John Patrick Sheehy, Author at Petaluma Historian

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.

******

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

Historic Steiger Building Threatened

Steiger Building, built 1876 (Photo by Scott Hess)

While much of Petaluma is caught up in a furious debate over what constitutes acceptable public art along Water Street, developers are busy pursuing their own agendas for the area, with little regard for the historic guidelines set out in the Central Petaluma Specific Plan. The area’s first major proposed development—the Haystack Pacifica complex intended for the former Petaluma and Santa Rosa Railway yard between Weller and Copeland streets—is an ultra-modern complex with no visual compatibility to the historic downtown.

Now, the new owner of the Steiger Building, home to the Riverfront Art Gallery at 132 Petaluma Boulevard North, is proposing to hollow out much of this prominent landmark, while preserving its street-facing façade (“Revamp for Historic Building,” Argus-Courier, March 21, 2019). Known in the development trade as “architectural facadism”—preserving the face of a building while constructing an entire new building behind it—the practice is popular in older cities like San Francisco that are looking to build up rather than out.

For the Steiger Building however, there’s a hitch—it was built in two phases, the Greek Revival storefront in 1876, and a back addition in 1905. Both halves were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995 as they were part of a continuous family business. In order to hollow out the Steiger Building and construct a new three-story structure, the developer is reportedly challenging the historic status of the building’s back half.

The Steiger Building is steeped in Petaluma history. It occupies the site of the town’s first grocery—Kent, Smith & Coe—established in 1852. It was here, according to meat hunter John E. Lockwood, founder of Petaluma’s initial trading post in 1850, that the town’s first 4th of July celebration was held, with a grand ball that lasted for three days.

William Steiger, a colorful German immigrant, arrived in town in 1856 and opened up a gun and locksmith shop on Main Street near where the current day Odd Fellows Lodge sits, later moving in the 1860s roughly to where Thistle Meats resides today. In 1876, he moved again into the newly constructed building at 132 Petaluma Boulevard North, sharing the building with its owner, George Ross, who operated a photo gallery on the second floor. Not long after, Steiger purchased the building from Ross, and posted an iconic large sign in the shape of a rifle above the front entrance. Upon his death in 1878, his son, P.J. Steiger, renamed the shop Steiger’s Sportsman Emporium, and made it the founding headquarters of the Petaluma Sportsman Club, which operated a rod and gun preserve down the river through the 1920s.

One of P.J. Steiger’s sons, Joseph, turned out to be an adventurous entrepreneur. After purchasing Petaluma’s first bicycle, he convinced his father to open the town’s first bicycle outlet at the store just as the bicycle craze of the Gay 90s was taking off. In 1902, he purchased one the town’s first automobiles, a single cylinder Oldsmobile Runabout, and the next year persuaded his father to establish in the store Petaluma’s first automobile agency. After his father added the back extension to the building in 1905, Joe used the space to open Petaluma’s first auto repair shop, as well as its first “livery auto,” or taxi service. In 1907, after he and his brother Will assumed ownership of the store upon their father’s death, they began selling Indian motorcycles in addition to guns, fishing gear, automobiles, Victor phonographs, and sewing machines.

Joe Steiger (middle), with Don Cella and Bill Palmer, outside Steiger Bldg, 1924

Steiger’s eclectic sporting goods store remained a popular downtown anchor until Joe’s tragic death in 1924, when he and a close friend, city councilman H.S. McCargar, both drowned while fishing for bass in a rowboat near the Sportsman’s Club. Joe’s premature death put an end to Sonoma County’s oldest family-owned business. The Steiger Building went on to house many businesses over the years—including the Petaluma Power and Water Company, a real estate office, and most recently Murray Rockowitz’s photo studio and a co-op art gallery—as well as to become a cornerstone of the Golden Concourse.

