John is a history detective who digs beneath the legends, folklore, and myths to learn what’s either been hidden from the common narrative or else lost to time, in hopes of enlarging the collective understanding of our culture and communities.
Hobble skirt race, 1912 (photo The Missouri History Museum)
On October 21, 1910, the musical comedy “The White Hen” opened at Petaluma’s Hill Opera House, setting off a new fashion craze in town. The fashion foray was led by the traveling theater company’s showgirls, who took the stage adorned in feathered plumes and the latest couture from Paris, an ankle-length skirt so narrow at the hem the women could only “hobble” around in short, pigeon-like steps.[1]
“The hobble skirt,” the Petaluma Argus announced, “has invaded Petaluma with a vengeance.”[2]
When two women wearing the skirts attempted to board a train departing the Petaluma depot, they were unable to mount the steps. Clinging onto the handrail, they found themselves dragged down the platform as the train pulled out of the station.[3]
Hobble skirt illustrations, 1910s (public domain)
“Of course, women must wear what is ‘worn’ even at the risk of death,” observed the Petaluma Courier. “Shall railroad corporations now dictate fashions for women?”[4]
No, but the government appeared ready to. As reports of similar incidents surfaced, a California state legislator proposed subjecting hobble skirts to the same scale used by the Fish and Game Department to regulate fishing. Those with a bottom circumference of less than 35½ inches would be banned from the streets.[5]
A dentist located on the second floor of a building recommended installing new stairs with a rise of only five inches to accommodate women wearing hobble skirts.[6]
The hobble skirt, 1910 (photo public domain)
Petaluma’s reigning fashionista, Charles Kelly, aka “Kelly the Tailor,” pointed out that physical danger wasn’t the only thing preventing some women from climbing stairs in hobble skirts. There was also having to hike up their skirts and scandalously expose their ankles in doing so. Kelly noted that the excuse “Oh, I’ve got nothing to wear,” was becoming commonplace among women choosing instead to stay home.[7]
Woman in hobble skirt boarding New York City streetcar, 1910 (public domain)
The hobble skirt craze coincided with suffragist efforts to place a proposition on the California ballot giving women the right to vote. Some men cited the skirt as one of the reasons they were opposed to the proposition. “So long as a woman buttons her clothes up the back,” declared an Episcopal minister, “she certainly has not sense enough to vote.”[8]
With tongue-in-cheek, the editor of the Courier chided, “Any unregenerate man who has ever been called upon to button a woman’s dress with the usual hooks and eyes, and who is not permitted to swear, will certainly agree.”[9]
A year after the “White Hen” played Petaluma, the suffrage proposition passed by a narrow margin, making California the sixth state in the county in which women could vote. Male politicians chasing the votes of women found themselves baffled by the demographic labeled the “hobble skirt vote.”[10]
Transition from Victorian S-curve style to Poiret’s corset-free Empire line(photo public domain)
By 1911, women were increasingly entering the workforce, demanding more freedom, more rights, and more comfortable fashions. Gone were the suffocating corsets, bulky crinoline skirts, and voluminous gigot sleeves of the Victorian era. The high-waisted Empire line was back, only now with dresses that skimmed the body instead of billowing petticoats.[11]
Why then, some men wondered, had such a seemingly restrictive, masochistic style of wear suddenly come into vogue?
Ad for the hobble skirt, 1910 (photo public domain)
Paul Poiret, the Paris designer credited with creating the hobble skirt, reportedly took his inspiration from the famous pioneer aviator Wilbur Wright, of the Wright brothers.
French fashion designer, Paul Poiret, 1908 (photo public domain)
While on a visit in France, Wright took popular American actress named Edith Berg up for a joyride in his biplane. To prevent Berg’s large skirt from ballooning over her head or getting caught in the plane’s engines, Wright tied a rope around her skirt at the ankles. The flight lasted a mere two minutes, but distinguished Berg as the first American woman to fly.[12]
Edith Berg in roped skirt with Wilbur Wright on historic 1908 flight (photo public domain)
Poiret found himself captivated by the contradictory image of Berg flying freely while being bound up. It was a puzzling fascination for a man previously dubbed “The King of Fashion” for his streamlined, corset-free dresses that liberated women from the Victorian confines of the S-curve silhouette. “It was,” he confessed in his autobiography, “in the name of Liberty that I proclaimed the fall of the corset and the adoption of the brassiere . . . . Yes, I freed the bust, but I shackled the legs.”[13]
Those fashion historians who view clothing styles as reflections of the zeitgeist, point out that while women may have been on the verge of emancipation, the tradition of being sheltered and in need of protection in a male-dominated society still lingered. Hence the hobble skirt. Others believe the skirt’s popularity was expressive of newly emancipated women confidently experimenting with fashion, no longer held to the suffocating standards of Victorian modesty.[14]
Actress Fannie Brice in hobble skirt, 1910 (public domain)
Whatever the skirt’s social or political implications, Poiret’s shackled design didn’t stop women from adopting subtle slits, hidden pleats, and buttons at the skirt’s hem for greater range of motion.[15]
Among those most perplexed by the new fashion was the Anti-Saloon League. A powerful group of conservative men, the League, along with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, were hellbent on banning the manufacturing and sale of alcohol. They viewed California’s newly enfranchised women as critical swing voters, calling upon their innate morality to cleanse the nation of its sins and provide “home protection” against the tyranny of drinking men.[16]
National officers of the Anti-Saloon League (photo Library of Congress)
Thanks to their influence, the rural districts west of Petaluma voted to go “dry” in 1912, banning the sale and possession of alcohol at country roadhouses. Petaluma, meanwhile, remained stubbornly “wet.”[17]
In 1914, the Anti-Saloon League succeeded in getting a prohibition proposition on the state ballot. To mobilize women voters, they dispatched a temperance campaigner to Petaluma. She made the hobble skirt into a wedge issue, denouncing it as indecent and vulgar, and proposing police stop women from wearing it on the streets. “The morality of men,” she declared, “cannot be improved as long as women wear such suggestive clothes.”[18]
The prohibition proposition was soundly defeated in 1914, and again when reintroduced in 1916, indicating California women were not single-issue voters. Some of that had to do with the underlying motives of the Anti-Saloon League and the WCTU.
Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Sonoma County, 1910s (photo Sonoma County Library)
For all their talk of saving people from the saloons’ cauldrons of sin and debauchery, their deeper concern was who the saloons catered to—European immigrants flooding into the country, threatening to change the America they knew.[19]
Petaluma remained stubbornly anti-prohibition, due in part to the city’s large number of first- and second-generation Irish, German, Danish, Italian, Portuguese, and Swiss citizens, who viewed their ethnic taverns as community hubs in keeping their traditions alive.[20]
America’s entry into World War One, followed by the terrifying influenza epidemic of 1918, put an end to idle indulgences like the hobble skirt. In 1919, the Anti-Saloon League succeeded in imposing a nationwide Prohibition. The following year, women secured the vote nationally.[21]
The paradoxical mix of restriction and liberation gave birth to unexpected new freedoms for women. Taking advantage of the underground culture and social chaos created by Prohibition, women began to indulge in the forbidden pleasure of drinking in speakeasies, which, unlike traditional American saloons, were coed, and out of the public eye.
Ladies night out in Speakeasy, 1920s (photo public domain)
Their new sense of independence was reflected in the loose flapper dresses of the Roaring Twenties, which, in a nod to the hobble skirt’s focus on women’s legs, were distinguished by rising hemlines.[22]
Flapper dress styles, 1920s (photo public domain)
The hobble skirt surfaced again in the 1950s as the inspiration for French designer Christian Dior’s slim-fitting pencil skirt, which quickly became a popular form of office wear. Like the hobble skirt, it required a very particular way of walking, famously epitomized by Marilyn Monroe’s wiggle along a train platform in the film Some Like It Hot.[23]
Marilyn Monroe wearing pencil skirt in Some Like it Hot (photo public domain)
A version of this story ran in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.
*****
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Max Dill Has ‘Come Back,’” Petaluma Argus, October 22, 1910.
[2] “Rare Comedy, Pretty Girls,” Petaluma Courier, October 22, 1910; “Local Notes,” Petaluma Argus, October 22, 1910.
[3] “A Dangerous Practice,” Petaluma Courier, February 20, 1911.
[4] “Shall a Railroad Dictate Women’s Fashions,” Petaluma Courier, September 28, 1911.
[5] “A Law to Regulate Hobble Skirts,” Petaluma Courier, January 11, 1911.
[6] “‘Hobble Stairway,’” Petaluma Argus, April 15, 1925.
[7] “Accident Cause by Hobble Skirt,” Petaluma Courier, January 16, 1911
[8] “The Temerity of Cyrus,” Petaluma Courier, May 10, 1911.
[9] “The Temerity of Cyrus,” Petaluma Courier, May 10, 1911.
[10] “Wise Talks by the Office Boy,” Petaluma Argus, November 14, 1911.
[11] Ann Beth Presley, “Fifty Years of Change: Societal Attitudes and Women’s Fashions, 1900-1950,” The Historian, Winter 1998, Vol. 60, No. 2, pp. 307-324.
[12] “Snapshot: A Hobble Skirt Race, a Century Ago,” St. Louis Magazine, August 25, 2017.
[13] Presley, p. 312; Harold Koda, Andrew Bolton, “Paul Poiret (1879–1944),”Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/poir/hd_poir.htm
[14] Presley, p. 312; Cecile Paul, “Before the Pencil Skirt there was the Hobble Skirt,” Messynessychic.com.
[15] Daniel Milford-Cottam, Edwardian Fashion (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014). P. 49.
[16] Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (NY: Scribner, 2011), pp. 65-66.
[17] “’Drys’ Win by Big Majority in Supervisor Green’s District,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 13, 1912.
[18]“Prohibition, Slavery and Woman’s Dress,” Petaluma Courier, May 15, 1914.
[19] “Vote in Doubt on Red Light Abatement,” San Francisco Examiner, November 6, 1914; “Petaluma Complete Returns,” Petaluma Argus, November 8, 1916; “110,000 and 40,000 Estimate on Nos. 1 and 2,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 10, 1916; Pietro Pinna, “Fresh Water Triumphs: The Italian American Wine Industry’s Struggle Against Prohibition in California,” Italian American Review, Vol. 8, Issue 8, Winter 2018, pp. 23-46; Okrent, pp. 85-87.
[20] Pietro Pinna, “Fresh Water Triumphs”: The Italian American Wine Industry’s Struggle Against Prohibition in California,” Italian America Review, 81., Winter 2018, pp. 23-25; ’Drys’ Win by Big Majority in Supervisor Green’s District,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 13, 1912; “Amendments in Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, November 6, 1914.
Illustration of Richard P. “Dicky” Jessup, 1892 (San Francisco Examiner)
Growing up in Tomales, Henry Kowalsky dreamed of a life grander than working in his father’s general store. For years, he burned the midnight oil studying the law, until finally, in 1883 at the age of 24, he passed the California bar. With the help of his father, he opened a legal office in San Francisco, furnishing it in Victorian gilt and plush more suggestive of a parlor than a place of business.[1]
Kowalsky’s flamboyant performances—pulling out a pistol to defend himself from opposing counsel, falling asleep during trial—made good tabloid fodder, as did his life outside the courtroom, where he cast himself as a bon vivant, raconteur, and connoisseur of the arts, nonchalantly racking up debts residing at the luxurious Baldwin Hotel on Market Street.[2]
Baldwin Hotel, Market and Powell streets, 1885 (photo Marilyn Blaisdell Collection)
In 1887, he was appointed advocate-general of the California National Guard with the honorary title of colonel. That same year, the Colonel—as he insisted on being called—took on the case of an illegitimate son of a wealthy bachelor challenging his father’s will. As probate cases go, it was fairly commonplace, except for one twist: the father, Gershom Jessup, had his white son raised by a Black family in Petaluma.[3]
The case became one of the most sensationalistic of San Francisco’s Gilded Age, casting a spotlight on an issue bedeviling the country since Reconstruction: race.
Colonel Henry Kowalsky, 1889 (illustration public domain)
Jessup was manager of a stage line company in Marysville in 1865 when he became romantically involved with an attractive 18-year-old named Josie Landis. She became pregnant with his child. That same year, Jessup inherited a small fortune from his deceased brother Richard, co-founder of the prosperous California Steam Navigation Company.[4]
Moving to San Francisco, Jessup arranged for Josie to spend the final stage of her pregnancy at the North Beach home of Mrs. Abigail Nugent. A Black widow from Philadelphia, Nugent served as a midwife and nurse to the city’s elite. Two months after giving birth to a boy, Josie returned to Marysville. Keeping her child a secret, she quickly married a local dentist.[5]
Jessup named the boy Richard, or “Dicky,” after his recently deceased brother. He paid Nugent to raise him, and to have him baptized by the bishop of San Francisco’s Bethel African Methodist Church, T.M.D. Ward, where Nugent was a prominent member.[6] It was at the church that Nugent’s 18-year-old daughter Maggie met 42-year-old George Miller, a recently widowed barber from Petaluma.
