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.
(Spanish translation provided by the Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)
The settlers arriving in Petaluma in the 1850s were gamblers, speculators, and adventurers. Restless and ambitious, they saw themselves as pioneers starting anew. A small number of them had struck it rich in the gold fields, either from mining ore or “mining the miners” through selling them goods and services, but most came away from the Gold Rush empty-handed. Still itching with gold fever, a number of them turned to working the land, and soon discovered that gold was the smallest part of California’s abundant storehouse.
Los colonos que llegaron a Petaluma en la década de 1850 eran jugadores, especuladores y aventureros. Inquietos y ambiciosos, se vieron a sí mismos como pioneros que comenzaban de nuevo. Un pequeño número de ellos se había hecho rico en los campos de oro, ya sea por la extracción de minerales o por “la extracción de los mineros” a través de vendiéndoles bienes y servicios, pero la mayoría salió de la fiebre del oro con las manos vacías. Todavía picazón con fiebre del oro, algunos de ellos se dedicaron a trabajar la tierra, y pronto descubrieron que el oro era la parte más pequeña del abundante almacén de California.
The Petaluma Valley appeared to them a beautiful, uninhabited wilderness, its marshes and creeks thick with waterfowl and fish, its coastal prairie tall with wild oats, its woodlands abounding with elk, quail, grizzly bears, deer, and antelope. The indigenous natives were decimated by a smallpox epidemic in 1838, the herds of longhorn cattle and sheep, introduced by Mexican colonists in the 1830s for the export trade with Europe and New England of hides, tallow, and wool, had been rounded up during the Gold Rush and fed to miners.
El valle de Petaluma les pareció un hermoso desierto deshabitado, sus marismas y arroyos llenos de aves acuáticas y peces, su pradera costera llena de avena silvestre, sus bosques abundando en alces, codornices, osos pardos, ciervos y antílopes. Los nativos indígenas fueron diezmados por una epidemia de viruela en 1838, los rebaños de ganado bovino y ovino de cuernos largos, introducidos por Colonos mexicanos en la década de 1830 para el comercio de exportación con Europa y Nueva Inglaterra de cueros, el sebo y la lana habían sido reunidos durante la Fiebre del Oro y alimentados a los mineros.
Within two years of gold’s discovery in 1848, California’s nonindigenous population exploded from 10,000 to 200,000. San Francisco, the new state’s main port of entry, became one of the busiest commercial centers in America. Feeding its burgeoning masses became paramount. The Petaluma River, a saltwater tidal slough meandering north into the Petaluma Valley from San Pablo Bay, found itself transformed into one of the city’s main supply channels.
Dos años después del descubrimiento del oro en 1848, la población no indígena de California se disparó de 10.000 a 200.000. San Francisco, el principal puerto de entrada del nuevo estado, se convirtió en uno de los centros comerciales más concurridos de América. Alimentar a sus crecientes masas se convirtió en algo primordial. La Río Petaluma, un pantano de agua salada que serpentea hacia el norte en el valle de Petaluma desde San Pablo Bay, se transformó en uno de los principales canales de abastecimiento de la ciudad.
The profusion of wild game and fowl in the valley was the first to go. Meat hunters established a trading post at an abandoned Miwok village along the river that became the genesis of Petaluma. The new settlers then set about reordering the valley to their ranching needs, rechanneling the creeks, reclaiming the wetlands, plowing the fields, and planting extensive crop systems of imported vegetables, fruit, and grain. They brought in new herds of cattle and sheep, turning them loose on the meadows and hills where they devoured the native perennial grasses, allowing settlers to reseed the entire valley with Mediterranean annual grasses better suited to heavy grazing.
La profusión de animales de caza y aves de corral en el valle fue la primera en desaparecer. Los cazadores de carne establecieron una puesto comercial en una aldea Miwok abandonada a lo largo del río que se convirtió en la génesis de Petaluma. Luego, los nuevos colonos se dispusieron a reordenar el valle según sus necesidades ganaderas, reorientando el arroyos, recuperando los humedales, arando los campos y plantando extensos sistemas de cultivos de hortalizas, frutas y cereales importados. Trajeron nuevos rebaños de ganado y ovejas, convirtiendo soltaron en los prados y colinas donde devoraron las hierbas perennes nativas, permitiendo colonos para resembrar todo el valle con pastos anuales mediterráneos más adecuados para pasto.
By the mid-1850s, the Petaluma River was filled with scow schooners, sloops, and steamers transporting cargo and passengers to and from San Francisco. Easy access to the city’s international ports set off a wave of volatile boom-and-bust cycles in Petaluma, beginning with a potato boom in 1850, during which fortunes were made and quickly lost due to soil erosion and overproduction—a common agricultural theme, despite every rancher’s effort to diversify.
A mediados de la década de 1850, el río Petaluma estaba lleno de goletas, balandras y vapores. transporte de carga y pasajeros hacia y desde San Francisco. Fácil acceso a la ciudad los puertos internacionales desencadenaron una ola de ciclos volátiles de auge y caída en Petaluma, comenzando con un auge de la papa en 1850, durante el cual se hicieron fortunas y se perdieron rápidamente debido a la erosión del suelo y sobreproducción, un tema agrícola común, a pesar del esfuerzo de cada ganadero por diversificarse.
The monocrop phenomenon continued with California’s wheat boom in the late 1850s, beginning with exports to Australia and New Zealand, and then, when the Civil War disrupted Midwest wheat production, with exports to Europe, transforming Petaluma into a bustling international river port. Sonoma County’s non-native population, which stood at 560 in 1850, grew to almost 12,000 by 1860, cultivating 750 ranches of more than 200,000 consolidated acres. Almost a quarter of the population resided in the Petaluma Valley.
El fenómeno de los monocultivos continuó con el auge del trigo de California a fines de la década de 1850, comenzando con las exportaciones a Australia y Nueva Zelanda, y luego, cuando la Guerra Civil interrumpió la producción de trigo del Medio Oeste, con exportaciones a Europa, transforma a Petaluma en un bullicioso puerto fluvial internacional. La población no nativa del condado de Sonoma, que era de 560 en 1850, creció a casi 12.000 en 1860, cultivando 750 ranchos de más de 200.000 acres consolidados. Casi una cuarta parte de la población residía en el Valle de Petaluma.
The town’s pioneer days officially ended in 1870 with the introduction of the San Francisco & Northern Pacific Railroad, which bypassed Petaluma in favor of a new river terminus near Lakeville called Donahue, putting an end to the town’s shipping monopoly and making Santa Rosa the county’s new agricultural hub. As a result, Petaluma’s economy began to stagnate. In the 1870s and ’80s, a declining wheat market, undermined by a recession, international competition, and local soil depletion, forced farmers to convert their land to cattle, sheep, and dairy ranches.
Los días pioneros de la ciudad terminaron oficialmente en 1870 con la introducción del San Francisco & Northern Pacific Railroad, que pasó por alto Petaluma en favor de una nueva terminal fluvial cerca Lakeville llamó a Donahue, poniendo fin al monopolio de envío de la ciudad y haciendo que Santa Rosa el nuevo centro agrícola del condado. Como resultado, la economía de Petaluma comenzó a estancarse. En las décadas de 1870 y 80, un mercado de trigo en declive, socavado por una recesión, competencia y el agotamiento del suelo local, obligaron a los agricultores a convertir sus tierras en ganado vacuno, ovino y ranchos lecheros.
Beginning in the 1890s, Petaluma embraced an egg boom spawned by the local inventions of both an efficient egg incubator and an industrialized method of chicken ranching. Along with the valley’s growing dairy industry, the boom elevated Petaluma to unprecedented heights of prosperity in the 1910s and 1920s. The Great Depression of the 1930s, followed by a shift to large factory farms in the Central Valley following World War II, dealt a lethal blow to Petaluma’s chicken and dairy ranches.
A partir de la década de 1890, Petaluma abrazó un boom de huevos generado por las invenciones locales de tanto una incubadora de huevos eficiente como un método industrializado de cría de pollos. Junto con creciente industria láctea del valle, el auge elevó a Petaluma a alturas sin precedentes de prosperidad en las décadas de 1910 y 1920. La Gran Depresión de la década de 1930, seguida de un cambio a grandes granjas industriales en el Valle Central después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, asestó un golpe letal a los ranchos de pollo y lácteos de Petaluma.
In the 1970s, as a boom in suburban tract housing began encroaching on ranches, Petaluma imposed growth limits and a greenbelt around the city to help preserve local agriculture. Equestrian ranches and Sonoma County’s new monocrop, grape vineyards, gradually began replacing many dairy ranches. In 1998, Petaluma voters passed a 20-year urban growth boundary to further protect the ranchlands.
En la década de 1970, cuando un boom de viviendas en zonas suburbanas comenzó a invadir los ranchos, Petaluma impuso límites de crecimiento y un cinturón verde alrededor de la ciudad para ayudar a preservar la agricultura local. Los ranchos ecuestres y el nuevo monocultivo del condado de Sonoma, viñedos de uva, comenzaron gradualmente reemplazando muchos ranchos lecheros. En 1998, los votantes de Petaluma aprobaron un crecimiento urbano de 20 años límite para proteger aún más los ranchos.
In the early 21st century, the remaining ranches, many operated by descendants of earlier settlers, began diversifying with niche products that commanded premium prices in the market, including organic milk, artisan cheeses, organic vegetables, pasture-raised beef and lamb, and cannabis.
A principios del siglo XXI, los ranchos restantes, muchos operados por descendientes de colonos anteriores, comenzaron a diversificarse con productos de nicho que tenían precios superiores en el mercado, que incluían leche orgánica, quesos artesanales, vegetales orgánicos, carne de res y cordero criados en pastos y cannabis.
(Spanish translation provided by Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)
By the time of Petaluma’s founding in 1851, homesteading had become quite common in the American West, thanks to the Preemption Act of 1841. Under the act, a squatter was permitted to purchase up to 160 acres of any land he found in the public domain, assuming he had either resided on the land for at least 14 months or made agricultural improvements to it for five years.
En el momento de la fundación de Petaluma en 1851, las granjas se habían vuelto bastante comunes en el Oeste americano, gracias a la Ley de Prevención de Derechos de 1841. En virtud de esa ley, un ocupante ilegal fue se le permitió comprar hasta 160 acres de cualquier terreno que encontrara en el dominio público, asumiendo que había residido en la tierra durante al menos 14 meses o había hecho agricultura mejoras a la misma durante cinco años.
But early settlers in California, most of them failed gold miners, discovered that the land most coveted for farming and ranching was not available in the public domain, but privately held in Mexican land grants. That included Sonoma County, which was made up of 26 land grants. Thanks to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which brought an end to the Mexican-American War, those grants were legally protected under U.S. law. At least they appeared to be.
Pero los primeros colonos en California, la mayoría de ellos mineros de oro fracasados, descubrieron que la tierra más codiciado para la agricultura y la ganadería no estaba disponible en el dominio público, pero propiedad privada en mercedes de tierras mexicanas. Eso incluyó el condado de Sonoma, que se hizo hasta 26 mercedes de tierras. Gracias al Tratado de Guadalupe Hidalgo de 1848, que trajo con el fin de la guerra entre México y Estados Unidos, esas subvenciones estaban legalmente protegidas por los ley. Al menos parecían estarlo.
In 1851, Congress passed the California Land Act, which subjected all Mexican land grant claims, some of which were sketchy, incomplete, or outright fraudulent, to a legal review by the California Land Commission. Two-thirds of their decisions were then challenged in a court of appeals.
En 1851, el Congreso aprobó la Ley de Tierras de California, que sometió a todas las tierras mexicanas otorgar reclamaciones, algunas de las cuales eran incompletas, incompletas o rotundamente fraudulentas, a un revisión por la Comisión de Tierras de California. Dos tercios de sus decisiones fueron entonces impugnado en un tribunal de apelaciones.
The original grant holders, many of them land rich but cash poor, found themselves subjected to a laborious and costly legal process that, on average, lasted 17 years. They also faced the added burden of California’s property taxes, which became an incentive to either intensively cultivate the land or subdivide it. As a result, many grant holders were forced to sell out to their Yankee lawyers or American speculators.
Los titulares de subvenciones originales, muchos de ellos ricos en tierras pero pobres en efectivo, se encontraron sometidos a un laborioso y costoso proceso legal que, en promedio, duró 17 años. Ellos también enfrentó la carga adicional de los impuestos a la propiedad de California, que se convirtió en un incentivo para cultivar intensamente la tierra o subdividirla. Como resultado, muchos becarios fueron obligados a venderse a sus abogados yanquis o especuladores estadounidenses.
The land grant battles were intensified by a huge influx of American settlers following the Gold Rush. In 1850, the U.S. census for Sonoma County counted only 500 people. By 1860 that number had grown to almost 12,000 and, by 1870, 20,000.
Las batallas de concesión de tierras se intensificaron por una gran afluencia de colonos estadounidenses que siguieron la fiebre del oro. En 1850, el censo de Estados Unidos. Para el condado de Sonoma contaba solo a 500 personas. Por en 1860 ese número había aumentado a casi 12.000 y, en 1870, a 20.000.
The new settlers were faced with two choices: either buy land from a Mexican grant holder, risking that his title might be assigned to another claimant in years to come, or squat on the land without permission in hopes the claim would be thrown out and land placed in the public domain, allowing them to establish preemptive rights to the property.
Los nuevos colonos se enfrentaron a dos opciones: comprar tierras de una subvención Mexicana titular, arriesgándose a que su título pueda ser asignado a otro reclamante en los próximos años, o ponerse en cuclillas en la tierra sin permiso con la esperanza de que el reclamo sea descartado y aterrice colocados en el dominio público, lo que les permite establecer derechos de preferencia sobre la propiedad.
The latter strategy was used to establish the town of Petaluma, which sat at the northern tip of a 13,000-acre land grant known as the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. In 1851, a brazen gold miner from Missouri, George H. Keller, made his own claim to 158 acres of the grant. With the help of two surveyors, he laid out the streets and lot lines for a new town he called Petaluma. Opening up a real estate office by the river, Keller sold the lots to unsuspecting new settlers before returning home to Missouri with his ill-gotten gains.
Esta última estrategia se utilizó para establecer la ciudad de Petaluma, que se encontraba en el norte punta de una concesión de tierra de 13,000 acres conocida como el Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. En 1851, un el descarado minero de oro de Missouri, George H. Keller, hizo su propio reclamo de 158 acres de la subvención. Con la ayuda de dos topógrafos, trazó las calles y las líneas de lote para un nuevo pueblo que llamó Petaluma. Al abrir una oficina de bienes raíces junto al río, Keller vendió los lotes a nuevos colonos desprevenidos antes de regresar a casa en Missouri con sus ganancias mal habidas.
It would take the courts 20 years to sort out the town’s tangled legal ownership, as the land grant got caught up in a marathon legal battle between competing claimants.
Los tribunales tardarían 20 años en resolver la propiedad legal enredada de la ciudad, ya que la concesión de tierras quedó atrapada en una batalla legal maratónica entre demandantes en competencia.
In the spring of 1859, Petaluma settlers formed a chapter of the Settlers’ League to ferret out crooked land sharks. As a group, they pledged not to purchase property held in any of the county’s land grants until the titles of those grants were legally “settled and reliable.”
En la primavera de 1859, los colonos de Petaluma formaron un capítulo de la Liga de Colonos para hurgar tiburones terrestres torcidos. Como grupo, se comprometieron a no comprar propiedades en ninguno de los concesiones de tierras del condado hasta que los títulos de esas concesiones fueran legalmente “establecidos y confiables.”
