MARINER, REAL ESTATE SALESMAN, COAD YARD OPERATOR, JOURNALIST, AND SONOMA COUNTY’S FIRST HISTORIAN
It’s New Year’s Day 1875, and you have settled in Sonoma County. Twenty-five years have passed since the county was established; one hundred years since the area’s first significant Spanish contact. Like others, you made the hazardous journey west looking for prosperity and happiness. Instead, you’ve faced years of uncertainty. You’ve seen agricultural booms and busts, cataclysmic fires and floods, property battles over Mexican land grants, and ugly political divisions during the Civil War.
Now, a national recession is driving down crop and livestock prices. Farmers are losing their land. Capitalists are creating “bonanza farms” using steam-powered machinery. Unemployment is on the rise, generating hostilities toward low-paid Chinese immigrants.
What you could use is some assurance, an acknowledgement that despite all the turmoil, your sacrifices, hard work, and persistence have been worthwhile. On January 2, 1875, it arrives; a special edition of the Sonoma Democrat commemorating Sonoma County’s 25th anniversary hits the newsstands.[1]
The county’s first extensive history, the edition sidesteps its troubled times, focusing instead on the successful efforts of hardworking settlers like yourself in creating such a prosperous region.
Its author, Robert A. Thompson, Jr., or “Bob” as he is known, seems an unlikely choice for first county historian. A former San Francisco coal dealer, he has been working at the Sonoma Democrat for only two years. The style and format of his history, however, point to something of his intentions, as they mimic the text found in popular county atlases across the country.
A phenomenon launched in the Midwest soon after the Civil War, the county atlas is a large, 15-by-18-inch, leather-bound book designed for parlor table display. Available only by pre-order from door-to-door canvassers, it sells for about $15 a copy ($460 in today’s currency). Each book contains more than 100 pages of hand-colored maps of a county’s landholdings and towns, as well as biographies commissioned by prominent settlers, and illustrations of farms, businesses, and buildings also commissioned by their owners. An uplifting county history ties all the pieces together.[2]
Bob began writing his history in 1874, the same year the two creators of the county atlas phenomenon, Louis H. Evarts and Thomas H. Thompson, announced plans to bring their atlas phenomenon to California.[3] A year later, Thompson (no relation to Bob) launched a new atlas publishing company in San Francisco with Albert A. West. They called the company “Thompson & West.”[4]
The two began by developing atlases for Santa Clara, Solano, and Alameda counties. In 1876, they decided to add Sonoma County to the mix, which was when they met Bob.[5]
The Thompson Brothers
A member of a prominent Virginia family—both his father and grandfather had served in Congress—Bob sailed for California as a mariner in 1852, after graduating from the University of Virginia.[6] His uncle, Philip Roote Thompson, Jr.— one of Sonoma County’s first judges—had already settled in Petaluma.[7]
The following year, Bob’s father, former Virginian congressman Robert A. Thompson, Sr., was appointed to the three-man California Land Commission. Charged with sorting out the legal claims to the state’s 813 Mexican land grants, the commission helped lay the ground for a new gold rush of land sharks and speculators in the state.[8] Looking to cash in, Bob’s uncle, Judge Philip Thompson, opened a real estate office in Petaluma and hired Bob as a sales agent.[9]
In 1860, Bob married Elizabeth West, a fellow Virginian, and settled in San Francisco operating a coal yard.[10] Twelve years later, in 1872, he sold the coal business and moved his family to Santa Rosa to work as an editor for his younger brother, Thomas Larkin Thompson, owner of the Sonoma Democrat newspaper.[11]
“Tom,” as he was known, came to California in 1855 at age 17. A printing apprentice, he worked a couple months at the San Francisco Herald before moving to Petaluma to launch the town’s first newspaper, the Petaluma Weekly Journal and Sonoma County Advertiser. After six months, he sold that paper and returned to the Herald before taking a job at the San Francisco Post Office. In 1860, he purchased the Sonoma Democrat and moved to Santa Rosa.[12]
Raised in a slave-owning family, the Thompsons held white supremacist and Anglocentric views which they unabashedly expressed in the Sonoma Democrat.[13] During the Civil War, the newspaper served as the voice of Southern settlers in Sonoma County, arguing for the legality of slavery under States Rights, publishing Confederate propaganda that teetered on the brink of treason, and dismissing Union victories as fake news.[14]
Soon after the war, Tom sold the Sonoma Democrat and moved to Vallejo, where he briefly published two newspapers. He returned to Santa Rosa in 1871, repurchased the Sonoma Democrat, and hired his brother Bob along with a second brother, Frank, a printer, as co-editors.[15]
All three brothers harbored political ambitions. First to realize them was Frank, who was appointed California’s state printer in 1875.[16] Bob meanwhile set his sights on becoming Sonoma County clerk. Writing the county’s first history that year was likely his means of burnishing his credentials.[17]
In 1876, atlas publishers Thomas Thompson and Albert West came calling at the Sonoma Democrat, seeking an endorsement of their forthcoming Sonoma County book. Upon learning the newspaper had already published a county history Bob produced the year before—in their format no less—they agreed to let Bob write an expanded version of his history for inclusion in their atlas. They also gave him rights to publish the history independently.[18]
In August 1877, The Historical Atlas of Sonoma County was delivered to its subscribers.[19] The book featured 12 colored maps; 15 town and village plats; 120 commissioned illustrations of farms, businesses, and buildings; five commissioned biographies and portraits of prominent settlers; and Bob’s enhanced history.
