John Patrick Sheehy, Author at Petaluma Historian

Petaluma’s Parks Visionary

By Katherine J. Rinehart & John Sheehy

Kenilworth Racetrack and Clubhouse, 1910, Sonoma County Library photo No. 41762

In 1927, Golden Gate Park’s famed superintendent, John McLaren, was invited to Petaluma to help beautify an undeveloped six-acre lot that would become McNear Park, donated to the city by grain merchant George P. McNear. It wasn’t the first time that a McLaren had been called in for parks consultation—thirteen years prior, McLaren’s son Donald, a San Francisco landscape architect, had performed his own evaluation. His findings were succinctly expressed in a Petaluma Argus headline that proclaimed “Petaluma Parks Can Be Made To Make City World Famous.”

The younger McLaren spent a day being led about Petaluma by long time friend, pioneer nurseryman and city park commissioner George Syme, along with three other park commissioners, Charles Egan, Ed Hedges, and Eldridge Dykes.

The Petaluma Parks Commission was fairly new, having been established in 1911, a year after Donald McLaren became a partner in the nursery and landscape engineering firm of MacRorie & McLaren in San Francisco. Prior to that, Petaluma’s parks had been beautified and managed since 1896 by members of the Ladies Improvement Clubs, who took matters into their own hands after the city refused to devote taxpayer dollars to maintaining public parks.

*Postcard of Hill Plaza Park. Sonoma County Library Photo No. 7363*

After touring Oak Hill Park, Walnut Park, Hill Plaza (today’s Penry Park), and Petaluma’s two gores—small, triangular pocket parks at Liberty Street and Stanley Street, McLaren expressed his amazement that while most cities were striving to secure a square or park, Petaluma already had many, and they all were well laid out and stylishly improved.

*Postcard of Oak Hill Park. Sonoma County Library Photo No. 4841*

McLaren was especially impressed with the “beautiful specimens” of oak trees he found at Oak Hill Park, a park created from the city’s first cemetery in 1908 by the women of the Oak Hill Park Club.

But it was Kenilworth Park that surprised him the most. Originally established along Payran Street as a fairground In 1882 by the Sonoma and Marin Agricultural Society, it was sold in 1897 after the state of California stopped subsidizing its operation. In 1902, the 65-acre tract was turned into a racetrack and horse breeding ranch named for the champion race horse Kenilworth.

It was purchased by the city in 1911, and transformed into a municipal park for baseball games, horse racing, rodeos, and a public campground (the Sonoma-Marin District Fair returned to staging annual fairs at Kenilworth Park in 1936, converting the horse-race track to auto racing).

“The trees are all grown, the roads and avenues laid out, and the foundation has been prepared,” McLaren pointed out after touring Kenilworth, “so that at a small expense it can be beautified and made a modern pleasure ground which will cost but little to maintain and will be the pride of the people.”

McLaren promised the park commissioners that he would send a sketch of a plan for making Kenilworth one of the prettiest parks in the whole state. “Good parks induce people to settle in a city,” he said, making them “a great asset of a modern and well-kept city.”

*Harness Racing at Kenilworth Park. Sonoma County Library Photo No. 34414*

In addition to the parks, McLaren also visited the famous nursery of William A.T. Stratton, known as California’s “Gum Wizard” for his cultivation of eucalyptus trees. McLaren expressed his surprise at the beauty and size of Stratton’s nursery, located on the west side of Upham Street where Tunzi Parkway is today.

He also stopped by the home of Dr. John A. McNear, owner of the Mystic Theater and the older brother of George P. McNear, at 216 Liberty Street, where McLaren was delighted by McNear’s famous Japanese plum tree, which he declared to be the finest he had ever seen in the country.

Although he was only in town for the one day, McLaren promised to visit Petaluma again. It was a promise that he most likely kept. In 1916, his firm, MacRorie & McLaren, was engaged by George P. McNear and his wife Ida Belle to assist with a complete renovation of the extensive grounds of their Belleview estate, located at the south end of town across from the current day bowling alley. In 1922, MacRorie & McLaren returned to Petaluma to provide landscape plans for the newly constructed Christian Science Church at the corner of the B and Sixth Streets.

