an orchardist named Joseph Sweetser purchased 8,871-acres of the Rancho de Novato just south of Petaluma.[7]

Francis DeLong (History of Marin County, Allen, Bowen & Co., 1880)

Over time they expanded the ranch to 15,000 acres, leasing much of it to dairy ranchers. On 250 acres they planted 30,000 fruit trees, most of them apples, creating one of the largest orchards in the state. In 1879, DeLong bought out Sweetser, and brought on his 36-year-old son, Frank, Jr., as a partner.[8]

Illustration of Francis DeLong’s Novato Rancho, 1878 (public domain)

A year after Groom’s visit to Petaluma, DeLong and Cassidy joined with four local capitalists—A.P. Whitney, John Fritsch, H.T. Fairbanks, and Conrad Poehlman—to build a cannery along the Petaluma River at First and F streets.[9] With Groom overseeing the launch, the Petaluma Fruit Packing Company opened in time for the 1883 harvest season, which extended from June through December.[10]

In its first year of operation, the cannery generated about $100,000 in revenue ($3.2 million in today’s currency).[11] Of its initial 100 employees, 60 were women and teenaged girls, cannery operators having recognized their “domestic” skills in sorting, cutting, slicing, and preparing fruit. Fourteen Chinese men operated the tin-making shop, and 26 European immigrants manned the warehouse.[12]

Healdsburg’s Magnolia Cannery (Courtesy of the Healdsburg Museum & Historical Society)

Groom left the company after its first year to launch a new cannery in Napa. He was replaced by Delmar E. Ashby, who had worked for San Francisco’s largest cannery, A. Lusk & Co.[13] By 1885, the Petaluma cannery was operating at full capacity. That same year, DeLong died, leaving an estate of $650,000 ($22 million in today’s currency) to his son Frank, Jr.[14]

Frank DeLong, Jr. (findagrave.com)

Frank had been elected the year before to the California state Senate. Flush with his new inheritance, he bought out Cassidy and the cannery’s other seed investors, and formed a new partnership, DeLong, Ashby & Co., with Ashby and a San Francisco fruit broker. He then expanded the cannery to encompass the entire riverside block of First Street between F and G streets.[15]

Petaluma Fruit Packing Company, First & F streets, 1888 Sanborn map

By the late 1880s, the Petaluma Fruit Packing Company was on its way to becoming one of the leading canneries on the west coast. With 500 seasonal workers, it was annually exporting 2 million cans of fruit and vegetables around the world.[16]

DeLong, Ashby & Co. can of Crawford peaches, a small, yellow-skinned freestone peach known for its intense , aromatic and rich flavor (courtesy of Dan Brown Collection)

New canneries were also springing up in Healdsburg, Sebastopol, and Santa Rosa, the largest of which would become the Hunt Brothers, predecessors of Hunt’s Ketchup.[17]

Inspired by the cannery’s success, Petaluma capitalist John A. McNear set out to create a Factory District along the banks of the Petaluma River. To lure factories up from San Francisco and Oakland, he offered inexpensive land, generous financing, and easy shipping via his newly-dredged McNear Canal. In 1892, he persuaded the Carlson-Currier Company to build a major silk mill across the river from the cannery.[18]

Carlson-Currier Silk Mill, Petaluma early 1900s (Sonoma County Library)

With the cannery and silk mill serving as industrial pillars, Petaluma began marketing itself as the North Bay’s new manufacturing center.[19] In 1893, that campaign stumbled when the Petaluma Fruit Packing Company abruptly shut its doors during harvest season.[20]

Senator Frank DeLong, Jr. might have inherited his father’s money, but not his business acumen. With a proclivity for extravagance, the senator spent his inheritance on mansions, show horses, lavish parties, and every new-fangled idea that came his way.[21] His house of cards all came tumbling down during the financial panic of 1893, leaving him half a million of dollars in debt ($18 million today’s currency). Three Petaluma lenders—Isaac Wickersham, William Hill, and George P. McNear—were among those left holding the bag.[22]

Liens were placed on all of DeLong’s assets, including the Petaluma Fruit Packing Company. Attempts were made to reopen the cannery, but potential investors worried their money would be confiscated by creditors.[23]

Vacant former Petaluma Fruit Packing Company plant, 1st & F streets, early 1900s (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

The cannery sat vacant until 1906, when Heynemann & Company, manufacturers of “Can’t Bust ‘Em” overalls, purchased the plant after losing their San Francisco factory in the earthquake that year.[24]

Pre-1907 Label for Hyenemann & Co. overalls (public domain)

Heynemann later purchased an adjacent block upon which to build a second plant, but was unable to find sufficient bedrock to support a concrete building. In 1913, the firm moved back to San Francisco, selling the plant to George P. McNear, who converted it into warehouses.[25]

Senator DeLong died penniless.[26] Cassidy meanwhile expanded his Cherry Hill orchard to encompass 53 acres. By the mid-1880s, he was surrounded by a dozen other small fruit orchards on an additional 50 acres of what became known as Cherry Valley. [26a]

In 1894, Cassidy successfully sued the Hunt Brothers for manufacturing fruit drying machines based on his 1874 patent.[27] He and Petaluma capitalist William Hill then raised $100,000 ($3.5 million in today’s currency) to launch the Sonoma County Fruit Company, which brokered the export of fruit to the east coast.[28]

Cassidy’s house at Cherry Hill, then and now (1877 illustration Sonoma County Atlas, 2026 photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

With the cannery’s demise, Petaluma’s dream of becoming a manufacturing center was overtaken in the 1890s by a local poultry boom. Using an efficient egg incubator invented by Petaluma dentist Isaac Dias, Two Rock rancher Chris Nisson industrialized chicken ranching by establishing America’s first commercial hatchery.[29]

The resulting poultry boom rejuvenated Petaluma’s economy. Instead of becoming the “World’s Fruit Basket,” the city became widely known as the “World’s Egg Basket.”

Former site of the Petaluma Fruit Packing Company, 2026 (photo John Sheehy)

A version of this story was published in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 20, 2026.

******

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Editorial Dashes,” Petaluma Courier, February 15, 1882; “D.E. Ashby, Old Settler of Palo Alto, Passes,” The Peninsula Times Tribune, November 22, 1923.

[2] James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-22532010000200002; Santa Rosa: A Nineteenth Century Town (Historia, Ltd., 1985), p. 102; “Sonoma County,” Petaluma Courier, December 10, 1890; U.S. Census: Petaluma’s population essentially plateaued from 2,868 in 1870 to only 3,871 by 1900, while Santa Rosa’s grew from 2,989 in 1870 to 6,673 by 1900. Petaluma’s population increased to 5,880 in 1910, thanks largely to the egg boom.

[3] “Golden Gate Fruit Packing Company,” San Jose Mercury News, August 2, 1877; “Obituary,” Los Gatos Mail, April 25, 1901; “A New Industry,” San Jose Mercury News, April 22, 1873; “Fruit Canning and Drying,” Petaluma Argus, April 25, 1873; “The Cannery,” Napa County Register, April 9, 1886;

“Cannery Life in the Santa Clara Valley,” History San Jose.com, https://historysanjose.org/plan-your-visit/exhibits-activities/online-exhibits/cannery-life-del-monte-in-the-santa-clara-valley/

[4] “Santa Barbara Fruit Cannery, “ Santa Barbara Morning Press, April 1, 1880; “The City,” Santa Barbara Morning Press, March 11, 1881; “Important Industry,” Los Angeles Daily Commercial, June 23, 1881.

[5] Sanuel Cassiday, “J.W. Cassidy,” History of Sonoma County (Lewis & Co., 1889), pps. 465-466; “Strawberries,” Sonoma County Journal, May 27, 1859; “About Cherries,” Petaluma Argus, May 29, 1874. Note: W. H. Pepper of the Liberty Nursery was the largest cherry producer; “Large Cherry Orchard,” Petaluma Argus, June 7, 1884; “Mrs. Cassidy Answers Call,” Petaluma Courier, October 21, 1913.

[6] “An Important Invention,” Petaluma Argus, June 26, 1874; “Cassidy Fruit Dryer,” Petaluma Argus, September 18, 1874; “The Fire Fiend,” Petaluma Argus, September 25, 1874.

[7] “Novato Hangs on to Rich History,” Marin Independent Journal, September 19, 2006.

[8] History of Marin County (Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 439-440; “A California Ranch,” California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences, May 2, 1878; “Novato Hangs on to Rich History,” Marin Independent Journal, September 19, 2006.

[9] “The Cannery,” Petaluma Argus, March 3, 1883; “Our Fruit Cannery,” Petaluma Courier, March 14, 1883; “Questions Answered,” Petaluma Argus, March 31, 1883.

[10] “Fine Canned Fruit,” Petaluma Argus, June 8, 1883; “Flattering Prospects of the New Enterprise at Petaluma,” San Francisco Call Bulletin, June 15, 1883.

[11] “Flattering Prospects of the New Enterprise at Petaluma,” San Francisco Call Bulletin, June 15, 1883.

[12] “Flattering Prospects of the New Enterprise at Petaluma,” San Francisco Call Bulletin, June 15, 1883.

[13] “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, August 8, 1883; “The Cannery,” Petaluma Argus, May 17, 1884; “The Cannery,” Napa County Register, April 9, 1886; “How Canning of California Products has Grown into a World-famous Industry,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 1, 1904; “D.E. Ashby, Old Settler of Palo Alto, Passes,” Peninsula Times Tribune, November 22, 1923.

[14] “Ranch Brings Cool Million,” Petaluma Argus, December 22, 1905.

[15] “Copartnership Notice,” Petaluma Courier, October 27, 1886. Note: Field & Stone, a fruit broker in San Francisco, was also partners in the new Delong, Ashby & Co.

[16] “The Petaluma Cannery,” Petaluma Courier, August 10, 1887; “Local Brevities,” Sonoma Democrat, July 31, 1888; “Petaluma Industries,” Petaluma Courier, July 10, 1889.

[17] Note: Joseph Black appears to have opened Sonoma County’s first factory-scale cannery in Santa Rosa in 1881 with 29 employees. He rebuilt it in 1887, after the building burnedr down (“Santa Rosa Items,” Cloverdale Reveille, August 20, 1881; “Santa Rosa Items,” Cloverdale Reveille, September 10, 1881; “About Tramps,” Petaluma Courier, September 22, 1886; “The New Cannery,” Sonoma Democrat, June 4, 1887). In 1888, J.H. Hunt started a cannery in Sebastopol (“Canning and Drying,” Sonoma Democrat, June 29, 1889), and T.S. Merchant started the Magnolia Cannery in Healdsburg (“Magnolia Cannery,” Healdsburg Enterprise, April 12, 1888). The Hunt Brothers Cannery opened in Sebastopol in 1889, and in 1890 expanded to plants in Santa Rosa and Carquinez to become the largest in the North Bay (“Local Brevities,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, July 21, 1889; “Cannery at Santa Rosa,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 11, 1890).