Their efforts came to a head later that summer with the “Bodega War,” when 80 armed league members were dispatched to the town of Bodega to defend 48 settlers being evicted by a land grant claimant and 40 armed hirelings from San Francisco. The claimant backed down.
Sus esfuerzos llegaron a un punto crítico más tarde ese verano, cuando 80 miembros de la liga armada fueron enviado al pueblo de Bodega para defender a 48 colonos desalojados por una merced de tierra reclamante y 40 mercenarios armados de San Francisco. El reclamante se echó atrás.
Tensions escalated again in the summer of 1862, when Sheriff J.M. Bowles of Petaluma was dispatched to the Healdsburg area to serve eviction notices on squatters. Anticipating trouble, he brought with him a posse comitatus of 300 largely unarmed men. They were met in Healdsburg by 50 armed and determined members of the Settlers’ League, who shot and killed a member of the sheriff’s posse. Two months later, the governor ordered Sheriff Bowles to return to Healdsburg with the Emmet Rifles and Petaluma Guard, Petaluma’s Union militias, who succeeded in peacefully evicting the squatters.
Las tensiones aumentaron de nuevo en el verano de 1862, cuando el sheriff J.M. Bowles de Petaluma fue enviado al área de Healdsburg para entregar avisos de desalojo a ocupantes ilegales. Anticipando problemas, trajo consigo una pandilla comitatus de 300 hombres en gran parte desarmados. Ellos eran reunido en Healdsburg por 50 miembros armados y decididos de la Liga de Colonos, que disparó y mató a un miembro de la pandilla del sheriff. Dos meses después, el gobernador ordenó el sheriff Bowles regresará a Healdsburg con los rifles Emmet y Petaluma Guard, la milicia de la Unión de Petaluma, que logró desalojar pacíficamente a los ocupantes ilegales.
It wasn’t until the 1870s that the legal status of all land grant claims, including Petaluma’s, were finally settled.
No fue hasta la década de 1870 que el estado legal de todas las reclamaciones de concesión de tierras, incluso de Petaluma, finalmente se resolvió.
*****
SOURCES (FUENTES)
Books
Samuel Cassiday, An Illustrated History of Sonoma County, California (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1889). LeBaron, Blackman, Mitchell, Hansen, Santa Rosa: A Nineteenth Century Town (Historia, Ltd., 1985). Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982). Harvey J. Hansen and Jeanne Thurlow Miller, Wild Oats in Eden (Santa Rosa, CA, 1962).
Newspapers Petaluma Argus: “Letter from the Seat of War,” July 16, 1862; “The Settlers’ Troubles Happily Terminated,” October 1, 1862. Sacramento Daily Bee: “Land Difficulties in Sonoma,” July 19, 1862. Sonoma County Journal: “The Bodega Difficulty,” June 3, 1859; “The Healdsburg War,” July 18, 1862.
The north front of the White House, 1861 (photo White House Historical Association)
On April 12, 1861, five weeks after moving into the White House, Abraham Lincoln found himself stranded in the nation’s capital. Railroad tracks leading into the city had been torn up, bridges burned, telegraph lines severed. Across the Potomac River, a seditious mob gathered to either kidnap him or hang him from a tree on the South Lawn.
Army units protecting the capital had been dispatched to the western frontier by the previous administration, just before Lincoln’s arrival. What military remained consisted of clerks, ceremonial guards, and a military band, none of whom had fighting experience.
When news reached the capital that day that Confederates had fired upon Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the Union residents of D.C., surrounded by the slave states of Virginia and Maryland and anticipating an imminent siege, began fleeing the city.
In desperation, Lincoln turned to a group of battle-experienced office seekers staying at the Willard Hotel a block from the White House. Among them was Petaluma’s founder, George Horine Keller.
Keller and Lincoln had met the previous year, when Keller helped escort Lincoln during his five-day visit to Leavenworth, Kansas, the city Keller co-founded shortly after establishing Petaluma.
Like Lincoln, Keller was born in Kentucky. At age 12, he enlisted to fight in the War of 1812, but was rejected because of his youth. After operating an inn in Indiana, he settled down for 15 years with his family on a farm in Weston, Missouri, before catching gold rush fever and setting off in 1850 for California.
Striking out in the gold mines, Keller found his way to a meat hunters’ encampment at the headwaters of the Petaluma Creek, where he opened a makeshift store and overnight lodge for disappointed miners like himself. Many came searching for land to homestead, only to be thwarted by California’s Mexican land grants.
In the fall of 1851, a group of frustrated settlers encouraged Keller to illegally claim 158 acres at the northern tip of a 13,000-acre land grant known as the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. Hiring a surveyor, he platted and subdivided 40 acres of his claim into a town he called Petaluma, selling off the lots to land-hungry settlers.
1855 map of Petaluma (photo Sonoma County Library)
In 1853, Keller returned to Weston, Missouri, leaving behind a town built on fraudulent land deeds, which, along with a protracted court battle over the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio land grant, would leave Petaluma on shaky legal ground for the next 20 years.
When Kansas Territory opened for settlement in 1854, Keller and a handful of partners from Weston formed a development company to create Leavenworth, the territory’s first town, along the Missouri River.
As was the case in Petaluma, Keller and company squatted on land they didn’t own—in this case, land held by the Delaware Indian tribe—with plans to subdivide it, reap the rewards, and address the legal consequences down the road (which they eventually did, settling with the Delawares).
Two days before the Leavenworth Town Company began auctioning off town lots, Keller and his son-in-law A.T. Kyle opened the town’s first hotel, The Leavenworth House, to a full house of land buyers.
Ad for Keller’s Leavenworth House in the Leavenworth Herald, October 13, 1854
Or so they thought. It quickly became clear most of their guests were activists from Missouri, more interested in establishing residency for voting purposes in Leavenworth than actually living there.
The seeds of the influx were planted in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which left it to territory residents to determine whether to eventually become a free or a slave territory.
Authored by Stephen Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois looking to boost his presidential prospects, the act overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which banned slavery above the latitude of Missouri’s southern border.
Enraged by the act, abolitionists formed the Republican Party to stop the further spread of slavery. Lincoln, who had returned to legal practice after serving a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, was so incensed he decided to reenter politics to run against Douglas in the next senate election.
Leavenworth rapidly turned into a hotbed of electoral fraud, assaults, and murders, in a violent struggle between pro- and anti-slavery factions known as “Bleeding Kansas.”
An abolitionist, Keller turned his hotel into a popular gathering place for militant “Free-Staters” known as “Jayhawkers,” as well as part of the network providing refuge to escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad, making him a target of the “Border Ruffians,” a pro-slave militia openly assaulting Free-Staters on the streets, in their homes, and at public meetings.
Shortly after fending off 20 armed Border Ruffians one night at his hotel, Keller was taken prisoner and confined to a blockhouse in Weston, before eventually escaping to safety in Nebraska Territory.
In 1856, after most of the partisan violence had been quelled, Keller returned to Leavenworth to find Border Ruffians had taken over his hotel. He quickly built a new hotel, the Mansion House. Dubbed “Abolition Hill” by pro-slavers, it soon became the local Free-Staters headquarters.
Leavenworth, Kansas, 1867 (photo courtesy of Legends of America)
Among his allies in town, the amiable Keller acquired the fond moniker “Uncle George” for resourcefulness and generosity—“the husband of all the widows and the father of all the orphans.” In 1857, he was elected to the first Kansas Territorial Legislature, which created a constitution establishing Kansas as a free territory.
Their request for statehood was blocked by Southern legislators in Congress until January 1861, when enough Southern states seceded from the Union to override the blockage. On April 4, 1861, Kansans elected James H. Lane as one of their first U.S. senators.
James Henry Lane, U.S. Senator from Kansas, 1861 (photo Library of Congress)
A lawyer known for electrifying oration, the daring and flamboyant Lane was a close colleague of Keller. He was also a Mexican War hero, and had commanded the Free State militia during “Bleeding Kansas,” ruthlessly and cunningly out maneuvering much larger pro-slaver forces.
Lane befriended Lincoln during Lincoln’s visit to Leavenworth in 1859, a year after his senate race against Douglas. Despite Lincoln’s defeat, his debates with Douglas—in which Lincoln argued that the fundamental rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness triumphed over Douglas’ advocacy of states’ rights for institutions like slavery—elevated him to the national stage.
Postage stamp commemorating the 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas durung the U.S. Senate race (image in public domain)
By the time of Lincoln’s visit, Leavenworth had grown to 10,000 residents, making it the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco. Lincoln used the city as a focus group for a speech he was planning to deliver two months later at the Cooper Union in New York City, an event that would launch his campaign for the presidency.
After Lane’s election to the senate, Keller accompanied him and dozens of former Free State militia veterans to Washington to lobby President Lincoln for commissions in the Union army or federal appointments back home. Most of them checked into the Willard Hotel, just down the street from the White House.
On April 17, 1861, five days after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln received reliable intelligence that Confederates across the Potomac River in Virginia were preparing to march on Washington. He immediately summoned Senator Lane to the Oval Office, and asked him to assemble an armed militia of his Kansas colleagues to defend the White House.
Lincoln in his White House office (photo White House Historical Association)
Back at the Willard, Lane formed the Frontier Guard of Kansas, ultimately comprising of 115 members of his former militia, including Keller. They marched in formation down the street to the White House, where they set up camp in the East Room, arming themselves with crates of pistols, rifles, bayonets, and ammunition.
Mounting a propaganda campaign, Lane spread rumors throughout D.C. that the Frontier Guard was more than 1,000-men strong and planning a counter attack on the Confederate stronghold across the river. For ten tenuous days, the Frontier Guard defended Lincoln in the White House until Union troops were able to break through the Confederate blockade.
Frontier Guard of Kansas on South Lawn of the White House, April 1861 (photo Library of Congress)
Lincoln thanked each of the guard members personally for having saved the government from overthrow. The guard returned to Kansas, where they formed the nucleus of two Union companies during the Civil War.
Keller assumed command of Leavenworth’s “Old Guard,” protecting the city from Confederate forces. A year after the war ended, the Kansas governor rewarded him for his service by appointing him the first warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary.
Keller died on his farm outside Leavenworth in 1876, two years after the legal battle over the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio land grant, on which he had founded Petaluma, was finally settled.
*****
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier
SOURCES:
Books, Magazines, Journals
Samuel Cassiday, Pen Pictures From the Garden of the World, An Illustrated History of Sonoma County (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, 1889), pp. 109-114.
William Connelley, editor, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, Volume 14 (Chicago: Lewis, 1918), pp. 1209-1210; Frank M. Gable, “The Kansas Penitentiary,” p. 379.
Jelani Cobb, “How Parties Die,” New Yorker, March 15, 2020.
William G. Cutler, History of the State of Kansas (Chicago: A.T. Andreas, 1883).
Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 29.
David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Oct., 1979), pp. 434-448.
Jesse A. Hall and Leroy T. Hand, History of Leavenworth County, Kansas (Topeka, Kansas: Historical Publishing Company,1921), pp. 116-123.
George W. Martin, editor, “Territorial Legislature of 1857-58: George Horine Keller,” Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, p. 211.
James McClure, editor, Abraham Lincoln’s Stories and Speeches (Chicago: Rhodes & McClure Publishing Company, 1908), p. 111.
Henry Miles Moore, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the City and County of Leavenworth,” Western Life (Leavenworth, KS), August 3, 1900.
Henry Miles Moore, Early History of Leavenworth, City and County (Samuel Dodsworth Book Co., Leavenworth, KS, 1906), pgs. 21, 24, 56, 86, 103, 123-127, 147, 161, 171.
James P. Muehlberger, The 116: The True Story of Abraham Lincoln’s Lost Guard (Ankerwycke, 2015).
J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 131, pp. 259-262.
Donald J. Pisani, “Squatter Law in California, 1850-1858,” Western Historical Quarterly, Autumn, 1994, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 277-310.
Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pp. 53-54.
Websites
“Guarding the White House,” The White House Historical Association, whitehousehistory.org https://www.whitehousehistory.org/press-room/press-timelines/guarding-the-white-house
“1851, March 3 – 09 Stat. 631, Act to Settle Private Land Claims in California,” US Government Legislation and Statutes. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hornbeck_usa_2_d/7
Newspapers
Leavenworth Bulletin: “The Flag Still Waves (Election results),” November 4, 1863; “Lane Pays His Own Expenses,” August 3, 1864.
Leavenworth Times: “The Old Guard,” July 31, 1861; “Official Vote of Leavenworth County,” November 10, 1861;”Kyle’s Reminiscence of Early Border Life,” January 11, 1902; “The Planters House Is a Monument to Exciting Past,” February 25, 1940; “Lincoln’s Visit to the First City of Kansas,” February 14, 2018.
National Republican (D.C): “The Military Movements Yesterday,” April 20, 1861; “Gen. James H. Lane’s Company,” April 24, 1861; “The Frontier Guard,” April 27, 1861; “Visit to the Capital,” April 29, 1861.
Bar at Gilardi’s Corner, 1940s (photo Sonoma County Library)
The swanky Lanai Lounge opened in the Hotel Petaluma on August 16, 1938. Taking up the hotel’s entire front corner, it was adorned with South Seas murals, bananas hanging from the ceiling, a koi pond, and a horseshoe-shaped bar that served exotic rum cocktails, transporting its customers to a romantic and languorous tropical paradise of rattan furniture, flower leis, and live Hawaiian music.
To the delight of hotel operator Vernon Peck, the lounge was an overnight sensation. The Golden Gate Bridge had opened the year before, and waves of tourists were passing through town on the Redwood Highway, headed for resorts along the Russian River, where they danced the night away to the big bands of Harry James, Buddy Rogers, and Glenn Miller.
Hotel Petaluma, with lanai Lounge sign, 1938 (photo Sonoma County Library)
Meanwhile, Tiki culture was sweeping the Bay Area, having made a big splash in 1937 with the opening of Trader Vic’s restaurant in Oakland. As word spread of Peck’s exotic roadside attraction, members of the Bohemian Grove, an exclusive Monte Rio men’s club, made ritual stopovers at the lounge on their way from San Francisco to their annual summer gathering on the Russian River. Their chauffeured limousines lined up outside the hotel caused a sensation in town.
Ad announcing Lanai Lounge opening, 1938 (Petaluma Argus-Courier
That cachet helped draw in Peck’s other target clientele, Petaluma’s “smart set.” While a number of bars and grocery taverns sprang up around town following Prohibition’s repeal in 1933, there was a crowd of young men and women more attracted to the lure of night clubs. That was largely a hangover from the speakeasies of Prohibition, which ushered in both the cocktail culture and mixed sexes drinking together in a semi-public establishment.
Mike Gilardi, owner of a cigar store across the street from the hotel, had converted his store into a popular cocktail lounge in 1937, offering jazz, dancing, and an exciting mixology of new slings and fizzes.
Gilardi’s Corner at Washington & Kentucky streets, c. 1949 (photo Sonoma County Library)
Piggybacking on the success of Gilardi’s Corner, the Lanai Lounge quickly became the second anchor of Petaluma’s “night club row.”
Peck needed the business. The Great Depression had sent many hotel properties into receivership, or else turned them entirely into single-room occupancy hotels (SROs). Traveling businessmen and salesmen were starting to take rooms in the inexpensive new motels being built along the highways, which, in addition to convenient parking, also relieved them from running a gauntlet of hotel staff with their hands out for tips.