Based on MacRorie & McLaren’s familiarity with Petaluma, it seemed natural that when Donald’s father John McLaren was invited to Petaluma in 1927 to consult on development of McNear Park, he would bring Donald along with him. Sadly, Donald McLaren had died two years earlier in 1925, the victim of an apparent suicide. That left his father John to provide his own consultation as to what should be done to assure that McNear Park was developed in such a way as to meet the needs of “a modern and well-kept city.”

Today the modern and well-kept city of Petaluma is home to 46 public parks and 10 distinct, County-maintained open space areas — an impressive increase from the six parks that existed during Donald McLaren’s visit to Petaluma over 100 years ago.

SOURCES:

Oakland Tribune: “McLaren to Advise Petaluma on Park”, October 17, 1927.
Petaluma Argus: “Petaluma Parks Can Be Made to Make City World Famous”, February 14, 1914; “Tunzi Parkway, Petaluma’s Newest Residence Court; Completed Today”, December 16, 1927; “Beautifying the M’Near Grounds”, March 17, 1916.
Petaluma Daily Courier: “No Appropriations,” March 28, 1895; “Agricultural Park,” March 9, 1897; “Ladies Release Charge of City Parks”, May 3, 1911; “Organized a Club”, March 24, 1908; “Landscape Gardners Let Contract to Beautify Grounds”, November 10, 1922.
American Florist, October 22, 1910 Vol. 22, page 620

Petaluma’s First Pandemic

Chinatown, 3rd St between C & D, ca. 1900

On the evening of March 20, 1900, Ellen Button was on her way to teach at the Chinese Mission School when she spotted one of her students, Wong Qued, emerging from the Mutual Relief Building on the corner of Western Avenue and Kentucky Street. No sooner had Qued stepped onto the sidewalk than two men walked up, grabbed him, and to Button’s horror, threw him into the street. Qued was not the only student of Button’s attacked. Dong Tong, a strawberry grower, was chased for blocks and then stoned.

The attacks were sparked by news that the federal government had placed San Francisco’s Chinatown under quarantine after a newly arrived pandemic killed a Chinese laborer and infected dozens of others. Joseph Kinyoun, a federal bacteriologist, identified it as the same plague that was isolated in Hong Kong six years earlier. Transmitted by rat fleas, it made its way into San Francisco via a rat-infested ship from Australia.

Fearful that the news would negatively impact California’s economy, California’s governor, Henry Gage, vilified Kinyoun for fabricating the virus. Supportive newspapers and business leaders echoed the governor’s denial, as did state medical officials, many of whom considered bacteriology a lot of mumbo jumbo.

After a federal medical commission confirmed Kinyoun’s findings, Governor Gage, who was in the pocket of the powerful Southern Pacific Railroad, continued to deny the pandemic’s existence, silencing state medical authorities with a gag order, accusing federal authorities of injecting the virus into cadavers, and cynically joining Chinatown residents in suing the federal government to lift the quarantine on the basis of having violated their civil rights— a case they won.

As rumors of the pandemic circulated, fearmongering of the Chinese spread to Petaluma, which had its own Chinatown clustered along Petaluma Boulevard South between C and D streets. The Petaluma Courier sought to reignite racial prejudices by dubbing the virus the “yellow plague.”

On June 18^th, Ellen Button hosted a 25^th anniversary celebration of the Chinese Mission School at the Congregational Church on Fourth and B streets. Two blocks away, a group of drunken men set out to clean up Chinatown, engaging the Chinese there in a “battle royal.” Shortly afterward, the windows of the Chinese laundry on Washington Street were smashed in.

Widespread hostility toward the Chinese had been common in Sonoma County for decades, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which restricted further Chinese immigration. Four years later, dissatisfied that the act was serving as more of a sieve than a barrier, Petalumans formed an Anti-Chinese League, one of many in the county, seeking to drive the Chinese out of town by boycotting their businesses and labor.

The effort intensified after a former Petaluma couple, Captain Jesse Wickersham and his wife Sarah, were found murdered on their ranch outside of Cloverdale, allegedly by their Chinese cook. Stirred up by newspaper editorials depicting the Chinese as being possessed of “pestilential vapors, threatening disease, and death,” two thousand people rallied in Petaluma for the boycott. A sudden exodus of Chinese from Sonoma County followed, creating a labor shortage, especially on the farms and vineyards, which whites would not fill. By summer, the boycott had fizzled, and the Chinese began returning to the county in larger numbers than before.