A few weeks before its release, Bob announced his candidacy for county clerk. He also published his atlas history in a separate pamphlet entitled A Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, making it available in bookstores for$1 ($30 in today’s currency). Campaigning on his laurels as the county’s first historian, Bob was elected to his first of three consecutive terms as Sonoma County clerk.[20]
Thompson’s History of Sonoma County
In following the county atlas format for his history, Bob provided a straightforward description of Sonoma County’s origins, climate, geography, topography, agriculture, and industries, drawing upon county records and newspaper clippings. He made some minor errors—Mariano Vallejo’s Rancho Petaluma, for example, consisted of 66,000 acres, not the 75,000 cited in his history—but he provided a quantitative account of the county’s agricultural and industrial output over its first 25 years.[21]
To fill in gaps in the official records, Bob relied upon interviews with early settlers. Some of those accounts, as Sonoma County historian Jeff Elliott noted, had the veracity of stories shared over beers in a local saloon.[22]
That’s because, as cleverly demonstrated in Akira Kurosawa’s famous 1950 film Rashomon, the human memory can be a fickle storyteller. Wildly selective, muddled, and malleable, it feeds on feelings and experiences to construct meaning. If rigorous, evidence-based history can be said to be secular in its willingness to incorporate new findings and perspectives, memory commits to a sacred set of fixed stories that speak to heritage and identity, even if they are not entirely factual.[23]
A telling example is Bob’s depiction of the 1854 transfer of the county seat from Sonoma to Santa Rosa. He described the transfer of country records by wagon as taking place under “dire threats of injunction and violence from the Sonoma people.” That dramatic account was later disputed by the teamster who actually conveyed the records.[24]
Other oral histories gathered by Bob would cloud the historical record for decades to come. Petaluma’s founding in 1852 is a case in point. Bob identified the town’s founder simply as “a man named Keller.” He also mistakenly identified the town’s first postmaster as an early merchant named W.D. Kent, when in fact it was the mysterious Keller’s 21-year-old son, Garret Valentine Keller.[25]
The postmaster error was subsequently corrected by J.P. Munro-Fraser in his 1880 History of Sonoma County, but that correction led later historians to mistakenly assume Petaluma’s founder was “G.W. Keller.”[26] It wasn’t until 2021 that the city’s true founder was determined to be Garret’s father, George Horine Keller, who went on to cofound the city of Leavenworth, Kansas.[27]
Bob also failed to mention that Keller founded Petaluma illegally on part of a Mexican land grant he didn’t own. While Bob did recount the legal battle over the land grant’s proper ownership, he left out the fact that the city was in legal limbo for 20 years until 1874, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally resolved the matter.[28]
Likewise, Bob steered clear of other contentious conflicts over land grants, including the armed showdown in 1859 between the Settlers’ League and the owner of the Bodega Rancho. Instead, he falsely asserted that land grant claims “were settled without much dispute or delay, and the sub-divided lands were purchased by industrious and enterprising farmers.”[29]
Omissions like those are common in Bob’s history. Like a modern-day visitors center, he focused on celebrating the progress of early settlers, social organizations, businesses, and cultural traditions. In doing so, he promoted a false inevitability to Sonoma County’s creation.