Lanai Lounge matchbook cover (image in public domain)
In 1940, after successfully guiding the Hotel Petaluma through the Great Depression, Vernon Peck departed for a hotel in Los Angeles, selling his lease to Harold Eckart, a hotelier from Olympia, Washington. Eckart undertook a major renovation of the hotel in 1945, including a complete makeover of the Lanai Lounge, which he rechristened the Redwood Room. Newly decorated with large photo murals of the redwoods, the cocktail lounge quickly became a favorite hangout of Petaluma’s postwar café society, known as “the 400.”
Postcard of mural in the Redwood Room (image public domain)
They were serenaded most evenings by Earle Bond, a locally renowned organ player. Eckart also created a studio in the hotel for the local arm of the Santa Rosa radio station KSRO, and on the roof a Civil Air Patrol spotting station that continued to operate during the Cold War.
Redwood Room at corner of Hotel Petaluma, 1954 (photo Sonoma County Library)
The opening of Highway 101 to the east of town in 1956 put an end to travelers passing through the downtown on the Redwood Highway. As inexpensive motels were available just off the freeway, the Hotel Petaluma converted to being primarily an SRO.
In 1959, the local Elks Club, seeking more space for their club gatherings, purchased the hotel from the original Petaluma Hotel Company trust for $91,160, far short of the $285,000 local citizens had invested in 1924, when the hotel was built in a GoFundMe fashion. The Elks closed off the Redwood Room, carving it up into retail shops, blocked out the lobby for meeting spaces, and roofed over the open courtyard entrance, turning it into an exclusive barroom for club members.
Ed Mannion and Bill Soberanes of the Argus-Courier standing outside Gilardi’s Corner on the eve of its demolition in 1967 (photo Sonoma County Library)
In 1967, Gilardi’s Corner fell to the wrecking ball when Washington Street was widened into four lanes. A parking lot for the corner bank was eventually built in its place, erasing the last of Petaluma’s night club row.
*****
SOURCES:
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Lanai Cocktail Lounge Opens at Hotel,” August 17, 1938; “KSRO to Close Local Station,” February 16, 1951; “Through the New Hotel Petaluma This City Offers Accommodations to Local People, Travelers-Unexcelled,” November 29, 1953; “Elks Hotel Project Will Cost $50,000,” January 22, 1960; “Colorful Fifties in Petaluma,” January 22, 1969.
Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier: July 3, 1959, August 17, 1971, October 29, 1974, July 7, 1978, October 24, 1980, February 2, 2000.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “$35,000 to be Invested in ‘Motels,’” March 20, 1938.
The Groundbreaking Trial of Penngrove’s Mary Ann Kenney
By John Patrick Sheehy & Jack Withington
Penngrove Rail Station, circa 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)
To Sarah Looney, it looked like cold-blooded murder.
On the afternoon of July 18, 1872, Looney was standing outside her Penngrove ranch house watching William Cummings, a 20-year-old Irish laborer, leave the ranch with a wagonload of wood pulled by a team of horses. The wagon’s bed creaked as the wagon turned onto Adobe Road, heading for the Lavin Ranch half a mile to the south, where Cummings was regularly employed.
As the wagon passed Bannon Lane, Looney spotted John Bannon’s daughter, Mary Ann Kenney, walking across her family’s ranch toward Adobe Road. She was carrying a double-barreled shotgun in her hands. After jumping over the picket fence next to the road, the 17-year-old Kenney approached Cummings’ wagon from behind and leveled the shotgun at his back.
Looney couldn’t make out any conversation between the two, only the first shotgun blast, which missed Cummings. As Cummings turned in his seat, Kenney again leveled the gun and pulled the trigger. The second shot took off the top of Cummings’ head. The horses bolted, throwing Cummings back onto the wagon’s load of wood as they raced down the road.
Penngrove’s Main Street, circa 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)
Upon hearing the gunshots, Looney’s husband Robert came running out of the house in time to see the petite, five-foot Kenney walking back to the picket fence, where she carefully placed the shotgun on the top rail, took hold of two pickets, and vaulted over the four-foot high fence in a single bound. Picking up the gun, she calmly walked toward her parents’ house.
When the horses pulling Cummings’ wagon arrived at the Lavin Ranch, they found the gate closed. As they swerved to avoid it, the wagon lurched to one side, throwing Cummings onto the road. Ranch owner Tim Lavin found him there, breathing his last gasps, the top of his skull blown off.
1877 Map of Penngrove, with the Bannon, Looney, and Lavin ranches (courtesy of Thompson’s 1877 Sonoma County Atlas)
By that time, John Bannon was driving his daughter in a carriage to Petaluma, where she surrendered to James Knowles, the town marshal. She explained to Knowles that Cummings left her no choice. Despite her warnings, he persisted in spreading lies and slander about her virtue, leading her to painfully separate from her newlywed husband Thomas.
Knowles placed her under arrest at his home until an inquest hearing could be held two days later.
At the inquest, Kenney appeared, her face hidden by a veiled Shaker bonnet. On the advice of her lawyer, she refused to testify. After listening to the testimony of Sarah Looney and a few character witnesses, the grand jury, with Robert Looney as its foreman, charged Kenney with first degree murder.
Penngrove rancher and county supervisor John O’Hara served as a jury member at Mary Ann Kenney’s inquest hearing (photo Sonoma County Library)
In terms of the law, the case was cut-and-dried. The only justification for homicide was either self-defense or the defense of one’s home. Neither seduction nor slander qualified. However, small town society at the time was merciless to young women whose reputations had been blemished by sexual scandal. Once disgraced, their options for marriage or honorable work often became severely limited.
As a result, in the court of popular opinion, or “highway law” as it was called, deadly retribution was viewed as justifiable in cases where a young woman had been seduced, sexually assaulted, or had her virtue slandered, assuming such retribution was carried out by one of the woman’s male relatives. Likewise, in cases where a husband discovered another man making love to his wife, or else boasting about making love to her, he was viewed as justified in killing the man. What made Kenney’s case unusual was that she had meted out the deadly vengeance herself.
The case attracted a flock of reporters from San Francisco. Their stories were carried on the wires around the country, setting off a national debate as to whether women had rights equal to men when it came to exercising highway law.
Article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 2, 1872
To add some celebrity sparkle, Kenney was identified in news reports as the niece of the famous Irish prizefighter and New York congressman, John Morrissey.
Mary Ann Kenney’s uncle, legendary prizefighter and congressman John Morrissey (photo Library of Congress)
Kenney’s bail was set at $20,000 ($450,000 in today’s currency). It was posted by her father and 16 of his friends, including Petaluma coroner Kelly Tighe who had performed the autopsy on Cummings’ body. A barrel-chested, loquacious man with a booming Irish accent, Tighe operated the Brooklyn Hotel at the corner of Kentucky and Washington streets, site of today’s Hotel Petaluma. The hotel’s saloon, The Reading Room, was a popular gathering place for Irish immigrants.
On the Fourth of July, two weeks before Cummings’ murder, Kenney and her husband Thomas ventured into town to celebrate with friends. It was their first trip off the Bannon Ranch since their wedding five months earlier. Kenney’s parents had surreptitiously worked to keep the newlyweds secluded in Penngrove in an effort to protect them from Cummings’ vicious rumors.
Four of July parade on Main Street, Petaluma, circa 1880s (photo Sonoma County Library)
Once in town, the couple split up, with Mary Ann going off to visit her girlfriends, and Thomas joining a group of fellow farmhands at The Reading Room. No sooner had he ordered a beer, than an inebriated Cummings sauntered up to the bar and began making salacious remarks about Mary Ann. Thomas threw his beer in Cummings’ face, and the two began to fight.
Thomas’s friends quickly separated them, hurrying Thomas out to the street, where they told him about the slanderous stories Cummings had been spreading—that his wife was a common prostitute with whom he, and other men he could name, had engaged in sex with since she was 12 years old.
On their carriage ride home that night, Thomas told Mary Ann what he had heard and asked if any of it was true. Bursting into tears, she denied it all as lies. Once they reached the ranch, Mary Ann’s parents encouraged the couple not to pay any attention to the foul slanders, that they would die out with time.
Main Street leading into Penngrove, circa 1890 (photo Sonoma County Library)
A week passed. During that time, Thomas brought the matter up with Mary Ann a couple of times, leading to fights between the couple. Finally, concerned that her husband did not believe her assertions of innocence, Mary Ann insisted they separate and not reunite until her name was cleared. Thomas reluctantly left the ranch to take a job working for the railroad in Sonoma Valley.
Kenney’s murder trial was held at the county courthouse in Santa Rosa. A number of her Penngrove neighbors who had known her since she was a child, testified to her modest chastity, describing her as intelligent, quiet and retiring, with a good-natured disposition. A bold horsewoman, she was known for her physical prowess, taking charge of plowing the fields of her family’s 140-acre ranch while still a teen.
Sonoma County Courthouse, Santa Rosa, circa 1875 (photo Sonoma County Library)
William Cummings had come to live on the ranch five years before, when Mary Ann’s father hired him as a young ranch hand. He quickly became enamored with Mary Ann, asking her parents repeatedly for her hand in marriage, which they refused. Instead, another Irish laborer on the ranch, 30-year-old Thomas Kenney, won her heart.
After Mary Ann’s parents accepted his proposal to marry their daughter, Cummings left the ranch to work on the Lavin Ranch down the road. Following the wedding of Mary Ann and Thomas on Feb. 4, 1872, Cummings announced to friends he would dedicate himself to separating the couple before the year was out.
It took the jury only 50 minutes of deliberation to return with a verdict of not guilty in the case. Public opinion also sided with the verdict, extending their approval of a wronged woman’s right to deadly revenge. Wrote one local newspaper: “The tongue of her slanderer is silent forever. Not only she, but everybody else is safe from his malice.”
Three months after Mary Ann’s acquittal, Thomas filed a legal notice that his wife had abandoned him. “She left me,” he told reporters, “because she was conscience-struck.”
Unidentified couple at their Penngrove ranch, circa 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)
Mary Ann continued to live and work on the family ranch in Penngrove for the rest of her life. In 1899, at the age of 43, she married Jens Thomsen, a Danish chicken rancher, who joined her on the ranch until his unexpected death in 1906. She herself died in 1932 at the age of 76.
*****
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 15, 2023, as well as in Jack Withington’s book, Looking Back at Penngrove, published in 2023.
SOURCES:
Newspapers
Cloverdale Bee: “Our Petaluma Letter,” August 3, 1872.
Daily Alta California: “Mrs. Kinney’s Case,” July 27, 1872.
Petaluma Argus: “Terrible Tragedy,” July 20, 1872; “The Cummings Murder,” July 27, 1872; “Examination of Mrs. Kinney,” July 27, 1872; “The Petaluma Tragedy,” July 27, 1872 (reprinted in the Weekly Butte Record); “Notice (of abandonment),” February 26, 1873; “Nonagenarian Passes Away,” January 22, 1917.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Loved Pioneer Woman Called,” January 28, 1932.
Petaluma Courier: “Local News: Bannon Estate,” December 31, 1891.
Petaluma Crescent: “The Petaluma Tragedy,” July 19, 1872 (reprinted in the Cloverdale Bee, July 27, 1872); “Verdict in the Petaluma Case,” July 20, 1872 (reprinted in the Daily Alta California, July 21, 1872); “Why the Woman Shot Her Slanderer,” July 27, 1872 (reprinted in the Weekly Colusa Sun).
Sacramento Bee: “Slander and Killing,” July 23, 1872.
San Francisco Chronicle: “The Petaluma Tragedy,” July 21, 1872; “Not Guilty,” October 27, 1872.
San Jose Mercury News: “Pacific Coast Items,” July 25, 1872.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Sonoma Ranches Change Hands,” August 29, 1900.
Illustration of the David Wharff Ranch, Penngrove, current site of the Green Mill (from Thos. Thompson’s Historical Atlas of Sonoma County, 1877)
In August 1849, shortly after arriving in Sacramento from a six-month voyage around Cape Horn, David Wharff watched as a man in a gambling hall walked up to a faro table and casually placed $10,000 in gold nuggets ($315,000 in today’s currency) on the queen of spades. A game of chance, faro was more popular than poker in gold country because the odds were better.
As a crowd of awed onlookers gathered around the table, the faro dealer made nine consecutive draws from a deck of cards, with each draw turning one card over for himself and another for the gambler. On the tenth draw, as a matching queen card fell to the gambler’s side of the table, the crowd erupted with a roar. The gambler, a local merchant named Sam Brannan, pocketed his winnings, bought drinks for the house, and strolled out into the night.
Sam Brannan (photo courtesy of Utah Historical Society)
For Brannan, the wager may have seemed like small change, but to Wharff and the other Forty-niners in the hall it captured the high stakes gamble they had undertaken, deserting their families, jobs, and farms to sail around the world or trek across the country to California with hopes of hitting the jackpot. Brannan was among those who made a fortune enabling their California dream.
In 1848, while working in his dry goods store in Sacramento, then called Sutter’s Fort, Brannan sold some goods to a group of men who paid in gold nuggets. They had discovered the nuggets while constructing a sawmill for John Sutter along the South Fork of the American River.
With foresight, Brannan quickly converted his store into a mining supply center, the only one between San Francisco and the Sierra foothills. By 1849, 50,000 gold seekers had descended upon the area, and Brannan’s store was generating $150,000 a month in sales (almost $4.7 million in today’s currency), making him California’s first millionaire.
Illustration of Sam Brannan’s store at Sutter’s Fort, 1848 (photo Gutenberg Project)
But while Brannan and others made fortunes selling goods and services—one prostitute claimed to have made $50,000 ($1.5 million in today’s currency) after a year’s work—the majority of the Forty-niners came away from the gold fields empty handed, left to retreat back to the lives they discarded or, like David Wharff, redirect their California dream to a new wager with better odds, like farming.
Born into a colonial family in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Wharff inherited the stern demeanor of his Protestant ancestors, as well as a close attention to the value of a dollar. After finishing grammar school, he moved to Boston at age 14 to apprentice as a carpenter. By the time he turned 20, he was earning a journeyman’s wage of $1.25 a day ($40 in today’s currency), not enough to marry and settle down with the girl of his dreams, Olive Densmore from Nova Scotia. When word reached Boston of a gold strike in California, it resounded like a shot across the bow for frustrated men like Wharff.
Ad for Clipper Ship to Gold Rush (photo in the public domain)
Unable to afford a ticket on a first class clipper ship, Wharff and six of his friends pooled their money to book passage on a small, battered brig, the Christiana, departing Boston on February 15, 1849, among a flotilla of more than 500 vessels leaving eastern ports, packed with “Argonauts”—named for the band of heroes in Greek mythology who accompanied Jason on a sea quest for the golden fleece—undertaking the 15,000-mile voyage around Cape Horn to San Francisco and the golden state.
Wharff and the other nine passengers on the Christiana passed their time gambling, playing checkers, smoking, drinking, telling stories, and daydreaming of how to spend their gold. After subsiding for two months on salted meat that went bad, butter and lard that turned rancid, hard bread that became laced with bugs, and cheese nibbled on by rats, they put in for ten days just south of Rio de Janeiro for fresh water, provisions, and new sails.
“We could buy oranges, $1 a thousand; wine, 10 cents a gallon,” Wharff wrote.
Then came the most perilous leg of the journey, rounding Cape Horn. After 55 days braving monstrous waves, terrifying winds, and frigid temperatures, the ship docked at Valparaiso, Chile, where Wharff and his friends spent five days ashore watching Spaniards bet stacks of gold doubloons on horse races, further fueling their desire to reach California.
Valparaiso, Chile, 1850 (photo in public domain)
Finally, on the morning of August 16, 1849, six months after leaving Boston, the Christiana sailed through the Golden Gate alongside twenty other windjammers. The crew deserted the moment the ship docked. During the two days it took the captain to find replacements, Wharff and his friends took in the night life of the mushrooming metropolis, more than 500 bars and 1,000 gambling dens.