Sonoma County Chinese family, early 1900s

Still, an underlying racist divide remained. The Chinese Mission School, one of 16 in the state co-founded by Petaluma pastor William C. Pond, sat a block away from Chinatown’s joss-house, or Taoist-Buddhist temple. Offering evening instruction in English and Christianity, the school’s primary purpose, as Button made clear, was not to help acclimate the Chinese but rather to send them, as Christian evangelists, back to the “heathens” in their native land.

Due to Governor Gage’s obstruction of federal efforts to mitigate the virus, the pandemic worsened in 1901 and 1902, infecting a growing number of white victims, and leading other states to pass quarantines and economic boycotts of California goods. It was only after the election in 1902 of a new governor—a German-trained physician—that an intensified control program was implemented, bringing the pandemic to an end.

Although the 1900-1904 pandemic pales in comparison to the impact of today’s COVID-19, the parallels are clear. The global spread of a disease tends to increase prejudice as societies circle their wagons in fear. That’s especially true when leaders conceal or suppress the facts, delay mitigation in order to protect economic interests or assign discriminatory names to the virus for political gain. The fact is, pandemics don’t discriminate: only scared, ill-informed people do.

A version of this article appeared in the petaluma Argus-Courier, April 2, 2020.

Petaluma Historytelling Series: featuring John Sheehy

Onstage with Jim & Tom

Jim and Tom welcome local historian John Sheehy for a dive deep into Petaluma history, including the Coast Miwok, the machiavellian General Vallejo, the 1830’s smallpox epidemic, Petaluma’s Chinese-American and African-American communities in the 19th century, stock breeder William Bihler, Tom’s favorite explosions, Petaluma’s railroad battle in Santa Rosa, Tom’s favorite murder, the booms of busts of Petaluma, Deep Throat at the Mystic Theater, and much, much more.

John Sheehy is the author of On a River Winding Home: Stories and Visions of the Petaluma River Watershed, which features intimate historical stories of the Petaluma River Watershed paired with the stunning photography of Scott Hess. Tom Gaffey is the general manager and Jim Agius the talent buyer of the Phoenix Theater, where Onstage with Jim & Tom is produced.

Petaluma History Session I: with Harlan Osborne, Katie Watts, John Sheehy

Onstage with Jim & Tom

Left to right: Jim Agius, Harlan Osborne, Katie Watts, John Sheehy, Tom Gaffey (back to camera)

Onstage with Jim and Tom welcomes Petaluma historians Harlan Osborne of the Argus Courier, Katie Watts of the Press Democrat, and author John Sheehy to explore and discuss Petaluma history.

This 70-minute conversation explores many moments and characters in the town’s history, including: when Petaluma tried to secede (twice), the town squatter Garrett Keller, the near civil war battle with Santa Rosa, “Mr. Petaluma” Bill Soberanes, the origins of the title “egg capital of the world” (even if it wasn’t true), Doc Naify of the California Theater, Petaluma’s response to prohibition, the Jewish chicken farmer community, and much more.

Classic Petaluma locations & characters referenced: The Spa, Gilardi’s Corner, Marios & Johns, Agius Grocery, Fannie Brown’s brothel, A & B Market, Fairwest Grocery, Volpi’s, Twin Oaks, Elks Lodge, Petaluma Hotel, Caulfield’s Meats, Andresen’s, The Hideaway, Mattei Brothers, The State (The Mystic) and the California/Showcase Theater (The Phoenix), the roost dances at Kenilworth, radio stations KAFP (“Krowing Always For Petaluma”) and KTOB, Mario Figone, Baccala’s Market, The Cordas, The Dolcinis, Judge Rollie Webb, Clem McCorkell, “Stan the Man” Greenhagen, Tom Caulfield, Lamar Lauritzen, and Bert Kerrigan.

Petaluma History Panel II : with John Sheehy, Katie Watts, Skip Sommer, Chuck Lucas

Onstage with Jim & Tom

Left to right: John Sheehy, Katie Watts, Skip Sommer, Chuck Lucas, Tom Gaffey, Jim Agius (with back to camera)

Onstage with Jim and Tom welcomes Petaluma historians Skip Sommer of the Argus Courier, Katie Watts of the Press Democrat, Chuck Lucas of Penngrove Proud, and author John Sheehy to explore and discuss Petaluma history.