That wasn’t unusual for the county atlas genre itself, which blatantly embraced the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, America’s divine duty to conquer, settle, and prosper in the promised land of the west.[30] Hubert Howe Bancroft, who was assembling a comprehensive history of California at the time, was a major proponent. (His namesake, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, recently issued a report criticizing his work as “riddled with contradictions, tensions, and ambiguities.”) [31]
In adhering to Manifest Destiny in the scope and context of his history, Bob buried or minimized the conflicts, failures, and injustices of the county’s formation. That included turning a blind eye to the exploitation and devastation of the indigenous population when the region was under Spanish and Mexican rule. For an account of that period, Bob appears to have relied upon the writings of Mariano Vallejo, who, at Bancroft’s request, had recently written his own five-volume history.[32]
Vallejo largely positioned the decimation of the region’s native peoples as inevitable and beyond human control, thereby absolving him and others of any moral responsibility for their acts of violence, massacre, and malfeasance. That included his role in the lethal smallpox epidemic of 1838. While ample means of inoculation were available, he distributed them primarily to his fellow Californios, but not to the natives working in servitude at his Petaluma Adobe.[33]
It is not surprising that of the five commissioned biographies featured in the 1877 Historical Atlas of Sonoma County—presumably written by Bob—one is a glowing tribute to Vallejo, praised for having led a “more honorable” life than any man could claim.[34]
That biography captures in a nutshell the calculated distortion of Bob’s historical account. Despite his useful compilation of historical records, his history’s origin as part of a publication targeted to the financial interests, concerns, and ideological values of its paid subscribers—many of them prominent settlers and capitalists able to afford such a costly book—compromises its integrity as little more than propagandizing history.
It is best read as a reminder of how power, ambition, and money control the narrative of what is to be remembered, and what is left behind to be forgotten.
Bob Thompson Postscript
As for Bob, after serving three terms as Sonoma County Clerk, he returned in 1882 to editing the Sonoma Democrat following his brother Tom’s election as California’s Secretary of State. In 1884, Bob published a history of Santa Rosa before accepting an appointment as San Francisco’s port appraiser. He returned to the Democrat in 1893 when Tom was designated U.S. minister to Brazil. Four years later, the Thompson brothers sold the newspaper after Tom returned from Brazil following a nervous breakdown. He committed suicide a few months later.[35]
Bob made an unsuccessful run for Secretary of State in 1898, then returned to journalism, spending his final years as general manager of Out West magazine in San Francisco. At the time of his death in 1903, he was working on a history of California.[36]
A version of this story appeared in two parts in the 2026 Summer and Fall editions of the Sonoma Historian.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “The County of Sonoma: A Brief Historical Sketch,” Sonoma Democrat, January 2, 1875.
[2] Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pps. 37-39; Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, p. 169; “Board of Supervisors,” Sonoma Democrat, March 11, 1876; “Board of Supervisors,” Petaluma Argus, September 21, 1877. Note on pricing: In 1876, Sonoma County’s Board of Supervisors approved the purchase of 15 copies of the Sonoma County atlas for $225, or $15 each. They approved an additional acquisition of one copy in 1877 for $15.
[3] “The Coming Atlas of California,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 18, 1874; Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, “Picturing Progress: Assessing the Nineteenth-Century Atlas-Map Bonanza,” Michigan Historical Review, Vol. 30, No. 2, Fall 2004), pps. 171-172; Note: In 1874, Evarts and Thompson planned to create a state atlas of California, based on a state atlas they had just completed for Minnesota.
[4] David F. Myrick, Introduction to the 1958 Reprinted Edition of Thompson & West’s History of Nevada, 1881 (Howell-North, Berkeley, CA, 1958), p. h; Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, p. 168.
[5] “County News,” Vallejo Chronicle, September 29, 1876; “Proposed New Maps,” Oakland Tribune, January 25, 1877; “Nine Men Have Had Part in Building P.D. in the Last 71 Yrs.,” Press Democrat, October 28, 1928.
[6] U.S. Census, California, 1852, p. 699: Bob is listed as living in San Francisco as a mariner.
[7] Died,” Sonoma Democrat, November 5, 1864; The Historical Atlas of Sonoma County (Oakland, CA: Thompson & Co., 1877), p. 19; “Pen is Laid Aside,” Press Democrat, August 5, 1903; Sonoma County Deeds, Liber B, Book K, Page 176, February 15, 1853; Note: In 1853, Philip R. Thompson purchased from Mariano Vallejo 160 acres for his ranch at the southwest corner of Adobe and Corona roads, where Bethel School (later known as Waugh School) was located.