Bethel A.M.E. Church, Powell & Jackson strets, San Francisco, 1870s (public domain)
Born and educated a free man in New Jersey, Miller came to San Francisco in 1850 to open a barbershop. In 1855, he moved his business and young family to Petaluma. He continued to spend a good deal of time in San Francisco, where he was actively engaged with the A.M.E. Church, the Black Freemasons, and the California Colored Convention, a group of businessmen, clergy, and journalists working to rescind the state’s racial restriction laws.[7]
Illustration of a Colored Convention held in 1876 (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper)
Miller’s exclusive white clientele provided him with economic and social advantages that he put to use in Petaluma opening a state-supported “colored school” and the North Bay’s first A.M.E. Church. In 1868, two years after his wife’s death, Miller married Maggie Nugent, bringing her to town to live with him and his four children. Within a year, the couple had a child of their own.[8]
Margaret Nugent Miller, 1886 (photo courtesy Sharon McGriff-Payne)
Soon afterward, Maggie’s mother brought Dicky, a sickly child, to reside with the Millers. She hoped the move would improve his health. Jessup continued to provide financially support the boy, occasionally visiting him at the Miller home, as did Dicky’s mother on one occasion. When Dicky came of school age, the Millers enrolled him with their own children in Petaluma’s “colored school” under the name Richard Miller.[9]
1870 Brooklyn Colored School in Oakland, Mary J. Sanderson, teacher (photo public domain)
At the time, George Miller and the Colored Convention were engaged in a case before the state Supreme Court to desegregate California schools. Although the court ultimately upheld the state’s “separate but equal” education law, a major economic recession led most California cities with “colored schools” to desegregate by 1875 as a cost-saving measure.[10]
Petaluma was the exception, maintaining its “colored school” until the state abolished them in 1880. As Dicky’s presence at the school violated Petaluma’s segregation adherence, he was forced to transfer to a white elementary school, where students bullied him so badly the Millers withdrew him for homeschooling.[11]
Washington College, Alameda County, 1878 (illustration David Rumsey’s Historical Map Collection)
In 1876, Jessup instructed Maggie—George Miller having unexpectedly died in 1873—to board 10-year-old Dicky in Washington College, a technical school in Alameda County under the name Richard Miller. He was afraid Josie’s family, having recently learned of the boy’s existence, would try to steal him away. Dicky lived with Maggie during school breaks.[12]
That same year, Maggie’s mother died, leaving her a sizable inheritance.[13] Her four stepchildren grown and gone, Maggie decided to move with her seven-year-old son Hoddie to Napa, where she eventually purchased a ranch, opened a restaurant, and married a Black barber named Ed Hatton.[14]
Ad for Maggie’s Arcade Restaurant (Napa Register, 1887).
In 1881, Dicky’s mother Josie died. Jessup had Maggie pull Dicky out of the Alameda technical school and send him to work on a friend’s ranch in San Diego, ending financial support for the boy. Within a year, Dicky returned to live with Maggie in Napa, working in a tannery and as a bootblack in her husband’s barbershop.[15]
Jessup died in 1886 at Harbin Springs in Lake County while seeking treatment for his rheumatism. In his will he named his brother and two sisters as sole beneficiaries of his estate. The estate was valued at $140,000, or $5 million in today’s currency.[16]
Maggie engaged Jerry Mahoney, a private detective, to determine if 20-year-old Dicky had a claim to the estate. Mahoney enlisted Colonel Kowalsky as legal counsel. Borrowing $20,000 ($600,000 in today’s currency) against a prospective settlement, Kowalsky filed a probate challenge and sent Mahoney scouring the state for witnesses to testify to Jessup’s fatherly relationship with Dicky.[17]
Senator Jeremiah H. Mahoney, 1896 (illustration public domain)
A media circus erupted around the trial, putting Dicky in the public spotlight. Mahoney took the young man under his wing, introducing him to the life of white luxury denied him by his father. To pay for his posh hotel, fancy meals, and tailored suits, Dicky borrowed against his prospective settlement at usury rates.[18]
In district court, Kowalsky was able to convince the judge that Jessup, through his actions and public acknowledgements, had legitimized Dicky as his offspring, entitling him to the entire estate. Jessup’s siblings filed an appeal with the state’s Supreme Court, who affirmed the lower court ruling. [19]
Undeterred, the siblings filed a second appeal. A new presiding judge, Charles Fox, reversed the ruling. Although he cited insubstantial evidence, the main thrust of his decision was race.[20]
California Supreme Court Justice Charles Fox (photo public domain)
Fox believed Jessup’s actions toward Dicky were not those of a loving father, but a punitive one. Why else would he have the boy brought up by a Black family, “considered inferior and by most white people as degrading,” having him take the family’s surname, attend a “colored school,” and work in a Black barber shop? Fox also speculated that Jessup’s cut off of funding for Dicky the same year the boy’s mother died, indicated he had agreed to provide support only during her lifetime, most likely out of fear she would expose their affair if he didn’t.[21]
Following the decision, Kowalsky incited a campaign among Black political leaders to oppose Fox’s reelection to the bench. It quickly escalated into death threats against the judge.[22] After Kowalsky filed for a new trial in district court, he discovered his key witness, Maggie Nugent Miller Hatton, refused to testify.
Maggie’s relationship with Dicky had apparently deteriorated during his time under Mahoney’s tutelage. To convince her to retestify, Kowalsky secured a $5,000 promissory note for her against the prospective settlement.[23]
The retrial once again ended in Kowalsky’s favor. Jessup’s siblings filed another appeal, but this time the two sides negotiated a settlement, granting one-third of the estate to the siblings. Dicky walked away with $90,000, or $3 million in today’s currency.[24]
Colonel Henry Kowalsky, 1899 (photo public domain)
Of that amount, Kowalsky took $40,000 for his fee. Another $20,000 went to paying off the loan he secured at the beginning of the trial. Mahoney, Kowalsky’s legal associate, and the court-appointed administrator of Jessup’s estate got $15,000. Dicky’s loan sharks got $10,000. That left Dicky with $5,000, which he legally owed to Maggie. She never received a penny.[25]
After the trial, Dicky moved to Sacramento to live with Mahoney, who had used his newfound fame to get elected to the state senate. Mahoney got him a job working as a senate page for $3 a day. After the senator’s death in 1897, Dicky vanished from sight.[26]
Maggie and her family moved to Oakland. She died there in 1928. Kowalsky went on to land a number of high-profile cases, including defending Belgium’s King Leopold II against charges of genocide in the Congo. He died in 1914, still living the high life at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel.[27]
******
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 2, 2024
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Col. Kowalsky was Reared at Tomales,” Petaluma Courier, December 9, 1914; “Aneurysm Cause of Kowalsky’s Sleeping Sickness,” Sacramento Bee, November 30, 1914.
[2] “Henry Kowalsky Called by Death,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 29, 1914.
[3] “Colonel Kowalsky is Dead,” San Francisco Bulletin, November 28, 1914.
[4] “Estate of Gershom P. Jessup, Deceased,” Decided March 29, 1891, by California Superior Court, Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2 (San Francisco Probate Department, James Vincent Coffey, Bancroft-Whitney, 1909), pp. 480-481; “First Boatbuilder on the Pacific Coast,” San Francisco Call and Port, March 9, 1902.
[5]Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, p. 481. “The Lost Heir,” San Francisco Examiner, September 8, 1887.
[6]Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, pp. 482-483; “Young Jessup Wins,” Napa Register Weekly, July 5, 1889; “Jessup Contest,” Napa Register Weekly, September 19, 1890.
[7] John Sheehy, “Black Sonoma County’s Birth,” PetalumaHistorian.com, https://petalumahistorian.com/black-sonoma-countys-political-birth/
[9]Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, p. 482; “Jessup Contest,” Napa Register Weekly, September 19, 1890.
[10] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; Jo Ann Williamson, Lori Rhodes, Michael Dunson, “Chapter 7 A Selected History of Social Justice in Education,” Review of Research in Education, November 15, 2016, Vol. 31 (1), pp. 195–224; “1874 Ward V. Flood,” Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/.
[11] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 25; “Local Dots,” Petaluma Courier, July 21, 1880; “Jessup Contest,” Napa Register Weekly, September 19, 1890.
[12]Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, p. 484.
[13] “Died, The Elevator, October 25, 1873; Maggie inherited property valued at $8,000: “The Jessup Case,” Napa Register Weekly, September 19, 1890.
[14] “Dancing Party,” Napa Register Weekly, November 30, 1883; “Real Estate Transfers,” Napa Register Weekly, March 5, 1885; “Local Brevities,” Napa Register Weekly, April 1, 1886; “Local Brevities,” Napa Register Weekly, August 5, 1887; “Local Briefs,” Napa Valley Register, January 17, 1890; “Death of Edward Hatton,” Napa Register Weekly, May 11, 1897.
[15]Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, p. 485; “Gershom P. Jessup’s Estate,” Lawyers’ Reports Annotated, Book VI (The Lawyers’ Co-operative Publishing Company, 1890), p. 600.
[16]Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, p. 477; “Stripped of His Birthright,” San Francisco Examiner, April 9, 1893: The Jessup estate, initially valued at $93,000 at the time of Jessup’s death, rose in value to $140,000 by the time of the settlement in 1892.
[17] “Mahoney Did It,” San Francisco Call and Post, October 13, 1894.
[18] “Young Jessup’s Estate,” San Francisco Examiner, July 2, 1892; “Stripped of His Birthright,” San Francisco Examiner, April 9, 1893; “Mahoney Did It,” San Francisco Call and Post, October 13, 1894.
[19]Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, p. 476.
[20]Lawyers’ Reports Annotated, Book VI, pp. 594-601.
[21]Lawyers’ Reports Annotated, Book VI, pp. 600-601.
[22] “Offices Seeking Men,” San Francisco Examiner, August 6, 1890; Stockton Evening Mail, August 7, 1890; “The Fox Resolutions,” San Francisco Call and Post, August 7, 1890.
[23] “To Protect Her Claim,” San Francisco Examiner, September 8, 1894; Hatton’s promissory note was issued September 12, 1890, she testified September 19th.
[24] “Stripped of His Birthright,” San Francisco Examiner, April 9, 1893.
[25] In the Hotel Corridors,” Sacramento Bee, December 8, 1892; “Stripped of His Birthright,” San Francisco Examiner, April 9, 1893; “Made Certain of His Fees, San Francisco Examiner, May 15, 1893; “Young Jessup’s Note,” San Francisco Call and Post, September 8, 1894; “To Protect Her Claim,” San Francisco Examiner, September 8, 1894.
[26] “Stripped of His Birthright,” San Francisco Examiner, April 9, 1893; “Jessup is Penniless,” Pacific Bee, December 27, 1893; “State Senator Mahoney Dead,” Sacramento Bee, December 24, 1897; “List of Letters,” Sacramento Union, October 11, 1897: Jessup still in Sacramento.
[27] “Deaths,” San Francisco Examiner, December 28, 1928; “Aneurysm Cause of Kowalsky’s Sleeping Sickness,” Sacramento Bee, November 30, 1914.
Hang the Jew!” an agitated member of the vigilantes bellowed. His quarry, Petaluma poultry rancher Sol Nitzberg, a labor organizer, Communist, and Jew, was standing with four comrades taken captive by the vigilantes, awaiting judgment in the yard of a feed mill in west Santa Rosa.
The conflict between vigilantes and the labor “troublemakers” arose during the Great Depression. Labor fears in Sonoma County were intensified by the general strike of 1934, during which every longshoreman union member in every port on the West Coast walked off the job. Lasting 83 days, the strike completely crippled the shipping of agricultural goods.
In response, large business interests and corporate farms formed their own statewide militant group, the Associated Farmers of California. Pushing a platform to “save America,” they lobbied for anti-union laws and legislation against picketing and strikes. They also organized vigilante groups known as “Citizens’ Armies” to end labor protests by any means necessary.
In the summer of 1935, apple pickers in Sebastopol went on strike. Anticipating riots in the orchards and fruit packing sheds, Sonoma County sheriff Harry Patteson deputized 500 citizens as an “Army of Peace.”
Sonoma County Sheriff Harry Patteson, 1934 (photo Sonoma County Library)
On the evening of August 1, 250 strikers and labor activists gathered at Santa Rosa’s Germania Hall, calling for a wage increase from 25 cents to 40 cents per hour, a nine-hour workday and time and a half for overtime. Sheriff Patteson sent his Army of Peace to break up the gathering with clubs and sticks. Among those beaten bloody was Nitzberg.
Born in Pruzany, Poland in 1897, Nitzberg came from a long line of rabbis. As a young man he studied at a yeshiva (rabbinical school.) Reflecting a lifelong commitment to social justice, he joined the Russian Social Revolution Party. During that period, he was deeply influenced by the writings and philosophy of Karl Marx. His political activities early in the 20th century placed him at odds with Russia’s ruling Romanov Dynasty, resulting in his arrest and three-year sentence in a cold and isolated Siberian labor camp.
Getting there required a 300-mile trip by dogsled. Once he arrived, Nitzberg was subjected to grueling agricultural work that, he later reflected ironically, prepared him for his future as a chicken rancher in Petaluma.
After he was released from the camp, Nitzberg found Russia in a state of turmoil, and since the government blamed many of its problems on Jewish people, he gathered his few possessions, boarded the ship “Amerika” in Hamburg, Germany, and arrived at Ellis Island in New York City on July 12, 1913. He came into the country as Schlozme Nitzberg, but soon anglicized his first name to Solomon, or just Sol.
In New York, he attended the liberal Cooper Union College and then served overseas in the U.S. Army during World War I. Feeling a sense of wanderlust, he walked across the country to California, where he found work in San Francisco in the electrical engineering field.
Bored by the confining nature of his labor, he was drawn to the small but growing Jewish community of poultry ranchers located 40 miles north of the city in Petaluma, a town which claimed the title “Egg Basket of the World.”
Petaluma offered Jewish immigrants a mix of politics, culture and Zionism, together with hard work and the easy availability of seed money to start a chicken ranch. Although these settlers came from different countries, their one commonality was a fervent belief in creating a better world. Social gatherings often revolved around loud, sometimes raucous political arguments. Sol Nitzberg had found his home.