If there’s a site that deserves protected landmark status, it’s the Steiger Building—both halves of it. The downtown needs to continue evolving and being revitalized, but not at the price of losing its historical fabric. Merely paying lip service to that fabric by retaining a storefront façade undermines the downtown’s authenticity. Unlike the debate raging over public art, there can be no question of the Steiger Building’s legitimate standing in town.

A version of this article appeared in the Petlauma Argus-Courier on March 28, 2019.

Why This Blog?

The Petaluma River Watershed has been a stage for the passing exploits of land stewards and pillagers, community builders and adventurers, boosters and steely-eyed entrepreneurs, immigrants and suburban commuters. In making a living space of the watershed, their efforts extend from the inspiring to the dispiriting, the noble to the disgraceful, the sublime to the ridiculous. In other words, a microcosm of much of California as a whole.

Over time, the watershed has been carved up into a crazy quilt of borders, ranging from tribal areas to Mexican rancherias, county lines, city limits, property lines, and community separators. Over the last two centuries the watershed’s resources have been subjected to extraction and exploitation, leaving behind a legacy of good as well as bad.

This blog seeks to “re-story” the landscape of the Petaluma River Watershed by digging beneath the legends, folklore, and myths to learn like a history detective what’s either been hidden from the common narrative or else lost to time, in hopes of enlarging our collective understanding of Petaluma and, in doing so, deepening our roots as a community.

The more we come to hear the stories of those who have passed this way before us, the more we find ourselves beckoned to a sense of belonging that extends beyond our lifetimes.

Communities that lose their collective memory often lose their sense of meaning and identity.

— John Sheehy

Petaluma Suffragist Josephine P. Hill

Josie Hill (photo courtesy of Melissa Hill Spease)

A member of Petaluma’s early rivertown aristocracy, Josephine Pilkington Hill came from humble beginnings. Born in 1841, in Troy, New York, to James Pilkington, a traveling salesman, and Margaret Lonnon Pilkington, she traveled at the age of twelve with her parents and two brothers west across the plains by wagon train to Oregon.

In 1862, at the age of twenty, Josie made her way to San Francisco, where she met and married William B. Hill (1829-1902), also a native of New York, who had come to California to mine for gold in 1852, and then settled in the town of Petaluma in Sonoma County as a merchant and farmer. Over the first twelve years of their marriage, Josie gave birth to four sons.

In 1866, William used his riches to help form the Bank of Sonoma County, serving as its president until 1886, when he established the banking firm of William Hill & Son. By then, Hill was among the area’s largest landowners with 6,000 acres in Sonoma and Marin counties, including a 200-acre vineyard and winery. He also owned land in Mexico.

Despite William’s winery enterprise, Josie was an early temperance activist. A devoted member of the Christian Scientist Church, whose teachings informed her political and civic engagement, she attended the inaugural convention Pacific Coast Woman Suffrage Association in 1871 as a Petaluma delegate with other local temperance supporters. In 1879, she served as a founding member of Sonoma-Marin Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the first WTCU chapter formed in California, embracing the “do everything” reform initiative of the Union’s president, Frances Willard, whom the chapter welcomed to town in 1883.

In 1896, as California suffragists rallied behind a state ballot amendment granting women the right to vote, Josie became a charter member of Petaluma’s Political Equality Club, sponsored by the California Woman Suffrage Association, serving later as the club’s vice president. That same year the new club welcomed Carrie Chapman Catt of the National American Woman Suffrage Association to town.

Hill Opera House, Keller and Washington streets, built 1904 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

After the unexpected death of her husband William in 1902—which came soon after the deaths of three of her adult sons from tuberculosis—Josie and her surviving son Alexander built the Hill Opera House at Washington and Keller streets in William’s memory. Deemed by Josie “a temple of the thespian,” it was heralded as one of the finest playhouses in the state.

Josie also played a critical role in the development of the Petaluma Woman’s Club, donating the club a valuable piece of real estate on Washington Street, the sale of which they used to help fund construction of their B Street clubhouse in 1913.