San Francisco, 1851 (photo Library of Congress)
At establishments like the Parker House or the El Dorado, women dealt the cards, brass bands or banjo musicians performed, and gold nuggets sat piled high on the gambling tables. They could eat at places like the Fly Trap or Monkey Warner’s Cobweb Palace, which was decorated with whales’ teeth. After six months of boredom cooped up in close quarters at sea, it was like entering a carnival.
From San Francisco, a pilot boat guided the Christiana up the river to their final destination, Sacramento. By the time Wharff stepped off the boat, he was down to his last 25 cents. Spotting a house under construction near the wharf, he approached the foreman, who, after learning he was a carpenter, hired him on the spot for $20 a day.
Sacramento waterfront, 1850s (photo courtesy of Bancroft Library Collection)
Wharff and his Boston friends formed a company to share in the collective spoils of their gold diggings, purchasing an empty lot in Sacramento for $10 upon which to erect a small, prefabricated house they had brought with them on the Christina, to serve as company headquarters. However, within a couple of weeks of watching Forty-niners return to town with $3,000-$4,000 in gold dust ($95,000 to $125,000 in today’s currency), the collective fell apart, as each man set off on his own for the foothills.
After Wharff earned $300 ($9,500 in today’s currency) working 15 days as a carpenter, he paid a driver with an ox team $80 ($2,500 in today’s currency) to haul him, his equipment and provisions up to Weaver Creek in El Dorado County, where he quickly learned squeezing gold out of rocks was harder work than he imagined. Not only were living conditions primitive and costs high, the work itself—digging, pickaxing, shoveling, clawing, scraping, shifting, and panning—was tedious, with little success. The first piece of gold he found was the size of a pin head.
Prospectors working gold placer, 1850 (photo in public domain)
Teaming up with three other men, Wharff moved on to the South Fork of the American River, where they built a cofferdam of sandbags to divert the water around a small stretch of river bottom. For two days they risked their lives in ice cold water from the snow pack, blocked by a sandbag wall teetering on the verge of collapse, to extract $800 of gold nuggets ($25,000 in today’s currency), which they divided up and then went their separate ways. Wharff traveled to Marysville to pan for gold, and then to Shasta County, where he joined 16 other men on a mining crew.
Finally, after more than two years working the riverbeds and mines, Wharff decided to call it quits. He had witnessed his fair share of casualties, men broken by exhaustion and fatigue, as well as those whose lives were taken by disease, murders, fights, and mining accidents. He returned to San Francisco with a full belt of gold dust strapped to his waist, not enough to make him a wealthy man, but enough to stake a claim in starting a new life. For Wharff, that meant returning to Boston to claim the hand of his sweetheart.
On December 15, 1851, he purchased a $200 ticket ($6,200 in today’s currency) aboard a steamer of 650 passengers departing San Francisco for New York via Nicaragua. The overland route across Nicaragua, similar to the route across the Isthmus of Panama, trimmed 8,000 miles and five months of travel time off the voyage around Cape Horn. The tradeoff was a risk of contracting a deadly tropical disease, such as malaria, yellow fever, or cholera.
1849 ad for Nicaragua route on California Steam Navigation Company (photo in public domain)
After sailing to the port of San Juan del Sur on Nicaragua’s west coast, Wharff and the other passengers were greeted by a long line of mules waiting to take them on an 11-mile trail to Lake Nicaragua. At night they slept on elevated wooden benches to protect them from poisonous centipedes on the ground.
Nicaragua route of the California Steam Navigation Company (map in the public domain)
In the morning, they rode a ferry across the lake, disembarking to walk around a set of rapids down to the San Juan River, where they boarded steamers on a 100-mile river journey through dense forests of mangrove trees, dazzling tropical flowers, and exotic animals such as crocodiles, parrots, and jaguars. At the port of Greytown on the Caribbean coast, they transferred to a steamer bound for New York, arriving on January 15, 1852, only one month after leaving San Francisco.
Wharff, bewhiskered and in rough miner’s garb, was unrecognizable to his family when he showed up in Boston. Only his voice was familiar. After shaving and donning a new suit of clothes, he called on the girl he’d left behind.
Illustration of David Wharff, 1852 (courtesy of Sacramento Bee)
But after two and half years in California, Boston felt tired and slow. Carpenters were still working for $1.25 a day compared to the $20 he was able to earn in Sacramento. Within a few days, he was ready to return to the gold fields. His older sister Mary Jane stepped in, agreeing to go with him, but only on the condition he marry Olive and bring her with them.
Court Street in Boston, 1850 (photo in public domain)
The couple wed on February 19, 1852 and, along with Mary Jane, departed for California on March 1st. The steamers using the Nicaragua and Isthmus of Panama routes were booked through mid-summer, so Wharff paid $900 ($28,500 in today’s currency) for three tickets aboard the Sam Appleton, a large windjammer sailing around the Horn.
A windjammer sailing to San Francisco, 1850s (photo in the public domain)
The ship made only one stop in Valparaiso and arrived in San Francisco on July 22nd. Sailing on to Sacramento, Wharff took the two women to the company house he and his Boston friends built. Only one of the of men was there, the rest were working in the mines.
“My wife and sister,” wrote Wharff, “thought it was a hard-looking place. I had never seen a broom in the house since we put it up in ’49, so you can judge how clean it was.”
Sacramento was experiencing a heat wave so hot the women refused to accompany Wharff to the diggings. Instead, he had to content himself with carpentry work around town, even though the day rate had dropped to $12. That may have been for the best.
By 1852, an estimated 250,000 people had flooded into California, making for the largest migration in U.S. history. With most surface deposits exhausted, the days of the miner with a pick, shovel, and wash pan were ending, replaced by well-capitalized mining companies operating with deep power drills and hydraulic water jets that blasted away mountainsides.
California hydraulic mining, 1850s (photo miningartifacts.org)
Mary Jane and Olive prevailed on Wharff to move them out of the company house into a nearby rental, while he built a new house on the same lot. No sooner had he finished than a fire (later known as the Great Conflagration) swept through Sacramento on November 2, 1852, burning down more than 80 percent of the city’s structures.
A wind-blown ember set fire to the floor joists of the new house, but two men passing by— Sacramento merchants Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington, who a decade later would team up with Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker to form the Central Pacific Railroad as “the Big Four”—extinguished the blaze, saving the house.
Collis P. Huntington, 1860 (photo courtesy of Huntington Library), and Leland Stanford, 184 ( photo courtesy of Stanford Archives)
The following morning, a merchant approached Wharff with an offer to buy his house and move it down the street. Having spent $300 to construct it, he sold the house and some furniture in it for $2,200 ($70,000 in today’s currency). He and Olive, who was four months pregnant with their first child, promptly boarded a steamer for San Francisco, where they rented a small house on Washington Street. Mary Jane, who was making a good living as a dressmaker, stayed behind in Sacramento, where she soon married Frank Green, a Forty-niner from Boston.
After four months in San Francisco, Wharff ran into a Boston man who had returned from the east coast with three large bundles of fruit trees. Having earlier purchased land in Sonoma County, he asked Wharff to accompany him there to help construct the floor and doors of a wall tent he was planning to install as temporary living quarters. Ever adventurous, Wharff boarded a small schooner with the man and sailed up a winding creek to Petaluma.
Established as a trading post two years earlier by meat hunters shipping game down to San Francisco, by early 1853 Petaluma consisted of two hotels, roughly 50 houses, a dry goods store, and a potato warehouse. As Sonoma County’s main shipping port, it found itself at the center of the area’s first agricultural boom—potatoes.
First introduced by an Irish immigrant named John Keyes out at Bodega Head in 1850, potato farming was well-suited to the area’s coastal climate. Quick to grow, easy to transport and store without refrigeration, potatoes became a staple for the burgeoning population of San Francisco.
The Cash Store in Bloomfield, 1850s (photo Sonoma County Library)
Farmers hauled wagonloads of their spuds into Petaluma via Potato Street (renamed Prospect Street in the 1860s), storing them at the warehouse until they could be loaded onto “potato boats” bound for the city. Each planted acre of potatoes generated $1,200 annually ($37,000 in today’s currency). For disappointed Argonauts like Wharff, those seemed like better odds than panning for gold.
After disembarking in Petaluma, Wharff and his friend stayed overnight at the American Hotel on Main Street (site of today’s Putnam Plaza). The hotel’s proprietor, George Williams, a Forty-Niner from Maine and the father-in-law of future Petaluma grain merchant John McNear, also operated a freight service with a wagon and three oxen. In the morning, for $10 ($300 in today’s currency), he hauled the wall tent and lumber out to the new farm six miles north of town.
Illustration of the American Hotel and Wells Fargo Express office, Main Street, Petaluma, 1850s (photo Sonoma County Library)
At the time, there were only two other settlers on the 16-mile stretch between Petaluma and Santa Rosa, Tom Hopper and Almer Clark. Hopper would go on to become one of the wealthiest landowners in the county, and Clark would soon open a popular stagecoach stop, the Valley House along Petaluma Hill Road. Along the way, Williams pointed out to Wharff 160 acres of land for sale in what is today downtown Penngrove.
“I thought I had hit a gold mine,” Wharff wrote.
After helping his friend construct the wall tent, Wharff hurried back to Petaluma to purchase his new farm before sailing back to San Francisco to share the news with Olive, who, during his absence, had given birth on March 31st to a baby daughter, Mary.
David and Olive Wharff (photos courtesy of Lee Torliatt)
Anxious to get his potato crop in, Wharff sailed back to Petaluma with lumber and a wall tent, as well as six dozen laying hens he purchased from a Frenchman in the Presidio for $225 ($7,100 in today’s currency).
George Williams hauled everything out to the new farm, where Wharff built a chicken coop directly onto the tent, to protect his valuable hens from preying coyotes. Returning to San Francisco for Olive and Mary, he once again hired Williams to transport them and their worldly possessions to the farm. As the made their way through the deserted valley, Olive nervously asked where exactly they were going.
“Home,” Wharff said.
After setting up Olive and the baby in the tent, Wharff traveled to Tomales, then a booming shipping port, where he purchased two tons of seed potatoes from Henry McCleave for $400 ($12,000 in today’s currency). That summer, while waiting for the potato crop to come in, the Wharffs made money by selling their eggs in town for $1.50 a dozen ($47 in today’s currency), becoming the first poultry producers in the area.
Illustration of Tomales, 1850s, by Richard Shell (photo Sonoma County Library)
What Olive made of life on the farm, her husband didn’t say, except to note there were only three other women living in Petaluma at the time, and that Olive went for six months without seeing the face of another white woman.
In September 1853, a month before the fall potato harvest, one of Wharff’s neighbors, upset his potato patch was being trampled by grazing cattle from the nearby ranch of Tom Hopper, set fire to the dry grasses on his property. As the wind came up, the fire quickly extended across the valley, and by evening had burned over to the top of Sonoma Mountain. Having earlier cleared the grasses and wild oats from around his tent home and potato patch, Wharff was spared any damage.
The following month, he harvested his potatoes, bagging them in sacks he purchased for $16 per 100, and hauled them to Petaluma’s potato warehouse, to eventually be loaded aboard “potato boats” bound for San Francisco. Unfortunately, the potato buyer at the warehouse had bad news—the market had crashed due to an overabundance of spuds that fall. He advised him to store his 20 tons of potatoes at the warehouse for $200 ($6,300 in today’s currency) until early spring, when prices would hopefully rebound.
By February, as it became clear that the boom was over, a victim of overplanting, soil erosion, and increased competition, the manager of the warehouse asked Wharff to remove his potatoes which were beginning to sprout. Wharff told him to move them himself, which he did, dumping them in the Petaluma Creek.
Disappointed, Wharff sold his ranch for $200 to a man named Brad Baily, and sailed with his family back to San Francisco, where he built a new house on the corner of Pacific and Leavenworth streets.
San Francisco’s Montgomery Street, 1850 (photo in the public domain)
After less than a year in the city however, Wharff was lured back to Sonoma County by the idea of starting a cattle ranch with his new brother-in-law Frank Green. A former neighbor told him 160 acres were for sale adjacent to Wharff’s former potato farm. Wharff paid the owner, Tet Carpenter, $200 for the property, which came with a small two-room house.
Back in San Francisco, he purchased twelve head of cattle from a rancher near the Mission Dolores for $480 ($14,000 in today’s currency), herding them aboard a new steamer Charles Minturn, the Ferryboat King of San Francisco Bay, had recently installed on the Petaluma Creek to Haystack Landing just south of Petaluma.
Ferryboat King Charles Minturn standing in front of his paddle steamer, E.Corning, on San Francisco docks, early 1850s (photo Sonoma County Library)
Wharff wrote he thought the ranch land was in the public domain, allowing him and Green to purchase it without a deed. That belief was rooted in the Preemption Act of 1841, which allowed settlers to purchase from the federal government up to 160 acres of any land in the public domain, assuming they had either lived on it for at least 14 months or made improvements to it for five years. In either case, it wasn’t necessary for a settler to hold actual title to the land while establishing homesteading rights.
California, however, presented a problem for aspiring homesteaders, as most of the desirable farming land was held in Mexican land grants, ownership of which was legally protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 that ended the Mexican-American War. For squatters like Wharff and Green, that would soon become a rude awakening.
The average Mexican land grant measured 17,000 acres. Owners with clear title, like General Mariano Vallejo, whose 66,000-acre grant extended from the east side of the Petaluma Creek all the way to the town of Sonoma, spent the 1850s selling off parcels of their land holdings to newly arriving American settlers. But a number of the land grant had changed hands so many times since the Mexican-American war that their legal trails were cloudy, with competing or even fraudulent claims.
Map of Marin and Southern Sonoma Land Grants, 1860 (excerpted from Map of the Country 40 Miles Around San Francisco by Lelander Ransom, courtesy of BLR Antique Maps)
In response, California created a land commission to review the legal status of the state’s 813 land grants. The reviews, which ran from 1852 until 1856, ultimately confirmed 514 of the 813 claims filed. Almost all of land commission’s decisions were appealed in the courts, creating a bureaucratic quagmire that added to the uncertainty and confusion of grant ownership, opening the door to speculators and land sharks.
Prospective settlers were faced with two choices: either purchase land from a claimant whose claim might be challenged and reversed by the land commission or courts in years to come, or else squat on the land illegally, hoping the land commission would eventually void the claim, placing the land in the public domain for purchase under the Preemption Act.
The extent to which Wharff and Green made this “pre-empt” squatter’s gamble is unknown. Although their land purchase was not recorded with the county, tax records indicate that in 1855 they paid state and county property taxes. By that time, the land commission had already ruled on the claim of the Rancho Cotate land grant they were squatting on.
Totaling 17,000 acres, Rancho Cotate had been originally granted in 1844 to Captain Juan Castenada, a secretary of Mariano Vallejo. At the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846, Castenada sold the grant to Thomas Larkin, the U.S. Consul to Mexico’s Alta California. In 1849, Larkin sold it to an American trader, Joseph S. Ruckle, who held it for only two months before selling it to Dr. Thomas S. Page, an expatriate American physician practicing in Valparaiso, Chile.
Map of Rancho Cotate and adjacent land grants, 1877 (from Thos. Thompson’s Historical Atlas of Sonoma County)
Page remained in Chile after the purchase, making him an absentee landlord and subjecting his land grant, which would one day encompass Cotati, Rohnert Park and Penngrove, to illegal squatters, including Wharff and Green. In 1852, he filed his claim with the new land commission. The claim was approved in August 1854, around the same time Wharff and Green purchased their land from the squatter Carpenter. As with most land grants, the land commission’s ruling was immediately appealed, leaving the land in legal limbo until the courts dismissed the appeal in March, 1857.
