Category: Petaluma’s Early Black Community

In September of 1855, George Webster Miller took out in advertisement in the Sonoma County Journal, Petaluma’s newspaper at the time, announcing the opening of his new Humboldt Shaving & Hair Dressing Saloon on Main Street, two doors north of today’s Putnam Plaza. Miller had just moved to Petaluma from San Francisco, where he had resided for four years, with his twenty-three year old wife Catherine and their two infant children, Elizabeth and George Frank. Although Miller proclaimed in his ad that he was determined to please his customers “in the tonsorial art,” his intentions extended beyond merely providing a close shave and a good haircut.[1]

Like a number of free-born, educated Blacks from the Northeast and Midwest, Miller had come to California looking for economic and social opportunities at the height of the Gold Rush. A native of New Jersey, the twenty-five-year old Miller had arrived in California in 1850 via the Steamer Pacific, which meant that he would have sailed from New York to Nicaragua, traveled cross that country by boat on the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua, then taken a stagecoach to the west coast port of San Juan del Sal, where he would have boarded the sidewheel steamer Pacific bound for San Francisco.

The route, operated by shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, transported many people to California during the Gold Rush, including both free and enslaved African Americans, most of whom headed straight for the mining towns.[2] Slaves brought to California by their Southern owners to work the mines, where often able to purchase their freedom by working nights in the mines to earn money.[3]

As news of Blacks finding success and freedom in California spread among newspapers back east like Frederick Douglass’ North Star, the state’s black population climbed from 962 in 1850 to 4,800 by 1855. Half of the newcomers settled in the mining counties of El Dorado, Yuba, Nevada, and Sacramento; a third in the fast-growing city of San Francisco; and the remainder in towns like Petaluma, then a small but bustling river town supplying San Francisco with agricultural goods.^[4]

In California, most free Black men and women were relegated to low skilled and poorly paid jobs. One of the more lucrative occupations for Black men however was barbering. In the South, slave owners had turned a profit by leasing out black barbers to neighboring plantations and local establishments to groom both slaves and affluent white men alike. As a result, many Black men literally “cut” their way to freedom.[5]

Access to an exclusive white clientele provided Black barbers with economic and social advantages that placed them in positions of prestige among Black communities. As customers demanded a high level of gentility from their surroundings, barbers were also expected to excel as interior decorators. The best of these shops were what historian Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr., author of Knights of the Razor, a history of Black barbers, called “first-class.”

Barbers cultivated the personae to match these surroundings. Refined in dress and graceful in movement, they were also expert conversationalists, engaging and entertaining their customers while they worked. They were disseminators of every bit of news, politics, gossip, and anecdote customers shared with each other in the shop. But they also had to watch their step.

If their knowledge of politics or business was too extensive, or their jokes too pointed, customers might accuse them of overstepping racial boundaries—with potentially disastrous consequences. Their biggest challenge was the simple intimacy of the shop between the barber and patron. Listening in on the schemes and foibles of the white elite, they were expected to keep their secrets in confidence.[6]

Navigating these situations, a number of 19th-century barbers parlayed their work into economic independence, and in a few cases, investments that brought them extraordinary wealth. In a number of U.S. cities, Black barbers ranked among the richest and most powerful members of the free Black community.[7] 

In turn, they often used their prestige to advance the welfare of those communities, occupied positions of authority in Black organizations and working side-by-side ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in California, which persistently advocated for the social improvement, religious autonomy, and political engagement of Blacks.[8]  

Two months after arriving in Petaluma, George Miller traveled to St. Andrew’s A.M.E. Church in Sacramento to attend the first Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California. The convention drew forty-nine attendees, representing all of California’s ten counties, with Miller serving as Sonoma County’s sole representative. Its primary focus was to mobilize Blacks to lobby for rescinding the state’s restriction laws on African Americans.

Although California had entered the Union in 1850 as a free, non-slave state, the early state legislature enacted a number proscriptions against people of color—specifically, Blacks, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants—including the right to testify against a white person in court, homestead on public land, attend publicly-funded common schools, and vote.[9]

After its inaugural meeting in 1855, the Colored Citizens Convention held annual meetings again in 1856 and 1857, with George Miller once again representing Sonoma County (along in 1857 with Elisha Banks, also of Petaluma).

At the 1857 gathering Miller reported that Sonoma County’s Black population—which in 1850 had consisted of just Joseph and Louisa Silver, two free blacks working as servants to Santa Rosa physician Elisha Ely—had grown to seventy-two, thirty-one of whom resided in Petaluma and were living independently.

Of the remanding forty-one, twenty-seven were listed as farmers, with all but one claimed as slaves by their employers from the South, who, like many other southerners in Sonoma County, had settled primarily on the Santa Rosa plain.[10] Petaluma, by contrast, had drawn as much as fifty percent of its early white population from the Northeastern states, and another twenty percent from Europe, Britain, and Ireland.[11]

The differences in the background composition of the two towns became more pronounced and acrimonious during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era, as expressed in the adversarial relationship between their respective newspapers, the Petaluma Argus and the Sonoma Democrat, with Santa Rosa’s paper backing the Confederacy, and Petaluma’s paper supporting the Union. As a result, Petaluma’s small Black community enjoyed a relatively more supportive social, political, and economic environment than was found in Santa Rosa.[12]

Freedom for former slaves in California became tenuous in 1852 after the state passed its own version of the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, allowing whites to keep slaves they had brought into California as long as they eventually transported them back to the South. This placed freed slaves, who often lacked clear legal documentation of their freedom, at risk of being kidnapped and sold back into slavery in the South.[13]

The state of affairs for all Blacks in California became more precarious in the mid-1850s, when many whites, concerned that their economic livelihoods were being threatened by the relatively cheap labor provided by Blacks and Chinese workers, mounted an anti-immigration campaign to drive them from the state.