The Hill mansion at 106 Seventh Street (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

At her stately Victorian home at 106 Seventh Street in Petaluma, Josie hosted numerous gatherings over the years of the WCTU, Political Equality Club, and Woman’s Club, and held elaborate luncheons for visiting speakers to town. Josie also made her house and the Hill Opera House available for religious services and lectures of the Christian Scientist Church, as the local congregation lacked a church building at the time. A generous philanthropist, she served as president of the Antietam Women’s Relief Corp and a trustee of the Harold Meacham Relief Fund.

Josie passed in 1918 after a long illness at the age of seventy-six, and was buried in the Hill Family plot at Cypress Hill Cemetery.

SOURCES:

Illustrated History of Sonoma County, Lewis Publishing Company, 1889

Petaluma Courier: Princely Philanthropy,” November 6, 1892; G.A.R. Installation,” January 13, 1893; “For Equal Suffrage,” October 30, 1896; “Equal Suffrage,” September 28, 1896; “James Vincent Hill,” July 15, 1899; June 24, 1899; William Hill,” July 31, 1902: “New Equality Club is Organized,” December 3, 1903; “A Christian Science Lecture,” June 18, 1909; August 15, 1909; September 7, 1911.

San Francisco Chronicle: “Woman Suffrage,” January 20, 1871.

Petaluma Argus: “W.C.T.U.,” June 13, 1878.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Pioneer Woman Crosses the Divide,” January 10, 1918.

KSRO Interview: Sonoma County’s Irish History

A gathering is held at Jasper O’Farrell’s home near Freestone (Sonoma County Library).

In preparation for St. Patrick’s Day, historian John Sheehy was interviewed on KSRO about the early Irish history in Sonoma County. For those who missed it, below is an excerpt from the transcript:

How the Irish Settled Sonoma County

The Irish were the first large immigrant group to settle in Sonoma County from the time the county was established in 1850 until the 1890s. They came from Ireland on three different paths:

Many following the Potato Famine of 1845-1849 back home, when a million Irish immigrated to America. Others came to California earlier in 1846 as Union soldiers in the Mexican-American War, and then stayed behind after the war ended to mine for gold before settling on farms in Sonoma County. And finally, a number of Irish men been exiled to the penal colonies in Australia by their British rulers after the Irish Rebellions of 1848 and the early 1860s, and then made their way to California, including one of my great-grandfathers, the Fenian Charles Sheehy from County Limerick.

The fact that California had been governed by Mexican Catholics was certainly appealing to those suffering religious persecution under British Protestant rule back home.

The Earliest Irish Settlers: Read & O’Farrell

Sonoma County’s first Irish settler, John Read, arrived in 1827 while the area was under Mexican rule. He built a ramshackle house along Crane Creek near Cotati and planted corn. But the Coast Miwok natives burned his crops, and so he retreated to Mill Valley, where he married a Californio widow—a native of Spanish and Mexican heritage—and so was able to become a landowner of large Mexican land grant, the Rancho Corte Madera. John Reed Elementary School in Rohnert Park is (mis)named in his honor.

In 1843, the man who is perhaps the county’s most famous Irishman, Jasper O’Farrell, a civil engineer from Dublin, came to work in the area as a surveyor for the Mexican government. The Mexicans paid him in land grants, including part of Rancho Nicasio in Marin. He also purchased the Rancho Estero Americano, which included land between Freestone and Valley Ford. There, he established his family estate named Analy after ancestral lands in Ireland (which carried over to the naming of Analy High School in Sebastopol).

After the Mexican-American War ended, O’Farrell was hired to map out the grid for the new city of San Francisco, including its grand promenade known as Market Street, and a street that still bears his name. He made good money surveying, and in the 1850 U.S. Census he was reported to be Sonoma County’s wealthiest citizen.