This 45-minute conversation explores many moments and characters in the town’s early 19th century history as a river town.

Petaluma’s First Suffragist Leader

Barnabus, William, and Abigail Haskell, circa 1852 (photo by Charles Hamilton, courtesy of Ann Nisson)

On March 18, 1870, Abigail Goodwin Haskell arrived in Sacramento from Petaluma to address the California State Assembly. Having recently been elected president of the newly formed California Woman Suffrage Association, she carried with her a petition signed by 3,000 Californians, 400 of them from Petaluma, calling for an amendment granting women the right to vote. As the first woman to address a select committee of the state assembly, she got straight to the point. “We claim to be recognized as citizens of this free Republic!”

It was not a request but a demand, one that continues to resonate today, 150 years later, with the persistent campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.

The twelve months leading up to Haskell’s historic Sacramento appearance was something of a watershed moment for the women’s rights movement. It began with news that Wyoming and Utah had become the first U.S. territories to award women the vote, followed a few months later by the formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In December of 1869, Haskell—Petaluma’s first female public school principal—called a meeting of activists at her home on 4th Street between B and C streets to form the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association. Many who responded were involved with Haskell in local temperance fraternities, but a handful also shared her belief in Spiritualism.

Abigail Haskell’s “Rose Cottage,” 523 B Street at Sixth Street, which she allegedly occupied in late life (photo by Scott Hess)

Inspired in part by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg—a Swedish philosopher whose revelatory claims into Christian theology were buttressed with visions, trances, and dreams—Spiritualism asserted that all of life was spiritual and an expression of the divine. Its main attraction was a belief in the immortality of the soul, which, at a time when early death was commonplace, offered solace to many, including Abigail Haskell and her husband Barnabus, who had lost their young daughter.

Spiritualism’s other attraction was its rebellion against authority. Direction didn’t come from ministers but from mediums or trance speakers—the most prominent of whom were female—called to their positions by spirits of the dead. Freed from the yoke of traditional values and institutions, Spiritualists endorsed some of the more radical reforms of the nineteenth century, including temperance, marriage reform, labor reform, children’s rights, pacifism, and socialism.

Spiritualism helped many women find their voice, producing not only the first large group of female religious leaders, but also the first sizable number of women to address large public gatherings, away from the hierarchical environment of churches and the patriarchal environment of the home. The early California suffrage movement relied almost exclusively on trance speakers to recruit followers.

Haskell and her husband Barnabus, who owned a dry goods store in town, were longtime members of the Swedenborg Church which, with its ministers and doctrines, placed them on the conservative end of the Spiritualist spectrum. But Haskell believed with Spiritualists that obtaining the vote was merely the first step in securing equal rights for women. Having devoted her life to teaching—one of the few professions open to women in the mid-19th century—she championed women’s access to higher education.

Abigail Goodwin Haskell (photo courtesy of Ann Nisson)

Speaking before the state assembly committee, she cited her experience of having attended high school in Connecticut with boys preparing to enter nearby Harvard or Yale. Although equally qualified, she said she was prevented from joining them “on the basis of my sex alone, in accordance with the absurd customs and time-honored usages of the past.” She equated such practices with those of a Muslim harem.

Haskell’s efforts in Sacramento failed, as did other California suffrage efforts throughout the 1870s, blocked by the then Southern-affiliated, conservative Democratic Party, which functioned much like today’s Republican Party which has blocked passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

In 1879, Frances Willard assumed the helm of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Declaring a motto of “do everything,” she expanded the Union’s mission to include suffrage and other social reforms. Inspired by her vison, Abigail Haskell, along with Mary E. Cogdon and other Petaluma women, formed California’s first chapter of the WCTU. With Haskell serving as chapter president, they hosted the inaugural convention of the California WCTU in Petaluma.

In 1883, her health failing, Abigail Haskell welcomed Willard to town, where she lectured to a packed house. A year later Haskell died at age 64. Befitting a fallen crusader, she was conveyed to her gravesite at Cypress Hill Cemetery in a white coffin atop a white hearse of white plumes and drapes, drawn by six white horses.