In 1858, after the state assembly approved a bill banning further Black immigration, some blacks fled the state, a number of them to British Columbia, where a new gold strike was underway. The bill subsequently died in the state senate, overshadowed by passage of the first anti-Chinese immigration law.[14]

Despite the general adversarial climate in California, some of the legal restrictions Blacks faced began to lift in the early 1860s, as Republicans gained control of the governorship and state legislature. In 1863, the Franchise League, a lobbying group formed by members of the Colored Conventions, succeeded in securing Blacks the right to testify in court, placing a check on the immunity violent white racists had benefitted from. In 1862, the Federal Homesteading Act overrode the prohibitions California had placed on Black homesteaders with its Homesteading Acts of 1851 and 1860.[15]

One area however where  Blacks were dealt a setback was access to education. Along with Chinese and Indian students, they had been excluded from California’s common public schools since the state’s admission to the Union in 1850. The California School Law of 1855 strengthened that exclusionary policy by providing school funding based strictly on the number of white students attending a school. The policy was further fortified by an 1860 law that prohibited public schools from admitting “Negroes and Mongolians” under the threat of losing all funding.^[16]

For George Miller and the other members of the Colored Conventions—most of whom had been educated as free men in the North—access to education was vital to Black success in California, not only in terms of becoming financially autonomous, but also in being viewed as educated and respected members of the community, and hopefully extinguishing some of the racist attitudes that whites held toward them. By embargoing Blacks from entering public schools, California was choosing to perpetuate the Southern fallacy that Blacks didn’t have the ability to survive off the plantation because of their illiteracy.

At the 1855 Colored Convention, members made it one of their top priorities to lobby the state legislature to educate all of California’s children. But they also took matters into their own hands, pooling their resources to buy land and create private schools for black children, often in alliance with the A.M.E. Church, which opened its basements for use as school rooms, deployed its ministers and their wives to serve as teachers, and raised money from its congregations to keep the schools operating.[17]

Petaluma at the time lacked both an A.M.E. Church and a school for black children. George Miller set out to change that. By the early 1860s, his Humboldt Shaving & Hairdressing Saloon was thriving. In 1861, he added a bath house, and in 1863 moved into the newly constructed Towne Building on Main Street across from the American Hotel (today a small parking lot extending between Petaluma Boulevard North and Water Street).[18]

That same year, Miller was joined by another Black barber in town, Frank Vandry Miller, who had immigrated to American from Jamaica in 1843. He opened up his barbershop a couple doors down from George Miller’s shop, also in the Towne Building.[19]

While the Chinese residents in Petaluma at the time lived close together in a designated “Chinese colony” on Main Street between Western Avenue and B Street, there was no clearly distinguished pattern of neighborhood groupings among Black residents. They lived in buildings scattered throughout the city. As a result, a challenge George Miller and other local Black leaders faced was bringing the Black community together. The appearance in 1862 of the Pacific Appeal, the west coast’s first major black newspaper, provided them with one means of doing that.

Sporting the motto “He who would be free, himself must strike the blow,” the Pacific Appeal was co-founded by Peter Anderson, an early leader of the Colored Conventions, and Philip Alexander Bell, a pioneering Black journalist from New York. Launched in San Francisco shortly after the demise of California’s first black newspaper, Mirror of the Times, the Pacific Appeal provided a voice for California’s Black communities.[20] George Miller immediately signed on as the newspaper’s distribution agent in Petaluma and Santa Rosa, and Frank Miller as their agent in Sonoma.[21]

In an early edition of the Pacific Appeal, George Miller offered a colorful account of his weekly delivery route aboard the horse-drawn mail wagon from Petaluma to Santa Rosa (a five hour ride), describing some of the newspaper’s subscribers he conversed with along the way, including Santa Rosa barber John Richards.[22]

Born into slavery in Kentucky in 1824, Richards had made his way in 1856, after having acquired his freedom, to Santa Rosa, California, where he opened a shaving saloon and bathhouse at the southwest corner of Main (Santa Rosa Avenue) and Second streets.[23] By the early 1860s, Richards had established branches of his barbershop in Ukiah and Lakeport, and had also began to acquire large land holdings, eventually amassing an estate more than $12,000 ($300,000 in early 21^st century currency), making him one of the most prosperous men in Sonoma County.[24] He and Miller would become close allies in educational initiatives for Blacks in Sonoma County.

In addition to networking among Sonoma County’s Black community, George Miller kept strong ties to the Black community in San Francisco, making frequent visits to the city, where he stayed in Black boarding houses.[25] In July of 1862, he represented Sonoma County at the Grand Festival of the Colored Citizens of San Francisco commemorating the emancipation of slavery in the British West Isles and the District of Columbia.[26] Six months later, upon President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, he joined in a large celebration held at Platt’s Hall on Montgomery Street in the city.[27]

By 1863, Miller’s wife Catherine had given birth to two more children, bringing the total number of school-age children in their house to four. Miller felt that it was time to establish a school for African American children in town. On December 4th, he organized a gathering of Petaluma’s Black community, presided over by John Richards of Santa Rosa. (Richards would personally fund the opening of Santa Rosa’s “colored school” a year later in January, 1865).^[28] After the meeting, the group pooled their resources to rent a small house on Washington Street and furnish it with seats and desks.

They also began recruiting for a teacher in the pages of the Pacific Appeal. A young Black woman from San Francisco named Mrs. Rachel Coursey, responded to the query. Despite having been married just six months before to John G. Coursey, a music teacher at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in San Francisco, Rachel Coursey came to Petaluma and began teaching at the so-called “colored school” on opening day, January 11, 1864.^[29]

Two months after the school opened, the California Supreme Court ruled that public school districts were required to provide “separate but equal” schools for Blacks, except in cases where there were fewer than ten such students in the district, in which case they would be integrated into white schools. At the time, there were 831 Black children of school age living in California. After some pushback, two years later, the Revised School Law of 1866 specified that in the event a town had fewer than ten Black children, the school district could integrate those students into its white schools, assuming that a majority of the white parents didn’t object—a clause that would later become a bone of contention in Petaluma.^[30]

Although Petaluma’s “colored school” had only eight students, George Miller’s group succeeded in obtaining public funding for their “colored school” after the passage of the new school law, thanks in part to Petaluma’s new Superintendent of Public Schools, Rev. Edward S. Lippitt, a Republican abolitionist minister originally from Connecticut.[31] By the end of 1864, Petaluma was identified as one of six California cities with a public-funded “colored school,” the others being San Francisco, Sacramento, Marysville, San Jose, and Stockton.^[32]