The Potato Boom

A number of the Irish immigrants in the early 1850s followed a fellow Irishman named John Keyes to the west Sonoma County—Bloomfield, Bodega, Valley Ford—where he began growing potatoes, or “Irish diamonds” as they were known, the county’s first big boom crop. Potatoes were able to keep without refrigeration, which made them transportable on schooners down the Petaluma River to a growing San Francisco. By the mid-1850s, Sonoma County’s potato boom was largely over, a victim of overplanting, soil erosion, and increased competition.

The Wheat Boom

The potato boom in Sonoma County was followed by the California wheat boom. With it came a second influx of Irish immigrants in the 1860s, including my Irish ancestors from County Kerry, the Caseys, many of them attracted by wheat’s reputation as the “poor man’s crop.” It required little expertise or capital, and unlike fruit trees or grape vines that took years to mature, it returned a good profit the first year. Best of all, wheat harvesting was mechanized through the use threshers, and so not particularly labor intense.

Wheat schooner, Petaluma River (Petaluma Historical Museum & Library)

Many of the Irish wheat farmers, including my ancestors, settled in Lakeville south of Petaluma and on the western slope of Sonoma Mountain, an area that became known as “Little Ireland,” somewhat segregated from Protestant-dominated river town of Petaluma. My great-grandfather John Casey farmed 160 acres across the northern end of Tolay Lake, previously a sacred Coast Miwok site, that was drained by a wealthy German settler William Bihler in 1870 for planting potatoes. The old Casey farm is now part of the new Tolay Lake Regional Park.

The wheat boom crashed in the 1880s, after which my ancestors and many other farmers switched to dairy ranching.

Donahue Landing

By that time, a new Irish community had been established south of Lakeville called Donahue Landing. It was actually a company pop-up town of 200 people erected by an Irishman named Peter Donahue, who in 1870 built the San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad that extended from Donahue Landing north to Healdsburg.

Steamship moored at Donahue’s Landing, 1878 (Sonoma County Library photo)

His instant town of Donahue Landing featured a two-story hotel, a firehouse, a one-room county school, two laundries, a saloon, and a stable that doubled as a dance hall. Donahue employed only Irish on his crews. Meanwhile, another Irishman, John Frisbee, a son-in-law of Mariano Vallejo, who built a separate rail line through the Sonoma Valley to Healdsburg at the time, employed only Chinese workers. Many of Donahue’s Irish workers stayed on in Sonoma County after the railroad was finished.

Catholic Church Communities

The other impact of the Irish immigrants in Sonoma County was the establishment of English-speaking Catholic Church communities in a county that was largely Protestant in its early days. That included St. Vincent’s parish in Petaluma in 1857, St. Rose parish in Santa Rosa in 1860, and St. Teresa parish in Bodega in 1861. These parishes usually started out in someone’s stable, as in Petaluma, or a hotel, as in Santa Rosa, with visiting priests who rode a circuit from the San Rafael mission until such time as enough money was raised by the parish to build a church and support a permanent priest.

St. Vincent’s Church, Liberty & Howard streets in Petaluma, built in 1876 for the Irish parish (Sonoma County Library)

By 1870, the U.S. Census counted the Irish as the largest single immigrant group in Sonoma County, about a third of the 20,000 people in the county. They also comprised a third of San Francisco’s population of 100,000.

The Swedenborgian Suffragist Sarah Myers Latimer

Born in 1826 in Lambertville, New Jersey, Sarah Myers Rich Latimer was the sixth child of Abraham Dillion Myers (1789-1872) and Martha Preston Gillingham (1788-1844). Shortly after losing her mother at the age of nineteen, Sarah married John Pennington Rich (1815-1862), a construction engineer, and moved with him on his various assignments around Massachusetts and ultimately to Portland, Maine, where she was introduced to the teachings of the Swedenborgian Church which would influence her life going forward.

Over the next fifteen years Sarah gave birth to three boys, one of whom died in infancy, and two girls. In 1862, the family sailed to California via the Isthmus of Panama route, where they settled on a 480-acre ranch of fruit trees, cattle, and mineral springs in town of Windsor, Sonoma County, adjacent to farms of Sarah’s father and brother, who had settled there in the mid-1850s. Sarah named the ranch Glen Valley Springs. Tragically, Sarah’s husband John died from malaria six months after their arrival, leaving Sarah to run the ranch.