[18] “The Silk Mill,” Petaluma Courier, December 8, 1891; “Carlson-Currier Company,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1892;

[19] “Petaluma: Its Advantages, Industries, and Resources,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1892; “Nearly Eight Hundred,” Petaluma Courier, March 1, 1893.

[20] “Wanted: Work,” Petaluma Courier, August 11, 1893.

[21] “Ranch Brings Cool Million,” Petaluma Argus, December 22, 1905; “F.C. DeLong,” Petaluma Courier, June 28, 1910.

[22] “Ranch Brings Cool Million,” Petaluma Argus, December 22, 1905; “Ancient History Reviewed,” Petaluma Courier, February 7, 1913.

[23] “Wanted: Work,” Petaluma Courier, August 11, 1893; “The Rancho Novato,” Petaluma Courier, May 16, 1894.

[24] “Preparing for Business,” Petaluma Courier, May 12, 1906.

[25] “Big Deal is Now Pending,” Petaluma Argus, May 12, 1910; “Title Now Cleared on Heynemann Lot,” Petaluma Courier, May 19, 1911; “Heynemann Co. to Close Local Factory,” Petaluma Courier, June 18, 1913; “Fire Burns the McNear Warehouse,” Petaluma Courier, January 19, 1915; “Grass Fire is Cause of Still Alarm,” Petaluma Courier, October 30, 1915.

[26] “Ranch Brings Cool Million,” Petaluma Argus, December 22, 1905; “Ancient History Reviewed,” Petaluma Courier, February 7, 1913.

[26a] “Cherry Valley,” Petaluma Courier, May 4, 1887; Note: what was called Cherry Valley by 1887 extended from the west end of Howard Street at the city limits of Petaluma, northwest to the west end of the Cypress Hill Cemetery, comprising almost 100 acres.

[27] “Damages for Infringement,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 30, 1891; Court Notes,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 18, 1892; “A Surprised Inventor,” San Francisco Examiner, August 31, 1893; Cassidy Won His Suit,” San Francisco Call Bulletin, October 30, 1894; Note: The Hunt Brothers appealed the decision, and Cassidy won the appeal.

[28] “Sonoma County Fruit Company,” Petaluma Courier, May 6, 1891; Cassidy sold his orchard in 1899 to J.B. Dickson, and died in Petaluma in 1903 (“A New Firm,” Petaluma Argus, October 5, 1899; “Pioneer Orchardist Dies,” San Francisco Examiner, August 9, 1903).

[29] “Who Really Invented the Petaluma Incubator,” PetalumaHisstorian.com, https://petalumahistorian.com/who-really-invented-the-petaluma-incubator.

History vs. Lore

READING SONOMA COUNTY’S EARLY SUBSCRIPTON HISTORIES

Iron front buildings lining Western Avenue, c. 1888 (photo public domain)

When I was a boy, my great-uncle Will Casey took me on walks around Petaluma, filling my head with local lore. One day we stopped across from the town clock to gaze upon the 1880s cast-iron front buildings lining Western Avenue.

“When I was your age,” Uncle Will said, “I stood here and watched them build those.”

That bit deep.

A retired town merchant, Uncle Will was one of Petaluma’s popular storytellers in his old age. For me, his stories always brought the past alive, giving me a sense of place and continuity. But once I grew older and started researching Petaluma history, I learned his tales weren’t all that factual, which might be what made them so memorable.

“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story,” Mark Twain said, or is reputed to have said.

Mark Twain (photo by A.F. Bradley, public domain)

People often conflate lore with history. But as meaning-making creatures, humans tend to be more interested in meaning than truth, which is where lore and history part ways.

Lore functions much like memory, which, according to playwright Tennessee Williams, “takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is predominantly seated in the heart.”[1]

That same dim interior protects lore from cognitive dissonance with contrary facts.

Coalescing around objects, sites, and monuments, lore is passed down from generation to generation as sacred and absolute.[2] History, by contrast, is secular. No one has a monopoly on its narrative. Multiple, conflicting perspectives are part of its truth.

STORYTELLING

Like a detective investigating a cold case, trained historians take a critical and skeptical view of all human motive and action. Vigilant about making mistakes, they question everything, including their sources and their own perspectives, which they struggle to root in the contextual complexities of the times they are investigating.[3]

According to historian David McCullough, history’s attraction is driven by two of life’s most absorbing mysteries—time and human nature.[4]

David McCullough (National Endowment for the Humanities)

Hilary Mantel, prize-winning author of the historical novel Wolf Hall based on the life of Thomas Cromwell, had a similar take. “History is what people are trying to hide from you, not what they’re trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through a landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.”[5]

That is also where some of the most compelling stories can be found. As the current popularity of genealogy demonstrates, the more you learn, the more you want to know. Thanks to recent advances in digital access, sifting through the landfill is becoming more efficient than ever.

But for the historian, gathering research is merely the first step. As with a composer assembling notes, one ultimately needs to make music. Which is where storytelling comes in.

“You have to be clear and you have to be interesting,” Barbara Tuchman, author of The Guns of August, wrote in her classic essay, “The Historian as Artist.” Her secret: “Tell stories.”[6]

Historian Barbara Tuchman (National Endowment for the Humanities)

Unlike stories of lore, historical narratives are not restricted to sacrosanct scripts owned by groups and communities. Their fundamental plot—the unfolding story of change—tracks with how life itself plays out: ever changing and open to interpretation. What the historian brings to the plot are insights into the consequences of past decisions made and actions taken.[7] 

Some offer those insights from a distance, as though chronicling history from a mountaintop. Others, like Tuchman and McCullough, prefer to view it from within, bringing characters from the past back to life in stories. Those stories serve to engage others in a meaningful pursuit of the truth in documenting human nature over time.[8]

Yet, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”[9] In the marketplace of meaning making, history’s inherent complexity often leaves it victim to the simplified storylines of lore, especially when tailored for commercial purposes.

SONOMA COUNTY SUBSCRIPTION HISTORIES

Nowhere is that more evident than in the early histories of Sonoma County, specifically the seven subscription-based history books published in 1877 (Thompson), 1880 (Munro-Fraser), 1889 (Cassiday), 1898 (Reynolds & Proctor), 1911 (Gregory), 1926 (Tuomey), and 1937 (Finley).[10]

Top, left to right: Robert A. Thompson, J.P. Munro-Fraser; Middle, left to right:Samuel Cassiday, William D. Reynolds, Thomas A. Proctor; Bottom, left to right: Tom Gregory, Honoria Tuomey, Ernest L. Finley (photos credits: Sonoma County Library, Oregonian newspaper, subscription histories)

These books have played a powerful role in sculpting the county’s historical landscape, one that continues to resonate to this day. The early 19th century histories in particular serving as foundations for the histories that folowed.

However, as informative as these books are in many regards, their commercial origins as subscription histories—books pre-sold before publication by door-to-door salespeople—compromise their integrity as official narratives.

Title pages of 1877 and 1898 Sonoma County atlases

Architects of desire, these histories were factory produced and intentionally shaped by what people wanted to hear and experience. Neatly aligning beginnings with ends and causes with effects, they are full of omissions and fabrications created to cover them. Their biographies, illustrations, and historical mentions were customarily paid for by the farmers and business owners they showcased.[11]

Title pages of 1880, 1889, 1911, 1926, and 1937 Sonoma County subscription histories

Their underlying ideological purpose was to lend a false inevitability to Sonoma County’s creation and early development as the embodiment of “Manifest Destiny.”

A national propaganda initiative, Manifest Destiny promoted a belief in America’s divine duty to conquer, settle, and prosper in the promised land of the west. Its patriotic call to action appealed to those looking for a brighter future, justifying their break with the familiar and comfortable to plunge into the unknown and make the hazardous journey west, where they dedicated themselves to the hardships of developing farms and towns.[12]

Given that context, the appeal of subscription history books at the time is understandable.

By the late 1870s, settlers to Sonoma County had endured three decades of surprises and uncertainty, including land grant and homesteading legal challenges, agricultural booms and busts, cataclysmic fires and floods, resistant Natives, unwanted immigration, a Civil War, and a national recession. They needed a narrative to affirm it had been worthwhile, one that celebrated them as pioneers in the successful service of Manifest Destiny.

For that reason, the series of manufactured histories of early Sonoma County are best viewed as a study in human meaning making, with a skeptical eye toward historical source material. As such, when taken with a grain of salt, they no longer hinder our ability to look to the county’s past as a means of better understanding its present.

Iron front buildings along Western Avenue, 2026 (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

******

A version of this story appeared in the Sonoma Historian, Winter 2026 edition

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Tennessee Williams, Stage Directions for Scene 1 of The Glass Menagerie (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1945), page 1.

[2] David Blight, “History and ‘Memory,’” Commonplace, the Journal of Early American Life, Issue 2.3, April 2002.

[3] “Statements on Standards of Professional Conduct,” American Historical Association, January 2023. https://www.historians.org/resource/statement-on-standards-of-professional-conduct/

[4] McCullough, pgs. 5, 146.

[5] Hillary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost (NY: Picador, 2004).

[6] Barbara Tuchman, Practicing History: Selected Essays (NY: Knopf, 1981), p. 45; David McCullough, History Matters ( Simon & Schuster, 2025), p. 5.

[7] David Blight, “History and ‘Memory,’” Commonplace, the Journal of Early American Life, Issue 2.3, April 2002.

[8] McCullough, p. 37.

[9] Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Dover Thrift Editions, R.R. Donnelley, 2016), p. 6.

[10]T.H. Thompson, Historical Atlas Map of Sonoma County (Oakland, CA: Thos. H. Thompson Company, 1877); J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco, CA: Alley, Bowen & Company, 1880);Samuel Cassiday, An Illustrated History of Sonoma County (Chicago, IL: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1889);Tom Gregory, History of Sonoma County (Los Angeles, CA: Historic Record Company, 1911).

[11] How ‘Tis Done: A Thorough Ventilation of the Numerous Schemes Conducted By Wandering Canvassers Together with the Various Advertising Dodges for the Swindling of the Public (Chicago: Fidelity Publishing Co., 1879); Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

[12] Anders Stephenson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (NY: Hill & Wang, 1995).