Versions of this article appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 5, 2020, and the Sonoma Historian, 2o2o, Vol. 2.

Petaluma’s “Colored School”

109 Howard Street, site of the African Methodist Episcopal Church 1867-1885 (photo by Scott Hess)

On the afternoon of May 10, 1871, Constable Frank Adel was scouring the streets of Petaluma for registered voters to call to jury duty. Passing by the barbershop of George W. Miller, he noticed Miller taking a break. On his voter rolls, Adel saw that Miller was one of the fifteen local African American men who, thanks to ratification of the 15th Amendment the year before, had registered to vote. Deciding to put the new amendment to the test, Adel summoned Miller to jury duty.

Upon entering the courtroom, Miller was greeted by gasps from fellow jurors. “N— in the pit,” one of them shouted, “put him out!” After a few preliminary questions from the deputy district attorney, Miller was issued a peremptory challenge and sent back to his barbershop.

For those hoping the 15th Amendment would fully enfranchise African Americans, Miller’s experience was an early wake-up call, one that continues to resonate to this day, as a number of states prepare for the upcoming 2020 election by purging their voter rolls in order to whittle down members of groups like African Americans. Such purges have become common since 2013, when the Supreme Court rolled back many of the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 meant to protect African Americans from the sort of deterrents George Miller faced on his day in court.

In selecting Miller for his jury test, Constable Adel undoubtedly knew he was choosing one of the leaders of Petaluma’s small Black community. A native of New Jersey, Miller moved to town with his wife and two infant children in 1855, opening up the Humboldt Shaving & Hair Dressing Saloon on Main Street for a white clientele. The shop thrived, but Miller was interested in more than just providing a close shave and a good haircut.

In the fall of 1855, he set off for Sacramento as Sonoma County’s sole representative at the first state Convention of Colored Citizens. Although California had entered the Union as a free, non-slave state, California’s early legislature enacted a number restrictions against people of color, including the rights to vote and to attend publicly-funded schools. With mixed success, members of the California Colored Convention—a who’s who of prominent African Americans—lobbied elected officials over the years to rescind the restrictions.

The California legislature voted against ratifying the 14th Amendment, which granted African Americans citizenship, and also against the 15th Amendment, which granted them voting rights. These rights were not extended in California until the two amendments were ratified nationwide, the 14th in 1868 and the 15th in 1870. (California, in fact, didn’t ratify either amendment until the civil rights era of the 1960s).

As public schools were prohibited from admitting “Negroes and Mongolians” under the threat of losing their funding, Blacks were forced to establish their own schools, which is what George Miller did in January, 1864, pooling resources with other Blacks living in Petaluma to rent out a small house on Washington Street, furnish it with seats and desks, and hire a young Black teacher from San Francisco named Mrs. Rachel Coursey. Half of the eight students attending the school were children of George Miller.

Richard “Hoodie” Miller, son of George Miller, who attended the “Colored School”

Two months after Miller’s school opened, California’s Supreme Court ruled that public school districts were required to provide “separate but equal” schools for Blacks. After Miller secured funding from Rev. Edward S. Lippitt, Petaluma’s Superintendent of Public Schools, Petaluma joined six other cities—San Francisco, Sacramento, Marysville, San Jose, and Stockton—in having a publicly-funded “colored school.”

The “colored schools” provided limited and inferior education by design. Members of the Colored Convention succeeded by 1875 in convincing five of the cities to integrate their white schools. The lone holdout was Petaluma, which refused school integration until the state legislature finally mandated it in 1880. Sadly, George Miller did not live to see that day, having died unexpectedly in 1873.

Before his death, Miller celebrated the nation’s ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870 by leading the Colfax Guard, a local Black militia he had formed, in a public 30-gun salute—one gun for each state ratifying the amendment—followed by an address from Rev. Edward S. Lippitt. Years later, Lippitt retracted his support of the 15th Amendment, contending that African Americans shouldn’t have been granted the vote until they had been properly educated to execute it, a process he believed would take generations.

Such racist attitudes remind us why, on the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment’s ratification this month, the fight George Miller and other Petaluma Blacks waged for full enfranchisement continues, generations later.

A version of this article appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier January 16, 2020.