It was at a political meeting in Petaluma that Nitzberg met Millie Rosenthal, an attractive, recently widowed woman from Canada, who had moved to Petaluma with her sons George and Leo. When the couple married, Sol adopted the boys. Raising poultry on his ranch, Sol also worked to help laborers gain a foothold in the Sonoma County economy.
Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 2, 1935
Three weeks after Sheriff Harry Patteson’s Army of Peace broke up the gathering at Germania Hall on August 3, 1935, Nitzberg and other labor activists started organizing a strike of the hops harvest in Healdsburg. On the eve of harvest, August 21, a group of 300 vigilantes rounded up five of the labor activists in the middle of the night.
One of them was Jack Green, who was snatched from his place of business in Santa Rosa and driven to Nitzberg’s ranch in west Petaluma, where he was instructed to go to the farmhouse and lure Nitzberg outside.
Witnesses say he rapped on the front door and when it opened, scurried inside to warn the family that a mob had surrounded their home. A defiant Nitzberg yelled out to the vigilantes, warning them he was armed and, as a warning, fired off several rounds from a shotgun.
Nitzberg ranch house, Middle Two Rock Road, Petaluma (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)
A two-hour standoff ensued, during which Nitzberg’s wife made several phone calls to law enforcement officials that went unanswered, perhaps because the group included local law enforcement officers. It ended after the vigilantes began throwing tear gas canisters through the windows.
Green and Nitzberg, along with Nitzberg’s wife and children, stumbled outside, gasping for air.
Nitzberg and Green were bound with rope and tossed into the back seat of a vigilante’s sedan, which sped off into the night, leaving Nitzberg’s wife and children at the ranch.
The vigilantes proceeded to round up three other men that evening – Edward Burton Wolff, Charles Meyers, and George Ford – taking them all to a feed mill warehouse beside the railroad tracks in Santa Rosa, where they were abused, beaten and ordered to kiss the American flag.
When Green and Nitzberg, a U.S. Army veteran, balked, they were both covered in a smelly concoction of oily tar and chicken feathers and marched through downtown Santa Rosa in the early morning hours, surrounded by a parade of people in cars who circled Courthouse Square, yelling, honking their horns and firing guns in the air. Led to the city limits, Nitzberg and Green were given 12 hours to leave the county with their families.
Left, Sol Nitzberg and Jack Green, tarred and feathered in Santa Rosa; right, Green, Nitzberg, Charles Meyers, and George Ford held by vigilantes (clipping Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
Thanks to the help of a passing motorist, Nitzberg made his way to the home of a friend in Penngrove. He notified his family of his whereabouts, and then went about the business of cleaning the sticky, gooey mess off his body. Instead of leaving the county as the vigilantes had ordered, he went back to his ranch to care for his family. The other victims of mob action took temporary refuge in San Francisco.
The story of the kidnapping and tar-and-feathering spread worldwide in newspapers and magazines such as Time and The Nation. Many leading citizens were identified as members of the vigilante force that evening. They included the secretary of the Healdsburg Chamber of Commerce, a member of the state legislature, the mayor and city attorney of Santa Rosa, a member of the Santa Rosa City Council, plus bankers, doctors, a California Highway patrolman and newsmen.
At first, officials refused to apprehend or prosecute the major suspects. However, at the urging of the American Civil Liberties Union, felony charges against 12 alleged vigilantes were brought in Sonoma County Superior Court by the state attorney general, acting in place of County District Attorney William Cowen, who refused to prosecute the vigilantes.
The twelve men – Frederick Cairns, Edward W. Jenkins, William Castleberry, William Maher, Frank Silano, Ernest Demostene, Arthur Meese, John Barries, D.H. Madison, Thomas J. Campion, George Maher and Sidney Elphick – were charged with the crimes of kidnapping and conspiring to act illegally against the five union men.
It took more than a year, but thanks to Green’s persistence, the trial finally started. Charges against four of the 12 were quickly dropped by a visiting judge, after which there was a four-day trial. The 12 members of the jury – eight of whom were either growers or wives of growers – deliberated just 16 minutes before returning with a “not guilty” verdict for all of the accused. Still, the victims had gotten their day in court.
Four of the acquitted vigilantes standing, with their four attorneys sitting before them (clipping Santa Rosa Press Democrat , October 27, 1936)
After the trial, Jack Green moved out of Sonoma County. In memory of his heroic effort to force a trial in the face of strong community antagonism, he was honored with an award by the Sonoma County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Nitzberg and his family were stalked by vigilantes after the trial, and their credit was cut off at local feed mills. Doors previously opened to the family were now closed.
Sol and Millie Nitzberg, Petaluma, late 1940s (photo Sonoma County Library)
After enduring more than two years of living with a loaded gun, Nitzberg and his family decided to leave Sonoma County. They journeyed to New York City with plans to continue on to the Soviet Union, but the Soviet government refused their immigration request. So it was back to Petaluma, where Nitzberg returned to working in the chicken and egg business until his death in 1984.
Chinese butcher and grocery, San Francisco, ca. 1885 (photo Universal Archives/Getty Images)
On January 17, 1866, John McNear’s wife Clara died from complications related to the birth of the couple’s fifth child.[1]Rather than bury her at Petaluma’s public graveyard in Oak Park, McNear developed his own cemetery on forty acres at the edge of town. He called it Cypress Hill. Reverend William C. Pond, the new Congregational minister in town, officiated over Clara’s burial. In gratitude, McNear gifted him Cypress Hill’s first commercial burial plot.[2]
But death wasn’t all the two men bonded over. There was also “the Chinese question.”
For capitalists like McNear, the Chinese were quiet, diligent laborers, willing to work at wages below those of whites. For Protestant evangelists like Pond, they were prospective converts to send back to China as missionaries in spreading Christianity.
Two years after Clara’s death, lobbyists of commerce and conversion persuaded the U.S. to sign the Burlingame Treaty with China. In addition to opening up new trade opportunities, the treaty lifted restrictions on Chinese immigration, ensuring a steady flow of cheap labor to the U.S, and allowed Christian missionaries to practice in China.[3]
Chinese Bottling Wine at Buena Vista Winery, Sonoma (photo Eadweard Muybridge, California State Library)
By 1870, there were nearly 500 Chinese immigrants living in Sonoma County. Their numbers would double over the next decade.[4]They worked in vineyards, on creek rechanneling and levee crews along the Petaluma River, at wineries, as railroad workers, lumberjacks, quarry miners, farm laborers, and builders of stone fences before the arrival of barbed wire.[5] A quarter of them lived in Petaluma, primarily in Chinatown, an ethnic enclave extending along today’s Petaluma Boulevard from Western Avenue to D Street.[6]
Relegated to shanties as living quarters, they operated laundries, groceries, tobacco shops, boarding houses, and restaurants—including one specializing in abalone porterhouse steaks. Dr. Shing Kee operated an herbal medical practice at B and Main streets, that doubled as a laborer hiring company. A handful of Chinese also worked as servants and cooks for wealthy white households.[7]
Chung, house servant of T. B and Caroline Hood, Santa Rosa, 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)
Excluded from local fraternities, they formed their own Freemasons Lodge. For worship and meditation, they established a Joss House, or Taoist-Buddhist temple, which also served as a community center, especially during Chinese New Year.[8]
Joss House temple in San Francisco, 1887 (photo Bancroft Library)
The Chinese were almost exclusively men, women largely precluded by custom and immigration law. Of the 3,536 Chinese women living in California in 1870, 60% were victims of sex traffickers, smuggled into the country by a crime network known as the Tong, whose reach extended to Petaluma, where they operated brothels, gambling houses, and opium dens for Chinese and whites.[9]
Most Chinese emigrated to “Gold Mountain”—as they called California—from South China’s Guangtong Province, a region wracked by war, civil unrest, floods, famines, and drought. Petaluma’s other early immigrant groups—the Irish, Swiss Italians, and Germans—who made up a third of the city’s population, fled their own homelands under similar conditions.[10]
Like them, the Chinese had their own benevolent association, the Six Companies, which fronted their passage to California, aided them in sickness, and shipped their bones back to China for burial.[11]
Headquarters of the Chinese Six Companies in San Francisco (photo Bancroft Library)
As Sonoma County burst from encampments into a bustling economy, the Chinese proved indispensable in building railroads, reclaiming wetland areas, and developing agriculture. Most carved out meager livings, sending a share of their earnings back home to struggling family members.[12] But unlike European immigrants, who were able to gradually assimilate into Anglo-American culture, the Chinese found themselves perennially marked as foreign, set apart by their features, skin color, exotic dress, and customs.
Prohibited from owning property, denied naturalization and legal protections, they were mislabeled “coolies”—a Hindi term from the British empire for indentured or slave labor—and consigned to the shadow of Gold Mountain as second-class citizens.[13]
Rev. William C. Pond (photo public domain)
John A. McNear (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)
McNear was one of the largest employers of Chinese in the area. Along with his banking and real estate concerns, his primary business was selling grain. He made a fortune during the state’s wheat boom, exporting grain overseas. He also employed hundreds of Chinese at San Pedro Point in Marin County, where he operated a 2,500-acre cattle ranch, brickyard, quarry, and shrimping business.[14]
Chinese shrimpers at San Pedro Point (photo Friends of China Camp)
McNear found a ready ally in Reverend Pond, a fellow New Englander, over the “Chinese question.” Pond left the Petaluma parish after three years to serve as pastor of San Francisco’s Third Congregational Church. Employing a Protestant strategy known as “baiting the Gospel hook with the English alphabet,” he started a night school for the “heathen” Chinese.
After conservative parishioners balked at admitting Chinese converts, Pond established his own parish, the Bethany Congregational Church. He also created the California Chinese Mission, which opened dozens of Chinese Mission Schools across California, including one in Petaluma’s Chinatown in 1876.[15]
Students at Congregational Chinese Mission School, Los Angeles, 1880s (photo Chinese Historical Society of Southern California)
That same year, California was hit with the full brunt of a national recession. Triggered in 1873 by overspeculation in railroads and a drop in European demand for U.S. farm goods, it brought with it farm foreclosures and high unemployment.[16]
In the fall of 1877, labor protestors in San Francisco formed the Workingmen’s Party. Led by a charismatic young Irish immigrant named Denis Kearney, they called for better pay, an eight-hour work day, regulation of banks and railroads, high taxation of the rich, and help for the poor. Denouncing the employment of low-paid Chinese immigrants by rich capitalists, they launched a Chinese labor boycott, adopting as their rallying cry “the Chinese must go.”[17]
Cover of the San Francisco Wasp magazine, December 8, 1877(Bancroft Library)
Within weeks, Anti-Chinese Clubs sprang up throughout California, including in Petaluma, where membership quickly exceeded 300. In the spring of 1878, Kearney and his lieutenants staged a mass rally at Petaluma’s Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park) to address local party members and discontented members of the Petaluma Grange.[18]
Illustration of 1874 Grange meeting in a schoolhouse (Joseph E. Beale, Pixels.com)
Formed in 1873 to provide social and intellectual benefits to the local farming community, the Grange aligned with the Workingmen to protest “the wheat-bag trust” of exploitative middlemen—wheat brokers, shipping companies, and bankers—who forced them to dispose of their crops at little or no profit, while charging them interest rates of between 12% and 20%. They called out McNear to be “subjected to the inquisitorial thumbscrews.”[19]
In the fall of 1878, California voters approved a proposal to hold a convention to update California’s state constitution. After capturing a majority of the convention delegates, the Workingmen’s Party pushed for more stringent federal and state laws against the Chinese, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which placed a ten-year prohibition on the immigration of Chinese laborers.[20]
Illustration in the San Francisco Wasp magazine, May 11, 1878, lampooning whites who claim to be anti-Chinese but use their services(Bancroft Library)
Far from appeasing the fanatics, the new restrictions prompted them to expel the remaining Chinese from the U.S., unleashing more hostilities against Chinese communities.[21] In 1883, an arsonist in Petaluma torched Wah Lee’s laundry at the corner of Western Avenue and Kentucky Street. Before it could be rebuilt, the city banned laundries—new and existing—from its “fire limits” downtown, a zone extending from the river to Kentucky and Fourth streets, and from B Street to Washington Street.[22]
1883 Sanborn map of Chinese businesses (in green) at Western Avenue and Petaluma Boulevard (then Main Street)
Tensions reached a fevered pitch in 1886, following the murder of a former Petaluma couple, Jesse and Sarah Wickersham, at their remote farm house west of Cloverdale. Married cousins, they were the nephew and niece of Petaluma banker Isaac Wickersham, who owned numerous properties in Chinatown. Unfounded accusations pinned the murder on the couple’s Chinese cook, who disappeared after the crime.[23]
With newspapers fanning the flames, “anti-coolie” meetings were held across Sonoma County, resulting in Chinese being attacked, beaten, and driven out. Some had their homes and shops burned to the ground, including in Petaluma.[24] Taking advantage of the exodus, McNear replaced a shanty-filled lot he owned in Chinatown with the 1886 McNear Building, launching a commercial gentrification of the block.[25]
John McNear before his the new 1886 McNear Building (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)
Within a year, labor shortages—largely in jobs whites refused to fill—led to the gradual return of the Chinese to Sonoma County. Exhibiting resilience in the face of hostilities, their numbers rebounded by 1890 to 1,145, of which 104 lived in Petaluma.[26] Looking to reduce tensions, McNear offered to build a segregated Chinese colony east of town, on the condition the Chinese be compelled to abandon Chinatown.[27]That never materialized.