Miller’s group also launched plans in 1864 to establish an Black church in Petaluma.[33] For help, they turned to the A.M.E.’s Presiding Elder, Rev. Thomas M.D. Ward of San Francisco’s Bethel A.M.E. Church. Miller knew Ward from the Colored Conventions, where Ward had played a major role. Ward traveled by steamer to Petaluma where, in a makeshift church, he delivered a Sunday sermon entitled “The Importance of Mental and Moral Culture Among the Colored People of America.”[34]

By 1965, Miller’s group had secured the use of a house near the northwest corner of Western Avenue and Howard Street, believed to be the Greek Revival house at 109 Howard Street, to serve as Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church.^[35]

Rev. Ward assigned seventy-five year-old Peter Killingsworth to serve as pastor.^[36] Born into slavery in South Carolina, Killingsworth had immigrated to California in 1857 after purchasing his and his wife’s freedom in Atlanta, Georgia, for $3,000 ($93,000 in early 21^st century currency).

Soon after they reached California foothills, Killingsworth’s wife died in El Dorado County. The reverend consoled himself knowing that “her bones lie in the free soil of El Dorado.”^[37] Prior to being assigned to Petaluma, Killingsworth had served as a clergy member of the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Sacramento, and as one of their traveling preachers with assignments in Grass Valley, Nevada County, and San Jose.^[38]

Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church opened sometime in the summer of 1865, and was formally dedicated in a ceremony presided over by the Rev. Ward on December 10, 1865, an event that also served as a fundraiser to address the $150 debt still looming over the church ($2,400 in early 21^st century currency).^[39]

Rev. Killingworth would sometimes feature A.M.E. pastors from other parts of California to deliver Sunday services, as well as invite white men and women from the local Methodist Episcopal Church, where School Superintendent Rev. Edward S. Lippitt served as pastor, to teach at Sunday school classes.^[40] In addition to serving as a place of worship and religious education, the church also provided a meeting place for George Miller and other members of the Black community interested in securing their civil rights.^[41]

To that end, in November of 1865, Rev. Killingsworth attended the fourth Colored Convention in Sacramento, where he served as Sonoma County’s sole representative and also the convention’s chaplain. In his report on Sonoma County, Killingsworth noted that the county had seventy Black residents, comprised of fifty-five adults and twenty children.

Twelve of the adults were general laborers, ten farmers, seven barbers, two blacksmiths, and two carpenters. Together, their combined property holdings were estimated to have a total valuation of $25,000 ($400,000 in early 21^st century currency). Killingsworth also noted that the county had one Black church and one Black schoolhouse (Santa Rosa’s “colored school” was clearly operating at that time, but it’s not certain that Petaluma’s was still active).^[42]

The members of the Colored Convention were generally hopeful that year, seeking to capitalize on California’s changing social and political climate in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, the end of the Civil War, and California’s Republican-dominated legislature led by Governor Leland Stanford, which, in 1863, had repealed California’s ban on blacks testifying in court against whites. The convention’s Committee on Education revised their proposal from their earlier conventions, once again calling on the legislature to end segregated public education in California.[43]

Their call went unanswered thanks to the Democrats in the state legislature, who also succeeded in blocking California’s ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing civil rights to Blacks, and the Fifteenth Amendment granting Black men the right to vote (California, in fact, would not ratify these two amendments until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s). Ultimately, it was national ratification of the two amendments in 1868 and 1870 respectively that extended these rights to California Blacks.[44]

Miller had a near death experience in August 1866, when the steam engine of the Petaluma & Haystack Railroad he had just boarded at the depot in town, killing four people and injuring many others, including Miller, whose arm was broken.[45]

As the school year began in July 1867, Petaluma had 627 school-age children between the ages of five and fifteen, eight of whom were black.^[46] Petaluma’s “colored school” however was clearly shut down by the fall of 1867 when Philip A. Bell, editor of The Elevator, a Black newspaper in San Francisco that Bell spun off from the Pacific Appeal in 1865, came to Petaluma to lecture on the topic of education at the bequest of Rev. Killingsworth.

The day before Bell’s scheduled lecture, the trustees of Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church overruled Rev. Killingsworth, cancelling the talk. Bell, an articulate and outspoken advocate of education for Black children, instead spent the weekend attending Rev. Killingsworth’s Sunday sermon at the church and being introduced around the community by Petaluma’s two Black barbers, George Miller and Frank Miller. ^[47]

By the time of Bell’s visit, George Miller and Frank Miller were both prospering in their tonsorial businesses, one of the few areas, along with boot black, livery, restaurant, and drayage businesses, that a Black man could reasonably expect sufficient white patronage to be able to work for himself (Black women also worked for themselves, operating hair salons, dressmaking businesses, restaurants, and hiring out as nursemaids and midwives).[48]

Still, Black businesses faced unique risks, as Frank Miller experienced soon after expanding his barbershop to include a bathing salon “for exclusive use of the Ladies” called the Crystal Baths. Late one night his shop windows were smashed out, assumedly by members of the local Ku Klux Klan.[49] Undeterred, Miller repaired the damage and added a new ladies hair salon to his business, featuring “the latest Paris styles” from a Miss Aralena Purnell, “recently arrived from Philadelphia.”[50]

The twenty-six year old Purnell was the daughter of Zedekiah J. Purnell, a barber, literary scholar, and popular orator in Philadelphia, who had recently relocated his family to Petaluma.[51] His daughter Aralena was an educated and trained operatic singer who, prior to coming to California, had undertaken singing tours of Pennsylvania, New York, and New England. In addition to working for Frank Miller as a hairdresser, she and her sister Louisa began performing concerts to rave reviews at Petaluma’s Hinshaw Hall on Main Street just north of Washington Street.[52]

After discovering the Purnell sisters in Petaluma, Philip Bell of The Elevator recruited them to perform at a musical benefit in San Francisco to a white and Black audience of fifteen hundred people. For the Purnell sisters, it became the first of many subsequent performances in the city.[53] In 1870, Zedekiah Purnell and his family left Petaluma for Oakland, where in 1877, Purnell mounted the first Black candidacy for the Oakland city council. He withdrew from the campaign upon the unexpected death of his daughter Aralena at the age of thirty-six.[54]

Philip Bell would make subsequent trips to Petaluma, but he summed up his first visit to town by noting that its Black community was relatively cautious and conservative. “Many of them cannot disengage themselves from their old ideas engendered while in slavery in Virginia and Missouri,” he wrote. “They have no ideas of progress.”