In 1865, Sarah married thirty-five year old Lorenzo Dow Latimer (1830-1901), a Santa Rosa attorney, whose first two wives had died prematurely, each leaving him with a young child. A prominent leader of the Sonoma County Republican Party, he ran unsuccessfully for the state senate the year he married Sarah, followed by two unsuccessful campaigns for county judge. In December, 1869, he was appointed California’s U.S. District Attorney, a position based in San Francisco that he held for the next decade.

That same month, Sarah participated in the formation of the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association held at the Petaluma home of fellow Swedenborgian, Abigail Haskell. In late January, 1870, she accompanied Haskell to the inaugural convention of the California Woman Suffrage Association in San Francisco, where Haskell was elected president and Sarah vice president. Sarah also became an officer of the local chapter of the International Order of Good Templars, a national temperance organization promoting abstinence (a position she may have modified once she and Lorenzo added a large vineyard to their ranch).

In 1871, Sarah accompanied Haskell’s husband Barnabus, a prominent Petaluma dry good merchant, to Chicago on the new transcontinental railroad, to attend the annual Swedenborg Church convention. Barnabus had faithfully traveled to Chicago or to an east coast city to the convention ever summer since settling in Petaluma in the mid-1850s.

In 1880, Lorenzo was appointed to fill the eight-month term of the deceased Superior Court Judge of San Francisco, after which he maintained a law partnership in San Francisco until 1886. During the early years that Lorenzo worked in San Francisco, the couple commuted between Glen Valley Springs and the city, where Sarah remained engaged with the California Woman Suffrage Association, participated in philanthropic affairs, including the founding of the Hospital for Children, and served as a delegate to the national regional Swedenborgian conventions.

She also joined the board of the California Women’s Silk Culture Association, an initiative by women suffragists in the 1880s to foster the cultivation of mulberry trees and silk production as a means of providing work to unemployed women and children.

In 1878, Sarah returned full time to her ranch, which had grown to almost 1,000 acres, and converted it into a hot springs resort, which she managed with the help of her son William Rich. She passed away in 1904, a few years after her husband, surrounded by her family at Glen Valley Springs.

SOURCES:

Elinor Rich, Along Family Lines, the family history of the Rich Family, Windsor Museum & Historical Society.

Nelson Klose, “Sericulture in the United States,” Agricultural History Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct. 1963) pp. 225-234.

Annual Report of the Women’s Silk Culture Association of the United States, Volume 3 (Philadelphia, April, 1883).

Journals of 37th-46th General Conventions of the New Jerusalem: General convention of the Church of New Jerusalem (Swedenborg Church) in Chicago, June 9-13, 1871.

New Church Messenger, Vol. 88, 1904, “Latimer,” p. 211.

Oakland Tribune: November 17, 1886.

Petaluma Argus: “Appointed,” December 18, 1869; May 14, 1870.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “The Death of William B. Rich,” April 27, 1933.

Petaluma Courier: May 19, 1880: “Former Local Woman Dead,” January 29, 1925.

Sacramento Bee: “Deaths,” February 20, 1858; “Marriages,” November 27, 1860; “Deaths,” October 8, 1864; “State, County, and City Officers,” December 24, 1880.

San Francisco Call: “Swedenborgian Church,” October 13, 1895.

San Francisco Chronicle, “Hospital for Children,”, January 13, 1887.

San Francisco Examiner: “ The City’s Vote,” November 5, 1880; Ad, March 9, 1881; “Silk Culture,” January 21, 1882; “The Juice of the Grape,” January 11, 1887.

Santa Rosa Republican: “Death of Mrs. Latimer,” March 9, 1904.

Sonoma Democrat: March 31, 1859.