Instead, an ongoing series of discriminatory legislative acts led to the steady reduction of California’s Chinese population. Among them was the Geary Act introduced in 1892 by Sonoma County congressman Thomas Geary, a former Petaluma lawyer. It extended the Chinese Exclusion Act another ten years. Once it expired, Congress extended the exclusion period indefinitely. It would not be lifted until 1943.[28]
Congressman Thomas J. Geary (photo public domain)
Reverend Pond continued his regular visits to town to preach at the Congregational Church, but closed down the Chinese Mission School in 1900, soon after celebrating its 25th anniversary.[29] In the years that followed, Petaluma’s Chinatown was reduced to the block of Petaluma Boulevard between C and D streets, as the Chinese population fell to below two dozen.[30]
View of Chinatown on Petaluma Blvd (then Third Street) between C and D Streets, early 1900s(photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)
McNear designated a section at Cypress Hill for the Chinese, to be buried in their traditional Buddhist ceremonies.[31] In 1913, the Six Companies exhumed their remains and shipped them back to China.[32] McNear himself was laid to rest in Cypress Hill in 1918, beside his first wife Clara. He was joined there by Reverend Pond in 1925, in the plot McNear gifted him in 1866.[33]
A few weeks after Pond’s death, the last remaining vestige of Chinatown—a Chinese laundry and boarding house between C and D streets owned by the McNear family—was torn down.[34]
McNear family gravesite, Cypress Hill Cemetery (photo public domain)Rev. William C. Pond gravesite, Cypress Hill Cemetery (photo public domain)
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 3, 2023.
******
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Died,” Daily Alta California, January 18, 1866; the child, Herbert Lincoln McNear, died two months later: “Died,” Daily Alta California, March 16, 1866.
[2] “Dr. Pond Rests at Cypress Hill,” Petaluma Argus, November 18, 1925; “Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, November 16, 1877.
[4] The 1870 U.S. census lists 473 Chinese in Sonoma County, 121 of them living in Petaluma; the 1880 U.S. census lists 904 Chinese living in the county, with no breakout for Petaluma as it was under a population of 4,000. The census groups them under the category “Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and all other,” but “Our Population,” Petaluma Argus, December 17, 1880, states there are 904 Chinese, two Japanese, and 339 Indians and half-breeds.
[5] Nancy Olmsted, “A History of Paving Blocks Along San Francisco’s South Beach Waterfront,” San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, July 1991, p. 17; Sue Doherty, “Sonoma Stories and the Song Wong Bourbeau Collection,” Masters Thesis, Sonoma State University, 2005, p. 34; “Notes from the White Family Collection,” Katherine Rinehart private archives: in 1880 ,Chinese crews worked on levees in Lakeville to reclaim marshland; “More Johns,” Petaluma Argus, May 6, 1869.
[6] Chinese stores and shanties are listed in the 1883 Sanborn map of Petaluma extending along Western Avenue from Kentucky to Main Street, and from there down Main and Third streets to D Street, as well as along B Street from Main Street to Fourth Street.
[7] “Chinese New Year,” Petaluma Argus, January 30, 1868: abalone porterhouse steak & tobacco factory; Ad for physician Dr. Shing Kee, Petaluma Argus, November 14, 1873; Ad for Chung Kee Chinese Grocery, Petaluma Argus, July 25, 1875; Ad for See Hop Chinese Grocery, Petaluma Argus, October 5, 1875; “Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, January 14, 1876: 6 Chinese wash houses, 3 Chinese drug stores; Ad for Wa Sing Wash House, Petaluma Courier, July 19, 1877; “After the Riot,” Petaluma Argus, August 2, 1877: Petaluma had 10 Chinese wash houses, 5 Chinese stores, and boarding houses; “Not Very Pretty,” Petaluma Argus, August 20, 1887: new Chinese wash house on North Main; “Our Fires,” Petaluma Courier, April 6, 1881: 5 Chinese wash houses listed; Ad for Wah Yene Employment Office and Chinese Goods store, Petaluma Argus, November 24, 1882; Ad for Wah Lee Wash House, Petaluma Argus, April 28, 1883; Ad for Jim Kee Laundry Petaluma Courier, January 14, 1891.
[9]Jean Pfaelzer, California a Slave State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), p. 252: more than 90% of the Chinese population in 1870 was male; Iris Chang, The Chinese in America (NY: Viking Books, 2003), pp. 80-86; Phillips, pp. 80-84; “Is There No Remedy?” Petaluma Argus, August 26, 1871; “Half Told,” Petaluma Argus, September 2, 1871; “Chinese Wedding,” Petaluma Argus, September 12, 1873: bride from local brothel; “Recorder’s Court,” Petaluma Argus, September 12, 1873: gambling house; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, March 14, 1879: Chinese gambling house; “Voice of the People,” Petaluma Argus, December 19, 1885: five alleged opium dens in town; “The Chinese,” Petaluma Argus, February 6, 1886: local brothels; “Police Notes,” Petaluma Argus, August 27, 1880: opium dens; “Caught in the Act,” Petaluma Courier, September 16, 1896: opium den; Phillips, pp. 7, 63-64.
[10] 6,093 of Sonoma County’s 19,833 were foreign born per the 1880 U.S. Census, “Population by Race, Sex, and Nativity,” p. 428.
[15] William C. Pond, Gospel Pioneering: Reminiscences of Early Congregationalism in California 1833-1920 (Oberlin, OH: The News Printing Company, 1921), pgs. 10, 17, 91-95, 130-135; Robert Segar II, “Some Denominational Reactions to Chinese Immigration to California, 1856-1892,” Pacific Historical Review , February, 1959, Vol. 28, No. 1, pgs. 51, 58; Wesley S. Woo, “Presbyterian Mission: Christianizing and Civilizing The Chinese in Nineteenth Century California,” American Presbyterians, Fall 1990, Vol. 68, No. 3, pgs. 68, 71, 167-172.
[17] Ralph Kauer, “The Workingmen’s Party of California,” Pacific Historical Review, 1944, 13 (3): 278–291.
[18] Kearney first held a meeting in Donahue, but was a no show at the Main Street Plaza rally, leaving his lieutenants Wellock and Knight to preside: “Anti-Coolie Meeting,” Petaluma Courier, December 27, 1877; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, February 15, 1878; “Kearney,” Petaluma Argus, March 15, 1878; “Kearney, Wellock, and Knight,” Petaluma Argus, March 22, 1878; “Workingmen’s Club at Donahue,” Petaluma Argus, March 29, 1878; “Workingmen’s Meeting Saturday,” Petaluma Argus, March 29, 1878; “The Workingmen’s Meeting,” Petaluma Courier, April 11, 1878; “Notice,” Petaluma Argus, May 3, 1878; “Workingmen’s Convention,” Petaluma Argus, May 31, 1878.
[19] “Farmers’ Club,” Petaluma Argus, June 2, 1873; “Organization of a Grange,” Petaluma Argus, June 16, 1873; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, February 4, 1876; “W.W. Chapman,” Petaluma Courier, June 5, 1878; “History,” Sebastopol Grange #306, http://sebastopolgrange.org/history/; W.L. Robinson, First Century of Service and Evolution – The Grange 1867 – 1967 (National Grange, 1967); Clarke Chambers, California Farm Organizations (University of California, 1952), p. 11; “Sonoma County National Bank, Petaluma, 50th Anniversary,” Coast Banker, Volume 16, Coast Banker Publishing Company, 1916; “The Boycott,” Petaluma Argus, March 13, 1886; Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “A History of California Agriculture,” University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (Giannini Foundation Publications, December, 2017). http://giannini.ucop.edu/publications.htm.
[22] “Another Blaze,” Petaluma Courier, February 14, 1883; “Polly Larkin’s Pot-Pourri,” Petaluma Courier, October 1, 1884; “The Fire Limits,” Petaluma Argus, Aril 2, 1875; The laundry ban applied to the city’s fire limits: “Legal Notice: Ordinance No. 11,” Petaluma Courier, November 19, 1884; “Fire Friday Evening,” Petaluma Courier, August 15, 1894.
[23] “A Terrible Crime,” Petaluma Courier, January 27, 1886; “Ah Ti, the Murderer,” Petaluma Argus, January 30, 1886; Jeff Elliot examines holes in the accusations against the Wickersham’s cook: “The Wickersham Murders,” “Who Killed the Wickershams,” Santarosahistory.com, http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2017/05/the-wickersham-murders/.
[24] “Anti-Coolie Meeting,” Sonoma Democrat, February 6, 1886; “Going Below,” Petaluma Argus, February 13, 1866; “Sebastopol Anti-Chinese League,” Sonoma Democrat, February 27, 1886; “Blew Them Up,” Petaluma Argus, March 10, 1886; Chinatown fires (no headline) Petaluma Courier, September 21, 1887.
[25] “An Additional Story,” Petaluma Argus, April 3, 1886.
[26] Phillips, pp. 38-39; “Fruit Growers,” Petaluma Courier, march 13, 1886; “Potato Diggers,” Petaluma Argus, November 19, 1887; U.S. Census, 1890.
[27] “Polly Larkin’s Pot-Pourri,” Petaluma Courier, October 1, 1884: McNear first raised the idea of a colony in East Petaluma in 1884; “A Persistent Fire,” Petaluma Argus, September 3, 1887; “Locals,” Petaluma Argus, September 17, 1887; “Recent Burning,” Petaluma Courier, September 21, 1887; “That Citizens’ Meeting,” Petaluma Courier, September 21, 1887.
[31] “Chinaman Gone,” Petaluma Argus, February 12, 1875.
[32] “Remains Will Be Shipped to Orient,” Petaluma Courier, May 2, 1913; “6,000 Will Sail Home to Final Rest in China,” Los Angeles Herald, April 23, 1913.
[33] “Dr. Pond Rests at Cypress Hill,” Petaluma Argus, November 18, 1925; “People Honor Memory of J.A. McNear,” Petaluma Courier, June 22, 1918.
[34] “Chinatown Building Being Razed,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1926.
San Francisco’s Chinatown, 1920s (photo Shop City Merch)
On March 12, 1925, Homer O. Webster abruptly left the shoe factory he operated in Petaluma to take an overnight trip to San Francisco. When he failed to return home two days later, his wife Mary, filed a missing persons report with San Francisco police.
That same morning, the police received another missing persons report from the wife of a San Francisco chemist named Fred Kormann. Officers located Kormann’s car in a city parking garage, where it had been sitting for days. By coincidence, the garage was near the hotel Webster had checked into. His bags were found in his room, unpacked.[1]
Later that day, a detective spotted a man matching Webster’s description wandering the streets of Chinatown in a daze. Webster told the detective he had been partying the night before in Chinatown with Kormann. He promised to find Kormann and see to it that he got home safely.[2]
He then disappeared without a trace.
Grant Street, Chinatown, San Francisco, 1920s (photo San Francisco Chamber of Commerce)
The next day, Kormann’s wife Ida called in an international private detective firm. Her husband—an internationally known inventor— had left the house with patent papers, planning to officially file them the following day. They were for a new secret formula he had developed for a deadly poison gas.[3]
Through tips, the private detectives were able to determine Kormann had been kidnapped by a band of international conspirators from China looking to gain possession of his new invention. Webster’s involvement in the abduction was unclear, which led the detectives to Petaluma.[4]
A descendant of Daniel Webster, Homer Webster grew up in Boston, where he followed in the footsteps of his father, who also ran a shoe factory. In 1922, he decided to team up with A.H. Crafts, a traveling shoe salesman from Boston, in leasing the Nolan-Earle Shoe Factory in Petaluma.[5]
Nolan-Earl Shoe Factory, Jefferson and Wilson streets (photo Sonoma County Library)
The factory opened its doors in 1898. Located beside the city’s silk mill, it was part of a campaign led by local capitalist John A. McNear to create a local Factory District on the east side of the city that would transform Petaluma into the manufacturing hub of the North Bay. Instead, after the turn of the century, McNear found his efforts overtaken by the local poultry industry, which transformed the city into the Egg Basket of the World.[6]
Webster and Crafts sold off most of the factory’s machinery to Petaluma’s former mayor William Keig, for his shoe factory in Napa. Keig also operated a shoe store on Petaluma’s Main Street.
After completely renovating the building, Webster and Crafts shipped in from the east coast all new, state-of-the-art machinery for manufacturing high-end work boots, their niche in the highly competitive shoe market, using tanned leather sourced largely from Sonoma County.[7]
The upfront investment and initial slow sales led Crafts to sell his interest within the first year to A.W. Green, a San Francisco investor. By 1924, factory production tripled to more than 600 pairs a day, with the boots selling all along the west coast and in Hawaii.
To keep up with demand, Webster and his new partner Green had to invest in frequent upgrades to the factory’s machinery. Cash-strapped, the 33-year old Webster was forced to declare personal bankruptcy in order to stave off creditors. That ultimately led him to Kormann.[8]
Workers inside the Petaluma shoe factory (photo Sonoma County Library)
Like Webster, the 43-year old Kormann was an entrepreneur in financial trouble.
He first made his mark as a young chemist in San Francisco during World War I, when he developed a chemical compound for increasing eight-fold the amount of gasoline that could be extracted from a barrel of crude oil. In a patriotic gesture, he donated his patent to the government, allowing them to meet their gasoline needs in the war effort.[9]
After working for a large oil company back east, Kormann returned to the Bay Area in 1923 to launch a company for manufacturing a new synthetic gasoline he developed. He capitalized the company on the promise that it would solve the country’s gasoline shortfalls which were being created by the increase in automobile sales during the Roaring Twenties. He continued selling shares to new investors after it became clear the company was financially underwater.[10]
Fred A. Kormann (illustration San Pedro News Pilot)
By early 1925, he was battling lawsuits from disgruntled investors who charged him with grand larceny. He was banking on restoring his finances with a new poisonous gas formula he had just invented. The day before he planned to file the patent for the gas formula, he got a call from a representative of the Chinese government expressing an interest in his earlier synthetic gas venture.[11]
Kormann contacted Webster, who he apparently knew from investing circles, asking him to come to the city that evening to serve as his witness in the meeting with the representative. He also dangled before him the possibility of providing him with a connection for exporting his work boots to China.[12]
Trade with China was tricky at the time. The country was undergoing a period of civil wars waged by regional warlords. Following World War I, China began flooding the U.S. with cheap exports, including eggs, which undermined Petaluma’s booming poultry industry.