Bell also reported that while George Miller had exerted himself to obtain educational privileges from the local school district with a “colored school,” the effort had not been sustained by a majority of other Black residents, which was why, he contended, the trustees had cancelled his talk on education.^[55]

By 1869, things began to change for Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church. In April of that year, Rev. T.M.D. Ward, now a bishop, came to Petaluma to visit Rev. Killingsworth. A few weeks later, Killingsworth, then eighty years old, gave one last sermon before leaving Petaluma for a new A.M.E. parish in Oregon, before returning to preach at the Bethel A.M.E. in Sacramento, where he died in 1872.[56]

Killingsworth was not replaced by a new pastor in Petaluma. Instead, the church appears to have operated under the supervision of the A.M.E. elder for Sonoma and Napa counties, with visiting ministers coming through from time to time. As he departed Petaluma, Killingworth appointed a group trustees —Lewis Barnes, Cooper Smith, Thomas Johnson, and Alex McFarland— to oversee all operations of the church.^[57]

Three of the trustees—Barnes, Smith, and McFarland—owned homes on Fifth Street between E and F streets in town. The oldest among them, Alexander McFarland, was born into slavery in Tennessee in 1794 and brought to California by his owner in 1850, where he eventually purchased his freedom. McFarland and his wife Melvina, who was from Florida, married in Sonoma County in 1865 when McFarland was seventy, and adopted a daughter named Eliza.[58]

The next oldest, Lewis Barnes, was born into slavery at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, in 1801, sold twice on the auction block, and brought to California in the 1849 as a slave of a Mr. Cassidy, eventually working his way to freedom and settling in Petaluma in 1855 with his wife Peggy, who had originally been brought to Santa Rosa by her owners, the Overton family. “Uncle” or “Father” Barnes, as he was known around town, worked as a general laborer.[59] The two younger trustees were also general laborers.

Irwin Cooper Smith lived next door to McFarland on Fifth Street with his wife Elizabeth. Both were born slaves—he in North Carolina in 1831, and she in Georgia in 1830. Smith came to California during the Gold Rush to work for his owner in the mines. After two years, he was able to purchase his freedom. Thomas Johnson lived on Petaluma Boulevard South (then Third Street) with his wife Julianna and their three small children. Thomas had been born into slavery in Virginia in 1825, and Elizabeth in South Carolina in 1837. They settled in Petaluma in 1863.[60]

Although George Miller was no longer a trustee of the A.M.E. Church, he continued his efforts to advance Petaluma Blacks by serving as a conduit to larger Black organizations in the state. One of the most vital of these was the fraternal order of the Black Masons, whose membership rolls read like a who’s who of California Black leadership.[61] Miller was a member of the Olive Branch Lodge, which like other Black lodges, had descended from the Black Freemasons established for freed slaves in Boston during the War of Independence by a Black man named Prince Hall.

While the Prince Hall Lodges had been officially chartered by the Grand Lodge of England, they were still not recognized by the white Mason lodges in America a century later when Miller joined the Olive Branch Lodge, where he served as Deputy District Master for Petaluma.[62]

Miller was also a member of the Brannan Guard, a Black militia organized in San Francisco in 1866 by John Jones, James Riker, and Alexander G. Dennison. Volunteer militias had become popular in the country following the Civil War, serving as something of a national guard. The Brannan Guards were named after California pioneer Sam Brannan, who had helped to pay for their uniforms.[63] Comprised of forty-five members, they maintained an armory on Pacific Street in the city, and marched with white militias in parades on special occasions like Independence Day. They also staged their own an annual celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of each year.

In the summer of 1869, a white militia called the Hewston Guard had been commissioned in Petaluma by California’s governor, Henry Haight. Led by Captain James Armstrong, they were provided with an armory in the Hopper Building on Main Street opposite Penry Park.[64] That fall, George Miller decided to form a black militia he called the Colfax Guard, named for the newly elected U.S. vice-president, Schuyler Colfax.

Before becoming U.S. Grant’s running mate in the election of 1868, Colfax had served as Speaker of the House, where he helped guide through the congress both the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment protecting the civil rights of former slaves. (Speaker Colfax made a visit to Petaluma in 1865 to visit his stepfather’s brother from Indiana, Elias Matthews).^[65]

Although not commissioned by Democratic Governor Haight, an openly white supremacist, Miller’s militia become the third Black unit of the Colfax Guard formed in the country that year, joining units already established in New Orleans and Annapolis, Maryland.[66]

On December 30, 1869, the Colfax Guard, joined by Petaluma’s Hewston Guard, inaugurated their  new armory on Washington Street with a “Flag Presentation” that featured a large brass band and presentations by both Captain Miller and his wife Margaret. The festivities were followed by a dinner and a dance that lasted until dawn, with music provided by Miller’s own quadrille, or square dancing, band.[67]

On April 1, 1870, the day after the Fifteenth Amendment had been ratified and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, Miller served as Marshal of the Day for the first formal celebration of the amendment held in the state of California. The festivities began with the Colfax Guard staging at noon in Hill Plaza a 30-gun salute—one gun for each state that had ratified the amendment—followed in the evening by what the Petaluma Argus called a “general jollification” by “the colored people of this city,” across the street from the plaza in Hinshaw Hall.