As one last formality, a survey of the land was scheduled to be undertaken in August 1857 before Dr. Page could assert his claim. What happened next illustrates the gambling mentality of former gold miners at the time.
Before the surveyors arrived, Wharff and Green sold their 160 acres to a man for $500 ($14,000 in today’s currency) and squatted on an adjacent 161-acre parcel. Whether or not they were looking to make a quick profit is unknown.
Dr. Thomas S. Page, Cotati, 1870 (photo Sonoma County Library)
In February 1858, after a patent was issued to Dr. Page, giving him clear and legal title to Rancho Cotate, he began immediately selling off 160-acre parcels to settlers, beginning with the squatters already in place. The settler who purchased the Wharff and Green ranch the year before for $500 paid Page $1,800 ($50,000 in today’s currency) to obtain legal deed to the property, bringing his total outlay for the land to $2,300 ($70,000 in today’s currency).
Wharff and Green purchased the 161 acres they had recently squatted on from Page for $1,610 ($45,000 in today’s currency). A short while later, they also bought back their former ranch from the man they sold it to, paying him $2,500 ($75,000 in today’s currency).
1858 Land Sale by Thomas S. Page to David Wharff (Sonoma County Deed Records, LDS Family Search Database)
The escalating land values had to do with a flood of new settlers to the area in the late 1850s. By 1860, Sonoma County had 12,000 residents, most of them farmers, living on 756 farms, with more than 200,000 acres under cultivation. The primary driver of that expansion was the California wheat boom.
Wheat schooner sailing down the Petlauma River (photo Sonoma County Library)
After the Crimean War cut off Russian wheat exports in the 1850s, Australia and New Zealand turned to California for wheat supplies, setting off a minor boom. The boom went into overdrive in the 1860s, following the disruption of Midwest wheat exports to Europe during the Civil War. By 1867, 80 percent of the wheat grown in Sonoma County was being shipped around the Horn to Europe’s central grain market in Liverpool, England, making Petaluma not only a thriving river town, but also an international shipping port.
In addition to riding the wheat boom, on their two ranches Wharf and Green also raised barley and oats, and annually produced 600 pounds of butter, 100 tons of hay, 400 pounds of honey, along with poultry and cattle. A tobacco chewer, Wharff was known for nailing the lids of his Star Tobacco tins to his barn, which was covered in them.
In 1871, Mary Jane and Frank Green decided to move to San Francisco. Wharff and Green sold the 161-acre ranch they had been living on, the one they purchased together directly from Page, to James and Lydia Goodwin, owners of a furniture store in San Francisco, who operated it as a second residence. They retained their original ranch, which was located along Old Redwood Highway near where the Green Mill Inn was erected in 1932.
1877 map of Penn’s Grove, Wharff and Goodwin ranches upper left (map from Thos. Thompson’s Historical Atlas of Sonoma County)
In the mid-1870s, the California wheat market began to decline due to an international recession and increasing competition from the Midwest. Like many of his neighbors, Wharff shifted to planting apples and grapes as part of a new fruit boom.
Olive and David Wharff, circa 1910 (photos courtesy of Penngrove Proud)
After the restless Argonaut odyssey of his twenties, Wharff ultimately found his golden fleece in Penngrove, settling with Olive for 55 years on the same ranch, where they raised seven children. Only three of whom survived beyond childhood, the others falling victim to diphtheria and scarlet fever. They were surrounded by family, as two of Olive’s brothers, George and John Densmore from Nova Scotia, joined them to settle in the area, and Mary and Frank Green eventually moved back to Penngrove in 1893, as the area began to experience a new egg boom, filling the countryside with chicken houses.
Wharff house built circa 1858 on ranch sold to the Goodwins in 1871. The house was moved in 1902 from where it had resided at 2368 Goodwin Avenue, to 1291 Elysian Road in Penngrove, where it sits today (photo courtesy of Chuck Lucas)
In 1905, the Wharffs leased their ranch and farmhouse to a neighbor, Antone Ronsheimer, who with his half-brother John Formschlag had purchased in 1865 the farm in downtown Penngrove where Wharff first grew potatoes in 1853. The Wharffs built a small cottage on the ranch for themselves and lived there until 1909, when they left Penngrove to live with their daughter Belinda Hoadley in San Francisco’s Mission District. Olive died there in 1913 at age 85, and David in 1918 at age 89.
By that time, swaggering, opportunistic Argonauts like Wharff had been recast in local lore as Pioneers, a little flamboyant perhaps, but always purposeful in channeling the wild exploitations of the Gold Rush into building California. Wharff’s daughter Belinda maintained that her father was not the adventurous, “harum scarum” type of Argonaut, but a quiet family man of tenacious courage, whose feet, like thousands of others who tilled the land, were firmly placed on the soil.
She clearly hadn’t seen him in his youth.
*****
Thanks to Lee Torliatt, Chuck Lucas, Katherine Rinehart, and Rich Wharff for their research assistance.
SOURCES:
Newspapers & Magazines
Petaluma Argus: “Personal and Social,” May 5, 1883; “A Bit of Penngrove History,” November 28, 1901; “Has Read the Argus for Over Fifty Years,” March 31, 1906; “The Death of Mrs. F. B. Green,” February 5, 1909; “Celebrated 57th Wedding Anniversary,” February 20, 1909; “Celebrate Sixtieth Anniversary of Their Marriage Tuesday,” February 20, 1912; “David Wharff Passes Away,” September 16, 1918.
Petaluma Courier: “Their Golden Anniversary,” February 20, 1902; “Celebrate Anniversary,” February 18, 1909; “Ancient Land History,” November 30, 1912; “Mrs. O. Wharff Enters Rest,” April 20, 1913; “Frank B. Green, Penngrove Pioneer, Found Dead in Kitchen at Country Home,” November 9, 1913.
Sacramento Bee: Harry P. Bagley, “From Sedate Boston to the Wild Gold Country of California,” September 12, 1942.
Sacramento Daily Union: “From the South (Page’s deed),” October 4, 1852.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “A Pioneer Woman of Petaluma Dead,” April 20, 1913.
Scientific American, “Agriculture in California,” November 27, 1852 (price of potatoes). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/agriculture-in-california/
Sonoma Democrat: “Patents Received in Sonoma (Page grant),” April 1, 1858.
Books, Journals, Websites, Other
Paul Bailey, Sam Brannan and the California Mormons (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1943), p. 124.
Christopher Warren Haskins, The Argonauts of California, Being the Reminiscences of Scenes and Incidents that Occurred in California in Early Mining Days (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1890) p. 462.
Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982).
Katherine Johnson, “West Penngrove Historical Resources Survey,” Master of Arts Thesis, Sonoma State University, 1994. https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/g445cg87h?locale=en
John Haskell Kemble, “The Gold Rush by Panama, 1848-1851,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, Rushing for Gold (University of California Press, February, 1949), pp. 45-56.
“Central America: Nicaragua,” The Maritime Heritage Project. https://www.maritimeheritage.org/ports/centralAmericaNicaragua.html
J.P. Munro-Fraser, “George B. Williams,” History of Sonoma County (Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), pp. 604-605.
Thor Severson, Sacramento: An Illustrated History, 1839 to 1874 (California Historical Society, 1973).
Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream 1850-1913 (Oxford University Press USA, 1973), pp. 49-68.
Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch Of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pgs. 18, 24, 55.
Lee Torliatt, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2002) pp. 18-20.
David Wharff letter to William Farrell, dated April 10, 1914. From personal collection of Richard Wharff.
David Wharff letter to A.P. Behrens, dated April 26, 1918. From personal collection of Lee Torliatt.
Rich Warff, “David Wharff,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016) pp. 115-122.
Luzena Stanley Wilson, 49er: Her Memoirs as Taken Down by Her Daughter in 1881 (Mills College, Calif., Eucalyptus Press, 1937). www.digitalhistory.uh.edu.
Petaluma History Podcast , Onstage with Jim & Tom, Phoenix Theater, September 30, 2014., r-to-l: John Sheehy, Katie Watts, Skip Sommer, Chuck Lucas, Tom Gaffey, and Jim Agius with back to camera (photo courtesy of The Phoenix Theater)
A number of years ago, I participated in a podcast interview about early Petaluma history for Onstage with Jim and Tom, hosted by Jim Agius and Tom Gaffey at the Phoenix Theater. Joining me were local historians Katie Watts, Skip Sommer, and Chuck Lucas. In the interview, we discussed at length Garrett W. Keller, who developed the town of Petaluma in 1852, before mysteriously disappearing.
After the podcast was broadcast, a woman claiming to be a descendent of Keller sent us an email informing us that we had it all wrong—her ancestor was not the man we made him out to be, a scam artist who illegally claimed land he didn’t own, divided it up into lots that he then sold to unsuspecting new settlers, and then vanished with the proceeds without a trace. He was actually an honest, well-respected fellow who went on to do good in the world, and who founded a town in Kansas after leaving Petaluma. I made another online search of Garrett W. Keller, but, as usual, finding nothing on the man, filed the woman’s email away
Years later, after accidentally stumbling upon it, I decided to contact the woman. She responded, and after some back and forth and digging around in ancestry records, we determined that she wasn’t in fact a descendant of Garrett W. Keller, but rather a descendant of another Keller who had resided sometime later in Petaluma.
But the point she made about Keller establishing another town in Kansas was a new lead in an otherwise cold case. As anyone who has engaged in researching family genealogy knows, such leads often go nowhere, but sometime they are the thread to a major discovery. Such a breakthrough is fraught with suspense, as it can lead to information that have been deleted, omitted, or else revised in family lore.
Communities are no different. Garrett W. Keller had been a vital part of Petaluma’s creation myth for 170 years. That he himself was something of a blank slate made it easier to fit him into the colorful myth of the wild west scam artist.
1855 map of Petaluma (courtesy of the Sonoma County Library)
Such lore and mythology are important in passing down a sense of shared heritage and social identity, whether in families or cultural groups, apocryphal or not. History through is something different.
As any aspiring family genealogist discovers, it is first and foremost about inquiry, and the willingness to go where the inquiry takes you. Historian Jill Lepore calls it “the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence.” It’s an art that when done well gives us a richer and perhaps more inclusive humanistic view of our past in order get our bearings in moving forward. It’s always one that’s open to revision as new evidence comes to light.
In the case of Garrett W. Keller, my new evidence initially led me nowhere. In frustration, I turned to the historical sources that identified him as Petaluma’s founder. The first mention of him is in Robert Allan Thompson’s Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California, published in 1877. Thompson refers to him merely as “Keller,” with no first name nor middle initial.
Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, by Robert A. Thompson, 1877
It’s in J.P. Munro-Fraser’s History of Sonoma County, published in 1880, that he appears as “Garrett W. Keller.” In a footnote on page 260, Munro-Fraser points out that a “Garrett W. Keller” was appointed Petaluma’s first postmaster on February 9, 1852, which leads him apparently to conclude that he was the Keller who originally laid out of the town.
History of Sonoma County, by J.P. Munro-Fraser, 1880
The next county history, 1889’s Pen Pictures From the Garden of the World, An Illustrated History of Sonoma County, written by longtime Petaluma Argus editor Samuel Cassiday, makes no mention of a Keller at all, although Cassiday first arrived in Petaluma in 1854, only two years after Keller had left.
Tom Gregory’s History of Sonoma County, published in 1911, basically picks up Munro-Fraser’s identification of Garrett W. Keller. The two historians appear to serve as the source of Ed Mannion’s legendary history column “Rear View Mirror,” which ran the Petaluma Argus-Courier in the early 1960s, and served in part as the basis of Adair Heig’s History of Petaluma: A California River Town, published in 1982, with Mannion as an advisor.
History of Petlauma by Adair Heig, 1982
For help finding the primary source of Munro-Fraser’s discovery of Keller as Petaluma’s first postmaster, I turned for help to Katherine J. Rinehart, the former manager of the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library. She provided me with the copy of an official handwritten record of Sonoma County’s first postmasters in the 1850s. This was apparently the same document Munro-Fraser discovered in his identification of Garrett W. Keller.
Garret V. Keller, Post Master Appointment, National Archives
The first thing I noticed is that Munro-Fraser has incorrectly transcribed Keller’s name. In the handwritten record his first name is spelled “Garret,” with one “t”, and his middle initial is clearly not a W, but instead either a U or a V.
That question led me to a document I found in an online government depository entitled A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United State that had been typeset and printed in 1853 by the U.S. Department of State. In it, a “Garret V. Keller” is listed as the first postmaster of Petaluma, appointed February 9, 1852, and replaced in December, 1852. In a search of Newspapers.com, I also found a listing of California postmasters published in the November 15, 1852, edition of the Sacramento Daily Union newspaper, that confirmed “Garret V. Keller” to be the postmaster of Petaluma.
A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United States, 1853, United States, Department of State
With the new name spelling and my earlier clue about Kansas, I began searching Findagrave.com for anyone with that name who had been buried in Kansas in the late 19th century. The site led me to a Garret V. Keller who died in 1901 in a small rural Kansas town of outside of the city of Leavenworth. There was no description of his life, but there was a link to the gravesite of his father, George Horine Keller, which did include a memorial drawn from a Kansas history book.
Reading down the text I suddenly hit paydirt:
“In Platte County, Missouri, [George Horine Keller] engaged in farming and manufacturing till the year 1850, but catching the gold fever, he sold out, equipped a large train with merchandise and went to California during the spring of that year. Settling down in the Sonoma valley, he founded the town of Petaluma, now a prosperous city of some 10,000 people. He returned in 1852 to Weston [Missouri].”
I quickly discovered in Google books a copy of the source cited in the memorial—Transactions of the Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, edited by George W. Martin. The book featured a short biography of George Horine Keller, noting that after founding Petaluma, he went on to help establish the town of Leavenworth, Kansas.
With that information, I also discovered online two other historical sources that provided more details on George Horine Keller’s life: William G. Cutler’s History of the State of Kansas, published in 1883, and The History of Leavenworth County, Kansas, written by Jesse A. Hall and Leroy T. Hand, published in 1921.
From a search of old newspaper clippings at Newspapers.com, I discovered that George Keller and his wife Nancy had one daughter and five sons. On the wagon train that took him to California in 1850, Keller had taken along with him with his oldest son, Garret Valentine Keller (named for his two Dutch grandfathers), as well as his new son-in-law Andrew Thomas Kyle, both of whom were 19 years old.
After being disappointed in the gold fields, the Keller party headed to Sonoma County, where, after Keller made his land claim and laid out the new town of Petaluma, his son Garret, then 21 years old, was appointed town’s first postmaster.
The one mention of George Keller I found in old Petaluma newspapers was in an article published in the Petaluma Weekly Argus in 1876 about a group of men who, while preparing Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park) for America’s centennial celebration, unearthed a coffin. From John E. Lockwood, who established Petaluma’s first trading post in 1850, reporters learned that it was the burial site of the first white man to die in the village in the fall of 1851. He and some other men dug the grave, and George Keller gave the service.
While sources indicate that George Keller and his son-in-law Andrew Kyle left Petaluma to return to Missouri in the fall of 1852, Garret Keller stayed behind in California for the next seven years, although it’s unknown exactly where. Postal records indicate he had vacated his position as Petaluma’s postmaster by December, 1852.