Legalizing Pot and Lessons from Prohibition

Petaluma Hills Farms on Purvine Road, first permitted cannabis farm in Sonoma County

Reefer Madness, the name of the 1930s anti-cannabis propaganda film, has lately taken on new meaning in Sonoma County, where elected officials are wrangling with pot farmers and rural residents over ordinances regulating the cultivation and sale of cannabis. Fear-based propaganda isn’t the only 1930s throwback to this fracas—reminders of Prohibition hang about the county like the fumes of illegal stills, calling to mind Mark Twain’s alleged dictum: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it certain does rhyme.”

The main challenge facing responsible cannabis cultivation today is not the legal farmer living next door (one is applying for a license across the road from me), but the grower who remains, in the words of County Sheriff Mark Essick, “non-compliant” with the new ordinances. It was much the same following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.

While Prohibition is now viewed as a cautionary tale of moral overreach, its enactment and repeal actually had more to do with money. Prior to Congress’s enactment of a federal income tax in 1916, between 30 and 40 percent of the federal government’s revenue came from taxes on alcohol. The enactment of Prohibition in 1919 only became a viable prospect for moral advocates like the Anti-Saloon League and Women’s Christian Temperance Union once income taxes had replaced the government’s dependency on alcohol taxes.

Less well known is the role that criminal gangs played in fermenting Prohibition. They didn’t fear it, they loved it, and in fact supported politicians and organizations who fought to keep it in place. Having just been handed one of the biggest markets in the country, they made sure that nobody who wanted a drink went without. In protecting their market, they also unleashed a wave of corruption, extortion, and violence, placing a number of innocent people in the crossfire. (Sound familiar?). By 1926, annual sales of illegal liquor in the U.S. had reached an estimated $3.6 billion—roughly the size of the entire federal budget at the time.

Charlie Garzoli ran Petaluma’s largest liquor ring. A member of a large Two Rock dairy family, Garzoli used a dog food plant on Hopper Street near the river as his front. The plant featured a fifteen hundred gallon still that produced 196 proof “jackass” whiskey. Sugar used in its manufacture was first transported from ports in the South Bay to local dairies via inconspicuous, souped-up sedans stripped of all seats but the driver’s, giving them the storage capacity of a small truck, before being shuttled to Garzoli’s plant. After the “alky” was made, it was transported in five-gallon tins via the sedans back to the relay ranches, and then delivered to San Francisco via the Sausalito ferry, or driven north as far as Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.

Once the Great Depression hit, revenues from federal income taxes plummeted by 60 percent. Desperate for a new source of income, the government turned to the giant untaxed and unchecked liquor industry. (Sound familiar?). After Prohibition’s repeal in 1933, the industry was flooded with state and local regulations. The new measures set licensing and product safety requirements for sellers, and imposed enforceable restrictions (like tavern closing hours and age limits) on consumers. As Prohibition historian Dan Okrent notes, repeal actually “made it harder, not easier, to get a drink.”

Charlie Garzoli, unwilling to comply with the new regulations and taxes, continued bribing and extorting local law officials to maintain his criminal enterprise. For years, federal and state agents remained flummoxed by the seemingly unending supply of illegal alcohol flowing from Petaluma. Finally, in the spring of 1937, they succeeded in trailing a sugar shipment to Garzoli’s dog food plant. Garzoli was apprehended while trying to flee, and sentenced to two years in Washington state’s McNeil Island Penitentiary for having defrauded the government of $1,000,000 in taxes ($17 million in current-day-currency). Other members of Garzoli’s gang—including prominent ranchers and businessmen—were issued lighter sentences. A major local banker, Adolph Bloom, committed suicide.

Anti-pot sign on Purvine Road outside Petaluma

Those who had fought Prohibition’s repeal back in 1933 tried to present the new legal distillers as “the bootlegger’s friend,” much like some rural residents are trying to present legal cannabis growers today as “the drug dealer’s friend.” But, as Sheriff Essick noted at a community gathering , precisely the opposite is true. Legal growers, working with law enforcement, are the only ones who can bankrupt and destroy the criminal, black market gangs. The sad irony is that only pot prohibitionists, blinded by reefer madness, can keep them thriving.

A version of this article appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier May 9, 2019.