After the Petaluma Brass Band played to a packed hall, Rev. R.W. Johnson of the First Baptist Church offered a prayer that Blacks would use their newly acquired political power “to the glory and advancement of the whole country.” Miller then read aloud the amendment and a declaration of principles, before introducing Rev. Edward S. Lippitt, the former superintendent of schools who had since become the principal of his own private high school on D Street.[68]

In his oration, Lippitt was keen to distinguish between political and social rights, noting that “the mere exercise of the ballot was not a key to society, and no matter how far the freedom of the polls might be extended, yet individuality and social relations were not in the least compromised thereby.”

That had been a Republican theme throughout the battle for the 15^th Amendment, with many Republicans denying that extension of the franchise conferred nor advanced social equality. Lippitt furthered the point, made by Rev. Johnson, that “the colored people” should educate their race up to the requirements of their new responsibilities, a theme that was expressed in editorials and speeches elsewhere during the next few weeks.

Weeks later the Colfax Guard also joined in San Francisco’s Fifteenth Amendment celebration, which featured the singing talents of Petaluma’s Purnell sisters, Aralena and Louisa. When election time rolled around in the fall of 1870, George Miller and thirteen other Black men in Petaluma cast their votes for the first time.[69]

A year later, on May 10, 1871, Miller learned the limitations of his new voting status when Petaluma constable Frank Adel happened upon his barbershop one day during a lull in customers. Adel, who was having trouble finding jurors for a criminal case, decided to give the Fifteenth Amendment a test and summon Miller to jury duty. Miller marched into the courtroom and took his seat to the gasps of other jurors. Someone yelled out, “Nigger in the pit, put him out!” After a few preliminary questions by the deputy district attorney, Miller was issued a peremptory challenge and sent on his way.[70]

Soon after that event, George Miller and other Black parents in Petaluma began to lobby the school district to reopen the “colored school.” The town’s Black population had grown to forty-four, twenty-two of whom were school-age children.[71] George Miller, whose wife Catherine died in the mid-1860s, had remarried in 1868 to a twenty-year old woman from San Francisco named Margaret Nugent.^[72] In addition to the four school-age children living in the house from his first wife, Miller and his second wife Margaret had added two infants, Richard Hoddie Miller, born in 1869, and James Harris Miller born on January 1, 1871 (James would die in 1872, one day after his first birthday).[73]

There was also a sixth child living in the house, a white boy named Richard Page Jessup, that the Millers had taken in as something of a foster child. Jessup was born in 1866 out of wedlock as the result of an affair in Marysville between a white couple, Gershom Page Jessup, the local manager of the California Stage Company, and Josie Landis, a local nineteen year old woman attending the Mills Seminary boarding school in Santa Cruz. Without the knowledge of Landis’ parents, Jessup took her out of school in her last moth of pregnancy to live at the home of a black woman in San Francisco named Mrs. Abigail Nugent. Nugent, who had arrived in San Francisco from Philadelphia in 1856, was a midwife and nurse to women in the “400 Club,” the city’s social elite.

A few weeks after giving birth to a son, Landis returned to Marysville, where within months she wedded a local dentist. Gershom Jessup, who the year before had inherited a small fortune from his deceased brother Richard, vice-president of the California Steam Navigation company, paid Abigail Nugent to continue raising his son, visiting him frequently at Nugent’s home. Nugent, a prominent member and donor of San Francisco’s Bethel A.M.E. church, had the child baptized in the church by Rev. T. M. D. Ward, and brought him up assisted by her eighteen-year old daughter Margaret, an only child.[74]

Two years later, Margaret Nugent wed the widower George Miller, and joined him living with his children in Petaluma. In 1869, she gave birth to the couple’s first son, Richard “Hoddie” Miller.[75]

That same year, Margaret’s mother, brought Richard Jessup, a sickly child, to live with the Millers in Petaluma, hoping to improve his health. Mrs. Nugent lived with the Millers as well, working on fundraising for the local A.M.E. Church, before returning to San Francisco in 1871.[76] She left behind Richard Jessup, who had his own separate room in the Miller home, to be raised among the Millers’ children, with Gershom Jessup continuing to provide monthly financial support. [77]

In 1871, George Miller and other African American parents in Petaluma succeeded in convincing J.W. Anderson, who had replaced Rev. Edward S. Lippitt as the town’s school superintendent, to their cause. “The colored citizens,” Anderson said, “are clamoring for a school, and should have one.” The school district rented a dilapidated house on Fifth Street between D and E streets to house the “colored school,” and in January of 1872 hired A.G.W. Davis, a young man just beginning his teaching career, to teach the twelve African American students who had enrolled. That year Petaluma joined nineteen other “colored schools” in California teaching a total of 510 students.^[78]

The Millers enrolled their three younger children in the “colored school,” as well their white foster child, Richard Jessup, who attended under the name Richard Miller. The next year Jessup transferred to the white school, but after a week of being taunted by the other students, he withdrew, after which he was homeschooled by his foster mother Margaret Miller.

At the start of the school year in July, 1873, eighteen-year old Miss Rose Haskins was appointed teacher of the “colored school.”[79] Haskin lived just half a block away from the “colored school,” in the house her father, English contractor and stonemason Robert Haskins, had built on the southeast corner of 5^th and E streets. Enrollment that year totaled seventeen students, two of whom were Chinese.[80] In July, 1874, the school district, after complaints about the school’s ramshackle condition, moved the “colored school” into a former private school at the northeast corner of Fifth and D streets.[81]

During Rose Haskins’ first semester in the fall of 1873, the Petaluma Argus, a weekly newspaper edited by Henry L. Weston under the motto “equal rights and equal justice to all men,” began a campaign employed by other Republican newspapers in the state of questioning the cost efficiency of maintaining a separate school for such a small number of Black students (the Radical Republican Party, of which Weston was a member, were abolitionists supportive of expanding civil rights, including school integration, while the southern-dominated Democratic Party, for which Santa Rosa’s Sonoma Democrat newspaper served as the county organ, was strongly opposed to granting such rights).