Garret V. Keller in later life (photo courtesy of Alex Finlayson)
A brief biography of Garret Keller in Cutler’s History of the State of Kansas notes that in 1854 he married a woman in California named Jane E. Hoagland, who was a native of Fort Leavenworth in Kansas Territory. They moved to Kansas in 1859, where Garret purchased a farm in Springdale outside of Leavenworth. He apparently lived an otherwise quiet life.
As for George H. Keller, after returning in 1852 to Weston, Missouri, he became a prominent figure along with his son-in-law Kyle in establishing Leavenworth, the first town in the new Kansas Territory, under another illegal land scheme.
Fifth Street in Leavenworth by Alexander Gardner, 1867 (photo courtesy of Legends of America)
But there was another side to Keller, one in which he distinguished himself at the risk of his own life as an abolitionist leader who was elected to the first Kansas Territorial Legislature during the violent conflicts over establishing Kansas as a slave state or free state. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted in the Kansas Frontier Guard at the age of 60, and was immediately dispatched to Washington, D.C., to guard President Lincoln at the White House. After the war was appointed the first warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary by the state’s governor.
When he died in 1876, after retiring to a farm near the farm of his son Garret, Keller was highly lauded in newspapers throughout the state of Kansas.
George H. Keller gravesite, Leavenworth County, Kansas
Which leaves us with a much more complicated picture than we had for the previous 170 years with the blank slate known as “Garrett W. Keller.” The story of Petaluma’s true founder acknowledges what history does best, which the sociologist W.E.B DuBois noted was expose “the hideous mistakes, the frightful wrongs, and the great and beautiful things that people do.”
*****
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 11, 2021.
SOURCES:
Newspapers
Lawrence Tribune: “Settler’s Defense,” July 1, 1868.
Leavenworth Times: “Kyle’s Reminiscence of Early Border Life,” January 11, 1902.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Ed Mannion’s Rear View Mirror,” April 2, 1960.
Petaluma Courier: “Death of Major Singley,” March 2, 1898.
Petaluma Weekly Argus: “Centennial Resurrection,” March 31, 1876.
Sacramento Daily Union: “Post Offices in California,” November 15, 1852.
Books, Magazines, Journals
Samuel Cassiday, Pen Pictures From the Garden of the World, An Illustrated History of Sonoma County (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, 1889), pp. 109-114.
William Connelley, editor, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, Volume 14 (Chicago: Lewis, 1918), pp. 1209-1210; Frank M. Gable, “The Kansas Penitentiary,” p. 379.
Thomas Jefferson Gregory, History of Sonoma County, California, With Biographical Sketches of Leading Men and Women (Historical Record Company, Los Angeles, 1911), p. 177.
Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 29.
Jesse A. Hall and Leroy T. Hand, History of Leavenworth County, Kansas (Topeka, Kansas: Historical Publishing Company,1921), pp. 116-123.
LeBaron, Blackman, Mitchell, Hansen, Santa Rosa: A Nineteenth Century Town (Historia, Ltd., 1985), pgs. 16, 26-27.
George W. Martin, editor, Transactions of the Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908 (Kansas Historical Society).
Henry Miles Moore, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the City and County of Leavenworth,” Western Life (Leavenworth, KS), August 3, 1900.
Henry Miles Moore, Early History of Leavenworth, City and County (Samuel Dodsworth Book Co., Leavenworth, KS, 1906), pgs. 21, 24, 56, 86, 103, 123-127, 147, 161, 171.
J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 131, pp. 259-262.
Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pp. 53-54.
“Territorial Legislature of 1857-58: George Horine Keller,” Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, edited by George W. Martin, p. 211.
Websites
“Guarding the White House,” The White House Historical Association, whitehousehistory.org https://www.whitehousehistory.org/press-room/press-timelines/guarding-the-white-house
“1851, March 3 – 09 Stat. 631, Act to Settle Private Land Claims in California,” US Government Legislation and Statutes. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hornbeck_usa_2_d/7
A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United States, 1853, United States, Department of State. https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Register_of_Officers_and_Agents_Civil/C5EDAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
Loretta Young and Joseph Cotten in still photo from “The Farmer’s Daughter” (photo courtesy of Gregg Fautley Collection)
In the spring of 1946, Louis Shapero, a Hollywood location scout, spent three days in a chartered plane scouring Sonoma County for a picturesque setting that would pass as a Minnesota dairy ranch. Then he came upon the Bundesen Ranch. Nestled in the green rolling foothills of Sonoma Mountain, the ranch’s setting struck him as the perfect backdrop for what would become the first Hollywood film shot in Petaluma.
A 150-acre dairy, the Bundesen Ranch sat at 4295 Old Adobe Road, two miles south of the Petaluma Adobe on the road to Sonoma. Originally settled by an Irishman named James Sullivan, it was purchased in the late 1880s by Sophus Bundesen, an immigrant from the Isle of Fohr. After his arrival in America in 1873, he adopted the Anglo-Saxon first name Charles in place of his given name, which along with its feminine variation Sophia, stands for wisdom in Greek.
Charles was joined in Petaluma by his brothers Martin and Henry, who settled on chicken ranches west of town. Charles and his wife Marie, another Isle of Fohr immigrant whom he married in San Francisco in 1884, raised five children on the ranch.
The Bundesen Ranch at 4295 Old Adobe Road, with Charles and Marie Bundesen in buggy and sons and daughters standing outside the gate, 1905 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
After Marie’s death in 1912, Bundesen retired from ranching and moved into town, leaving his son Martin to operate the ranch. Following Charles’ death in 1919, and Martin’s subsequent move to Eureka, the family leased the ranch in 1930 to an Irishman named William Scott, who immigrated to Petaluma during Ireland’s civil war in the early 1920s.
Scott was on his deathbed at the ranch, being cared for by his son Bob, when Shapero came calling to secure a release for using the ranch as a movie set. Sophie Bundesen, a Petaluma nurse representing the Bundesen family, also signed off on the release. In early May of 1946, a few days after Scott died, a crew of 100 carpenters, painters, landscapers, location directors, and film crew members descended upon the ranch to spruce it up for the shoot.
Still from the film set of the Bundesen Ranch with new silo and paint job, 1946 (credit: The Farmer’s Daughter)
That included applying a fresh coat of white paint to the two-story farmhouse and painting the barn, chicken coops, and sheds bright red, despite the fact the film would be shot in black and white. A second large barn was erected at the ranch’s entrance with a large mural depicting the rolling countryside, which would play into the movie’s storyline, along with a duck pond and a grain silo to make it look more like a Minnesota farm. The line of eucalyptus trees lining the short lane from Old Adobe Road to the farmhouse were cut down and replaced with pine trees, which were more akin to Minnesota.
Once the stage was set, filming began in mid-May. Each day for ten days, a small fleet of swanky, chauffeured cars delivered the director, producer, and stars Loretta Young and Joseph Cotten, to the ranch from the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, where they were lodged. The rest of the film crew stayed at Hotel Petaluma, which also provided picnic-style meals on the set each day.
Hotel Petaluma with Redwood Room on ground floor, 1954 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
The hotel’s owner, Harold Eckart, had undertaken a major renovation of the hotel the year before, including a makeover of the cocktail lounge. He rechristened it the Redwood Room (current site of the Shuckery restaurant). Decorated with a large photo mural of the redwoods, it quickly became a favorite hangout of Petaluma’s postwar café society, known as “the 400.” They were serenaded most evenings by Earle Bond, a locally renowned organ player.
Members of the 400 looking to catch a glimpse of the movie’s stars at the Redwood Room were disappointed however, as the evenings they were in town they chose to dine at the Golden Gate Grill on Main Street near Western Avenue (current site of the Sake 107 sushi restaurant).
Golden Gate Grill, 107 Main Street, 1947 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
A popular stop for celebrities and tourists traveling the Redwood Highway north to the Russian River resorts, the grill was owned and operated by two Yugoslavian immigrants, Pete Goich and chef “Big Tom” Kasovich. It being Petaluma, the house specialty was chicken.
Both the opening and closing scenes of the film were shot at the Bundesen Ranch. A cheerful comedy-drama originally called “Katie Goes to Congress,” it opens with a convertible driving into the Bundesen Ranch to pick up Young, who plays a Swedish-American farmgirl headed to the big city to attend nursing school.
Filming at Bundesen Ranch (photo courtesy of the Ed Fratini Collection, Petaluma Historical Museum)
While waiting at a bus stop created for the film on the corner of Stage Gulch and Old Adobe roads, Young’s character warily accepts a ride from an itinerant sign painter who just finished painting a mural on the side of her family’s barn.
Bus stop set up at the corner of Old Adobe and Stage Gulch roads (credit: The Farmer’s Daughter)
Taking advantage of her good nature—along with all her savings for school tuition—he leaves her scandalously stranded that night at a roadside motel.
The motel featured in the film was the Pioneer Auto Court on the southeast corner of Fern Avenue and Redwood Highway, just south of Cotati. Opened in 1938 by John Frankfurter, the Pioneer featured 13 small cabins, a cocktail lounge, and a large swimming pool. In its heyday, it catered to travelers headed north along the Redwood Highway.
Loretta Young’s character at the Pioneer (credit: The Farmer’s Daughter)
During the nighttime shoot at the Pioneer, an inebriated local, drawn by the bright studio lights outside the motel, drove up to the set and stumbled into the bar to order a drink. “Nice opening you’re having,” he said to the bartender, “just like in Hollywood.” Turning to Young, who was waiting inside the lounge to shoot a scene outside, he added, “And, baby, you’re a dead ringer for Loretta Young. What won’t they think of next?”
Cocktail Lounge at the Pioneer Auto Court featured in the film (credit: The Farmer’s Daughter)
In the film, Young’s character, broke but determined to stand on her own two feet, hitchhikes from the motel into the big city, where she manages to secure a job as domestic in the home of a prominent congressman played by Cotten.
After Cotten’s right-wing political party decides to back an unscrupulous alderman for Congress, Young, an outspoken progressive just as comfortable discussing politics as she is washing sheets and ironing shirts, stands up at a campaign rally to deride the two-faced alderman, leading to an offer from the opposing party to run against him.
Loretta Young plays Katie Holstrum, addressing a campaign rally in this still shot from the film (credit: The Farmer’s Daughter)
Propelled into the lead in the race thanks to her plainspoken and honest aphorisms, Young is tripped up at the eleventh hour when the sign painter, paid by the opposition, shows up to publicly slander her with false salacious accusations regarding their night together at the Pioneer Auto Club.
Returning to the ranch to console herself with feeding the chickens, Young is encouraged by both her father and Cotten, who’s come to propose to her (in the chicken yard), to fight the smear campaign. With Cotten’s help, she gets the sign painter to confess to his lies and is elected to Congress. She also accepts Cotten’s hand in marriage, despite the fact they are on opposite sides of the political aisle.
Love scene, Petaluma style (credit: The Farmer’s Daughter, courtesy of Rocco Rivetti)
Ironically, Young was dealing with one of Hollywood’s biggest cover-ups at the time. It involved her 10-year-old adopted daughter, who accompanied Young to the Bundesen Ranch during filming. Despite rumors swirling around Hollywood, it wouldn’t be until just before Young’s death in 2000 that it was publicly confirmed the girl was actually her biological daughter. Later came the disclosure that she had become pregnant after being date raped by Clark Gable while the two of them were shooting Call of the Wild in Washington state.
Originally shot as Katie Goes to Congress, Petaluma’s first movie was released in 1947 under the title, The Farmer’s Daughter. It opened that summer to packed houses at Petaluma’s California Theater (the current Phoenix Theater). A popular box office hit, the film earned Young her first and only Oscar.
Ad for “The Farmer’s Daughter” (credit: Pinterest)
After the 101 Freeway opened in 1957, travelers no longer took the Redwood Highway through Petaluma when heading north to the Russian River. That hurt a lot of local businesses.
Casualties included Hotel Petaluma, which was sold to the Elks Club for use as a clubhouse and a single-room occupancy hotel until 2017, when it was restored as a boutique hotel. The Pioneer Auto Court was also forced to become a short-term SRO, although its swimming pool remained a popular attraction for local kids until the early 1970s, when the motel was torn down and replaced by a horse pasture.
Former Bundesen Ranch today, 4295 Old Adobe Road (credit: John Sheehy)
Out on the Bundesen Ranch, the film company tore down the Minnesota silo and barn after the shooting ended. The ranch itself was sold in the 1950s to dairy rancher Frank Flochinni, an Italian immigrant, and later passed down to his descendants. Over the years, the ranch house and original barn were torn down and replaced by a new house and barn.
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Thanks to Gregg Fautley for his research assistance on this story, and as always, to Katie Watts for herediting.
Video trailer for The Farmer’s Daughter:
The Farmer’s Daughter is also available for free viewing on youtube:
SOURCES:
Petaluma Argus: “A Mother is Called to Rest,” December 2, 1912; “Barn Dance at Bundesen Home,” September 2, 1922.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Leased Dairy Near Town,” December 15, 1930; “William J. Scott Claimed by Death,” April 19, 1946; “RKO Picture Co. Inc. to Shoot Movie, ‘Katie Goes to Congress,’ on Bundesen Place,” May 14, 1946; “Sunny Skies Hoped for by ‘Katie for Congress’ Artists,” May 23, 1946; “Elizabeth Olga Olberg Meets Loretta Young, Poses with Star for Picture on Lot,” May 25, 1946; “Carl Bundesen Succumbs to Illness,” May 31, 1946; “Katie For Congress Picture Completed at ‘Location,’” June 1, 1946; “Motorist Was Slightly Mixed,” June 10, 1946; “The Farmer’s Daughter Filmed Here; At Cal,” July 28, 1947; “So They Tell Me with Bill Soberanes column,” January 27, 1958; “ Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror column,” April 12, 1962, “Frank Flochinni,” May 25, 1977.
Petaluma Courier: “Arrived from Germany to Remain,” December 6, 1912; “Chas. Bundesen Has Passed into Rest,” July 22, 1919;
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Hollywood Location Party Using Ranch Near Petaluma,” May 15, 1946; Bundesens’ Roots in Ranching,” December 17, 1989.
“Yesterday’s Favorite Spot Just a Memory,” Cotati Historical Society Newsletter, Vol. 8, No. 2, June, 2015, pp.1-2.
Charles Bundesen, U.S. Census, 1880, 1890.
Herman Martin Theodore Bundesen, U.S. Census, 1910.
Helen Petersen, “Clark Gable Accused of Raping Co-Star,” Buzz Feed News, July 12, 2015. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/loretta-young
The former Cook Ranch along Lichau Road on Sonoma Mountain (photo public domain)
One June day in 1887, while delivering a wagonload of fresh strawberries to merchants along Petaluma’s Main Street, Frank Roberts ran into a neighbor from Sonoma Mountain, “French Louie” Marion, who was also delivering strawberries. The two got into a heated argument that ended when Roberts grabbed a handheld plowshare and whacked French Louie across the head with it, inflicting a large, bloody gash.
Arrested for assault and battery, Roberts was tried in court twice, with both cases ending in a hung jury. Although Petaluma had grown by the 1880s to a town of more than 3,000, a spirit of frontier justice still prevailed, with people often left to settle scores on their own.
And settle them they did, especially on Sonoma Mountain, where, in addition to physically accosting each other, neighbors were often in court, battling each other over deeds, property boundaries, water rights, livestock, and trespassing. But strawberries?
Illustration of Petlauma, 1877 (illustration courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
First introduced to Sonoma County in the 1850s, strawberry cultivation thrived in Petaluma’s Mediterranean climate. Farmers looking to get a premium price for their berries—25 cents per pound in 1887 ($7 in today’s currency)—relied upon branding, especially in June, when a number of local churches and temperance organizations held annual strawberry festivals, serving up berries and ice cream.