The Union Hotel 1852-1902

Entrance to the Union Hotel Beer Hall, Main and B streets, c. 1892, with the saloon proprietor John Hermer most likely the man with the white beard (Sonoma County Library)

In 1852, two brothers from Germany, Herman and John Schierhold, purchased a lot at the southwest corner of Main Street and today’s Western Avenue. Using timber they hauled down from Freestone, they built a two-story hotel. A classic German “gasthaus,” it included a bar and billiards room on the bottom floor, with six rooms upstairs for boarders and guests upstairs.[1]

The Schierholds’ gasthaus became an anchor for Petaluma’s growing German merchant district. By the mid-1870s German-owned businesses extended along the west side of lower Main Street from Western Avenue to Center Park (today’s Historic Chinatown Park).

They included Heinrich Matthies’ Continental Hotel and John Pfau’s Centennial Building (today’s Land Mart), which featured a German saloon, a livery stable, Heinrich Dortmund’s Wine Depot, and the German Druids Hall.

German-owned Continental Hotel and beside it the Centennial Building, 1890s (courtesy of Dan Brown Collection)

Two blocks away on Fourth Street between B and C streets sat Turn Verein, or Turner Hall, which served as a German social club, hosting lectures, social events, dances, festivals, and musical performances.[1a]

Turn Verein or Turner Hall at Fourth Street between B and C streets, built 1875 (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum and Petaluma Courier)

In 1855, the Schierholds sold their gasthaus to a woman named Rosanna Loftus who renamed it the Farmers’ Hotel. A married woman, Loftus purchased the hotel as a “sole trader,” which meant she was legally able to own and operate her own business independent of her husband.[2]

1855 map with arrow pointing to site of Farmers Hotel (Sonoma County Library)

Herman Schierhold went on to operate the Relief Saloon and the Capitol Saloon in town, as well as the Petaluma Brewery. The first brewery in Sonoma County, it was originally founded in 1855 by a fellow German immigrant, Fredrick Christlich.[3]

In 1858, a German named August Starke purchased the Farmers’ Hotel from Loftus, renaming it the Union Hotel & Saloon.[4] In 1866, he leased out operation of the hotel and saloon to Heinrich Matthies, who added “Deutsche Gasthaus” to the name Union Hotel.[5]

Illustration of the Union Hotel, Deutsche Gasthaus, 1885 (Map of Petaluma by William W. Elliott, Sonoma County Library)

In 1876, Petaluma’s leading capitalist John McNear purchased the hotel building and property from Starke’s widow, Frances.[6]

In 1881, McNear sold the Union Hotel building to fellow capitalist Isaac Wickersham, who moved it to property he owned at the southeastern corner of Main and B streets. That cleared the way for construction of the Masonic Lodge at the hotel’s original site on the corner of Main and Western Avenue.

Masonic Lodge at Main Street and Western Avenue, 1902 (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

Meanwhile, Wickersham undertook a complete rebuilding of the hotel in its new location, adding 17 new rooms.[7]

In 1889, the description “Deutsche Gasthaus” was dropped from ads for the Union Hotel by longtime operator Samuel Carstens, a Danish immigrant A German named John Hermer ran the Union Beer Hall in the hotel.[8]

Ad for Union Hotel Beer Hall, Petlauma Courier, May 24, 1892.

In 1900, a fire, suspected to be arson, badly damaged the hotel, destroying its bar and bowling alley. By that time, the hotel was owned by G.P. McNear, who leased it to Claus Struve, a German immigrant, and Jimmie Rasmussen, a Danish immigrant.[9] The hotel was restored and reopened.

In 1902, G.P. McNear’s Oriental Mills & Feed headquarters on Main Street across from Penry Park (then Hill Plaza) burned down. McNear decided to relocate his operation to the site of the Union Hotel, which sat in front of one of his grain mills (today’s Great Petaluma Mill).

He announced plans to move the Union Hotel to Third streets and C streets so that he could clear the site for his new building. A few months later, he changed his mind, and decided to tear the hotel down instead.[10] 

New G.P. McNear Feed Company Building, 1903 (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

So ended the legacy of a 50-year old Petaluma landmark building.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Local News As Condensed,” Petaluma Argus, October 3, 1902; “Built the Union Hotel,” Petaluma Courier, October 3, 1902; Note: no mention of the name of the Schierholds’ hotel found.

[1a] “Cosmopolitan Hotel,” Petaluma Argus, August 25, 1876; “Pfau’s Centennial Building,” Petaluma Argus, March 3, 1876; “Centennial Headquarters,” Petaluma Argus, July 14, 1876; “The Druids,” Petaluma Courier, December 22, 1880; “Turners’ Ball,” Petaluma Argus, January 1, 1875.

[2] Legal Sole Trader Notice, Petaluma Journal, September 22, 1855; Ad for Farmer’s Hotel, Petaluma Journal, November 20, 1855; Note: not clear if Schierholds were the owners at time of sale to Loftus.

[3] “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, October 22, 1884; “H. Schierhold Died Weeks Ago,” Petaluma Argus, December 22, 1905; “Petaluma Breweries,” Petaluma Argus, December 8, 1876; Note: Christlich launched the brewery with a partner named Erbe, who by 1860 had sold out his interest to Christian Theilman, who died in 1864.

[4] Ad, Sonoma County Journal, February 12, 1858: Starke converts Farmer’s Hotel to Lager Beer Saloon; “Brutal,” Sonoma County Journal, February 11, 1859: Starke’s establishment now referred to as the “Union Billiard Saloon”; Ad for Union Hotel, Sonoma County Journal, October 12, 1860.

[5] Ad for Union Hotel, Petaluma Argus, September 6, 1866. Note: by the 1870s, Matthies was also operating the Continental Hotel (“Cosmopolitan Hotel,” Petaluma Argus, August 25, 1876).

[6] “Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, October 20, 1876; “Real Estate Transactions,” Petaluma Argus, November 3, 1876.

[7] “City Improvements,” Petaluma Courier, June 1, 1881; “Housewarming,” Petaluma Argus, August 19, 1881; “Reopened,” Petaluma Courier, August 31, 1881; Ad for Union Hotel, Petaluma Argus, September 30, 1881.

[8] Last ad for Union Hotel including “Deutsche Gasthaus,” Petaluma Courier, January 30, 1889; Ad for Union Beer Hall, Petaluma Courier, May 24, 1892; “John Hirmer Dead,” Petaluma Courier, May 31, 1894.

[9] “The Union Hotel Badly Wrecked,” Petaluma Argus, July 9, 1900.

[10] “A Midnight Blaze,” Petaluma Courier, June 11, 1902; “Union Hotel to Be Moved to Third and C Streets,” Petaluma Argus, August 15, 1902; “Local News As Condensed,” Petaluma Argus, October 3, 1902.

Maps for the Masses

THE VANITY OF SONOMA COUNTY’S FIRST HISTORY

Full county map with illustrations of Sonoma Democrat and Petaluma Argus newspaper offices, Historical Atlas of Sonoma County, 1877

On the evening of May 16, 1876, William Colvig rode his horse to the Washoe House in Stony Point. Having spent the day surveying ranches, he was in need of supper and a room. The next morning he traded his tired horse for a new mount, and set off to survey Harrison Mecham’s nearby 10,000-acre ranch, not knowing Mecham wasn’t at home. Like most of his neighbors, he had left for Petaluma to see Montgomery Queen’s Traveling Circus.[1]

Washoe House, Stony Point & Roblar roads, c. 1900 (Sonoma County Library0

Colvig was part of a different traveling show—Thompson & West, publisher of county atlases. A new, mass-market racket, the county atlas appealed to settlers yearning to celebrate their participation in America’s epic westward movement.[2]

Published in a 15 x 18 inch book format, the typical atlas featured more than 100 pages of hand-colored maps and illustrations.[3] Available only by pre-order from door-to-door canvassers, it was priced as a luxury item at $15 ($460 in today’s currency). Subscribers were asked to pay half down and the rest upon delivery, which was usually a year away.[4]

Historical Atlas of Sonoma County, published by Thos. H. Thompson & Co., 1877 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Thompson & West, or T&W as they were known, looked to sell at least 1,500 copies of the Historical Atlas of Sonoma County, generating $22,500 in revenue ($700,000 in today’s currency).[5] Their main targets were the farmers and ranchers whose names were to be featured on the atlas’ maps, along with the size of their landholdings.

Canvassers preyed upon their egos and sense of social status, assuring them nothing better reflected agrarian progress, personal accomplishment, and civic pride than a luxurious atlas. Designed for display on the parlor table, the atlas was an heirloom families would treasure for generations.[6]

Colvig had worked previously for atlas publishers in the Midwest, where the books gained a reputation for being quickly and carelessly assembled, leaving behind duped customers and a flawed record of local landscapes.[7] Reluctant to rejoin the circuit, but in need of money, he agreed to work as a field surveyor for T&W, on the condition he wouldn’t have to double as a canvasser.[8]

William Colvig, 1873 (courtesy of Tim Colvig)

After discovering Mecham had gone off to the circus, Colvig rode into Petaluma, where he kept a room at the American Hotel (site of today’s Putnam Plaza). Awaiting him at the hotel was a telegram from T&W’s owner, Thomas H. Thompson, summoning him to the company’s office in San Francisco.[9]

American Hotel (center two story building), Main Street, Petaluma, 1869 (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

A founder of the county atlas craze, Thompson served in the Union Army as a battle captain and surveyor during the Civil War. After the war, he teamed up with two former army colleagues, Louis H. Everts and Alfred T. Andreas, to revolutionize the mapmaking business. They did so by combining the popular characteristics of the county wall map with illustrations and county histories in a book format.[10]

Captain Thomas Hinkley Thompson, Union Army, 1860s (public domain)

The three began publishing county atlases in Iowa and Illinois. In addition to ordering copies, subscribers also could purchase a full-page illustration of their farm or business for $145 ($4,400 in today’s currency), a hand-drawn portrait for $100 ($3,000 today), and a biography at two and half cents a word ($1 today).[11]

Farm illustrations included any improvements a farmer envisioned, and omitted anything he didn’t wish to show.