Living with Fire

Valley oak, Tara Firma Farm (photo by Scott Hess)

I was nine years old when the historic Hanly Fire burned through Sonoma County in September of 1964. My grandmother, who had borne witness to similar conflagrations in 1900 and 1923, tried to explain to me that growing up in Petaluma Valley meant learning to live with periodic wildfires — that while nature was something to love, it was both a refuge and at times a destroyer.

It was a lesson I conveniently forgot, believing the traumatic Hanly Fire to be a once in a lifetime event. My grandmother knew better. The lesson had been passed on to her by her parents and relatives, who, like the other early settlers to the valley, first witnessed nature’s wrath one early October morning in 1869 when a small straw fire on a Rincon Valley ranch turned into a firestorm that raged for days.

The Diablo winds — literally a devil’s brew of high temperatures, low humidity and strong northeast gales from the Great Basin — filled Petaluma with such a thick veil of smoke that residents believed they were surrounded by fire on all sides.

They were. Fires were consuming forests north of the Santa Rosa plain as well as fields planted with wheat and hay both east and west of town. Fortunately, a change in weather spared the town.

Prior to the arrival of settlers like my ancestors, large, catastrophic fires occasionally swept through pre-colonial Northern California. As a preventive measure, local Miwok Indians set deliberate fires in order to reduce fuel loads. They also applied selective burning as a broad-based means of pruning and weeding the valley. The burns decreased plant competition and controlled insects and diseases that threatened their food sources, including acorns, which formed a staple of their diet.

The Spanish padres and soldiers who first entered the valley in the 1820s believed it to be a wilderness. It was actually a subtle working landscape carefully managed by fire.
That long tradition of stewardship came to an abrupt end when General Mariano Vallejo banned the Miwok’s deliberate burns in order to introduce large herds of cattle and sheep to the valley.

Following the wildfires of 1869, Sonoma County’s next major firestorm arrived on the morning of Sept. 19, 1900. This time, abundant underbrush and dry, imported pasture grasses provided ready tinder.

A fire started in the woods near Cazadero divided into three branches, with one branch burning toward Sebastopol, a second toward the coast, and the third bearing down on Valley Ford.

Together, they burned 100 square miles. Fires also raged between St. Helena and Healdsburg, in Kenwood, and south of Petaluma on Mount Burdell, where flames started from a charcoal pit burned 18,000 acres of oak trees before heading west toward Nicasio, where it torched herds of grazing livestock.

Wildfires returned to Petaluma 23 years later, on Sept. 17, 1923. Strong Diablo winds blew over dozens of small poultry houses that dotted the hills and then ignited a fire near Nicasio. The infreno once again spread across Mount Burdell and down to the Petaluma Creek. Fire also burned through the redwood groves and cottages along the Russian River, through the forest outside Cloverdale, and down the Sonoma Valley to Boyes Hot Springs.

The eight-day Hanly Fire that I experienced as a boy in 1964 started on Sept. 19 in two spots — from a blown transformer east of Glen Ellen and a hunter’s cigarette on the southwest slope of Mount St. Helena. Spread by hot winds of up to 80 miles per hour, the fires quickly spread toward Calistoga, Sonoma Valley, and northern Santa Rosa along Highway 101, torching 60,000 acres and 151 homes.

One year later, almost to the day, Petaluma was surrounded by a ring of ten fires fed by strong winds reportedly blowing up to 100 miles per hour, the largest of which burned in Crane Canyon north of town and out west between Eastman Lane and the D Street Extension.

Jack Kessler, head of the state’s forest fire fighting effort at the time, pointed out that the problem was bound to get worse as long as people insisted on building homes in highly combustible areas.

As we witnessed in the fall of 2017, Kessler’s prophecy has come to fruition, most tragically in developments like Santa Rosa’s Fountaingrove and Coffey Park, both built well after the Hanly Fire. The question now is whether in the coming years we remember the lessons of the past, or continue to willfully ignore and arrogantly defy the wisdom of living with wildfire.

A version of this article appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier November 2, 2017.

