John Patrick Sheehy, Author at Petaluma Historian

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.

Ellen Hulett Button, Suffragist

Born in 1839, in Danby, Vermont, to Silas Hulett (1807-1895), a farmer, and his wife Elizabeth Campbell (1808-1896), at the age of eighteen, Ellen Hulett married Isaac V. Button (1835-1929), also of Danby. In 1861, the couple, along with members of their extended family, moved to Petaluma, California, where they built a house at 641 D Street near 7th Street, then the outskirts of town. Between 1863 and 1878 Ellen gave birth to eight children, only two of which, Isaac Monte Button (1878-1945) and Mabel Ella Button Brown (1869-1963), survived beyond infancy.

While Isaac occupied himself with cattle and horse breeding, Ellen served as founding treasurer of the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, launched at the B Street home of her Petaluma neighbor Abigail Haskell, and signed the 1870 Petition for Woman’s Suffrage presented to the California State Legislature. In 1873, the Button family moved to the new mining town of Spring City, Nevada, where Isaac acquired the 64,000 acre Double-Square Ranch, turning it into the West Coast’s most extensive horse breeding ranch.

In 1892, the couple separated and then divorced, with Ellen returning to Petaluma while Isaac remained at his ranch in Nevada. The family house on D Street was moved to the back of the lot fronting E Street, and the front part of the lot sold odd to Frank Denman, who built a new home.

Back in Petaluma, Ellen became actively involved in the suffrage movement through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, writing regularly for the Petaluma Courier newspaper as the union’s local press superintendent under the initials “E.H.B.,” and later serving as the local chapter’s president. Like scores of other evangelical Protestant women, she embraced the WCTU’s intersectional motto of “do everything,” making the case that as the morally superior sex women needed the vote to act as “citizen-mothers” in protecting their homes and curing a host of society’s ills, many of them rooted in alcohol consumption.

Following the 1893 veto by California governor of a suffrage bill passed by the state legislature, Ellen confronted the local opposition. “It is hard perhaps for one not in the work to realize,” she wrote, “what women have done in the busy walks of life towards creating a public sentiment that gradually places women foremost in all great reforms, as she ever has been in the church and in the home.”

In 1896, as California male voters were offered a referendum on approving a Sixth Amendment to the state constitution granting women the vote, Ellen helped to form the Petaluma Political Equality Club to advocate for its passage, and served as it founding president. At the request of the California Woman Suffrage Central Committee, she organized similar suffrage clubs in Napa County during the campaign for the suffrage referendum, which was ultimately defeated. In her writings and public talks she communicated to women a message of courage.

In 1902, Ellen helped to form a new Petaluma Equality Club to continued agitating for women suffrage, hosting regular meetings at her home as the club’s president.

An active member and clerk of Petaluma’s First Congregational Church, during the 1890s Ellen ran the church’s Petaluma Chinese Mission School, one of sixteen such California schools co-founded by the former Petaluma pastor William C. Pond. Although the Chinese Exclusion Acts had greatly decreased enrollment, the night school offered instruction in English and Christianity to Chinese servants for the sole purpose, as Ellen wrote in a Courier article, of sending them back to China as Christian evangelists.

In 1909, at the age of 70, Ellen reconciled with her husband Isaac, joining him in San Francisco, where he had started a draying business after selling his Nevada ranch. The couple later moved to Berkeley, where Ellen died in 1922 at age 83. She was buried at Cypress Hill Cemetery in Petaluma.

SOURCES:

Petaluma Morning Courier: January 25, 1893, March 18, 1893, March 19, 1893, September 11, 1896, September 28, 1896, October 2, 1896, October 3, 1896, November 6, 1896, May 12, 1897, October 25, 1897, June 15, 1897, July 8, 1897, October 25, 1899, July 7, 1900, October 17, 1900, May 8, 1901, November 1, 1901, September 29, 1902, January 6, 1904, September 25, 1906, August 17, 1909.

Petaluma Argus: September 30, 1902, August 3, 1909, March 17, 1922.

Reno Gazette-Journal: October 1, 1929.

San Francisco Call: September 29, 1896.

San Francisco Chronicle: December 22, 1907.