[8] “The Late Judge Thompson,” Sonoma Democrat, September 9, 1876; David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (October., 1979), pgs. 438, 443; Hornbeck, pps. 435-438; Donald J. Pisani, “Squatter Law in California, 1850-1858,” Western Historical Quarterly, Autumn, 1994, Vol. 25, No. 3, pps. 286, 291-292.
[9] Ad for Philip R. Thompson, Petaluma Journal, September 22, 1855; Ad for Thompson & Shattuck, Petaluma Journal, November 28, 1856; “List of Letters,” Petaluma Journal, October 2, 1857: letter waiting at Petaluma post office for R. Thompson; “List of Delinquent Taxes,” Sonoma Democrat, November 28, 1858: Robt. Thompson listed as agent in sale of 160 acres in Petaluma valley to Andrew Glassell, a relative, for $1,280.
[10] “Married,” Sonoma Democrat, May 3, 1860; “Births,” Sonoma County Journal, June 21, 1861: In San Francisco, wife of R.A. Thompson gave birth to a son, Andrew; Ad for R.A. Thompson & Co. Coal Yard, San Francisco Examiner, November 29, 1865; U.S. Census, California,1870, p. M593: Robert A. Thompson, coal dealer, living in San Francisco’s 10th Ward with wife Elizabeth and four children, including Andrew, age 9.
[11] Ad for R.A. Thompson, Dealer in Coal and Wood, San Francisco Examiner, August 15, 1871: this the final ad for Thompson’s coal yard to appear in any San Francisco newspapers.
[12] Newspaper Change,” Nevada Democrat, May 9, 1860; “Thomas L. Thompson,” Petaluma Courier, February 1, 1898.
[13] Jeff Elliott, Santa Rosa History, Santarosahistory.com: “A Far Away Outpost of Dixie,” June 29, 2018, “Lessons on Who Is Much Lesser Than You,” August 7, 2020, “A Short Truce in the (Un)Civil War,” September 18, 2017; Thompson family as slaveowners: 1850 U.S. Census Kanawha, Virginia: P.R. Thompson, Jr: 53 years old; farmer; also living in the property: Sarah (43), Philip (19), Susan (17), George (13) Lucy (14), Eliza (9), Lillias (7), Ellen (5), George (3) and seven slaves without names assigned to them.
[14] Gaye LeBaron, “Sonoma County Marks 165 years of Local Newspapers,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, October 22, 2021; Jeff Elliott, “A Far Away Outpost of Dixie,” June 29, 2018, “A Short Truce in the (Un)civil War,” September 18, 2017, Santa Rosa History, Santarosahistory.com.
[15] “Changed Hands,” Petaluma Argus, July 8, 1871; Masthead, Sonoma Democrat, June 15, 1872: first listing of Thomas L. Thompson, publisher and proprietor; R.A. Thompson and F.P. Thompson, editors; “Thompson Was a Pioneering Publisher,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 3, 1975. Note: Tom Thompson mistakenly believed Vallejo would become the North Bay’s main shipping port once the California Pacific Railroad laid its tracks from Vallejo to Santa Rosa. Instead, a competing railway, the San Francisco & Northern Pacific Railroad, established the main commercial route from the Petaluma River near Lakeville to Santa Rosa. In Vallejo, Thompson operated the Solano Democrat and the Vallejo Daily Independent; Jeff Elliott, “Santa Rosa’s 1871 Railroad Riots,” Santa Rosa History, December 6, 2108, http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2018/12/santa-rosas-1871-railroad-riots/
[16] Pacific Coast Items,” Marysville Daily Appeal, December 11, 1875.
[17] “Democrats,” Petaluma Argus, June 25, 1875.
[18] “Nailed to the Counter,” Sonoma Democrat, June 19, 1877; “A Kindly Recommendation,” Sonoma Democrat, June 19, 1877; “Sonoma County,” Petaluma Argus, September 21, 1877; “Now Ready,” Petaluma Courier, October 4, 1877.
[19] “Thompson’s Sonoma Atlas,” Petaluma Courier, August 16, 1877; Historical Atlas of Sonoma County (Oakland, CA: Thompson & Co., 1877), p. 3; Note: the Sonoma County atlas was published under the imprint “Thos. H. Thompson & Co.,” presumably because Thompson’s partner, Albert West, was not involved with writing the history section; “Sonoma County,” Petaluma Argus, September 21, 1877.