Illustration of atlas artist from Bates Harrington’s 1879 book How ‘Tis Done

Likewise, subscribers were given the final review of their biographies. Local merchants who endorsed the atlas received free listings in the book’s “business directory.” Newspapers willing to provide free publicity were rewarded with illustrations of their offices in the atlas.[12]

Illustration of Harrison Mecham’s ranch, Sonoma County Atlas, 1877

In 1875, Thompson brought his “maps for the masses” craze to California, teaming up with Albert A. West to launch Thompson & West Publishing. Thompson handled the mapping and production, West the histories and biographies.[13]

Albert A.West & Thomas H. Thompson, 1870s (Sacramento Bee)

The two began peddling atlases in Santa Clara, Solano, and Alameda counties. In 1876, they added Sonoma County to the mix. To round out their 12-man crew of canvassers, artists, surveyors, and writers, Thompson reached out to Colvig, who, after working with Thompson in the Midwest, had returned home to Oregon.[14]

Trained as a mapmaker in the Union Army, Colvig was assigned by Thompson to verify and update official surveys of Sonoma County. That included the county’s first comprehensive wall map, created in 1866 by A.B. Bowers.[15] Traveling by horse, Colvig reviewed property lines and mapped out significant topographical features, along with churches, schools, mills, roads, and railroads.[16]

Colvig’s sketch of Harrison Mecham’s property near the Washoe House (courtesy of Tim Colvig)

Known for his people skills, Colvig paid ranchers $1 a night ($30 in today’s currency) for supper and lodging. That led to some strange encounters, including the night he spent at the ranch of Dr. J.H. Happy, a spiritualist, whose young son attempted to induce him into a trance by playing a violin made from an old cigar box.[17]

Colvig accompanied Thompson to Santa Rosa to successfully lobby the county Board of Supervisors to adopt the atlas as the county’s official map.[18] They also appealed for free publicity from the publisher of the Sonoma Democrat newspaper, Thomas L. Thompson (no relation to T&W’s Thomas H. Thompson).[19]

Thomas Larkin Thompson, proprietor and co-editor of the Sonoma Democrat newspaper(public domain)

He informed them that his brother Bob—Robert Augustus Thompson, Jr., who co-edited the newspaper, had already written a 24,000-word history of Sonoma County the Sonoma Democrat had published the year before.[20]

A positive, reaffirming narrative, Bob’s history sidestepped or downplayed any political, economic, and social divisions in the county’s 26-year old history. Instead, he provided descriptions of the county’s climate, geography, topography, agriculture, and timber. There were also sketches of its milling, mining, and wine interests, and brief histories of each town .

Bob Thompson’s “A Brief Historical Sketch” of Sonoma County, Sonoma Democrat, January 2, 1875

Bob’s format and approach was the same T&W used in their county atlases, indicating he might have anticipated their arrival. To gain the Sonoma Democrat’s support, T&W agreed to license an expanded version of Bob’s history for the atlas, and allow Bob to publish it independently. Bob’s motives for doing so were likely political.[21]

Robert A. “Bob” Thompson (Honoria Tuomey, History of Sonoma County, 1926, p.207)

A leader of the Sonoma County Democratic Party, he was planning to run for county clerk in 1877. Authoring the county’s first comprehensive history would not only burnish his credentials, but also make for good publicity.[22]

In August 1877, The Historical Atlas of Sonoma County was delivered to subscribers under the imprint “Thos. H. Thompson & Co.,” presumably because Thompson’s partner West was not involved with the history section.[23]

Title page of the Historical Atlas Map of Sonoma County, 1877

The book contained 12 colored maps; 15 town and village plats; 120 engraved illustrations of farms, businesses, and buildings; Bob’s history; and five commissioned biographies and portraits of prominent settlers.

The book was met with great acclaim, at least from T&W’s local promoters. Many acknowledged that while it got some details wrong, on the whole it was the most complete effort to date.[24]

There were, however, disappointed subscribers who refused to pay for the balance of their orders. After T&W sued them for payment, a handful countersued, claiming their signatures on the orders had been forged.[25]

Illustration of a canvasser from Bates Harrington’s 1879 book, How ‘Tis Done

Colvig left Sonoma County long before the publication date. Having grown increasingly frustrated with the sketchiness of official surveys in the county’s western region, he returned early to Oregon. Pursuing a new career in the field of law, he was eventually elected district attorney of a district encompassing Jackson, Josephine, Lake, and Klamath counties.[26]

Judge William Colvig, Oregon, early 1900s (photo courtesy of Tim Colvig)

Coinciding with the atlas’ release, Bob became the Democratic Party’s nominee for Sonoma County clerk. He also published his own pamphlet version of the atlas’s history—A Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, for sale in bookstores for $1 ($30 in today’s currency). Shortly after, he was elected to the first of three terms as county clerk. His legacy today is as Sonoma County’s first historian.[27]

Robert A. Thompson’s Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, 1877

While T&W’s atlas provided a sense of stability to Sonoma County residents, its landscape images projecting a spatial permanency rooted in social values of family, community, and commerce, the ephemeral nature of the county atlas itself suggested such stability to be precarious.[28]

By the late 1870s, the novelty of “maps for the masses” began to lose its appeal. Subscription publishers like T&W quickly transitioned to a new model known as the “mug book.” Gone were the maps and illustrations, replaced by commissioned biographies with engraved portraits of their subjects, hence the nickname “mug book.” [29]

Sonoma County’s first mug book, History of Sonoma County, made its appearance in 1880.[30]   Written by J.P. Munro-Fraser, it provided a more robust and colorful history than that of the 1877 atlas. However, the book’s main attraction was its 349 commissioned biographies and 67 engraved portraits, comprising more than 300 of its 745 pages.

Title page of the mug book History of Sonoma County, 1880

Written in the laudatory style of a newspaper obituary, the biographies provided valuable information for future genealogists, but were, for historians, riddled with factual errors and errors of omission.

For better or worse, the mug book became the template of the four subsequent Sonoma County histories that followed, three of them written by local newspaper editors—Samuel Cassiday (1889), Tom Gregory (1911), and Ernest Finley (1937) —and one by Bodega school teacher Honoria Tuomey (1926).

The vanity of their attraction meant that for the next half century, the county was periodically flooded with canvassers knocking on doors with offers to publish the resident’s story and portrait in exchange for a fee and a subscription to the county’s new, exciting history.

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier on February 20, 2026. Special thanks to Tim Colvig for sharing family documents and photos.

******

FOOTNOTES:

[1] William M. Colvig, “Journal for 1876: May 16, 1876,” courtesy of Tim Colvig, Wm. M. Colvig Collection; Ad for Montgomery Queen Circus, Petaluma Argus, May 5, 1876; Mecham acreage cited in Historical Atlas Map of Sonoma County (Thompson & West, 1877), p. 99.

[2] Michael P. Conzen, “The County Landownership Map in America: Its Commercial Development and Social Transformation 1814-1939,” Imago Mundi, Vol. 36 (1984), p. 29

[3] Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, “Picturing Progress: Assessing the Nineteenth-Century Atlas-Map Bonanza,” Michigan Historical Review, Vol. 30, No. 2, Fall 2004), pp. 194, 198.

[4] Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pps. 37-39; Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, p. 169; Note on pricing: Cheryl Lyon-Jenness notes atlas books in Michigan in the early 1870s were priced at $9 a copy. In 1876, Sonoma County’s Board of Supervisors approved the purchase of 15 copies of the Sonoma County atlas for $225, or $15 each. They approved an additional acquisition of one copy in 1877 for $15 (“Board of Supervisors,” Sonoma Democrat, March 11, 1876; “Board of Supervisors,” Petaluma Argus, September 21, 1877; “Where the Money Goes,” PetalumaArgus, November 16, 1877). The Alameda County atlas, published by Thompson & West in 1878, sold for $20, but at 170 pages, was 66 pages longer than the Sonoma County atlas (“A County Atlas Map,” Oakland Daily Transcript, February 25, 1877).

[5] “A County Atlas Map,” Oakland Daily Transcript, February 25, 1877; Conzen, Agricultural History, p. 119. Note: Conzen cites the sales goal was generally 1,000 copies, but the Oakland Daily Transcript estimates the number at 1,500.

[6] Michael P. Conzen, “Landownership Maps and County Atlases,”  Agricultural History, Vol. 58, No. 2 (April, 1984), p. 119; “Minnesota Atlas,” Freeborn County Standard, Minnesota, April 30, 1874; Bates Harrington, How ‘Tis Done: A Thorough Ventilation of the Numerous Schemes Conducted By Wandering Canvassers Together with the Various Advertising Dodges for the Swindling of the Public (Chicago: Fidelity Publishing Co., 1879), pp. 22, 27; Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, pp. 194, 198.

[7] “Minnesota Atlas,” Freeborn County Standard, Minnesota, April 30, 1874; Harrington, pps. 42-43, 79-80, 87-88.

[8] Colvig Journal, April 23, 1876. Note: T&W agreed to pay him $100 per month ($3,000 in today’s currency) plus expenses.

[9] Colvig Journal, May 18-22, 1876. Note: in 1877, T&W moved their offices to Oakland.

[10] Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, pps. 171-172.

[11] Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, p. 198; Conzen, Agricultural History, p.119.

[12] Harrington, p. 40; Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, pp. 180, 196, 198.

[13] David F. Myrick, Introduction to the 1958 Reprinted Edition of Thompson & West’s History of Nevada, 1881 (Howell-North, Berkeley, CA, 1958), p. h; Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, p. 168.

[14] “Minnesota Atlas,” Freeborn County Standard, Minnesota, April 30, 1874; “County News,” Vallejo Chronicle, September 29, 1876; “Proposed New Maps,” Oakland Tribune, January 25, 1877.

[15] Charles Sweet, “The Judge Colvig Story,” Table Rock Sentinel, Southern Oregon Historical Society newsletter, September 1986; “Bowers Map of Sonoma County,” Petaluma Argus, December 13, 1866; William Walsh, “The Story of an Inventor,” Overland Monthly, January-June, 1897, pp. 166-179; Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, p. 182; Colvig Journal, April 23, 1876; Note: Colvig reviewed property lines and mapped out significant topographical features, along with churches, schools, mills, roads, and railroads.

[16] Colvig Journal, April 23, 1876; Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, p. 182.

[17] “A Friendly Call,” Petaluma Argus, November 6, 1874; Colvig Journal, April 23, May 3, July 14, August 14, 1876. Note: Colvig ended up working on the atlas for four and a half months, from May 3rd to August 14th.

[18] Harrington, p. 32; “New Advertisements: To the Citizens of Sonoma County,” Petaluma Argus, February 18, 1876; “Sonoma County Atlas,” Petaluma Argus, May 11, 1877; “Card from  T.H. Thompson,” Petaluma Courier, August 16, 1877; Note: the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors agreed to purchase 15 copies of the atlas for $225, or $15 each (“Board of Supervisors,” Sonoma Democrat, March 11, 1876; “Board of Supervisors,” Petaluma Argus, September 21, 1877).

[19] Note: Thomas L. Thompson was commonly referred to in newspaper articles of the time as “Tom.” Likewise, Robert A. Thompson went by “Bob” (“Nine Men Have Had Part in Building P.D. in the Last 71 Yrs.,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, October 28, 1928).

[20] ”The County of Sonoma: A Brief Historical Sketch,” Sonoma Democrat, January 2, 1875.

[21] “Nailed to the Counter,” Sonoma Democrat, June 19, 1877; “A Kindly Recommendation,” Sonoma Democrat, June 19, 1877; “Sonoma County,” Petaluma Argus, September 21, 1877; “Now Ready,” Petaluma Courier, October 4, 1877.