Weston pointed out that, given Haskins’ salary and rent for a separate school building, the average annual cost of educating a student in the “colored school” was $35, as opposed to $12 in Petaluma’s white schools ($1,100 and $370, respectively, in early 21^st century currency). Denouncing school segregation as an abomination, Weston declared that the “colored school” must soon “fade away before the ceaseless march of progress and civilization.”[82]

George Miller, meanwhile, remained actively engaged in that ceaseless march on a statewide level. In November of 1871, he and other members of the Colored Convention’s Educational Committee met in Stockton to draw up a petition calling for all school children, regardless of color, to be admitted to common public schools.^[83]

Although they succeeded in getting two bills passed by Republicans—then the progressive party—in the state assembly, both were defeated by Democrats—then the conservative, proslavery party—in the state senate. In the spring of 1872, Miller again gathered with the Educational Committee in San Francisco, and under the leadership of Elevator newspaper editor Philip Bell, decided to put a test case before the California Supreme Court.^[84]

The case was initiated by Mrs. Harriet A. Ward on behalf of her daughter Mary Frances. After the closing of a “colored school” on Broadway Street in San Francisco, Mary Frances was faced with having to walk a long distance to the nearest available “colored school” across town. Instead, Harriet A. Ward applied for admission of her daughter to the nearby white Broadway School. Her application was denied by Principal Noah F. Flood.

The case of Ward v. Flood became the first school segregation case to go before the state Supreme Court. In May, 1874, the court ruled on the case, upholding California’s School Law of “separate but equal” facilities for Blacks and Native American children, but also affirming that, based upon the civil rights extended by the Fourteenth Amendment ratified in 1868, the education of Black and Native American children must be provided for in separate schools upon the written application of parents of at least ten such children. If the trustees of the schools failed to do so, the children had to be admitted into the white schools.[85]

For the members of the Educational Committee, the ruling overall was disappointing, but it also represented an incremental victory in that it clearly mandated the public education of Black children, including admitting them into white schools if need be. With the ruling in hand, committee members turned their efforts to lobbying school districts to abolish “colored schools.” They were helped by the Recession of 1873, during which school districts, strapped for funding, opted to enroll black students rather than fund two separate school systems. By 1875, San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland, and Vallejo had done so.^[86] But not Petaluma.

As the school year began in July, 1875, Rose Haskins was promoted to a teaching position at the Brick School, Petaluma’s main grammar school for white students, at Fifth and B streets. She was replaced at the “colored school” by her cousin, Miss Annie Camm, the daughter of local English contractor William Camm.[87] A few months into Camm’s tenure, Henry Jones, a native of Massachusetts who had recently opened a new barbershop on Washington Street, complained about Camm’s competency in teaching his son at the ungraded “colored school.” He requested that Principal Martin E. Cooke Munday of the Brick School admit his son to the white school.^[88]

Munday, a young leader of the local Democratic Party, claimed to have examined Jones’ son—a claim Jones subsequently denied—and found him to be unqualified for entry into the Brick school. Privately, he told Jones that “no colored child should be admitted as long as he was principal of the school.” Jones, who pointed out that he paid school taxes just like everyone else in town, told the Petaluma Argus that he was “just looking for some justice.”

Instead of returning his son to the “colored school,” Jones placed him in a private school.[89] (Although this incident occurred in 1875, it was not made public until 1877 when the Argus reported it in an effort to embarrass Principal Munday, who at the time was running for county school superintendent. Munday ended up losing to the race to the Republican candidate, but subsequently went on to be elected to the state assembly and then to mount an unsuccessful campaign for Lieutenant Governor.)[90]

In the fall of 1876, a new weekly newspaper, the Petaluma Courier, was launched by two leading Democrats in town, publisher William F. Shattuck, and editor Edward S. Lippitt, the former school supervisor. Lippitt, who had formerly served as chairman of the Sonoma County Republican Party, was a longtime progressive abolitionist and supporter of the local Black community.

Following ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, George Miller and other African Americans had paraded with a band to Lippitt’s house, where they presented him with two silver spoons adorned with Lady Liberty in recognition of his “fearless and able advocacy of their rights, and of universal suffrage.”[91]

In 1876 however, Lippitt, distressed and angered by what he considered the Republican Party’s retribution against the South during the Reconstruction Era, switched his allegiances to the pro-South Democratic Party. He and Shattuck launched the Courier as an advocacy organ for Democratic candidates running in the 1876 election, including presidential candidate Samuel Tilden. They wasted no time attacking the Republican positions held by Henry Weston’s Argus, labeling the paper a “negro-worshipping sheet” for its stand on integrating Black students into the white schools.^[92]

(Later in life, Lippitt wrote that although he believed in freeing the slaves, he did not expect Blacks to be granted the vote until they had been properly educated to execute it, which he suspected may take generations; he deplored passage of the Fifteenth Amendment as merely a Republican political maneuver to humiliate the South.)^[93]

One result of the newspaper war waged between the Argus and the Courier in 1876 is that the “colored school” became a polarizing topic. Ezekiel Denman, one of the town’s most prominent and wealthiest men, was defeated in his 1876 re-election bid to the Board of Education after voicing support for eliminating the “colored school.”^[94] The Board’s stubborn refusal to abolish the “colored school” went viral in 1877, drawing ridicule from newspapers from as far away as San Francisco (“an ante-rebellion spirit of caste is still alive and dominate in Petaluma”) and Pennsylvania (“a great blotch on the face of human progress”).^[95]

The presidential election of 1876 was undermined by voter fraud, resulting in an deal between Republicans and Democrats to allow Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to ascend to the presidency, on the condition that he formally end Reconstruction in the South. The end of Reconstruction reversed whatever gains Blacks had made since the Civil War, ushering in an era of Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, and lynchings.

During this period, many Blacks living in Petaluma were drawn away to more vibrant Black communities in Oakland and in Vallejo, the latter of which offered jobs in the nearby Mare Island shipyards.[96]

By the spring of 1877, enrollment in the “colored school” had dropped to four students, which Henry Weston was quick to point out in the Argus raised the annual cost per student to $125, as opposed to $12 for students in the white schools.^[97] Still, Petaluma’s Board of Education held its ground.