The town’s main influencers were the two newspapers, the Argus and the Courier, whose editors were plied with free baskets of berries by growers looking to have theirs declared the largest, reddest, and most delicious of the season.
Argus office in McCune Building on northeast corner of Main & Washington streets; Courier office a few doors down on Main Street across from Mary Street and Penry Park (photos courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
The honor, previously held by Roberts, was bestowed upon French Louie in June 1887.
One of only a handful of French immigrants on the west slope of Sonoma Mountain—most early French immigrants settled in either Sonoma Valley or Healdsburg, many of them operating hotels and resorts—French Louie left his native Normandy while still a teenager in the early 1870s, fleeing like many other French immigrants the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Working on a ship bound for America, he befriended a young shipmate named Peter Torliatt who was either escaping the French military draft or running away from his village near the Italian border after being caught throwing rocks at a priest.
Once their steamer docked in San Francisco, the two young men jumped ship, and eventually made their way to Penngrove, where they were hired by Ned McDermott to work on his ranch along Lichau Road atop Sonoma Mountain. Like many of the mountain’s early settlers, McDermott was Irish, Sonoma County’s first large immigrant group.
Evart Produce Company on Penngrove’s Main Street, 1902 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
The Irish were drawn to the mountain by its springs, which provided year-round irrigation, as well as the notion that wheat—California’s first major boom crop in the mid-1800s—would grow better on the mountain’s rolling slopes than on the valley floor below.
In 1882, French Louie married McDermott’s only child, 20-year-old Minnie McDermott. Four years later, not long before French Louie’s brutal encounter with Frank Roberts, Minnie died in childbirth. By that time, both French Louie and Torliatt were leasing their own ranches along Lichau Road on the mountain. With the wheat boom having gone bust by the 1880s, the two men, like most Petaluma ranchers, turned to dairy ranching, supplementing their income with eggs from pastoral chickens and market vegetables and fruits, including strawberries.
1890s dairy ranch outside of Petaluma (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
The attraction of cultivating strawberries was that, unlike grain crops, which were planted and harvested only once a year, strawberries reproduced steadily through spring and summer, providing the highest income per acre of any crop in the area. In 1887, an acre of strawberry plants yielded $400 in annual income ($11,500 in today’s currency).
For growers on Sonoma Mountain the yields were even better. Thanks to the mountain’s year-round springs and freedom from the frosts that plagued the valley floor, they were able to reap a second season, harvesting strawberries in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Losing his crown as the mountain’s strawberry wizard, was no small thing apparently for a wealthy rancher like Frank Roberts. Born to early Santa Rosa settlers, Roberts married Mary Hopper, the youngest daughter of one of Sonoma Mountain’s largest landowners, Tom Hopper.
Tom Hopper (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
Having come to California from Missouri in 1847, Hopper found success in the mines during the gold rush before settling in 1852 on Sonoma Mountain, where he eventually expanded his ranch to 2,360 acres.
In September of 1853, a neighbor of Hopper, looking to keep Hopper’s cattle out of his potato fields, touched off a fire to burn the grasslands on his ranch. The wild oats in the field, which stood six feet tall and were dry as timber in early fall, blazed furiously. By evening time, the fire had burned over the top of Sonoma Mountain, inflicting heavy losses on several neighbors.
Thanks to further real estate investments, Hopper went on to become one of the wealthiest men in the county. After becoming president of the Santa Rosa Bank in 1878, he moved to Santa Rosa, dividing his Sonoma Mountain ranch between his daughters Eliza and Mary.
Eliza married Isaac Fountain “Fount” Cook, who came to the area from Indiana as a child with his parents in 1854. The Cook Ranch sat halfway up the mountain along Lichau Road. Mary married Frank Roberts. Their Roberts Ranch, which included a lucrative rock quarry as well as a strawberry patch, extended from Petaluma Hill at Roberts Road up the mountainside to the Cook Ranch.
View of the former Cook Ranch along Lichau Road atop Sonoma Mountain (photo public domain)
After French Louie recovered from Roberts’ head bashing, he sent for his sister Pauline back in France. To his surprise, Adrienne, his other sister, showed up, having intercepted the money he sent Pauline for ship passage. After being in the country for only two months, she married Peter Torliatt, French Louie’s neighbor. It would be a troubled relationship.
Peter Torliatt (photo courtesy of Lee Torliatt)
In 1889, French Louie married the daughter of another of his Irish neighbors, 19-year-old Nellie Crilly. Nellie’s parents, Ellen and Nicholas Crilly, had established a ranch near the top of Lichau Road in the late 1860s. Like other settlers, they endured a number of bitter disputes with neighbors on the mountain. In 1872, while involved in a lawsuit filed by their neighbor James O’Phelan, the Crillys took a family trip to San Francisco. While they were away, someone burned down their house.
Six months later, Ellen Crilly took out her revenge on O’Phelan in an encounter recounted in the Petaluma Argus:
“There was considerable excitement created on the Sonoma Mountains one day last week, growing out of a dispute on boundaries of the lands of James O’Phelan and Nicholas Crilly. Crilly, it seems, ran a fence through the premises of the neighbor O’Phelan, who after taking counsel in the matter, determined to tear [the] same down.
He was in the act of removing the fence, assisted by a hired man, when Mrs. Crilly appeared from a buckeye bush and with a handful of rocks and the “sprig of shelalah,” commenced a vigorous warfare. One rock struck the hired man on the head, inflicting an ugly scalp wound, which rendered him “hors de combat.” She then directed her attack against O’Phelan, and administered a severe blow upon his “cronk” with her stick. This let [sent] him out and left the woman in possession of the field.
A warrant was sworn out for her arrest, and Deputy Sheriff Hedges was two days scouring the hills in search of the combative Amazon. It appears that after her splendid feat at arms she became frightened and took to the brush, and up to date the place of her retreat remains a mystery.”
In 1881, Nicholas Crilly died unexpectedly, leaving Ellen a widow with ten children to run the dairy. Shortly after French Louie married her daughter Nellie, Ellen was pulled into a new violent dispute on the mountain with a neighbor named Puckett.
An unidentified rancher and his wife heading into Penngrove by buckboard, circa 1900 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
A teetotaler with strongly held opinions, Edward Puckett settled on the mountain in 1854 after coming across the plains from Missouri. In addition to operating a 186-acre dairy, he was known for growing some of the best apples and Picholine olives for making olive oil in the area. In 1867, he married Mary Meany, a Petaluma schoolteacher and poet, originally from Ireland. The couple had one son, Alfred, an inspiring writer, who, under his mother’s tutelage, became known at a young age as the “poet of Sonoma Mountain.”
In 1872, Puckett had provided an easement across his property for Lichau Road, named after one of the mountain’s earliest settlers. Puckett however reserved the right to maintain two gates on the road in order to keep his cows from wandering off the ranch. Neighbors living further up the road—the Crillys, Todds, Jordans, and Duersons—complained to the county for years about the nuisance of Puckett’s gates on a public thoroughfare. Puckett, in turn, offered to take them down if the neighbors would build a wooden fence on his property along both sides of the road.
1898 map of Todd and Puckett ranches (circled) along Lichau Road (map courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
The dispute was still going on in 1890, when James M. Todd, who owned an adjacent ranch, entered Puckett’s farm one evening to retrieve a stray calf that had wandered through a break in the fence. Todd claimed the break had been created by Puckett’s hogs. He brought with him three young stepsons—Willy, Melvin, and Adelbert Cook—and one of Ellen Crilly’s sons, 16-year-old John.
They were met on the property by Puckett and his 21-year-old poet son Alfred. After exchange of some “rough language,” Todd and Puckett began to brawl.
Willy Cook, 19, pulled out a revolver and fired a shot at Puckett, barely missing his head. Puckett’s son Alfred attempted to wrestle the gun away from Willy, while Todd and the other young men ganged up on the elder Puckett. During the tussle with Alfred, Willy fired the gun three times, hitting Alfred in the shoulder and abdomen. While he lay bleeding, John Crilly egged on Willy to shoot Puckett as well. Fortunately for Puckett, Willy’s gun was out of bullets.
Charged with attempted murder, Willy Cook pleaded self-defense and was acquitted in a jury trial. Alfred Puckett eventually recovered from his wounds and went on to become a noted local historian.
In 1894, Frank Roberts made a small fortune when the Southern Pacific Railroad announced they were purchasing the entire inventory of his rock quarry, along with the quarries of four of his neighbors, amounting to 350,000 basalt blocks, to pave the streets of San Francisco’s Potrero District.
The former Roberts Ranch along Petaluma Hill and Roberts roads (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)
The deal made Roberts one of the wealthiest men in the county. That however didn’t stop him from battling with a neighbor over a $57 bill for a broken water pipe.
Water rights on them mountain were even more precious than land. In the early 1870s, three of the mountain’s large landowners—Tom Hopper, William Hill, and Henry Hardin—secured water rights to the springs that fed Copeland and Lynch creeks. Forming the Sonoma County Water Company, they piped the water, along with water from Adobe Creek, into Petaluma, serving as the town’s main water source. In exchange for running their pipes across the ranches on the mountain, they provided ranchers with access to the water as well as stock in the company.
The water pipe running across Robert Forsyth’s ranch developed a leak that spilled out onto the adjacent Roberts Ranch. Roberts had the leak repaired, sending the $57 bill to Forsyth, who refused to pay it. Roberts responded by suing Forsyth, making it clear that the money was immaterial, it was the principle that mattered.
Frustrated with the slow pace the lawsuit was taking in the courts, Roberts resorted to fisticuffs, not once but twice. In the first encounter, he wielded a cane at Forsyth, who fought him off with a knife. In the second showdown, Roberts wielded an axe, while Forsyth fought him off with a club. Each man filed charges of assault and battery against the other, all of which were eventually dropped, along with Roberts’ lawsuit for the $57.
Contemporary strawberry farm on Stony Point Road (photo courtesy of Stony Point Strawberry Farm)
By the 1890s, the strawberry competition between Roberts and French Louie had been put to rest by Peter Torliatt, who had ascended to being the area’s strawberry wizard. Torliatt was leasing the 518 acres that remained of the Cook Ranch after Eliza Cook and her husband moved to Santa Rosa. In addition to operating a dairy on the ranch, he maintained a 2-acre strawberry patch.
But Torliatt had domestic problems. In 1898, Adrienne filed for divorce and custody of their four children, before reconciling with her husband.
Peter and Adrienne Torliatt with two of their four children, Marie and Teresa, 1890s (photo courtesy of Lee Torliatt)
A year later however, the couple fell into a raging fight. Two of their children, fearing for their mother’s safety, ran to the adjacent ranch of David Horne for help. Horne, a Scotsman who had been feuding with Torliatt over water rights, went to the Torliatt house with another neighbor, William Duerson.
As they approached the house, a shot rang out. They loudly announced their presence, after which another shot whizzed by their heads. Retreating, they contacted the sheriff, who traveled up tp the mountain to arrest Torliatt for assault with a deadly weapon.
At his court trial, Torliatt maintained that he had been shooting at an owl in a tree that had been disturbing his chickens, and that he wasn’t aware of the presence of Horne and Duerson by the ranch house. As evidence, he introduced a dead owl to the court, the body still suspiciously warm a week after the incident. The case was eventually dropped.
In August of 1900, Adrienne Torliatt once again filed for divorce. That same month, Torliatt received an eviction notice from Eliza Cook, exercising a clause in the lease that allowed her to sell the ranch at any time, assuming it was after the annual harvest. Cook sold the ranch that month to L.L. Cannon, a breeder of champion racehorses, but Torliatt refused to vacate, maintaining that his second strawberry harvest wouldn’t be over until after Christmas.
Cook took Torliatt to court, where a number of experts were called in, including horticulturalist Luther Burbank, to testify on the nature of strawberry cultivation, particularly in regard to the second season on Sonoma Mountain. The judged ultimately ruled in Torliatt’s favor.
Horticulturalist Luther Burbank, 1901 (photo courtesy of book “The World’s Work,” archive.com)
The next spring, Torliatt purchased a 30-acre ranch on Ely Road east of Petaluma, where he relocated his famed strawberry plants. By the early 1900s, he was earning $5,000 a year ($144,000 today) from three acres of what many considered the finest strawberry patch in the county.
Adrienne, who had dropped her second divorce suit, would file for divorce three more times, citing cruelty as the reason. She eventually separated from her husband and moved into Petaluma with her two daughters, while the couple’s two sons remained with their father on the ranch. The courts denied her divorce suit each time, noting that both parties were in acting in bad faith as the fight was really over dividing up their community property. They remained in a standoff until Torliatt’s death in 1916.
French Louie continued to grow strawberries on Sonoma Mountain until 1911, when he and Nellie decided to move into town due to his declining health. French Louie had just finished moving their furniture into their newly rented house at 23 Post Street, when he died. He was 57.
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Full disclosure: the author John Sheehy’s Irish great-grandparents settled on Sonoma Mountain in 1863, although thankfully not along Lichau Road, but instead at the bottom of the range outside Lakeville.
SOURCES:
Newspapers
Petaluma Argus: “Strawberries and Cream,” May 17, 1866; “Dwelling Burned,” January 27, 1872; “War on the Sonoma Mountains,” June 1, 1872; “The Festival Last Evening,” May 2, 1873 “Died: Nicholas Crilly,” May 27, 1881; “Notice: Frank G. Roberts to Mary E. Roberts,” August 12, 1881; “That Mountain Nuisance,” October 4, 1884; “Fine Apples,” December 5, 1885; “Strawberries,” April 16, 1887; “Strawberries for Christmas,” December 10, 1887; “Brevities,” April 11, 1899; “Roberts Brings Suit Against Forsyth,” February 20, 1905; “Delicious Strawberries for Easter,” April 14, 1906; “First of the Season,” February 27, 1908; “Denied Divorce,” November 20, 1908; “Third Case is Dismissed,” October 10, 1911; “Strawberries in the Market,” April 13, 1912; “Finest Strawberries on Christmas Day,” December 8, 1912; “Sudden Death of A.J. Puckett,” March 9, 1926.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: Emily H. Kelsey, “Pioneers Bought Vallejo’s Land,” August 17, 1955.
Petaluma Courier: “A Mountain Nuisance,” October 1, 1884; “Courierlets: Roberts and Marion,” July 27, 1887; “Courierlets: Marion,” February 1, 1888; “Petaluma Entire Paving Block Supply Purchased,” September 26, 1894; “Strawberry Culture,” May 27, 1896; “Courierlets: Puckett,” December 7, 1898; “A Penngrove Suit: Horne,” March 30, 1900; “A Letter from Penngrove Way,” August 8, 1900; “Petaluma Case Tried Wednesday,” November 16, 1900; “Peter Torliatt Gets the Decision,” November 22, 1900; “Mary Catherine Puckett,” Courier, July 2, 1901; “Frank Roberts Assaulted,” December 17, 1904; “Another Pioneer Passes: Puckett,” September 11, 1907; “Pioneer of Olden Days Called: McDermott,” October 13, 1909; “Pioneer of Petaluma Dead: Ellen Crilly,” March 29, 1911; “I.F. Cook is Summoned at Santa Rosa,” February 11, 1917; “Contested to Be Filed in Cook Will,” February 28, 1917.
Sacramento Bee: “From Sedate Boston to the Wild Gold Country of California (Wharff profile),” September 12, 1942.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Torliatt Held to Answer,” February 10, 1899; “He Shot at an Owl,” February 11, 1899; Gaye LeBaron, “French Among the Important Early Immigrants,” November 7, 1993.