[22] “Democrats,” Petaluma Argus, June 25, 1875.

[23] “Thompson’s Sonoma Atlas,” Petaluma Courier, August 16, 1877; Historical Atlas of Sonoma County (Oakland, CA: Thompson & Co., 1877), p. 3; Note: Thompson & West published 14 county atlases and histories between 1876 and 1884, after which their partnership was dissolved, and Thompson moved to Tulare, where he became a real estate broker; the imprint Thompson & Co. published three historical atlas map books on its own—Sonoma County (1877) while Thompson was still in partnership with West, and Fresno County (1891) and Tulare County (1892) after their partnership ended (Introduction to the 1958 Edition of Thompson & West’s History of Nevada, 1881 (Howell-North, Berkeley, CA, 1958, p. I).

[24] “Board of Supervisors,” Oakland Daily Times, January 29, 1878. Note: Facing criticism for their county atlas, officials in Alameda County issued a statement acknowledging the atlas was not entirely correct in some of its details, but was more complete than any previous map.

[25]“Thompson’s Sonoma Atlas,” Petaluma Courier, August 16, 1877;  “Card from  T.H. Thompson,” Petaluma Courier, August 16, 1877; “The Forgery Case,” Sonoma Democrat, December 1, 1877; “County News,” Vallejo Evening Chronicle, December 7, 1877; “The Atlas Suits,” Oakland Tribune, November 15, 1878.

[26] Colvig Journal, June 14, June 23-24, August 14-16, 1876; “Autobiography of Wm. M. Colvig, 1928,” Oregon Pioneer Association, courtesy of Tim Colvig.

[27] “Proceedings of the Convention,” Petaluma Courier, July 18, 1877; “Sonoma County,” Petaluma Argus, September 21, 1877; Note: R.A. Thompson’s pamphlet, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts, 1877), was published by Thomas H. Thompson’s former atlas partner in Illinois, implying that T.H. Thompson might have arranged for its publication.

[28] Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, pp. 196, 210.

[29] Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, p. 208; Rhonda Frevert, “Mug Books,” Commonplace: Journal of Early American Life, Issue 3.1, October 2002, https://commonplace.online/article/mug-books/

[30] “The History of Sonoma County,” Petaluma Courier, February 3, 1880; J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco, CA: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880).

Who Built This House: 770 B Street

770 B Street, designed and built by A. M Seeberg in 1929 (photo John Sheehy)

The Mediterranean Revival Style home at the corner of B and Spring Streets was built in 1929 by A.M. Seeberg for Catterina Carpella Berri.

Catterina was born in 1868 in Ticino, Switzerland, to Giuseppe and Grace Bedolla Carpella. As a young girl, she immigrated to California to join her older sister Severina, who had married a Swiss-Italian dairy rancher in Olema named Stephano Toroni. A second sister, Modesta, also immigrated to California, marrying Joseph Silacci of Salinas. Catterina’s brother, Joseph Carpella, remained behind in Switzerland.

Catterina Carpella, circa 1888 (courtesy of Dan Brown Collection)

Catterina lived in Olema with the Toroni family until her marriage in 1898 to Bartolomeo Berri. A 46-year old, Swiss-Italian immigrant, Berri was partners with his brother Vittore in the Berri Bros. Dairy Ranch at Salmon Creek near Marshall in Marin County.

Bartolomeo and Catterina Berri, circa 1900 (courtesy of Dan Brown Collection)

Catterina and Bartolomeo resided on the Berri Ranch until Bartolomeo retired in 1907, at which time they moved to Petaluma, purchasing a house at 816 B Street. Bartolomeo died in 1918, leaving Catterina a small fortune of $75,000 ($1.6 million in today’s currency).

The couple did not have any children. After Bartolomeo’s death, Catterina’s niece and nephew, Sara and Stephen Toroni, came to live with her following the death of their mother, Catterina’s sister Severina.

In 1929, Catterina purchased an empty lot on the corner of B and Spring streets from Charles Lynch, whose family had owned the property since 1875. She then hired A. Mariam Seeberg, a popular Norwegian architect and contractor in Petaluma, to build a new home for her and her niece and nephew.

The chimney at 770 B Street still displays the letter “B” for Berri(photo John Sheehy)

Seeberg, who had designed and built a number of residential and commercial buildings in town, designed Catterina’s new house in the Mediterranean Revival Style popular among his Swiss-Italian clients.

Acclaimed at the time as one most elegant homes in town, it became a signature building for Seeberg, along with his design of Charles Garzoli’s house on Old Redwood Highway in Penngrove.

The Charles Garzoli house designed and built by A.M. Seeberg in 1933 (photo John Sheehy)

A avid gardener, Catterina took great pride in her prize-winning flower beds, which she planted with seeds imported from Europe. She died at her home on B Street in 1937, attended by her niece and nephew, Sara and Stephen Toroni, who continued to reside at the house for the next couple decades.

******

SOURCES:

“Married in San Francisco,” Petaluma Courier, June 8, 1898.

“Marriage Licenses,” San Francisco Examiner, June 5, 1898.

“Mrs. Toroni Died in Olema,” Petaluma Courier, May 25, 1912.

“B. Berri is Summoned,” Petaluma Courier, June 12, 1918.

“Left Big Estate to His Widow,” Geyserville Gazette, July 5, 1918.

“Purple and Pink, Blue and Gold, Flower Show Story in Short is Told,” Petaluma Courier, May 1, 1927.

“A.M. Seeberg Will Build New Building for Hunt & Behrens,” Petaluma Argus, July 27, 1927.

“Mrs. B. Berri Will Build Costly Home,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 5, 1929.

“Gorgeous Flower from Berri Gardens,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 1, 1933

“Funeral Notices,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 6, 1937.

“A. Mariam Seeberg, Long Prominent Here, Succumbs,” Petlauma Argus-Courier, August 9, 1946.

Sonoma Mountain Feuds

A Video Presentation on the Historical Prequel to the Lafferty Ranch Battle

For nearly the past 200 years, since European contact, neighbors on Sonoma Mountain have battled each other in the courts over legal challenges to deeds, property boundaries, water rights, livestock, and trespassing. Occasionally, those quarrels battles have lead to physical threats and altercations.

No feud has been as long standing as the one being still be waged over public access to Lafferty Ranch, which has been owned by the City of Petaluma since 1959 as part of the city’s water works. In 1992, the the city announced plans make Lafferty into a public park, kicking off the series of lawsuits filed by neighbors over the past three decades.

While feuds may appear to come with the territory, it wasn’t always like that. It arrived with the European and American settlers, and their self-centered entitlement of “I have rights.”

Petaluma’s 1886 Poetry Feud

A HIP-HOP STYLE BEEF OVER IMMIGRATION

Chinese grape pickers at Fair Oaks Winery, Sacramento County, c. 1885 (Huntington Library)

The feud began with two murders. In January 1886, Jesse and Sarah Wickersham were found dead in their remote farm house outside Cloverdale. A former Petaluma couple, the two were married cousins, the nephew and niece of prominent capitalist Isaac Wickersham.

Although their killer’s identity was never determined, unfounded accusations pinned the murders on the couple’s Chinese cook, Ah Ti, who had gone missing.[1]

Such accusations were not uncommon. Vilified as criminals and cheap labor, Chinese immigrants had been largely banned from the United States for ten years by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.[2] The manhunt for Ah Ti unleashed a new fury of violence, triggering racists to drive them out of Sonoma County.[3]

Wickersham cabin outside Cloverdale, where Jesse and Sarah died (David Otero, Wickersham Ranch)

Ethnic hostilities didn’t end there. A wave of immigrant workers from Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, and Germany—most, like the Chinese, fleeing war and economic upheaval in their home countries—also threatened some American workers with their cheap labor, along with fears their Catholic and Jewish faiths were diluting the country’s Protestant identity.[4]

In local newspapers, a war of words broke out among three factions.

Capitalists like John McNear welcomed the Chinese for their low wages, while evangelists like Petaluma’s Rev. William Pond targeted them as Christian converts. Local Democrats, having sided with the South during the Civil War, opposed Chinese “aliens” but welcomed white Europeans. Nativists sought to limit or cleanse the country of all immigrants.[5]

Illustration of “WASP” (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) with Morrow’s Anti-Chinese Bill in pocket, holds Chinese man with paper labeled “Coolie contracts” in one hand and a European immigrant with with papers labeled “Contract cheap labor” in the other hand (Bancroft Library)

Nowhere was the ink slinging more ferociously eloquent than in the feud waged between two poets, Jack and Puck.

“Jack” was the pen name of a 35-year-old itinerant reporter named Tom Gregory. He stumbled into journalism as a war correspondent while in the U.S. Navy monitoring a war between Peru and Chile. Upon leaving the Navy, Jack went to work for newspapers in San Francisco and Sacramento. Between jobs, he lived with his mother and stepfather, Sarah and Martin Stone, on their farm in Bloomfield, serving as a correspondent and poet for Petaluma and Santa Rosa newspapers. His poetry earned him a reputation as Sonoma County’s “finest word-painter.”[6]

Poet, journalist, and historian Tom Gregory (History of Sonoma County, 1911)

Alfred James “Puck” Puckett was an 18-year-old literary prodigy known as “Petaluma’s boy poet.” He lived on his parents’ dairy ranch atop Sonoma Mountain. His mother, Mary Meany Puckett, an Irish immigrant and poet in her own right, presided over Petaluma’s Catholic School before marrying. She began Puck’s school days with story and song, cultivating his melodic relationship to language.[7]

Alfred James Puckett, 1886 (Courtesy of Janet Puckett, Puckett Family Collection)

Neither man had more than a rudimentary education.

The feud kicked off with one of Puck’s poems in the Petaluma Argus denouncing the Chinese as those “who have a fearful havoc made/to blot our country’s prime/who destroy morals, ruin trade/and fill the land with crime.”[8]

A fellow Democrat, Jack was no fan of the Chinese. Bloomfield had been the first town in Sonoma County to run out the Chinese after the Wickersham murders.[9]

Panoramic view of Bloomfield, taken by Thomas Rea, 1876 (Sonoma County Library)

But he had issues with Puck’s knee-jerk jingoism. In a letter to the Argus, Jack schooled Puck not to “mix up iambic, trochaic, and dactylic meter all in one line,” before invoking the wisdom of the Roman poet Virgil, omnia vincit labo, or work conquers all.

“I have seen a young Dutchman,” Jack wrote, “with his wardrobe locked up in a cotton handkerchief, strike a job, pitch in, save his low wages, and soon was a capitalist himself; while strong, healthy American boys sat at the saloon doors through all the long, golden, summer days, until the whole political and physical economy of their pants were worn threadbare.