1922 Petaluma Argus newspaper
Thanks to persistent campaigning by Petaluma poultry leaders and the city’s Chamber of Commerce, a tariff was imposed on Chinese eggs in late 1922, reducing their importation from more than 3 million dozen a year to less than half a million, and ending their threat to Petaluma’s prosperity.[13]
After meeting up with Kormann in San Francisco, Webster accompanied him to a luxurious apartment in Chinatown. There, they were royally entertained, feted with an elaborate banquet, and served exotic drinks, which turned out to be spiked with drugs. Aside from Webster’s brief escape into Chinatown where he encountered the police detective, the two men were drugged and held as prisoners for a week, after which they were both discovered aimlessly wandering the side streets of Chinatown.[14]
Grant Avenue, San Francisco’s Chinatown, 1925 (photo San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)
Webster was able to return home, but Kormann was admitted to the hospital, suffering from side effects of the drugs. The patent papers were missing. From that point on, the investigation became a matter of national security, and was conducted covertly.[15]
A month after the incident, Webster sold his interest in the Petaluma shoe factory to his partner, A.W. Green, and moved to Los Angeles. A few months later, he and his wife divorced. Kormann also moved to Los Angeles, where he became the chief chemist of a lubricant company.[16]
In 1927, the Webster-Green Shoe Factory was purchased by Keig, who shut down the plant, consolidating operations at his Napa factory. The factory building was repurposed for other uses until 1957, when it was torn down.[17]
As for the secret poison gas formula, it was never heard of again.
A version of this story appeared in the Sonoma Historian, September 2023.
******
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Police Asked to Hunt Missing Inventor,” San Francisco Examiner, Saturday, March 14, 1925; “Police Solve Two Mysteries,” San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, March 15, 1925; “Plot Hinted as Two Men Disappear in S.F.,” Petaluma Courier, Tuesday, March 17, 1925.
[2] “Police Solve Two Mysteries,” San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, March 15, 1925.
[3] “Plot Hinted as Two Men Disappear in S.F.,” Petaluma Courier, Tuesday, March 17, 1925.
[4] “Plot Hinted as Two Men Disappear in S.F.,” Petaluma Courier, Tuesday, March 17, 1925.
[5] “H.O. Webster,” Honoria Tuomey, History of Sonoma County (S.J. Clarke Publications, 1926), pps. 807-808; “City Council Changes License Ordinance to One Dollar Per Quarter,” Petaluma Courier, February 25, 1922.
[6] “Shoe Factory to Pass into History,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 16, 1927.
[7] “Shoe Concern Leases Factory,” Petaluma Courier, December 30, 1921; “Machinery Expected from the East,” Petaluma Courier, March 11, 1922.
[8] “Shoe Company Has Organized,” Petaluma Courier, July 26, 1922; “Shoe Factory Enlarging and Installing Costly and Wonderful Machinery,” Petaluma Argus, April 1, 1924; “H.O. Webster,” Honoria Tuomey, History of Sonoma County (S.J. Clarke Publications, 1926), pps. 807-808; “In Bankruptcy,” The Recorder, February 10, 1923.
[9] “Believes it Will Settle the Gas Problem,” Santa Cruz Evening News, September 29, 1917; Discovery Ends Threatened Shortage of Gasoline,” Santa Ana Register, September 29, 1917.
[10] “Oil Company is Organized for Plant at Benicia,” Daily Gazette-Martinez, September 18, 1922; “San Francisco Rich Chemist in Mystery Disappearance,” Victor Valley News Herald, March 20, 1925.
[11] “Superior Court,” The Recorder, May 31, 1923; “Oil Company Head Held,” Fresno Bee, February 28, 1924; “Missing Petaluma Man Returns Home,” Santa Rosa Republican,” March 20, 1925.
[12] “H.O. Webster Home After Experience,” Petaluma Argus, March 19, 1925.
[13] Thea Lowry, Empty Shells, (Manifold Press, Novato, CA, 2000), pp. 124-125; John P. Dunn, Matthew R. Portwood, “A Tale of Two Warlords: Republican China During the 1920s,” Association for Asian Studies, Vol. 19:3, Winter 2014; “What the Tariff Had Done for the Poultrymen,” Petaluma Argus, July 24, 1924.
[14] “Missing Petaluma Man Returns Home,” Santa Rosa Republican,” March 20, 1925.
[15] “H.O. Webster Home After Experience,” Petaluma Argus, March 19, 1925.
[16] “Greens Now Control Webster and Greens,” Petaluma Courier, April 14, 1925; “New Civil Suits,” The Recorder, November 2, 1925; “Oil Lubricant Company Here Recapitalizes,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1931; “F.A. Kormann Services,” Valley Times, February 9, 1948.
[17] “Wm. C. Keig Buys Controlling Interest in Webster-Green Shoe Factory,” Petaluma Argus, October 11, 1926; “Monday’s Meeting of the City Council Brief, But Important,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 17, 1927; “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 23, 1963.
GThe poet Gary Snyder (photo courtesy of Counterpoint Press)
Good poetry is meant to be disruptive. Subversive and indigestible, it enters the cultural bloodstream as a corrosive irritant. Resistant to containment and mass assimilation, it endures on its own terms like the timeless verses of Shakespeare.
So declared Kenneth Rexroth, leader of the San Francisco Renaissance literary movement. In the early 1950s, he welcomed into his North Beach circle three aspiring poets fresh out of Reed College—Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, and Gary Snyder. Under Rexroth’s tutelage, the trio began waging their own poetic assaults on America’s post-war materialistic appetite.
Crossing paths with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, they found themselves earmarked as the Beat Movement’s west coast wing. It was a pigeonhole Snyder, for one, sought to evade. By the time the movement morphed into the innocuous Beatniks, he had embarked upon a ten-year sojourn to Japan, immersing himself in Zen Buddhism, haiku, and Chinese poetry.
Combining those Asian influences with his undergraduate studies in the classics, modern literature, anthropology, and Native American mythology, Snyder was able to forge a fresh and original way of looking at the world, one that fostered one of the most singular and distinctive voices in modern poetry.
Collage of San Francisco Renaissance poets Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth (public domain)
Last year, the 93-year old Snyder was honored by the Library of America, who published his collected poems in their preeminent book series of prominent poets and writers. In celebration, a tribute was held, featuring testimonies from various distinguished literati.
After expressing his gratitude for the accolades, Snyder pointed out that his social anarchism, which views liberty and social equality as interrelated, had been largely overlooked. Its influence on his work, he said, was “not quite unspoken but very subtle often, or simply assumed in directions and spirits.”
It was a gentle reminder that there is nothing safe about a Gary Snyder poem.
Beneath the common speech-patterns and close, intimate attention to natural imagery, his poems elicit a complex interaction, resonating with the reader, consciously or unconsciously, on multiple levels. That Coyote—the slippery, wily trickster who warily keeps his distance from civilization—was a favorite Native American archetype during his studies at Reed, should come as no surprise.
The allure of Snyder’s poetry begins with the language itself. He cites Ezra Pound, a strong lyricist with an ear for words, as the first poet to truly speak to him. Similarly, Snyder’s cadence is crisp and clear. He lays down familiar terms in unfamiliar juxtapositions with rhythms borrowed from hand work.
Laying riprap trail in Grand Canyon (photo courtesy of the National Parks Service)
The approach is spelled out in his poem “Riprap,” a term he defines as “a cobble of stone laid on steep, slick rock to make a trail.
Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands. In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things
The “things” in a Snyder poem are largely drawn from the physical landscape. Finely distilled, they radiate a translucency easily mistaken for simplicity. But beneath their surface simplicity lies a terrain of unsettling depths, as in the poem “Piute Creek,” where a panorama suddenly coalesces with deep time:
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted Tough trees crammed In thin stone fractures A huge moon on it all, is too much. The mind wanders. A million Summers, night air still and the rocks Warm. Sky over endless mountains. All the junk that goes with being human Drops away, hard rock wavers
Gary Snyder’s library at his Kitkitdizze homestead in the Sierra Foothills (photo courtesy of Mark Gonnerman)
After returning from Japan in the mid-sixties, Snyder settled with his wife and two children among a community of back-to-the-land, Zen aficionados in the Sierra Foothills. As his general focus shifted to being rooted in place, his poetry became stylistically more emotional, metaphoric, and lyrical. It also gained relevance among those increasingly concerned with the natural world.
Because Snyder’s views are often so nuanced, drawing from a wide range of references with a timescale extending back 10,000 years, it’s possible for various schools of thought to adopt him as their own. Hence, his popular designation as “poet laureate of deep ecology.” As an environmental movement, deep ecology seeks freedom from the dichotomy of human civilization and nature by viewing humans as equal and interconnected with all other forms of life.
But Snyder is not so easily packaged. The trail he lays out toward such freedom ultimately leads into the wilds of Zen impermanence and emptiness.
“To be truly free,” he writes, “one must take on the basic conditions as they are—painful, impermanent, open, imperfect—and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us . . . The world is nature, and in the long runs inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence.”
His poem “Ripples on the Surface” points to the trail’s end.
The vast wild the house, alone.
The little house in the wild, the wild in the house.
Both forgotten. No nature Both together, one big, empty house.
******
A version of this article appear in the Summer 2023 issue of Reed Magazine.
Women restaurant operators, Sonoma County, 1880s (photo Sonoma County Library)
As a founding merchant of Kent & Smith, Petaluma’s first general store, Cassie Miranda Kent was said to have few equals.[1]You wouldn’t know it from the history books. In their pages, Petaluma was created by men—rugged pioneers who, after venturing west for gold, stayed to build the river town. That is, until their luck ran out and the debt collectors came calling.
In such instances, men fortunate enough to be married triggered a fail-safe option: California’s Sole Trader Act. Passed by the state legislature in 1852, the act enabled a married woman to independently own and operate her own business. Its intention was to provide women burdened with dissolute or absent husbands a means of supporting themselves.[2]Husbands however had a different view, using the act as a legal equivalent of hiding behind a woman’s skirt.
That was keeping in step with the spirit of the Gold Rush, best described by railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington as “whatever is not nailed down is mine, and whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”[3]
Petaluma was founded on the same ethos. In 1852, a failed gold miner named George H. Keller made an illegal squatter’s claim to 158 acres of a Mexican land grant. He then mapped out the town of Petaluma and began selling fraudulent lots to fellow disappointed miners looking to stake a claim in the next gold rush—land speculation.[4]
Illustrated map of Petaluma with Kent & Smith General Store and adjacent warehouse highlighted in red, 1855 (Sonoma County Library)
Cassie Kent—one of only three women in town at the time—and her husband Walter were among the first to buy in. With a partner named H.H. Smith, they purchased a lot from Keller on Main Street, where they built the town’s first general store, Kent & Smith, across from today’s Putnam Plaza. [5]Walter also served as the town’s second postmaster after the first, Keller’s 21-year old son Garrett, fled town with his father and the money he made in real estate.[6]
Kent & Smith opened its doors just as Petaluma was evolving from a village of meat hunters supplying wild game to San Francisco, into a bustling shipping port for potatoes, Sonoma County’s first boom crop. Within a couple years, overproduction and soil exhaustion led to a potato bust, after which Petaluma’s economy experienced a brief downturn during the national 1854 recession, before rebounding with the California wheat boom in the late 1850s. In the midst of that lull, Kent & Smith went belly up, and was sold at public auction to pay off creditors.[7]
The Kents also owned a 160-acre farm south of town. To shield it from the money hounds, 26-year-old Cassie filed as a sole trader, claiming she alone was in charge of raising stock and poultry on the farm.[8]
Sole trader legal notice posted by Cassie Kent (Sonoma County Journal, December 8, 1855)
The Kents weren’t alone in exploiting the act to evade debt collectors. More than three dozen married women filed as sole traders in Petaluma between 1852 and 1862. The majority registered their business as operating farms and raising livestock. Others listed wheelwright, saloon keeper, liquor seller, hotel keeper, store merchant, and lumber dealer.[9]In many cases, they designated their husbands as working agents, at least on paper.[10]
Not all sole trader filings were fraudulent. The state constitution allowed married women to personally retain assets they brought to a marriage, providing some with capital to invest. As Petaluma’s female population grew, comprising 38% of the town’s 1,338 residents by 1857, three married women—Mary Ann Trevor, Susan Cowles, and Hannah Davis—filed as sole traders to open their own millinery and dress shops.[11]Mrs. Fanny Ver Mehr filed to create a boarding school for girls.[12]
19th century woman-owned millinery shop (photo public domain)
Then there was Cassie Kent.
In the “separate spheres” of the Victorian era, women were relegated to the home while men engaged in the public world of business and politics. However, in California’s boom and bust cycles, many women unable to rely upon a breadwinning man were forced to work outside the home. Working class women were largely limited to domestic occupations—cooking, baking, house cleaning, washing clothes—or else working on the factory floors of Petaluma’s woolen and silk mills.[13]Among the middle-class, some women pursued careers as school teachers while others partnered silently in merchant enterprises with their husbands.[14]
A handful of women, however, challenged the notion that characteristics necessary to succeed in small business— ambition, assertiveness, and competition—were quintessentially masculine traits. Among them was Cassie Kent.