Evil in the Hills: The Infidelity of Copeland Creek

Copeland Creek on Sonoma Mountain (photo by Scott Hess)

When Frank Burton first settled his ranch along Roberts Road in Penngrove, he claimed that the trout in nearby Copeland Creek ran so thick that he could reach in and catch them by hand. For Burton and other early settlers in the 1850s, the creek’s abundance of fish and year-round fresh water made it a valuable resource. But they soon learned that Copeland Creek had a darker side. During heavy winter rainstorms, it jumped out of its usual streambed in the Russian River watershed and into the adjacent Petaluma River watershed, filling the river with silt and debris that contributed to flooding and impeded riverboat navigation.

Calls in Petaluma for finding a remedy to this “evil in the hills”—as the Petaluma Argus called it—began in the early 1860s. Those calls were raised again in the winter of 2018, after Copeland Creek jumped its banks along Lichau Road in Penngrove, spilling over into Petaluma. As in the past, addressing the problem was met with concerns over private property rights, state and federal regulations, and questions about funding.

Copeland Creek originates from Elphic Spring near the summit of Sonoma Mountain, naturally flowing onto the Santa Rosa Plain at the southern edge of the Russian River watershed. While winter storms annually drop an average 23 inches of rain on the valley plain, the top of Sonoma Mountain, literally scraping rain from passing storm clouds, averages 50 inches. Prior to the 1870s, rainwater flowed down Copeland Creek and fanned out into a large seasonal lake across parts of current day Cotati and Rohnert Park, providing a habitat for egrets, herons, ducks, amphibians, and trout.

The increasing development of farms on the plain led to large-scale draining of Copeland Creek’s seasonal wetlands. In the 1870s, a nine-mile channel was constructed to connect the creek with the main stem of the Laguna de Santa Rosa, ultimately feeding the creek into the Russian River. But the collection of sediment and storm debris that built up during winter storms tended to hinder the channel’s flood control function, contributing to Copeland Creek’s inclination to jump into the nearby Petaluma watershed. The channeling also appears to have brought about a steep decline of trout in the creek.

In 1872, Copeland Creek, along with two other year-round creeks that flowed down Sonoma Mountain’s west slope, Adobe Creek and Lynch Creek, became a primary water source for Petaluma. A diversionary dam built midway up Copeland Creek piped roughly half of the creek’s stream flow to Petaluma reservoirs. Even so, come rainy winter seasons, Copeland Creek failed to change its evil ways.

State engineer reports in 1896 and 1902 called for remedies for shoring up the creek’s banks, but ranch owners responded with threats of trespassing lawsuits. In 1914, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers recommended constructing a retaining wall along the creek. In 1918, local congressman Clarence Lea secured an appropriation of $91,000 from Congress to build such a wall, as well as to widen and dredge the Petaluma River and construct a turning basin at the foot of B and C Streets. The Cotati Land Company, a large landholder, sued the city of Petaluma, arguing that the retaining wall would result in flooding of their Cotati farmlands. While the Petaluma River was dredged and the turning basin constructed, it doesn’t appear the retaining wall was ever built.

By 1940, 69% of Petaluma’s water supply was coming from Copeland and Adobe creeks, with the remainder from wells on the east side of town. In 1959, Petalumans approved a revenue bond that purchased the rights and assets of the private company that provided the city its water, including the 270-acre Lafferty Ranch that held the headwaters of Adobe Creek. The purchase however excluded the water rights to Copeland Creek.

*Sonoma Mountain’s three watersheds, Petaluma River, Sonoma Creek, and Laguna de Santa Rosa, formerly known as the Middle Russian River Watershed* (*illustration Sonoma Mountain Preservation)*

In 1961, the city of Petaluma, pressed with growth demands, agreed to build an underground aqueduct that diverted Russian River water to town from the newly constructed Coyote Dam on Lake Mendocino. Subsequent water capacity was added in 1982 with the completion of the Warm Springs Dam. In 1992, Petaluma shut down its Sonoma Mountain water works due to earthquake concerns with Lawlor Reservoir.

In 2021, the City of Rohnert Park was awarded a $6 million FEMA grant toward the construction of the detention basin for Copeland Creek to help mitigate flood problems, with matching funds coming from the city’s development fees. Capturing storm water in the basin will allow a slower recharge of the groundwater while also creating habitat for fish passage, including steelhead trout.

Not so long ago, they ran so thick as to be caught by hand.

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Earlier versions of this article appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 15, 2018, and also the Sonoma Mountain Preservation Newsletter, 2018.