“But here comes a Chinaman! I’ll go out and kill him. Hence my song, armo virumque cano—I sing of arms and the man! Catch on?”[10]

Illustration lampooning anti-Chinese whites who still continue to use their services, San Francisco Wasp magazine (Bancroft Library)

Puck did. Like a pawn learning to navigate the chess board with the king in public, he accused Jack of “venting his spleen against white labor” while “laboring hard” to make the Chinese seem respectable. He also recounted some juicy gossip about Jack before he became a temperance crusader, being “turned over like a rum-logged wretch in an old barn in Bloomfield.”

As for his poetry, Puck asserted, “I never allow meter to cramp free expression of thought. Do you catch on, Jack?”[11]

“My dear, bright boy,” Jack replied, “do you really contemplate more poetry? You are driving on to destruction! You need praying for! Get right down on your knees, Brother Puckett, and I will pray for both of us, and give my genius a picnic: Gracious father in the sky/hear two awful sinners cry/Two poor poets on their knees/poorer, Heaven seldom seen!”[12]

Puck responded with a poem ending with the lines: “Pray that another foreign race/from shores beyond the sea/may never trample or erase/the birthright of the free.”[13]

Puck’s patriotic invocation reminded Jack of a traveling circus.

Ad for the Forepaugh Traveling Circus in Petaluma, 1877 (Petaluma Argus)

“A circus is a caravan of blacklegs and thieves,” he wrote. “Whenever one hits Petaluma with a bag of monkeys and a bare-back riding prostitute, every man who has a $, or can borrow one, goes to see them.”[14]

The two poets continued slinging insults back and forth for months like two modern-day hip-hop artists waging a “beef.” In the fall of 1886, their beef took an ominous turn as they began to run out of words.

Jack lifted some lyrics from “I’ve Got a Little List,” a song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta “The Mikado.” A satire of society set in an imaginary Japan, the musical was breaking box office records that year all across America.[15]

Poster for The Mikado operetta, 1885 (public domain)

“Now someday,” Jack wrote, tweaking the lyrics, “I am thinking, the Fool-Killer/must come round/I have got a little list—I have got a little list/Of rabid, red rhyme-writers who might well be underground/And who never would be missed/who never would be missed!”[16]

“Alas, poor Jack,” Puck replied in verse, “you are doomed/I feel it in my soul/That, when you have counted up your list/Yourself must head the roll/Better come down from the hill tops/And hide yourself away/The Fool-Killer is on the march/The oldest fool to slay.”[17]

Neither Jack nor Puck was a stranger to violence. The year before, Jack had wounded his 17-year-old stepsister’s suitor with a shotgun after catching him sneaking into her bedroom window one night.[18]

Puck’s views aligned with those of his father, Edward Puckett, who, prior to settling on Sonoma Mountain in 1854, had been a member of San Francisco’s Vigilante Committee. Seeking to wrestle control of the city from the Sydney Ducks, an Irish gang from the Australian penal colonies, the vigilantes resorted to secret trials, lynchings, and deportations.[19]

San Francisco Vigilantes Committee lynching Sydney Ducks, 1815 (public domain)

“You are almost gone, you poetic comedian,” Jack warned Puck. “You have the worst dose of cacoethes scribendi (an insatiable urge to write) that ever fell to the lot of juvenile flesh. In poetry you have no more chance than a stump-tail calf in fly-time. Good bye!”[20]

Before their feud could escalate any further, Jack fell victim to a lingering illness, forcing him to lay down his pen. By that time, Sonoma County’s racist fever had begun to subside, as labor shortages—largely in jobs whites refused to fill—made the Chinese appear less threatening, leading to their gradual return.[21]

Chinese field hands in California, 1890s (Huntington Library)

However, immigration from China continued to be highly restricted, thanks to an extension of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act introduced in 1892 by Sonoma County congressman Thomas Geary, a former Petaluma lawyer. The restrictions would not be lifted until 1943.[22]

Shortly after his feud with Jack, Puck and his father became involved in a violent dispute with a neighbor over a calf that had strayed onto their ranch. Puck was shot twice, in the abdomen and shoulder.[23] After recovering from his wounds, he went on to establish a reputation as “the poet of Sonoma Mountain,” publishing several books of his work, and as a local historian.[24]

Alfred James Puckett, 1915 (Courtesy of Janet Puckett, Puckett Family Collection)

As for Jack, a year after the feud he became editor of Santa Rosa’s Sonoma Democrat, replacing longstanding editor Thomas L. Thompson, who had been elected to Congress on his anti-Chinese platform.[25]

Finding his poetic temperament unsuitable for daily newspaper editing, Jack quit after a year, and went to work for the U.S. Post Office, and then the U.S. Navy’s recruiting office, before returning to covering the waterfront for San Francisco newspapers. [26]

In the early 1900s, Jack and his wife moved back to Santa Rosa, where he freelanced for local newspapers.[27] A few years before his death in 1914, he began writing books of regional history. His first was The History of Sonoma County, which, despite its rambling verbosity and questionable factchecking, still serves as a seminal work for local historians.[28]

In the book, he made no mention of the Chinese.

Tom Gregory’s History of Sonoma County, 1911

Versions of this story appeared in the Petlauma Argus-Courier, November 28, 2025, and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 30, 2025

FOOTNOTES:

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

[2] Michael Luo, “The Forgotten History of the Purging of Chinese from America,” The New Yorker, April 22, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-forgotten-history-of-the-purging-of-chinese-from-america?_sp=0b6879cb-dd67-4dcd-a2c6-f519bac1ace0.1757793793358.

[3] “Anti-Coolie Meeting,” Sonoma Democrat, February 6, 1886; “Going Below,” Petaluma Argus, February 13, 1886; “Sebastopol Anti-Chinese League,” Sonoma Democrat, February 27, 1886; “Blew Them Up,” Petaluma Argus, March 10, 1886; Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans (University of California Press, 2008); Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 5-8; Hannah Clayborn, “History of Healdsburg: The Chinese in Sonoma County, https://www.hannahclaybornshistoryofhealdsburg.com/the-chinese-in-sonoma-county.html

[4] “Speech of John F. Swift,” Petaluma Argus, October 30, 1886.

[5] Lew-Williams, pp. 5-8; Thomas Chinn, A History of the Chinese in California (San Francisco, CA: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969), p. 21; William C. Pond, Gospel Pioneering: Reminiscences of Early Congregationalism in California 1833-1920 (Oberlin, OH: The News Printing Company, 1921), pgs. 10, 17, 91-95, 130-135; Robert Segar II, “Some Denominational Reactions to Chinese Immigration to California, 1856-1892,” Pacific Historical Review , February, 1959, Vol. 28, No. 1, pgs. 51, 58; Wesley S. Woo, “Presbyterian Mission: Christianizing and Civilizing The Chinese in Nineteenth Century California,” American Presbyterians, Fall 1990, Vol. 68, No. 3, pgs. 68, 71, 167-172.

[6] “Death Calls for Tom Gregory,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 9, 1914;  Jeff Elliott, “Tom Gregory,” Santa Rosa History, December 29, 2011. http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2011/12/tom-gregory/

[7] “Decoration Day,” Petaluma Argus, May 24, 1884; “Early Days in Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, October 12 1899; “Mary Catherine Puckett,” Petaluma Courier, July 6, 1901; “Sudden Death of A.J. Puckett,” Petaluma Argus, March 9, 1926.

[8] “Free Labor,” Petaluma Argus, March 6, 1886; “Mary Catherine Puckett,” Petaluma Courier, July 6, 1901; “Early Days in Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, October 12 1899.

[9] “The Ball Still Rolling,” San Jose Herald, January 30, 1886; “Letter from Bloomfield,” Sonoma Democrat, February 27, 1886.

[10] “Omnia Vincit Labor,” Petaluma Argus, April 24, 1886.

[11] “Jack and Puckett,” Petaluma Argus, May 1, 1886; On Jack’s sobriety, “I haven’t drank a drop for six months”: “Letter from Jack,” Petaluma Courier, April 18, 1883.

[12] “Puck and Jack,” Petaluma Argus, May 8, 1886.

[13] “Reply to Jack,” Petaluma Argus, May 29, 1886.

[14] “An Alcoholic Ramble, addressed to “Bro. Puckett,” Petaluma Argus, June 5, 1886.

[15] “Some Recent Outbreaks of the Mikado Madness,” San Francisco Examiner, January 28, 1886; “Footlight Flashes,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 1886.

[16] “Song from the Mikado,” Petaluma Argus, September 4, 1886.

[17] “To Tom Gregory,” Petaluma Argus, September 18, 1886.

[18] “The Impetuous Step-Brother,“ Sacramento Bee, March 18, 1885; “Bloomfield Shooting Fracas,” Petaluma Argus, March 28, 1885; Simple Assault,” Petaluma Argus, May 23, 1885; “Love vs. Shotguns,” Sonoma Democrat, May 23, 1885.

[19] Mick Sinclair, San Francisco: A Cultural and Literary History (UK, Signal Books, 2024), pps. 53-60; “Another Pioneer Passes,” Petaluma Courier, September 11, 1907.

[20] “Cacoethes Scribendi” Petaluma Argus, October 2, 1886.

[21] “Fruit Growers,” Petaluma Courier, March 13, 1886; “Potato Diggers,” Petaluma Argus, November 19, 1887; U.S. Census, 1890: Sonoma County’s Chinese population rebounded to 1,145, of which 104 lived in Petaluma.; Gordon C. Phillips, “The Chinese in Sonoma County, California, 1900-1930: The Aftermath of Exclusion,”Masters Thesis, Sonoma State University, 2015, pgs.38-39, http://sonoma-dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.3/153831/PhillipsG_Thesis.pdf;sequence=1

[22]Iris Chang, The Chinese in America (NY: Viking Books, 2003), pp. 125-141.

[23] “Another Shooting,” Petaluma Courier, December 10, 1890; “Card from Mr. Puckett,” Petaluma Courier, December 17, 1890.

[24] “Pioneer Was a Visitor,” Petaluma Argus, January 26, 1925; “Sudden Death of A.J. Puckett,” Petaluma Argus, March 9, 1926; “A.J. Puckett Drops Dead at His Home,” Petaluma Courier, March 9, 1926; “Rich Petaluman Poet Dies of Heart Attack,” Santa Rosa Democrat, March 8, 1926.

[25] Petaluma Argus, November 19, 1887; Hannah Clayborn, “History of Healdsburg: The Chinese in Sonoma County.”