[20] “Democratic Ticket,” Petaluma Argus, July 20, 1877; “Sonoma County,” Petaluma Argus, September 21, 1877; “Board of Supervisors,” Petaluma Argus, September 21, 1877; Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts, 1877). Note: L.H. Everts was Thomas H. Thompson’s former atlas partner in Illinois, implying that T.H. Thompson may have arranged its publication; “Sonoma County,” Petaluma Argus, September 21, 1877; “Board of Supervisors,” Petaluma Argus, September 21, 1877.
[21] Historical Atlas of Sonoma County, p. 14; Ogden Hoffman, Reports of Land Cases Determined in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (Numa Hubert, San Francisco, 1862), Appendix, p. 35. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hornbeck_usa_3_d/16/
[22] Historical Atlas of Sonoma County, p. 3; Jeff Elliott, “The Fable of the Stolen Courthouse,” August 31, 2017, Santa Rosa History, Santarosahistory.com.
[23] Betsy Brinson, “Crossing Cultures: An Interview with Alessandro Portelli,” Oral History Review, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter/Spring 2001), p. 108; David Blight, “History and ‘Memory,” Commonplace, the Journal of Early American Life, Issue 2.3, April 2002.
[24] Historical Atlas of Sonoma County, pps. 20½ -21; Tom Gregory, History of Sonoma County (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1911), pps. 149-150.
[25] “Post Offices in California,” Sacramento Daily Union, November 15, 1852; Postmasters 1832-1971, Archives. Gov. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html; Note: it appears Petaluma’s first post office was located in George Horine Keller’s general store on Washington Street beside the Petaluma River.
[26] J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (Allen, Bowen & Co., 1880) pps. 259-260; Tom Gregory, History of Sonoma County (Los Angeles, Historic Record Company,1911) p. 177: identifies Petaluma’s founder as “G.W. Keller”; Ed Mannion, Rear-View Mirror column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 2, 1960: lists “G.W. Keller” as Petaluma’s founder.
[27] “The True Story of Petaluma’s Founder,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 11, 2021; “Territorial Legislature of 1857-58,” Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, p. 211.
[28] “The True Story of Petaluma’s Founder,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 11, 2021; “Letter from Petaluma,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1855.
[29] Historical Atlas of Sonoma County, p. 13; “Settler Excitement,” “The Bodega Difficulty,” Sonoma County Journal, June 3, 1859; Jeff Elliott, “The Man Who Stole Bodega Bay,” Santa Rosa History blog, May 17, 2014, http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2014/05/the-man-who-stole-bodega-bay/
[30] Anders Stephenson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (NY: Hill & Wang, 1995).
[31] Bancroft Library Reckoning Committee Final Report, UC Berkeley Chancellor’s office, June 2025, https://chancellor.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/blrc_public_report_june_2025.pdf.
[32] Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo: Life in Spanish, Mexican, and American California (University of Oklahoma Press, 2025), p. xiv. Note: Vallejo wrote his five-volume history of Alta California, Recuerdos: Historical and Personal Remembrances Relating to Alta California, at the request of California historian Hubert H. Bancroft, who subsequently rejected publishing them.
[33] Historical Atlas of Sonoma County, p. 29; Sherbourne F. Cook, “Smallpox in Spanish and Mexican California (1770-1854),” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, v.7, (February 1939), pps. 153-191; Benjamin Madley, American Genocide (Yale University Press, 2017), p. 185; Beebe and Senkewicz, p. 60.
[34] Historical Atlas of Sonoma County, p. 94.
[35] Robert A. Thompson, Central Sonoma: A Brief Description of the Township and Town of Santa Rosa (San Francisco, Wm H. Hinton & Company, 1884); “R.A. Thompson Resigns,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 24, 1891; “What is Said,” Sonoma Democrat, April 29, 1893; “Thomas L. Thompson,” Petaluma Courier, February 1, 1898; “R.A. Thompson,” Petaluma Courier, August 4, 1903; “Newspaper Change,” Healdsburg Tribune, September 30, 1897.
[36] “Curry Elected Secretary of State,” San Francisco Chronicle,” November 16, 1898; “Out West,” San Francisco Call Bulletin, February 16, 1902; “R.A. Thompson,” Petaluma Courier, August 4, 1903.