In 1857, she went into business on her own, leasing the Central Hotel on the southwest corner of Kentucky Street and Western Avenue, a site occupied today by the Chase Bank.[15]
Ad for Cassie Kent’s Central Hotel, 1857 (Sonoma County Journal, June 5, 1857)
It wasn’t the first hotel in Petaluma operated by a woman. That honor belonged to Rosanna Loftus, who in 1853 opened the Farmers Hotel (later renamed the Union Hotel) at the corner of Main Street and Western Avenue, where the Masonic Lodge stands today.[16]
Cassie’s Central Hotel was originally constructed in Valparaiso, Chile, and shipped to California in 1851 by a speculator named Charles H. Veeder. Veeder initially erected it in the newly established town of Vallejo, slated at the time to become the state capital. In 1853, state legislators, disenchanted with Vallejo’s sluggish development, voted to move the capital to Benicia, leaving Veeder $18,000 in debt ($700,000 in today’s currency).[17]
Veeder promptly dismantled the hotel and shipped it to Petaluma, reopening it as the Central Hotel, just before the potato boom went bust. Forced to declare bankruptcy, he leased the hotel to Cassie before moving on to his next gamble, developing the town of Calpella in Mendocino County.[18]
Hospitality proved a volatile industry in the new town. Cassie operated the Central Hotel for less than a year before turning it over to two other women, Mrs. Finchley and Mrs. Goodrich, who renamed it the Clinton House. A year later, two brothers named Schreck assumed the lease, changing the name to the City Hotel. The hotel was later rebuilt and renamed the Continental Hotel before being consumed by fire in 1968.[19]
The City Hotel, c. 1875, after extensions in 1868 and 1875 (photo Sonoma County Library)
In 1862, debt collectors convinced state legislators to close the loopholes in the Sole Trader Act. Going forward, women filing fraudulent claims were charged with felonies and husbands were prohibited from acting as working agents. But fraud wasn’t the only thing legislators were looking to clamp down on.[20]
Under the revised act a woman was required to testify before a judge as to why she desired to operate a business independent of her husband.[21] Women protested the change, arguing it forced a woman to air her dirty laundry in public by disclosing as much against her husband as she would in securing a divorce from him, and then explaining to a judge why she wasn’t simply divorcing him.[22]
Up through the 1890s, the majority of women-owned businesses in Petaluma were millineries and dress shops—an 1877 directory listed 12 in town—along with a few restaurants, boarding houses, and hair salons.[23]
Ad for bonnets in Petersen’s Magazine, 1880s (illustration courtesy of Princeton University)
By the turn of the century, progressivism, feminism, and immigration were opening the door to more women operating hotels, bakeries, restaurants, houseware stores, art supply shops, music schools, medical practices, newspapers, brothels, ice cream stands, and horse-drawn hacks, or taxi, services.[24]Among those who were married, some utilized the Sole Trader Act, while most did not.[25]
Fannie Brown’s brothel at 1st and C streets, early 1900s (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)
In 1905, 24-year-old Miss Frances Hardy opened the Bon Ton Millinery Shop in the Towne Building, which in 1867 replaced the building Walter and Cassie Kent constructed for their general store in 1852.[26]
Bon Ton Millinery in the Towne Building, Main Street, 1931 (photo Sonoma County Library)
Hardy operated Bon Ton at that location for fifty years, until the Petaluma City Council condemned the building in 1956 and converted the site into a parking lot, which it remains today, directly across from Putnam Plaza.[27]
Parking lot that replaced the Towne Building on Petaluma Boulevard North in 1956 (photo John Sheehy)
As for Cassie Kent, she eventually divorced Walter, opened her own sewing business and remarried, settling with her second husband in a cozy cottage on Post Street, where she died in 1902 at the age of 72.[28]
******
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 25, 2023.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Entered into Eternal Rest,” Petaluma Courier, July 5, 1902.
[2] “The Sole Trader Act,” Sonoma County Journal, January 16, 1857; Bonnie L. Ford, “Women, Marriage, and Divorce in California, 1849–1872,” California Legal History, Vol. 16, 2021, p. 34.
[4] John Sheehy, “The Story of the True Founder of Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 11, 2021.
[5] David Wharff wrote in a letter to A.B. Behrens, April 26, 1918, that there were only three women in Petaluma— Mrs. Horton, Mrs. Kent, and Mrs. Douglass—when he arrived in the fall of 1852, Sonoma County Library; Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (L.H. Everts, 1877), p. 55; “Worked on Original Building,” Petaluma Courier, April 15, 1902; “Fire Bell,” Sonoma County Journal, December 25, 1857; “Real Estate Petaluma,” Sonoma County Journal, January 28, 1859; “Death of Major Hewlett,” Petaluma Courier, January 8, 1896; Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (Allen, Bowen & Co, 1880), pp. 260-261.
[6] A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United States, 1853, United States, Department of State.
[7]“Fire Bell,” Sonoma County Journal, December 25, 1857; “Real Estate Petaluma,” Sonoma County Journal, January 28, 1859; “Death of Major Hewlett,” Petaluma Courier, January 8, 1896; “Worked on Original Building,” Petaluma Courier, April 15, 1902; Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (Allen, Bowen & Co, 1880), pp. 260-261; Victor Zarnowitz, Business Cycles: Theory, History, Indicators, and Forecasting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 221-226.
[9] Sole Trader Notices, Sonoma County Journal: December 8, December 22, December 29, 1855; June 7, June 21, August 22, August 29, October 10, October 31, December 5, 1856; January 15, May 8, October 23, 1857; April 15, May 28, June 18, July 28, November 30, December 10, 1858; March 18, April29, September 16, September 20, December 2, 1859; January 20, December 21, 1860; January 4, February 15, April 19, July 9, August 23, November 30, 1861; January 4, February 14, March 7, March 14, April 11, 1862.
[10] “The Sole Trader Act,” Sonoma County Journal, January 16, 1857.
[11] Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (University of Wisconsin, 1877) p. 56; Ad, Petaluma Journal, August 22, 1856; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, October 23, 1857; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, April 15, 1859.
[13] Bonnie L. Ford, “Women, Marriage, and Divorce in California, 1849–1872,” California Legal History, Vol. 16, 2021, pp. 33-34; Sixty girls working at Carlson-Currier Silk Mills, “Odds and Ends,” Petaluma Courier, January 22, 1893; Women comprise a third of 36 mill workers, soon to increase to 100, “Petaluma Woolen Mill,” Petaluma Courier, November 18, 1891.
[16] Ad, Petaluma Journal, November 20, 1855; Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County, California (San Francisco, CA: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 263: The Union Hotel, listed as having opened in 1853, was most likely was the Farmers Hotel in 1853–August Starke assumed ownership of the Farmers Hotel in 1858, initially renaming it the Petaluma Lager Beer Saloon, and then in 1859 the Union Hotel (Ads, Sonoma County Journal: February 12, 1858; February 11, 1859; October 12, 1860; October 22, 1861).
[17] Munro-Fraser, History of Solano County…and Histories of Its Cities, Towns, etc. (Wood, Alley & Co), 1879, p. 193; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma (Scottwall Publishing, 1982), p.30; “Personal,” Petaluma Journal, March 15, 1856.
[18] Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County, California (San Francisco, CA: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 263; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, June 12, 1857; “The Legislature,” Nevada Journal, January 24, 1852; “Assignee’s Sale in Bankruptcy,” Alta California, January 18, 1856; “Petaluma,” Sacramento Bee, December 15, 1857; “Letter from Col. Veeder, Calpella,” Sonoma Democrat, August 26, 1858; “Items of Local Interest,” Petaluma Argus, September 24, 1875.
[19] Ad, Sonoma County Journal, November 27, 1857; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, January 28, 1859; “Hotel Will Be Called The Continental,” Petaluma Argus, June 9, 1905; “Fire Destroys Hotel,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 6, 1968.
[20] “Sole Traders,” Sacramento Bee, October 6, 1862.
[21] “The Collection of Debts,” Sonoma County Journal, March 14, 1862; “Women Sole Traders,” Marysville Daily Appeal, March 23, 1862; “Sole Traders,” Sonoma County Journal, July 25, 1862; Ford, pp. 26-27.
[22] “Woman in California,” Petaluma Courier, December 21, 1893.
[23] Business types determined by a review of business ads and listings in the Petaluma Argus and Petaluma Courier newspapers 1855 to 1900 indicate 85 millineries and dress shops during that period ; 12 millineries and dressmaking shops were listed in “Our Industries,” Petaluma Argus, August 10, 1877; Ad for Mrs. E. Bradbury’s Tremont Bakery & Restaurant, Petaluma Argus, April 30, 1870; Ad for Madame Carter French hairdresser, Petaluma Argus, July 20, 1877; Ad for Mrs. Wilsey & Mrs. Avlesworth’s restaurant “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, October 24, 1888; Ad for Mrs. Lambert’s boarding house, PetalumaCourier, February 18, 1882; Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982).
[24] “Women Entrepreneurs: History of Women in Business,” Home Business, September 18, 2017; J.H. Starke and Mrs. G.W. Badger, furniture and housewares store, 19 Main, Ad, Petaluma Argus, June 4, 1884; “Mrs. Sarah Baruh operates a hack business (horse drawn taxi), “Hack Business,” Petaluma Argus, May 24, 1884; Mrs. Baruh also operates Baruh’s Store adjoining the American Hotel, Ad for J. Snow, Petaluma Argus, December 31, 1880; Mrs. Rowlston’s ice cream stand, “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, July 24, 1889; Ad for Dr. Ruth A. French, Case Block, corner of Kentucky Street and Western Avenue, Petaluma Courier, December 31, 1890; Ad for Christine E. Remarque, physician and surgeon, Petaluma Courier, August 15, 1894; Ad for Mrs. L. Lewis, proprietor of the Petaluma Hotel, Petaluma Courier, December 4, 1894; Ad for Mrs. F. White, proprietor of the Western Hotel, Petaluma Courier, December 22, 1894; Rena Shattuck’s launch of the Petalumian newspaper, “Petaluma’s New Paper,” San Francisco Call, June 7, 1895; Ad, Ad for Dr. Ruth P. Huffmann, physician, Petaluma Courier, November 2, 1896; Ads for Mrs. Cronk’s signs and art materials, Miss Maud S. Brainerd, teacher of piano and voice culture, and Miss L. Tourny, voice development and dramatic, Petaluma Courier, February 22, 1897; Madams Frankie Duval and Georgie Herbert applied for liquor licenses at their female boarding houses, which Sanborn maps used to designate brothels, “Board of Trustees,” Petaluma Courier, October 4, 1897.
[25] A search of legal notices for sole trader applications in the Petaluma Courier and Petaluma Argus newspapers identified only 15 sole trader applications made between 1862 and 1900.
[26] “Bon Ton Millinery Store is Opened,” Petaluma Argus, June 10, 1905; The site of the Kent & Smith general store was located most likely at 122-130 Petaluma Boulevard North, which is today a parking lot. John Lockwood described the town’s first 4th of July celebration in 1852 as being held in the Kent & Smith warehouse (“The Late J. E. Lockwood,” Petaluma Argus, December 13, 1904). That warehouse was replaced in 1856 by Capt. Palmer Hewlett with what is known today as the Steiger Building, and was initially occupied in the 1850s by Elder & Hinman Dry Goods Store. The building that originally housed Kent & Smith is cited in 1858 as still standing beside it to the south in ads, among them for the physician T.A. Hylton, “with office in old Kent & Smith Building one door below Messrs. Elder & Hinman” (Sonoma County Journal, March 26, 1858). S.D. Towne apparently replaced the Kent & Smith building with the Towne Building in 1867 (First ad mentioning the new Towne Building appears in the Petaluma Argus on September 5, 1867, for Frank Miller’s Crystal Baths and Shaving and Hair Dressing.
[27] “Memorial Won’t Go on May Ballot,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 20, 1956; Ad for Bon Ton, Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 11, 1956; Frances Hardy became Frances Studdert after marrying local merchant John W. Studdert in 1926, “The Studdert-Hardy Wedding,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 28, 1926.
[28] Ad, Petaluma Argus, November 16, 1877; “Divorce,” Petaluma Argus, December 12, 1879; “Married,” Petaluma Courier, July 8, 1885; “Entered Eternal Rest,” Petaluma Courier, July 5, 1902
The Historical Prequel to Petaluma’s Longest Running Land-War Drama
Jerry or Isaac Lafferty, son of Marshall Lafferty, 1872 (photo courtesy of Pete Vilmur Collection at PetalumaPioneers.org)
Kevin Costner is dressed in a tux, carrying a rifle.
Playing the role of land baron John Dutton in the TV series “Yellowstone,” he confronts a group of Chinese tourists on his property. One of them scolds him, calling it obscene that one man should own so much of the earth. He runs them off with a gunshot to the air.
“This is America,” he shouts. “We don’t share land.”
For the past 30 years, Petaluma has endured its own version of “Yellowstone” over Lafferty Ranch on Sonoma Mountain. It began when the city decided to shut down its century-old water works on the property and convert the 270 acres into a public park. Peter Pfendler, the millionaire owner of 800 acres abutting Lafferty, responded by firing off a shotgun brief to City Hall. Local officials naively brushed it off.[1]
“I think this could be a little war up there in the hills,” said one city council member. “Mr. Pfendler has threatened to call in his posse of lawyers, but you can’t keep 45,000 people off their property.”[2]
Police cars and protesters outside entrance to Lafferty Ranch, 2002 (photo North Bay Bohemian)
This is America. With enough lawyers, guns, and money, one can certainly try.