[26] Personal and Social,” Petaluma Argus, November 19, 1887; “Personal and Social,” Petaluma Argus, April 14, 1888; Petaluma Argus, October 20, 1888; “Peggy’s Pencilings,” Petaluma Courier, November 19, 1890; From 1893 to 1896 Gregory’s byline appears regularly in the San Francisco Call Bulletin: “The Call’s Staff Sups,” San Francisco Call Bulletin, June 7, 1896; “To Secure Men for Naval Vessels,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 26, 1898; Waterfront coverage: Petaluma Argus, July 9, 1904; Petaluma Courier, September 21, 1907; “Tom Gregory is Dead,” Sacramento Bee, September 9, 1914.

[27] “Born,” San Francisco Call, May 13, 1900; “New Up-to-date Home,” Santa Rosa Republican, October 12, 1905; “Bennett Valley,” Santa Rosa Republican, October 25, 1910.

[28] “History of Sonoma County Comes from the Press,” Petaluma Courier, December 26, 1911; Santa Rosa Republican, June 27, 1911; “Tom Gregory is Dead,” Sacramento Bee, September 9, 1914.

Remembering Lee Torliatt (1933-2025)

THE STORIES OF A SONOMA COUNTY HISTORIAN

Lee Torliatt (Sonoma County Library)

“Oh my, oh my.”

That phrase, customarily uttered in an Irish brogue by Father James Kiely when confronted with one of life’s wonders or mysteries, served as a secret code between Lee Torliatt and me.

The two of us grew up a generation apart under Kiely’s watchful eye, just a couple blocks away from the towering St. Vincent de Paul Church he oversaw the bu in 1928. Kiely’s exclamation summed up our mutual obsession of delving into local history as a means of making sense of the world, but always coming up short.

Father James Kiely, 1965 (Sonoma County Library)

After swapping stories of what W.E.B. DuBois called “the hideous mistakes, the frightful wrongs, and the great and beautiful things that people do,” we inevitably circled back to historian Shelby Foote’s appraisal of history as nothing more than “paradox, irony, and existential reality.”

Lee embraced that investigative cul-de-sac with both empathy and dry wit.

“Oh my, oh my.”

St. Vincent de Paul Church, built 1928 (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

The two of us bonded over shared anchor places in our lives—the Petaluma neighborhood near St. Vincent’s where we both grew up in large family clans, and Sonoma Mountain, where our immigrant ancestors originally settled in the 19th century, and where I live today.

Site of the strawberry ranch of Lee’s grandfather, “Strawberry Pete” Torliatt, in the late 19th century, Upper Lichau Road, Sonoma Mountain (photo public domain)

In the storytelling traditions of both our families— mine Irish, his French-Italian—facts were merely the bare bones of history. Unless cast in an engaging tale, they didn’t have legs. As John Keats noted, “a fact is not a truth until you love it.”

Lee loved facts, but not to the point they compromised his storytelling. Heaven forbid. Like the best history teachers, his stories had heart. They conveyed the humanity necessary to help students imagine the lives of people in the past, and the humor to show they were just as human as we are today.

Father Kiely liked to show up at the homes of parishioners unannounced, make a quick, five-minute inspection of the place, then abruptly leave. It was a vivid reminder that in a small town, knowing eyes are always upon you.

For Lee and me, they always were.

They bore witness to our stories—to who we were, how we got to be where we were, what we had been through, what we accomplished—just as we bore testimony to their stories before us, their footsteps we walked in, lending meaning to the transitory nature of our own wondrous presence.

“Oh my, oh my.”

Lee Torliatt (photo courtesy of Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

******

A version of this tribute appeared in the Fall 2025 edition of the Sonoma Historian

_____________

Born in Petaluma, Lee Torliatt was a Sonoma County high school teacher, newspaper reporter, storyteller, and author of Historic Photos of Sonoma County, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire, and Sports Memories of Sonoma County.

Petaluma’s School for Blacks 1864-1880

Segregated 19th century school (photo courtesy of Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com)

In 1855, the first California Colored Convention was held in Sacramento. Members made it one of their top priorities to lobby the state legislature to educate all of California’s children. But they also took matters into their own hands, pooling their resources to buy land and create private schools for Black children, often in alliance with the A.M.E. Church, which opened its basements for use as school rooms, deployed its ministers and their wives to serve as teachers, and raised money from its congregations to keep the schools operating.[1]

Along with Chinese and Native American students, Blacks had been excluded from California’s common public schools since the state’s admission to the Union in 1850. The California School Law of 1855 strengthened that exclusionary policy by providing school funding based strictly on the number of white students attending a school. The policy was further fortified by an 1860 law that prohibited public schools from admitting “Negroes and Mongolians” under the threat of losing all funding.[2]

An engraving featured in harper’s Weekly of the National Colored Convention in Washington, D.C., 1869 (courtesy of the James Casey Collection/New York Times)

For George Miller and the other members of the Colored Conventions—most of whom had been educated as free men in the North—access to education was vital to Black success in California, not only in terms of becoming financially autonomous, but also in being viewed as educated and respected members of the community, and hopefully extinguishing some of the racist attitudes that whites held toward them. By embargoing Blacks from entering public schools, California was choosing to perpetuate the Southern fallacy that Blacks didn’t have the ability to survive off the plantation because of their illiteracy.

Petaluma at the time lacked both an A.M.E. Church and a school for Black children. George Miller set out to change that. By the early 1860s, his Humboldt Shaving & Hairdressing Saloon was thriving. In 1861, he added a bath house, and in 1863 moved into the newly constructed Towne Building on Main Street across from the American Hotel (today a small parking lot extending between Petaluma Boulevard North and Water Street).[3]

19th century Black barbershop (photo public domain)

That same year, Miller was joined by another Black barber in town, Frank Vandry Miller, who had immigrated to American from Jamaica in 1843. He opened up his barbershop a couple doors down from George Miller’s shop, also in the Towne Building.[4]

By 1863, Miller’s wife Catherine had given birth to two more children, bringing the total number of school-age children in their house to four. Miller felt that it was time to establish a school for Black children in town. On December 4th, he organized a gathering of Petaluma’s Black community, presided over by John Richards of Santa Rosa. (Richards would personally fund the opening of Santa Rosa’s “colored school” a year later in January, 1865).[5]

After the meeting, the group pooled their resources to rent a small house on Washington Street and furnish it with seats and desks. They also began recruiting for a teacher in the pages of the Pacific Appeal. A young Black woman from San Francisco named Mrs. Rachel Coursey, responded to the query. Despite having been married just six months before to John G. Coursey, a music teacher at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in San Francisco, Rachel Coursey came to Petaluma and began teaching at the so-called “colored school” on opening day, January 11, 1864.[6]

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

Two months after the school opened, the California Supreme Court ruled that public school districts were required to provide “separate but equal” schools for Blacks, except in cases where there were fewer than ten such students in the district, in which case they would be integrated into white schools. At the time, there were 831 Black children of school age living in California. After some pushback, two years later, the Revised School Law of 1866 specified that in the event a town had fewer than ten Black children, the school district could integrate those students into its white schools, assuming that a majority of the white parents didn’t object—a clause that would later become a bone of contention in Petaluma.[7]

Although Petaluma’s “colored school” had only eight students, George Miller’s group succeeded in obtaining public funding for their “colored school” after the passage of the new school law, thanks in part to Petaluma’s new Superintendent of Public Schools, Rev. Edward S. Lippitt, a Republican abolitionist minister originally from Connecticut.[8] By the end of 1864, Petaluma was identified as one of six California cities with a public-funded “colored school,” the others being San Francisco, Sacramento, Marysville, San Jose, and Stockton.[9]

As the school year began in July 1867, Petaluma had 627 school-age children between the ages of five and fifteen, eight of whom were Black.[10] Petaluma’s “colored school” however was clearly shut down by the fall of 1867 when Philip A. Bell, editor of The Elevator, a Black newspaper in San Francisco that Bell spun off from the Pacific Appeal in 1865, came to Petaluma to lecture on the topic of education at the bequest of Rev. Killingsworth.

Drawing of Philip A. Bell, editor of The Elevator (courtesy of blackpast.org)

The day before Bell’s scheduled lecture, the trustees of Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church overruled Rev. Killingsworth, cancelling the talk. Bell, an articulate and outspoken advocate of education for Black children, instead spent the weekend attending Rev. Killingsworth’s Sunday sermon at the church and being introduced around the community by Petaluma’s two black barbers, George Miller and Frank Miller. [11]

In 1871, George Miller and other Black parents in Petaluma began to lobby the school district to reopen the “colored school.” The town’s Black population had grown to forty-four, twenty-two of whom were school-age children.[12]

In 1871, George Miller and other Black parents in Petaluma succeeded in convincing J.W. Anderson, who had replaced Rev. Edward S. Lippitt as the town’s school superintendent, to their cause. “The colored citizens,” Anderson said, “are clamoring for a school, and should have one.” The school district rented a dilapidated house on Fifth Street between D and E streets to house the “colored school,” and in January of 1872 hired A.G.W. Davis, a young man just beginning his teaching career, to teach the twelve Black students who had enrolled. That year Petaluma joined nineteen other “colored schools” in California teaching a total of 510 students.[13]

At the start of the school year in July, 1873, eighteen-year old Miss Rose Haskins was appointed teacher of the “colored school.”[14] Haskin lived just half a block away from the “colored school,” in the house her father, English contractor and stonemason Robert Haskins, had built on the southeast corner of 5th and E streets. Enrollment that year totaled seventeen students, two of whom were Chinese.[15] In July, 1874, the school district, after complaints about the school’s ramshackle condition, moved the “colored school” into a former private school at the northeast corner of Fifth and D streets.[16]

During Rose Haskins’ first semester in the fall of 1873, the Petaluma Argus, a weekly newspaper edited by Henry L. Weston under the motto “equal rights and equal justice to all men,” began a campaign employed by other Republican newspapers in the state of questioning the cost efficiency of maintaining a separate school for such a small number of Black students (the Radical Republican Party, of which Weston was a member, were abolitionists supportive of expanding civil rights, including school integration, while the southern-dominated Democratic Party, for which Santa Rosa’s Sonoma Democrat newspaper served as the county organ, was strongly opposed to granting such rights).

Petaluma Argus editor, Henry L. Weston (Photo Sonoma County Library)

Weston pointed out that, given Haskins’ salary and rent for a separate school building, the average annual cost of educating a student in the “colored school” was $35, as opposed to $12 in Petaluma’s white schools ($1,100 and $370, respectively, in early 21st century currency). Denouncing school segregation as an abomination, Weston declared that the “colored school” must soon “fade away before the ceaseless march of progress and civilization.”[17]

In the spring of 1872, Miller again gathered with the Educational Committee in San Francisco, and under the leadership of Elevator newspaper editor Philip Bell, decided to put a test case before the California Supreme Court.[18]

Call in The Elevator to 1870 Color Convention of the Pacific Coast, featuring George W. Miller as President of the Executive Committee

The case was initiated by Mrs. Harriet A. Ward on behalf of her daughter Mary Frances. After the closing of a “colored school” on Broadway Street in San Francisco, Mary Frances was faced with having to walk a long distance to the nearest available “colored school” across town. Instead, Harriet A. Ward applied for admission of her daughter to the nearby white Broadway School. Her application was denied by Principal Noah F. Flood.