Sonoma County Journal: Ad for strawberry vines, January 19, 1856; “Strawberries,” May 27, 1859.
Sonoma Democrat: “Another Tragedy: Alfred Puckett is Shot on Sonoma Mountain,” December 13, 1890; “Cook Acquitted,” October 31, 1891; “Same Couple Figure Four Times in Divorce Court,” April 28, 1911.
Books, Journals, Websites, Documents
Thomas Jefferson Gregory, History of Sonoma County, California, With Biographical Sketches of Leading Men and Women (Historical Record Company, Los Angeles, 1911), p. 433.
Scott Hess and John Sheehy, “Sonoma Mountain,” On a River Winding Home (Ensatina Press, 2018), pp. 60-64.
Lee Torliatt, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2001), pp. 22-27.
1881 Copeland Creek Easement between Thomas Hopper and M.J. Miller. Courtesy of Michael Healy personal collection.
Letter from David Wharff to A.P. Behrens, April 26, 1918. Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.
How Chinese Imports Doomed a Women’s Home Industry
Petaluma’s Carlson-Currier Silk Mill, built 1892, supported cheap silk imports over a domestic industry (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
On the evening of July 16, 1892, Ida Belle McNear called the women in her social coterie together for a meeting at Petaluma’s city hall. The topic was silk. Numerous attempts to create a raw silk industry in California over the previous 25 years had come to naught. Now, McNear believed she’d discovered a breakthrough.
Her father-in-law, grain merchant and capitalist John McNear, had recently convinced a San Francisco silk manufacturer to build a new mill in Petaluma. After some arm twisting, the mill’s executives, Edward Carlson and J.P. Currier, agreed to purchase California-grown raw silk from Ida Belle McNear at a 25% premium over the price they paid for imported raw silk from China. The men also warned her that her scheme would never work.
Ida Belle McNear, center pointing, with family members on the Petaluma wharf (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
Dauntless, the headstrong 32-year old McNear forged ahead, launching that evening at city hall the Petaluma Women’s Silk Association.
America’s dalliance with sericulture, or silk farming, began in 1825, after Congress approved the import of silk goods from Europe and China, setting off a new fashion fad. A year later, the white mulberry tree, moris multicaulis, was introduced to America from southeast Asia. When eaten by silkworms, the tree’s tender leaves produced silk of the highest quality.
1830s silk fashions (photos LACMA)
A subsequent “Mulberry Craze” soon overtook the country, giving rise to horticulture’s largest speculation bubble since the infamous “tulipmania” in 17th century Holland. Stock companies were formed to finance the plantings and import millions of silkworm eggs from Europe. Silk mills were rapidly constructed in New England and Michigan.
At the height of the market, the price of a young tree start rose from 5¢ to $5, before the bubble burst in 1839. Five years later, a mysterious blight destroyed what was left of America’s mulberry groves, forcing domestic factories to begin importing raw silk from Europe and Asia.
Poster for auction of mulberry trees in Connecticut, 1840 (photo crickethillgarden.com)
Twenty years later, a second American sericulture craze began after disease devastated mulberry groves in France and Italy. This time, the craze’s epicenter was California, whose Mediterranean climate made it ideal for growing mulberry trees.
Led by a French botanist named Louis Prevost, the craze was incentivized for the first two year by bounties from the state legislature of $250 for cultivating at least 5,000 mulberry trees and $300 for each 100,000 silk cocoons produced.
Orchards and vineyards were advised to border their roads and property lines with mulberry trees in preparation for the coming sericulture boom. California’s largest vineyard at that time, Buena Vista Winery in Sonoma, planted 3,000 mulberry trees around its 500 acres of grapes.
Diagram of the various stages of a silkworm (photo Barre Montpelier Times Argus)
Before the new craze could gain significant traction, Prevost died, leaving California sericulture to flounder as Europe recovered from its blight.
In 1880, imported raw silk sales surged to $13 million from a mere $3 million ten years earlier, as American women again became entranced with silk fashion. The sudden rise inspired a circle of influential Philadelphia women interested in promoting a domestic sericulture industry to form the Women’s Silk Culture Association of the United States.
Twelve auxiliary groups sprang up around the country, including in California, where a group of prominent suffragists with political clout formed the California Silk Culture Association.
Led by Elise Wiehe Hittell, wife of state senator and eminent California historian Theodore H. Hittell, the association’s members included Laura de Force Gordon, co-founder of the California Woman Suffrage Association, journalist, and the second female lawyer admitted to the state bar; Ellen Clark Sargent, treasurer of the National Woman Suffrage Association and wife of U.S. Senator Aaron Sargent; and Windsor’s Sarah Myers Latimer, a co-founder of the Sonoma Country Woman Suffrage Association and wife of California Superior Court Judge Lorenzo Latimer.
Portrait of Sarah Myers Latimer of Windsor by her son L.P. Latimer (photo Windsor Museum and Historical Society)
The women promoted sericulture as a home industry, pointing to Italy and France, where raising silk worms and reeling silk from cocoons was managed as a side business by women on family farms. In the five or six weeks it took each year to feed the worms and unreel the raw silk from the cocoons from 100 mulberry trees, a mother and her daughters were able make $300, or $8,500 in today’s currency, providing them with some economic independence.
Women reeling silk from cocoons, 1895 (photo History Museum, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints)
The silk culturists compared the work to that of raising chickens and eggs, which in the early 1880s appeared to defy industrialization, as chickens were still pastoral creatures who ranged about the barnyard and farm, leaving their eggs in mangers or under porches until the farm wife sent the children out to scare up any available eggs to sell for “pin-money” in town.
But industrialization was coming even for the chickens, thanks to innovations in the early 1880s of a Danish immigrant named Christopher Nisson at his Pioneer Hatchery in Two Rock.
Using an efficient new incubator developed in Petaluma by Isaac Dias and Lyman Byce, Nisson designed a poultry assembly line that began with hatching eggs in dozens of incubators, then placing the baby chicks in stove-heated brooder houses that served as surrogate mother hens. Once they were old enough to begin laying eggs themselves, they were moved them to a colony house, where their eggs could be easily collected.
Christopher Nisson’s Pioneer Hatchery, Two Rock, 1920 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
Nisson’s industrialized model would eventually give rise to a major egg boom in Petaluma that would last until the Great Depression.
Meanwhile, the women of the California Silk Association pressed forward with their craft-scale model for sericulture, using their political clout to persuaded the California legislature to create a State Board of Silk Culture, with five of its nine appointees drawn from the silk association. The state board distributed subsidies for planting mulberry trees and raising silk cocoons around the state, including in Sonoma County, where the sericulture effort was led by Frances Purrington on the farm she shared with her husband Joseph in Green Valley.
Laura De Force Gordon also convinced the legislature to appropriate $7,500 for funding for two years a free filature, or silk-reeling school, in San Francisco for young girls.
Laura de Force Gordon, 1887 (image Library of Congress)
On the promotional front, the women made a push at agricultural expositions, including the 1882 Philadelphia Silk Exposition, where cocoons raised by Mrs. H.C. Downing of San Rafael won first prize for exceptional quality; the 1884 Sonoma-Marin District Agricultural Fair, where a sericulture exhibit by horticulturalist Dr. Galen Burdell of Novato became the talk of the exposition; and the 1884 California state fair, where Lyman Byce’s new Petaluma Incubator Company displayed a baby incubator to improve the efficiency of hatching silkworm eggs.
The association also worked with the State Board of Silk Culture to promote silk culture in the public schools, distributing mulberry trees, silkworm eggs, and instructions to provide young girls with an elementary knowledge.
For most young women, the only employment available at the time was teaching, which only employed one in ten of them, or factory work. Many reported to having to marry unwisely in order to be supported. Silk culture was intended to teach them to earn money at home, and so provide them with an option to having to marry unwisely in order to be supported.
In 1885, the association helped to secure in the East Bay town of Piedmont one of five silk Experimental Stations established by the U.S. Department of Agricultural across the country to foster sericulture.
Piedmont Experimental Silk Culture Station, 1890s (photo History Room, Oakland Public Library)
Shortly after, Hittell spun off a new organization from the California Silk Association called the Ladies Silk Culture Society to foster sericulture for women in the state. The society’s membership such luminaries as Charles Crocker, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, U.S. Senator Leland Stanford, former state governor George C. Perkins, and a number of professors of agriculture and the sciences at the University of California.
The society assumed operation of the Experimental Silk Station in Piedmont, which consisted of a building for silk reeling and a eucalyptus-covered tract of 15 acres. With $10,000 appropriated from the state legislature, they replaced the eucalyptus with 6,000 mulberry trees and acquired half a million silkworm eggs for annual distribution. Hiring 100 women and girls, they used the station to teach people how to cultivate and handle silkworms, with the expectation they would be sent out as teachers of others in far reaches of the state.
Their efforts however faced an uphill battle with the industrialization overtaking the country. The Carlson-Currier Silk Mill in San Francisco publicly claimed to “have proven itself the fast friend of native-grown silk” by spinning some raw silk from the society’s Piedmont Experimental Station.
Trade card for Carlson & Currier, a subsidiary of Belding Bros. & Co. Silk Manufacturers, 1883 (California Historical Society)
However, as the west coast subsidiary of one of the country’s largest silk manufacturers, Michigan-based Belding Brothers & Company, their business relied upon cheap raw silk imports from Asia, where laborers made between 6 and 15 cents a day, versus $1 a day in California, for the tedious task of reeling raw silk from cocoons by hand. Half a pound represented a good day’s work.
Industrialists argued the solution was in labor-saving filature machinery that would take the silk directly from the cocoon and twist it for the weaver. American inventors set out to develop a reliable automatic reeling machine, but by the late 1880s, all attempts had proved disappointing.
In 1890, as import sales of raw silk rose to $24 million, or roughly $700 million in today’s currency, silk culturists called for tariffs on imported raw silk so as to make domestic sericulture competitive.
Silk dinner or reception dress in the 1880s (photo Frick Pittsburg)
Other industries were also lobbying congress for what came to be called the McKinley Act of 1890, a bill spearheaded by congressman and future president William McKinley, that raised duties of nearly 50% across a range of imported foreign goods to protect American manufacturing. Silk manufacturers, fearing silk tariffs would drive up consumer prices and thus reduce demand for silk goods, fought against the proposal, leading to its exclusion form the bill.
After the tariff battle, the political tide turned against silk culturalists, as government funding dried up at both the state and federal levels on the grounds that past appropriations had yielded poor results. In March of 1892, the Ladies Silk Culture Society purchased the Piedmont Experimental Silk Station from the U.S. government for a only $50, with plans to maintain it privately.
Four months later, Ida Belle McNear and the Petaluma Women’s Silk Association waded into the silk culture morass. Their plan was to set up a filature in Petaluma for reeling silk from cocoons they purchased from women around the state. They would then sell the raw silk to the new Carlson-Currier Silk Mill being constructed in town at an agreed upon 25% premium, making Petaluma the new silk center of California.
Carlson-Currier Silk Mill, Petaluma, 1910 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
Carlson-Currier had been lured to Petaluma from San Francisco with incentives provided by John McNear and other capitalists in the local Improvement Club, looking to transition the town into industrial center, the “Oakland of the North Bay.” The incentives included free land for the mill site and a bonus of $12,000, or $300,000 in today’s currency.
The club’s other big selling point was access to cheap labor, specifically girls and young women from town and the surrounding farms. They already filled the factory floors of Nolan-Earl Shoe Factory and Adams Box Factory in McNear’s new Factory District near the railroad depot, as well as the new poultry hatcheries springing up around town.
Ad in Petaluma Argus, September 1, 1909
Of the 200 employees Carlson-Currier ultimately employed after the mill opened in October, 1892, three quarters were female.
Merely three months after the new mill opened, Ida Belle McNear and the Petaluma Women’s Silk Association threw in the towel, realizing Carlson-Currier’s 25% premium for domestic raw silk was woefully insufficient in turning a profit on domestic sericulture. Labor costs alone for the two days it took a person to reel a pound of raw silk from cocoons by hand far outweighed the $1.40 per pound that Carlson-Currier paid for imported raw silk from Asia.
For largely the same reason, two years later the Ladies Silk Culture Society closed down their Piedmont Experimental Station, formally ending the dream of a home silk industry for women.
Inside Petaluma’s Carlson-Currier silk mill, subsidiary of Belding Bros. (photo Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library)
Meanwhile, Petaluma’s silk mill continued to grow and thrive, doubling in size during the fashion-conscious Roaring Twenties. However, the onset of the Great Depression decimated the luxury fabric market, as did the increasing popularity of cheaper synthetics like rayon and nylon, and the embargo Japan placed on silk exports in the years preceding World War II.
After the silk mill was forced to close down in 1939, the mill was purchased by the Sunset Line & Twine Company, which operated there until 2006, after which the building was converted to a boutique hotel.
Sunset Line & Twine, 1940s (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
*****
A version of this story appeared in the Sonoma Historian Journal, 2021 No. 1.
SOURCES:
Newspapers and Magazines
Los Angeles Times: David Karo, “The Fruit of Broken Dreams,” July 19, 2000.
Mercury News: Nilda Rego, “Days Gone By: Piedmont Clings to Its Caterpillars as Silkworm Mania Dies Out in California,” March 23, 2012.
Alameda Daily Argus: “Something About Silk,” November 24, 1883.
Petaluma Argus: “Our Fair,” September 1, 1882; “A Plea for Silk Culture,” March 28, 1885; “Eighteenth Annual Fair,” August 30, 1884; “Petaluma,” February 7, 1885; “The Multicaulis Mania,” June 27, 1885 (reprint from Harper’s Magazine, July 1885).
Petaluma Courier: “Silk Worms,” February 14, 1883; “The Petaluma Incubator,” October 8, 1884; “That Silkworm Foolishness,” July 30, 1890; “For a Silk Mill,” August 19, 1891; “Silk Factory Philosophy,” December 19, 1891; “The Silk Factory,” December 18, 1891; “Carlson-Currier Company,” October 19, 1892; “Silk Reeling,” January 24, 1893; “Personal Notes,” March 26, 1893.
San Francisco Call: “Enthusiastic Ladies,” July 17, 1892; Sericulture at Home,” October 2, 1892.
San Francisco Chronicle: “New Silk Mills,” S.F. Chronicle, November 29, 1891.
San Francisco Examiner: “Work for Women,” October 8, 1883; “A Young Industry,” June 23, 1884; “A Silk Culture Society,” June 5, 1885; “The Sericulturists,” October 14, 1887; “Signed by the Governor,” March 22, 1889; “The Culture of Silk,” January 25, 1891; “An Eloquent Arraignment,” March 24, 1891; “Silk Culture,” March 25, 1891; “In a Commercial Arcadia,” March 6, 1892; “Petaluma’s Silk Plant,” June 26, 1892; “To Stimulate Silk Culture,” July 21, 1892; “The Congress for Women,” May 2, 1894; “Horticulture and Agriculture,” January 24, 1894; “On the Wrong Track,” May 10, 1895;
Annual Report of the Women’s Silk Culture Association of the United States, Volume 3 (Philadelphia, April, 1883).
Stanton, Anthony, Gage, History of Woman’s Suffrage, Vol. 3, p. 762.
Nelson Klose, “Sericulture in the United States,” Agricultural History, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 225-234.
E.O. Essig, “Silk Culture in California,” Agricultural Experiment Station, Circular 363, October 1945, College of Agriculture University of California at Berkeley.
Evelyn Craig Pattiani, “Silk in Piedmont,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 4 (December, 1952), pp. 335-342.