Faced with a costly lawsuit, the city quickly backed down. Years of plot twists followed—public protests, proposed land swaps, property access battles, backroom deals, ballot fraud, polarized elections, rifle shots, environmental damage suits, Pfendler’s death—making “Lafferty” the city’s longest running class-war series drama.[3]
As with “Yellowstone,” the series came with historical prequels featuring two of Petaluma’s early land barons, General Mariano Vallejo and banker William Hill. Land for these men, as for Pfendler, was not only an object of lust but a source of legitimacy, power, and identity. The more they owned, the more they mattered.
View of Petaluma Valley from Lafferty Ranch (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)
It wasn’t always so. Prior to being “discovered” by Europeans, Sonoma Mountain was inhabited for millennia by the Coast Miwok. In their origin myth, it was an island in a primordial ocean at the beginning of time, a place where the world began. They called it Oona-pa’is.[4]
For tribal members, the mountain was a cultivated garden they carefully nurtured and co-existed with. During hunting and gathering seasons, they dispersed from villages on the valley floor to small encampments on the mountain near fresh water sources, including presumably the two springs comprising the Adobe Creek headwaters on today’s Lafferty Ranch.
Illustration of California natives fishing by John Russell Bartlett (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
Then came the colonizers. To their eyes, the land appeared as an uncivilized wilderness upon which to project their dreams, aspirations, and greed. First, the Franciscan padres claimed it for their Sacred Expedition, driving the Coast Miwok into mission servitude and conversion, then the Mexican government secularized the mission lands, carving them up for private ranchos.[5]
Vallejo laid claim to the 66,000-acre Rancho Petaluma, stocking it with imported sheep and longhorn cattle. He shipped their hides, tallow, and wool to Europe and New England, where they fetched good prices for making leather goods, blankets, candles, and soap. After the livestock decimated the perennial native fescue, or bunch grass, it was replaced by Mediterranean annual grasses. Better suited for heavy grazing, they turned the hills golden in summer.[6]
Vallejo lost his herd to American cattle rustlers during the Mexican-American War. To fill his coffers, he ventured into real estate, selling off subdivisions of Rancho Petaluma to land-hungry Americans, many of them disappointed lost boys from the Gold Rush. In 1859, Marshall Lafferty purchased 270 acres on Sonoma Mountain from Vallejo for $52,500 in today’s currency.[7]
Born in North Carolina in 1808 and raised in Kentucky, Lafferty descended from early colonial stock. At 17, he married Elizabeth Criss from Pennsylvania. The couple had 13 children, eventually settling in Illinois. There, Lafferty served in the U.S. Army during the Black Hawk War, putting down a revolt by Native Americans evicted from tribal land they had secured in a treaty.[8]
In 1850, Lafferty headed west for the Gold Rush, returning home four years later. In 1857, he took his wife and children out to California via covered wagon, initially settling in the city of Vallejo before purchasing property on Sonoma Mountain.[9]
Entrance to Lafferty Ranch Sonoma Mountain (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)
Like other “pioneers,” he looked upon the land with the boom-and-bust mentality of a gold miner.[10] The cycle began in the 1850s with a potato boom, which quickly faded because of overproduction and soil depletion. A cattle boom followed, fizzling out in the early 1860s due to overbreeding and competition. Then came the California wheat boom. Accelerating during the Civil War, which cut off Midwest wheat exports to Europe, it went bust in the 1880s due to soil erosion and competition.[11]
The steep terrain of Lafferty’s ranch lent itself more to cattle grazing than farming. Its elevation above the fog line and year-round water supply from Adobe Creek also made it feasible for growing imported fruit trees. The orchard had plenty of sunlight as most of the mountain’s native oaks had been logged out. Cut and piled into large mounds, they were covered with dirt and slowly burned to charcoal, which was shipped to San Francisco as a coal substitute for heating homes, businesses, and steam engines.[12]
In 1867, Marshall Lafferty sold his ranch to his two youngest sons, Isaac Newton Lafferty and Jeremiah Henry Clay Lafferty. Isaac left to pursue a teaching career, eventually becoming a school superintendent in Washington Territory. Jerry maintained the ranch, adding a large vineyard to the fruit orchard, and hosting deer hunting parties as well as social dances, where he played the violin. He eventually married and started a family, while continuing to care for his aging parents.[13]
Illustration of Petaluma, 1857 (Sonoma County Library)
Meanwhile, the thriving river port of Petaluma found itself hindered by water restrictions. Early residents near the river drew their water from wells and natural springs, but those buying into the new hillside developments were dependent upon water cart deliveries. The scarcity created a need for careful planning that clashed with the pioneering spirit of the times.Water became money.[14]
In the early 1870s, two groups of venture capitalists launched competing initiatives to pipe water into town from three creeks on Sonoma Mountain, Copeland, Lynch, and Adobe. By 1877, the two consolidated into the privately-owned Sonoma County Water Company.[15]
Adobe Creek near headwaters on Lafferty Ranch (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)
In 1888, the Lafferty brothers sold their ranch for $170,000 in today’s currency, purchasing a new ranch in Glen Ellen, where Marshall Lafferty spent his final years until his death in 1892 at the age of 87.[16]
The Lafferty Ranch was purchased by William Hill, president of the Bank of Sonoma County, one of four locally financed banks in Petaluma. The other three controlled by John McNear, Isaac Wickersham, and Hiram Fairbanks. Together with Hill, they were the wealthiest men in Petaluma and also its largest landowners. Hill’s holdings alone comprised 6,000 acres.[17]
Hill was also president of the Sonoma County Water Company. He first purchased the water rights to Lafferty Ranch in 1887, before purchasing the ranch itself the following year in order to secure the headwaters of Adobe Creek for the water company, which he quickly flipped the property to for a nominal $10. For income, the company leased the ranch out for livestock grazing.[18]
William Hill residence, D & 8th streets, Petaluma (photo Sonoma County Library)
Changing hands a few times, the Sonoma County Water Company served as Petaluma’s main water source until 1959, when it was purchased, along with Lafferty Ranch, by the city. The voter-approved bond used to acquire the waterworks also funded an underground aqueduct for transporting water from a new dam on the Russian River to Petaluma, facilitating the city’s suburban housing boom.[19]
Proposals to convert Lafferty Ranch into a community park began with Petaluma’s 1962 general plan. In the early 1970s, Petaluma schools were allowed to use the ranch for limited educational and environmental purposes. Meanwhile, the city continued leasing out grazing rights to the property.[20]
In 1992, the Sonoma Mountain waterworks were shut down after Lawler Reservoir, which Adobe Creek fed into, was declared vulnerable to earthquakes. The City of Petaluma then decided to convert Lafferty Ranch into a public park, launching the longest running political drama in Petaluma history.[21]
A group of hikers touring Lafferty Ranch (photo by Kent Porter / The Press Democrat)
After Lafferty’s adjacent neighbors sought to block public access to the ranch by claiming ownership of a small strip of land between the ranch and the public road, in 2013 the City filed a lawsuit against them, claiming a historic public easement to the land. In 2019, the City dismissed the lawsuit after Pfendler’s widow, Kimberley Pfendler, agreed to no longer finance the opposition to developing Lafferty as a public park. [22]
In 2022, the city began piloting guided hikes on the property through a partnership with the non-profit LandPaths. Many people on a recent hike said they were seeking an experience of the land before European contact. . [23]
Lafferty Ranch is sadly far from that. It remains scarred from two centuries of being logged out, worked, and grazed upon since the Coast Miwok were driven from the area. The upcoming new season of “Lafferty” will hopefully be a quiet drama, one of gradual restoration and renewed stewardship of the land.
Matt McGuire and John Sheehy on Lafferty Ranch (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)
******
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier July 7, 2023.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “City Opts to Keep Ranch Land,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 17, 1992; “Ranch Access May Be Stalled,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 7, 1992; “Petaluma Land Swap Foes Won’t Give Up,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 11, 1995.
[2] “This is Your Land—Mostly,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 23, 1992.
[3] M.V. Wood, “Lafferty,” North Bay Bohemian, October 3-9, 2002; “Chronology of the Lafferty Ranch Controversy,” Laffertyranch.org/timeline
[4] M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pgs. 1, 135; Merriam, C. Hart Merriam, editor, The Dawn of the World, Myths and Weird Tales Told by the Mewan (Miwok) Indians of California (Cleveland ,Ohio: Arthur H. Clarke Co, 1910). p. 203.
[5] Anderson, pp. 2-3; Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, “We Feel the Want of Protection: the Politics of Law and Race in California, 1848-1878,” Taming the Elephant: Politics, Government, and Law in Pioneer California, Burns and Orsi, editors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) pp. 96-120.
[6]Alan Rosenus, General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americas (Berkeley: Heyday Press, 1995); Anderson, pp. 76-77; Michael Ellis, “How Our Hills Got Golden,” KQED, July 9, 2010. www.kqed.org/perspectives.
[7] Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 12, page 185, August 1, 1859: sale by Mariano G. Vallejo to Marshall Lafferty for $1,348.75 lot 361 of Rancho Petaluma consisting of 169.75 acres.
[8]Sonoma Index-Tribune, February 20, 1892, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/217655953/marshall-lafferty.
[9] “Prof. I.N. Lafferty,” An Illustrated History of the State of Washington, by Rev. H.K. Hines, D.D. (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, IL., 1893), pages 473-474.
[10] “Opening Address,” Petaluma Argus, October 8, 1870.
[11] James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-22532010000200002
[12] Arthur Dawson, “The History of Sonoma County’s Woodlands,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 26, 2017; J. Charles Watford, “Charcoal Making In Sonoma County,” Society for California Archaeology, https://www.scahome.org/publications/proceedings/Proceedings.13Whatford.pdf
[13] Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 21 of Deeds, page 321, June 29, 1867, and Liber 79 of Deeds, page 603, July 3, 1872; “School Statistics,” Marin County Journal, September 24, 1870; “Prof. I.N. Lafferty,” An Illustrated History of the State of Washington, by Rev. H.K. Hines, D.D. (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, IL., 1893), pages 473-474; “Jottings,” Petaluma Courier, February 25, 1880; Jottings,” Petaluma Courier, September 1, 1880; “Agricultural Outlook,” Petaluma Courier, April 13, 1881; “H.C. Lafferty of Glen Ellen Dead,” Sonoma Press Democrat, May 9, 1914.
[14] Alexandra Wormley, Michael Varnum, “Nearly 20% of the Cultural Differences Between Societies Boil Down to Ecological Factors,” The Conversation, June 6, 2023. Theconversation.com.
[15] “Prospect Ahead for Good Water,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1871.
[16] Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 113, pp. 279-81 (pg. 787 in online deeds site), January 11, 1888: deed of I.N. Lafferty of Washington Territory and William Hill for $2,400, for half his interest in lot 361 of 269.75 acres of the Rancho Petaluma; Liber 109, pp.634-635, January 11, 1888, deed of J.H.C. Lafferty to William Hill, for $2,400 half his interest in lot 361 of 269.75 acres of the Petaluma Rancho; Liber 113, pp.184-186, April 29, 1887, sale of water rights lot 361 to on Petaluma Rancho by I. N. Lafferty and J. H.C. Lafferty to William Hill for $500 gold coin. (total sale for land and water rights $5,300).
[17] “Sonoma County National Bank, Petaluma, 50th Anniversary,” Coast Banker, Volume 16, Coast Banker Publishing Company, 1916; “William Hill,” Petaluma Courier, July 31, 1902.
[18] “William Hill,” Petaluma Courier, July 31, 1902; Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 113, page 282, January 25, 1888: deed of William Hill selling Lafferty Ranch to the Sonoma County Water Company: $10 sale for 169.75 acres, Lot 361 of the Rancho Petaluma.
[19] “Petaluma Aqueduct Contract Signed,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, May 10, 1960.
[20] “Petaluma’s New General Plan Aired April 25,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 5, 1961; “Commission Approves Ranch Use,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 1, 1970; “Study Trails Agreement Approved,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 9, 1970.
[21] “Petaluma May Mothball ‘Unsafe’ Lawler Dam,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 22, 1992.
[22] “City Joins Lafferty Ranch Lawsuit,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 19, 2013; “Lafferty Proponents Claim New Evidence in Access Fight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 17, 2013; “Petaluma Forging Ahead with Lafferty Ranch Plans after Dropping Lawsuit,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 6, 2019; Email from attorneys Mike Healy and Lawrence King to John Sheehy.
[23] Sheri Cardo, “Exciting Changes at Petaluma’s Lafferty Ranch on Sonoma Mountain,” Sonoma County Gazette, September 21, 2022.
Kentucky Street, 1908 (photo California State Library)
This photo of Kentucky Street was taken in 1908, soon after this stretch of Kentucky Street between Washington Street and Western Avenue became a central commercial strip.
The building on the corner was built by Angela Canepa in 1900. She and her husband Giovanni, both Italian immigrants, ran a grocery kitty corner across the street where Bank of America is today. Six months after Giovanni’s death in 1898, Angela purchased the old Washington Stable & Livery at the southwest corner of Washington and Kentucky streets, and hired a San Francisco architect to design a new Victorian commercial building on the site. Louis Solari, a clerk in her store, and his wife Emilia, opened the Golden West, a grocery tavern, on the bottom floor of the new Canepa Building in 1900. Canepa rented the upstairs out mainly to physicians and dentists.