The case of Ward v. Flood became the first school segregation case to go before the state Supreme Court. In May, 1874, the court ruled on the case, upholding California’s School Law of “separate but equal” facilities for Black and Native American children, but also affirming that, based upon the civil rights extended by the Fourteenth Amendment ratified in 1868, the education of Black and Native American children must be provided for in separate schools upon the written applicated of parents of at least ten such children. If the trustees of the schools failed to do so, the children had to be admitted into the white schools.[19]

For the members of the Educational Committee, the ruling overall was disappointing, but it also represented an incremental victory in that it clearly mandated the public education of Black children, including admitting them into white schools if need be. With the ruling in hand, committee members turned their efforts to lobbying school districts to abolish “colored schools.” By 1875, San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland, and Vallejo had done so.[20]

But not Petaluma.

As the school year began in July, 1875, Rose Haskins was promoted to a teaching position at the Brick School, Petaluma’s main grammar school for white students, at Fifth and B streets. She was replaced at the “colored school” by her cousin, Miss Annie Camm, the daughter of local English contractor William Camm.[21] A few months into Camm’s tenure, Henry Jones, a native of Massachusetts who had recently opened a new barbershop on Washington Street, complained about Camm’s competency in teaching his son at the ungraded “colored school.” He requested that Principal Martin E. Cooke Munday of the Brick School admit his son to the white school.[22]

Munday, a young leader of the local Democratic Party, claimed to have examined Jones’ son—a claim Jones subsequently denied—and found him to be unqualified for entry into the Brick school. Privately, he told Jones that “no colored child should be admitted as long as he was principal of the school.” Jones, who pointed out that he paid school taxes just like everyone else in town, told the Petaluma Argus that he was “just looking for some justice.”

Instead of returning his son to the “colored school,” Jones placed him in a private school.[23] (Although this incident occurred in 1875, it was not made public until 1877 when the Argus reported it in an effort to embarrass Principal Munday, who at the time was running for county school superintendent. Munday ended up losing to the race to the Republican candidate, but subsequently went on to be elected to the state assembly and then to mount an unsuccessful campaign for Lieutenant Governor.)[24]

In 1876 however, Lippitt, distressed and angered by what he considered the Republican Party’s retribution against the South during the Reconstruction Era, switched his allegiances to the pro-South Democratic Party. He and Shattuck launched the Courier as an advocacy organ for Democratic candidates running in the 1876 election, including presidential candidate Samuel Tilden.

Edward S. Lippitt, 1910 (photo Sonoma County Library)

They wasted no time attacking the Republican positions held by Henry Weston’s Argus, labeling the paper a “negro-worshipping sheet” for its stand on integrating Black students into the white schools.[25] (Later in life, Lippitt wrote that although he believed in freeing the slaves, he did not expect Blacks to be granted the vote until they had been properly educated to execute it, which he suspected may take generations; he deplored passage of the Fifteenth Amendment as merely a Republican political maneuver to humiliate the South.)[26]

One result of the newspaper war waged between the Argus and the Courier in 1876 is that the “colored school” became a polarizing topic. Ezekiel Denman, one of the town’s most prominent and wealthiest men, was defeated in his 1876 re-election bid to the Board of Education after voicing support for eliminating the “colored school.”[27] The Board’s stubborn refusal to abolish the “colored school” went viral in 1877, drawing ridicule from newspapers from as far away as The presidential election of 1876 was undermined by voter fraud, resulting in an deal between Republicans and Democrats to allow Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to ascend to the presidency, on the condition that he formally end Reconstruction in the South, removing all federal troops.

The end of Reconstruction reversed whatever gains Blacks had made since the Civil War, ushering in an era of Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, and lynchings. During this period, many Black living in Petaluma were drawn away to more vibrant Black communities in Oakland and in Vallejo, the latter of which offered jobs in the nearby Mare Island shipyards.[28]

By the spring of 1877, enrollment in the “colored school” had dropped to four students, which Henry Weston was quick to point out in the Argus raised the annual cost per student to $125, as opposed to $12 for students in the white schools.[29] Still, Petaluma’s Board of Education held its ground.

The following spring, Miss Annie Camm resigned from teaching at the “colored school” in order to get married.[30] She was replaced by Miss Mary C. Waterbury.[31] By 1880, Petaluma’s “colored school” was down to merely one student who was being taught by an Black teacher named Miss Louisa Dickson.[32] The population census year listed only seventeen Blacks living in Petaluma.[33]In April, 1880, the California state legislature voted to abolish “colored schools,” citing the expense of providing a separate education system for a relatively small number of children. They passed a new law requiring that schools be open “for the admission of all children.”[34]

At the beginning of the new school year in July 1880, E.S. Lippitt’s Petaluma Courier, unwilling to acknowledge the new law, spuriously reported that the “colored school” had been discontinued after enrollment had dwindled down to but one student.”[35] In 1882, there were four Black students enrolled in the newly integrated Petaluma public schools. By 1885, there were none.[36]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] J. Gordon Melton, J. Gordon, A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism (MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) pp. 8–11; Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, editors, The Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840-1865, Volume 2 (Temple University Press, 1979).

[2] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25.

[3] Petaluma Argus: Humboldt Shaving Saloon Advertisement, December 15, 1863; “Passing Away,” July 30, 1862.

[4] Advertisement for “Frank Miller’s Hairdressing Saloon,” Petaluma Argus, January 23, 1863.

[5] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 24. “Correspondence,” Pacific Appeal, December 12, 1863. The Elevator: “Santa Rosa,”, July 4, 1865 (The Santa Rosa “colored school’ was entering its second semester in July, indicating the first started in January of 1865). “School Examination in Santa Rosa,” February 16, 1866.

[6] Petaluma Argus: “School for Colored Children,” December 16, 1863; “Opened,” January 13, 1864; Pacific Appeal: “Correspondence,” December 12, 1863, “Married,” June 27, 1863, “Arrivals from the Interior,” February 13, 1864.

[7] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25.

[8] “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; Lippitt’s role is speculated given the silver spoons presented to him by Miller and other A.M.E. members in 1870 for his advocacy in helping them attain their civil rights.

[9] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864. (Eight students is an estimate–it’s unknown exactly how many students were in attendance during the Petaluma’s “colored school’s” first year. George Miller had four school-age children. In 1867 and 1868, Petaluma’s annual school census counted eight black school-age children between the ages of five and fifteen in town, out of a total of 627 children in the city.)

[10] Petaluma Argus: “School Census,” July 4, 1867, July 2, 1868, July 1, 1869, June 18, 1879.

[11] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 252-253. “Petaluma,” The Elevator, November 1, 1867.

[12] 1870 Population Census.

[13] Petaluma Argus: “Our Public Schools,” June 3, 1871; “Our Public Schools,” January 6, 1872; “Educational,” March 9, 1872; “The Public Schools,” July 20, 1872.

[14] Petaluma Argus: “Our Public Schools,” July 18, 1873;

[15] Petaluma Argus, “The Colored School,” November 7, 1873.

[16] Petaluma Argus: “Educational Notes,” July 17, 1874; “Colored Schools Elsewhere,” April 27, 1877. (E.S. Lippitt confirms that the “colored school’ was on the northeast corner of Fifth and B streets in An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt, p. 42.)

[17] Petaluma Argus: “Our ‘Colored Schools,’” December 8, 1876.

[18] The Elevator: “Educational Public Meeting at Bethel Church,” April 27, 1872; Address of the Educational Committee, May 11, 1872.

[19] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/

[20] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/

[21] Petaluma Argus, “Educational Notes,” June 25, 1875; “Educational Notes,” July 9, 1875.

[22] The Colored School,” Petaluma Courier, April, 12, 1877. Petaluma Argus: “Cozy Barber Shop,” April 23, 1875; “Died,” September 3, 1879; “Our Colored School,”

[23] Petaluma Courier: “The Colored School,” April, 12, 1877; “Letter from a Citizen,” April 19, 1877. Petaluma Argus: “The Colored School,” April 6, 1877; “The Colored School,” April 20, 1877; “Personalities,” August 31, 1877;  “How is This?” August 24, 1877.

[24] “The Election,” Petaluma Courier, September 6, 1877. “In the Assembly,” San Francisco Examiner, January 28, 1884.

[25] Petaluma Courier, “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877.

[26] An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p. 43.

[27] Petaluma Argus: “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877.

[28] Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 58.

[29] Petaluma Argus: March 30, 1877; “Our Colored School,” March 23, 1877.

[30] “Our Public Schools,” Petaluma Argus, June 14, 1878 (listed her as teaching for two months the spring). “Married,” Petaluma Courier, July 18, 1878.

[31] Petaluma Courier, “Election of Teachers,” June 19, 1878; “Teachers Elected,” January 8, 1879.

[32] Petaluma Courier, “The Public Schools,” June 18, 1879; History Of Sonoma County, Sonoma County, CA (Archives History – Books …..Petaluma Township, Part 3 1880).

[33] 1880 Population Census, Sonoma Country History and Genealogy.

[34] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 25; John Foord, Journal of the American Association, Volume 6, 1907, p. 84.

[35] “Local Dots,” Petaluma Courier, July 21, 1880.

[36] Petaluma Argus: “School Census Report,” June 2, 1882;  “School Census,” June 6, 1885.

Chenault Way Named for Henry Chenault

Chenault Way where Western Avenue meets Petaluma Boulevard (photo John Sheehy)

Petaluma’s beloved “sidewalk philosopher” and iconic shoeshine entrepreneur Henry Chenault was honored on September 17, 2025, in a ceremony remaining the former alleyway where Western Avenue meets Petaluma Boulevard as “Chenault Way,” not far from where he operated his shoeshine stand.

A bronze plaque recognizing Chenault for his contributions to Petaluma for more than 30 years, was also installed on Chenault Way, the first street in Petaluma to be named after a Black resident.

Plaque below Chenault Way street sign (photo John Sheehy)

Brief remarks were offered by Faith Ross, Bill Fishman, John Sheehy, and Chenault’s niece Barbara Clark.

Faith Ross, Bill Fishman, and Barbara Clark with Chenault’s original street sign, at the ceremony (photos courtesy of Connie Williams)

The ceremony was attended by the city mayor and city council members, as well as city officials. The proposal to rename the street in honor of Chenault was spearheaded by Carol Eber.

John Sheehy’s remarks can be viewed here:

Video of remarks at dedication by John Sheehy (video courtesy of Connie Williams)