The following spring, Miss Annie Camm resigned from teaching at the “colored school” in order to get married.^[98] She was replaced by Miss Mary C. Waterbury.^[99] By 1880, Petaluma’s “colored school” was down to merely one student who was being taught by a Black teacher named Miss Louisa Dickson.^[100] The population census year listed only seventeen Blacks living in Petaluma.^[101]

In April, 1880, the California state legislature voted to abolish “colored schools,” citing the expense of providing a separate education system for a relatively small number of children. They passed a new law requiring that schools be open “for the admission of all children.”^[102] At the beginning of the new school year in July 1880, E.S. Lippitt’s Petaluma Courier, unwilling to acknowledge the new law, spuriously reported that the “colored school” had been discontinued after enrollment had dwindled down to but one student.”^[103]

In 1882, there were four Black students enrolled in the newly integrated Petaluma public schools. By 1885, there were none.[104]

As the size of Petaluma’s Black community declined at the end of the Reconstruction Era, the local A.M.E. Church lost what remained of its vibrancy. After the A.M.E.’s final appointment of Rev. Fielding Smithea to the church in 1878, it appears the church stopping offering Sunday services altogether.[105] In 1879, William Zartman, a prominent business leader in town who owned a carriage factory across the street from the church as well as property adjacent to it, filed a city nuisance petition against the “colored folks church,” signed by a dozen neighbors.^[106]

In 1885, the church’s two surviving trustees, Alexander McFarlane and Irwin Cooper Smith, sold the church building and property to Zartman for $300 ($8,000 in early 21^st century currency), distributing the proceeds from the sale to other A.M.E churches in the state.[107]

White men’s fondness for their Black barbers didn’t last. The reasons were varied: The temperance movement and the evangelical religious revivals of the “Second Great Awakening” caused many customers to frown upon the barbershop’s liquor-fueled conviviality. The most important explanation for whites’ anxiety about the shop, however, involved Black barbers’ growing wealth.

For many, the success of leading Black barbers seemed to threaten the social order. As white customers were shaved by men with fortunes worth many thousands of dollars, some must have wondered who was serving whom. Meanwhile, at the other end of the social spectrum, immigrant barbers—many of them Germans—catered to a growing population of working-class customers: men too poor, and in many cases too resentful of Black barbers’ success, to patronize the best Black-owned barbershops. A handful of elite Black barbers continued to prosper, but the days when Blacks dominated the trade were coming to an end.[108]

Frank Miller, who by the 1870s had become Petaluma’s most prosperous Black citizens with property holdings of fifteen hundred dollars and a personal estate worth four hundred dollars ($38,000 and $10,000, respectively, in early 21^st century currency), was working in 1878 as a barber in the Union Hotel, located at the southwest corner of Western Avenue and Main Street. By the time the hotel was moved in 1881 to B and Main streets to make way for construction of the new Masonic Lodge building, it appears Miller and his wife Charlotte, who he had married in 1871, relocated to San Francisco where they managed a boarding house together.[110]

George W. Miller did not live to see any of this—the decline of Black barbershops in town, California’s integration of public schools, the end of Reconstruction, nor the closing of the A.M.E. church he had helped to start. In the fall of 1873, after returning from one of his regular trips to San Francisco with his wife Margaret, and preparing for the upcoming Colored Citizens Convention to be held in Sacramento, Miller unexpectedly died on October 20 at the age of forty-eight.

His funeral, held at St. John’s Episcopal Church in town, was overseen by his fellow barber Frank Miller. The pallbearers included Santa Rosa barber John Richards, Napa Barber Joseph Hatton, and fellow Brannan Guard, Major Alexander Dennison, who had recently moved to Petaluma.[111]

A few weeks after the funeral, Frank Miller and Alexander Dennison traveled to Sacramento to represent Sonoma County at the Colored Citizens of California Convention in place of George Miller.[112]

******

---

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Advertisement, Sonoma County Journal: August 25, 1855; September 5, 1856. “Deaths: George Miller,” Pacific Appeal, October 25, 1873.

[2] Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[3] Rudolph Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 15-19; Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 71.

[4] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 42;“Proceedings of the First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California, Held at Sacramento Nov. 21^st and 22^nd in the Colored Methodist Church, 1855.” http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/265

[5] Douglas W. Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

[6] Sean Trainor, “The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard,” The Atlantic, January 20, 2014.

[7] Sean Trainor, “The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard,” The Atlantic, January 20, 2014.

[8] Douglas Walter Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers on Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009). J. Gordon Melton, J. Gordon, A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism (MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) pp. 8–11.

[9] Herbert G. Ruffin II, “The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865),” February 9, 2009. BlackPast.com; Proceedings of the First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California, p.16, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/files/original/e2ddec1776e38c21ee7782d6b4d96eba.pdf

[10] Gaye LeBaron, et. Al., Santa Rosa: A Nineteen Century Town (Santa Rosa, CA: Historia, LTD, 1985), p. 87.“State Convention of the Colored People of California, San Francisco, October, 1857.” Coloredconventions.org. http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/267. ; “State Convention of the Colored People of California, San Francisco, October, 1856,” p.133, Coloredconventions.org.https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/266.

[11] Adair Heig, History of Petaluma,: A California River Town, (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 47.

[12] Sean Carroll, Sonoma County Early African Americans, paper for California State University, Hayward, 2008. Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library.

[13] Mike McPhate, “California’s Black Slaves and the Myth of Free Soil,” California Sun, January 23, 2019. Californiasun.com.

[14] Journal of the Eighth Session of the Legislature of the State of California, Volume 9, Part 1858, p. 623; Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009). Pgs. 17-18.

[15] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) pgs. 59-61.

[16] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25.

[17] J. Gordon Melton, J. Gordon, A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism (MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) pp. 8–11; Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, editors, The Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840-1865, Volume 2 (Temple University Press, 1979).

[18] Petaluma Argus: Humboldt Shaving Saloon Advertisement, December 15, 1863; “Passing Away,” July 30, 1862.

[19] Advertisement for “Frank Miller’s Hairdressing Saloon,” Petaluma Argus, January 23, 1863.

[20] https://blackvoicenews.com/2008/07/31/mirror-of-the-times-founded-1857/

[21] “Agents,” Pacific Appeal, January 17, 1863.

[22] “Communications,” Pacific Appeal, April 26, 1862.