The Healey Manson at Washington & Keokuk streets, built 1903 (Sonoma County Library)
In 1904, an Irish immigrant named Dennis Healey sold the grocery he operated with his wife Maggie on Main Street across from Penry Park, and constructed a new building next door to the Canepa Building for his new Petaluma Furniture Store. The couple had just built the new Healey Mansion at the corner of Washington and Keokuk the year before.
Two doors down from Healey’s furniture store, in 1901, Adolph Bloom, the son of Swiss Italian immigrants, purchased the Petaluma Theater (also known as the Opera House), built in 1870, and hired Brainerd Jones to convert it into retail space and offices.
Further down the block, in 1907, a German immigrant named Henry Schluckebier who operated Schluckebier’s Hardware across from Penry Park, moved his home from Kentucky Street to 245 Howard Street across from St. Vincent’s Elementary (currently under major renovation).
Brainerd jones’ Plans for the Telephone Building, 1907 (Petaluma Argus-Courier)
He hired Brainerd Jones to design a new commercial building in its place, extending 117 Kentucky St., where Threads A Boutique is today, to 131 Kentucky Street, where Round Table Pizza now resides. He named it the Telephone Building because the telephone company was his first tenant.
Downtown Petaluma’s Turning Basin (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)
When it came to business opportunities, Skip Sommer was superstitious. If a new venture didn’t include the number six, he approached it warily. If it referenced both six and an eagle, he doubled down.[1]
On May 11, 1975, Sommer drove his tan diesel Cadillac—license plate “Eagle 66”—into downtown Petaluma and pulled up beside the dilapidated Golden Eagle Mill at 6 Petaluma Boulevard North.[2]
Bingo!
Up the street, Petaluma’s statuesque mayor, Helen Putnam, was leading a group of 200 preservationists on a tour of the city’s historic downtown. As the group emerged from the new Lan Mart gallery of shops—Petaluma’s first adaptive reuse of a historical structure—Putnam steered them across the street to the Golden Eagle Mill.[3]
Golden Eagle Mill (former G.P. McNear Mill), 1973 (photo Sonoma County Library)
There, to the fanfare of popping champagne corks, she introduced Sommer, who emerged from a curtain of dusty cobwebs to announce his plan to save the river city. “In the old days,” he told the crowd, “schooners would tie up to the docks of this mill to pick up feed for the horses of San Francisco. Soon, it will be yachts tying up here to visit the new Great Petaluma Mill.”[4]
Skip Sommer inside the Great Petaluma Mill, 1976 (photo by Morrie Camhi, courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
He proceeded to unveil his vision: transforming the old granary into a Victorian-themed arcade of specialty shops patterned after San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square.
As crazy as it might have sounded, Putnam let it be known that Sommer’s scheme had her full support. The stakes were simply too high to fail.
Sprawling housing developments were overwhelming Petaluma’s infrastructure. The city’s attempt to pump the brakes—capping new housing units at 500 per year and imposing a greenbelt around the city—was met with a lawsuit from developers. After losing the first round in court, the city was granted an appeals hearing.[5] Optimistic about a favorable outcome, Putnam unleashed her side maneuver: revitalizing the downtown.
“The type of growth I’m interested in,” she declared, “is growth that retains Petaluma’s rank as a first-class city, not as a bedroom community.”[6]
For Putnam, that meant staging a comeback of the Petaluma River.[7]
Mayor Helen Putnam beside the Turning Basin (photo Sonoma County Library)
For more than a century, the river served as the lifeblood of the city, its downtown banks dotted with grain mills and warehouses. Following World War II, the rise of large factory farms in Central California and elsewhere decimated the local poultry and dairy industries, leading to a sharp decline in commercial river traffic. Then came the opening of the freeway in 1956, placing Petaluma within easy commuting distance of San Francisco.[8]
Tract homes quickly sprang up across the flats east of town, accompanied by shopping centers, restaurants, and motels, all draining foot traffic from the downtown. No longer able to command premium rents, commercial landlords let their timeworn buildings slowly deteriorate, leaving the town pockmarked with boarded-up eyesores.
The Wickersham Building, 170 Petlauma Boulevard North, 1973 (photo Sonoma County Library)
In the mid-sixties, the city began tagging old buildings as safety hazards. In most cases, demolishing them was cheaper than bringing them up to code for earthquake and fire risks. That opened the door to urban renewal, the federally funded movement sweeping America.
The wrecking ball began swinging in 1965, its first victim the original Golden Eagle Mill built in 1888 along the east side of the Turning Basin. Before the mill’s destruction, Golden Eagle moved its operations into the former G.P. McNear Feed Mill at Petaluma Boulevard and B Street, which it purchased in 1958.[9]
The original Golden Eagle Mill, East Washington Street, 1954 (Sonoma County Library)
Once the mill was razed, Novato developer Walter Kieckhefer began planning construction of the Golden Eagle Shopping Center (today’s River Plaza Shopping Center) in its place.[10]
Putnam, first elected mayor in 1965, supported urban renewal, overseeing the expansion of Washington Street, the sole traffic artery to the burgeoning eastside, into a four-lane thoroughfare. That began with the demolition of three blocks of historic buildings at the intersection of Washington Street and Petaluma Boulevard.[11]
In the late sixties she backed the Core Area Plan, a federally funded redesign of the downtown that called for converting Kentucky Street between Western Avenue and Washington Street into a closed-off mall, and demolishing all the buildings along the east side of Petaluma Boulevard from D to Oak streets to install a six-lane thoroughfare along the river.[12]
Mayor Helen Putnam (center) displaying illustration of proposed Core Plan on the Washington Street Bridge, 1969 (photo Sonoma County Library)
Two months before the Core Area Plan was put before voters, Petaluma’s urban renewal bulldozer hit a speed bump. The Healey Mansion, a stately Queen Anne Victorian at the corner of Washington and Keokuk streets, utilized for half a century as a funeral parlor, was torn down for a new gas station. Its leveling became the rallying cry of a local historic preservation movement.[13]
In June, voters rejected the Core Plan bond issue while reelecting Putnam to a second mayoral term by a slim margin. Deftly, she pivoted her downtown stance afterward from destruction to restoration, and began chasing federal tax credits for adaptive reuse—retrofitting old buildings for new uses.[14]
The trend began in 1964 with the transformation of San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory into a historically themed center of shops and eateries.[15]Two years later, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, giving communities some means of protecting their historic fabrics from the slash-and-burn of urban renewal. Grants and tax credits followed.[16]
National Ice & Cold Storage Building, E. Washington & Lakeville streets, c. 1950. (photo Sonoma County Library)
Lakeville Shopping Center at E. Washington & Lakeville streets (photo public domain)
Petaluma’s first attempts at adaptive reuse began in 1972. Developer Kieckhefer set out to convert the National Ice and Cold Storage Building, built in 1908 at the corner of East Washington and Lakeville streets, into a local Ghirardelli Square. Once he saw the price tag for seismic upgrading, he changed his mind, and instead tore the building down to erect the Lakeville Shopping Center in its place.[17]
That same year, Victor and Marisa DeCarli recombined the two Gross Buildings, extending from Petaluma Boulevard to Kentucky Street, to create the Lan Mart Center of boutique shops.[18]Their initiative inspired Putnam to marshal a crusade to revive Petaluma’s historic downtown waterfront, using the old Golden Eagle Mill as her cornerstone.
Lan Mart Building, 35 Petlauma Blvd North, 1977 (photo Sonoma County Library)
What she needed was someone to lead the charge, not just a developer, but a charismatic ringmaster like Bert Kerrigan. Hired as a front man for the Chamber of Commerce in 1918, Kerrigan unleashed upon the town an energetic, three ring circus atmosphere that boosted Petaluma’s prosperity and fame as the “Egg Basket of the World.”
For help, Putnam reached out to an old friend, Bill Murray, chairman of the Bank of Marin, who had started his banking career in Petaluma during the 1950s. He had just the man for the job: Ralph “Skip” Sommer, a former stage actor and IBM salesman turned theme developer. Growing up in Michigan, Sommer spent his summers driving horse-drawn carriages of tourists around Mackinac Island, a Victorian-era resort that still bans automobiles. He understood history as an economic engine. [19]
Skip Sommer aboard horse and buggy, Mackinac Island, 1950 (photo courtesy of Skip Sommer)
Murray, whose bank had financed two of Sommer’s conversions of historic buildings into shops and restaurants in Marin, drove him up to Petaluma for his first visit.[20] Lured by federal tax credits and Murray’s financial backing, Sommer jumped at the opportunity. With Putnam’s assistance, the proposal was fast-tracked through the city planning commission, bypassing the need for an environment impact report.
Then came the deal killer: $275,000 for seismic upgrading ($1.4 million in today’s currency). Sommer blinked, until Murray told him the bank would finance it.[21]
Sommer staged the grand opening of the Great Petaluma Mill in October 1976 with the razzle dazzle of Harold Hill in “The Music Man.” Soon, he was piloting his yacht, The Great Eagle II, up the Petaluma River to proclaim the Turning Basin the new port of call for recreational boating. The press ate it up, dubbing him the “new business czar of the downtown waterfront area.”[22]
Great Petaluma Mill, 1980s (photo Sonoma County Library)
That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand the ruling of a lower appeals court which had granted Petaluma the right to preserve the city’s character and open spaces “by growing at an orderly and deliberate pace.”[23]Putnam’s two pronged approach—sustainable growth paired with a revitalized downtown—had worked.
In the first year of the Great Petaluma Mill’s operation, downtown sales taxes increased by 30% thanks to increased foot traffic. A restoration fever soon overtook the downtown with developers of adaptive reuse flocking to town.[24]
But Putnam wasn’t finished. She wanted to anchor the new recreational Turning Basin with the warmth of Victorian homes.
In 1976, the Wendy’s hamburger chain purchased the Burns-Farrell house at East Washington and Wilson streets with plans to demolish it for a burger joint. Putnam negotiated a deal to have Sommer buy the house for $1, and then move it to an empty lot on the Turning Basin, where he converted it into a restaurant called the Farrell House (today’s River House).[25]
Burns-Farrell House being moved from E. Washington Street to the Turning Basin, 1979 (photo courtesy of Skip Sommer)
Burns-Farrell House (today’s River House) on Turning Basin (photo Scott Hess)
The next year, she did the same with the Pometta House, a Victorian on Petaluma Boulevard South between C and D streets, slated for destruction for a new bank parking lot. Sommer moved it to 1 C Street, beside today’s Petaluma’s Yacht Club, converting it into an office building.[26]
Pometta House, Petaluma Blvd South, between C & D streets, 1977 (photo Sonoma County Library)
Pometta House in foreground at C & 1st streets on the Turning Basin, 2023 (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)
In 1979, Sommer sold the Great Petaluma Mill in order to help fund his next adaptive reuse performance out on the coast and his producer, Mayor Putnam, began her newly elected term as a Sonoma County supervisor. Petaluma would never be the same.[27]
Petaluma Turning Basin (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)
*******
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 12, 2023.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “He’s Not Your Typical Developer,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 28, 1975; Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives.
[2] Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives.
[3] “Unique Development Announced,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 12, 1975.
[4] “Unique Development Announced,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 12, 1975.
[5] “Design Plan Passes; Is Effective at Once,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 28, 1972; “Good Case for Housing Limit,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 26, 1973; “City Growth Ordinance Outlawed,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 29, 1974; Growth Suit Decision Not Expected for Some Time,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 15, 1975.
[6] “Helen Putnam, First Woman Ever to Seek Office of Mayor,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 25, 1965.
[7] “River May Be Making a Comeback,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 28, 1975.
[8] “Cotati Man is First Fatality on Freeway,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 17, 1856.
[9] “Golden Eagle Completes McNear Deal,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 17, 1958; “Mayor Discusses Golden Eagle’s Present Property,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 24, 1964 “Golden Eagle’s Century Old Mill Site,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 13, 1965.
[10] “Golden Eagle, Once Towering Over Petaluma, Like a Phoenix Reborn,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 26, 1975.
[11] “Rezoning Aids Expansion Central Business District,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 17, 1967; “Our Most Important Need,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 11, 1967.
[12] “More Parking Would Boost Downtown Area,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 3, 1968.
[13] “Money to Decide Mansion’s Fate,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 1, 1969; “Thanks for the Effort,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 13, 1969.
[14] “Putnam Wins, Bonds Lose,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 11, 1969.
[15] “Old, Familiar Glow,” San Francisco Examiner, November 30, 1964.
[16] Historic Preservation & Development, September 20, 2006, U.S. Department of the Interior.
[17] “Center Project Proceeds,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 14, 1972; “New Building to Follow Razing,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 17, 1973.
[18] “Lan Mart Stores are Commercial Experiment,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 15, 1973; “Lan Mart Center Has Grand Opening,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 6, 1973.
[19] Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives; “He’s Not Your Typical Developer,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 28, 1975.
[20] “Skip Sommer’s Ideas Pay Off Very Well at Lark Creek Inn,” San Rafael Daily Independent, October 13, 1972; “Old Western Look,” San Rafael Daily Independent, October 30, 1974.
[21] “Great Petaluma Mill Needed Quake-proofing,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 1, 1976; Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives.
[22] “Reviving a Turn of the Century Town Center,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1977; Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 25 1977.
[23] “Growth Review Denied,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 23, 1976.
[24] “Ambitious New Business Owners See Potential in Old Buildings,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1977; “Mill Played a Key Role in Downtown Revitalization,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 9, 1980.
[25] “Historic Home to Become Restaurant at New Site,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 6, 1976.
[26] “House on Wheels,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 5, 1978.
[27] “Putnam Elected Supervisor,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1978: “Marin Investors Buy Great Petaluma Mill,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 19, 1979.