[23] Advertisement for the Santa Rosa Shaving Saloon, Sonoma Democrat, June 20, 1861.

[24] “Our Principal Taxpayers,” Petaluma Courier, January 31, 1878. “Death of John Richards,” Petaluma Argus, May 2, 1879.

[25] “Arrivals,” The Elevator, September 20, 1873.

[26] “Emancipation Grand Festival,” Pacific Appeal, July 26, 1862.

[27] “Celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1^st, 1863, at Platt’s Hall,”  Pacific Appeal, January 17, 1863.

^[28] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 24. “Correspondence,” Pacific Appeal, December 12, 1863. The Elevator: “Santa Rosa,”, July 4, 1865 (The Santa Rosa “colored school’ was entering its second semester in July, indicating the first started in January of 1865). “School Examination in Santa Rosa,” February 16, 1866.

[29] Petaluma Argus: “School for Colored Children,” December 16, 1863; “Opened,” January 13, 1864; Pacific Appeal: “Correspondence,” December 12, 1863, “Married,” June 27, 1863, “Arrivals from the Interior,” February 13, 1864.

[30] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25.

[31] “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; Lippitt’s role is speculated given the silver spoons presented to him by Miller and other A.M.E. members in 1870 for his advocacy in helping them attain their civil rights.

[32] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864. (Eight students is an estimate–it’s unknown exactly how many students were in attendance during the Petaluma’s “colored school’s” first year. George Miller had four school-age children. In 1867 and 1868, Petaluma’s annual school census counted eight black school-age children between the ages of five and fifteen in town, out of a total of 627 children in the city.)

[33] “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864.

[34] “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864.

[35] City of Petaluma Deed Records, Lot 276, Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library, Ref. 979.418.732. The church appears on the 1865 Stratton Map of Petaluma, at which time the lot it sat upon was legally owned by a homesteader named Thomas Craine, who owned a number of the subdivided lots in the area known as the Bassett Addition. Craine sold the church lot in 1866 to John Little John, who, in turn, transferred ownership to the A.M.E. Church, as recognized by the city as of January 1, 1867. It’s possible the church rented the building prior to that. (In his book, Petaluma’s Architectural Heritage, Dan Petersen notes that the houses on Howard Street between Western Avenue and Harris Street were typical examples of the western Greek Revival vernacular built for early residents. He dates the house at circa 1870).

[36] California State Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Sacramento on the 25, 26, 27, 28 of October 1865. P. 14., coloredconventions.org.

[37] California State Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Sacramento on the 25, 26, 27, 28 of October 1865. Coloredconventions.org.

[38] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 158. “The Appointments of the A. M. E. Church for the Conference,” Pacific Appeal, November 8, 1862; “The Appointments of the A. M. E. Church for the Conference,” Pacific Appeal, September 12, 1863; 1860 U.S. Census, Sacramento, California; 1861 Sacramento City Directory.

[39] Petaluma Argus: “Notice,” November 30, 1865; “Campbell’s Chapel, November 30, 1865. “Santa Rosa,” The Elevator, July 4, 1865, the first newspaper mention of Rev. Killingsworth at the A.M.E. Church in Petaluma.

[40] An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p.42.

[41] Rudolph Lapp, Afro-Americans in California (San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser Publishing Company, 1987).

[42] “Proceedings of California Convention of Colored Citizens, 1865” http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/268, pgs. 14, 24. (no mention of Santa Rosa’s colored school” in Killingsworth’s report to the convention).

[43] Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, editors, The Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840-1865, Volume 2 (Temple University Press, 1979); Herbert G. Ruffin II, “The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865),” February 9, 2009. BlackPast.com

The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865)

[44] Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction(The University of North Carolina Press; Reprint edition, 2015)

[45] “Frightful Explosion,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, August 30, 1866.

[46] Petaluma Argus: “School Census,” July 4, 1867, July 2, 1868, July 1, 1869, June 18, 1879.

[47] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 252-253. “Petaluma,” The Elevator, November 1, 1867.

[48] Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 29.

[49] “Cowardly,” Petaluma Argus, April 30, 1868.

[50] Advertisement for Miss Purnell from Philadelphia, Petaluma Argus, December 24, 1868.

[51] “Acknowledgments,” The Elevator, January 29. 1869. “Remittances received from . . . Z. F. Purnell, Petaluma.”

[52] “Remember It,” Petaluma Argus, March 25, 1869; Site of Hinshaw Hall: “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror, Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 7, 1861.

[53] The Elevator: “Personal,” February 26, 1868; “Letter to the Editor, Miss Purnell’s Concert,” December 4, 1868. “Deaths,” Pacific Appeal, November 30, 1877. “A Dramatic Novelty,” San Francisco Examiner, November 22, 1870.

[54] Pacific Appeal: advertisement for concert, August 12, 1871; advertisement for board house, September 2, 1871; “Brilliant Fifteenth Amendment Celebration,” May 2, 1874; “Personal,” December 21, 1872; “Deaths,” November 30, 1877. The Elevator: “Letter to the Editor,” December 4, 1868; “Personal,” February 26, 1869; “Freedom’s Jubilee,” March 18,1870. San Francisco Examiner: “A Dramatic Novelty,” November 22, 1870. The Evening Telegraphy (Philadelphia): “Musicians,” March 30, 1867; “A Political Rumpus,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 18, 1877.

[55] The Elevator: “Petaluma,” November 1, 1867; “Correspondence of the Elevator,” February 19, 1869; California State Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Sacramento on the 25, 26, 27, 28 of October 1865. P. 14. http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/268

[56] “Lecture,” Grass Valley Daily Union, February 15, 1871; “General Dispatches,” Grass Valley Daily Union, December 3, 1871; 1871 California Voter Registration, Nevada County; “Died,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 28, 1872;

[57] Petaluma Argus, “Lecture,” May 20, 1869; “If a Man Die, Shall He Live Again?” October 19, 1872; “Religious Notice,” March 25, 1871; “Bishop Black at A.M.E. Church,” August 14, 1878. Legal Agreement by Killingsworth Assigning Church Trustees, May 18, 1869, Sonoma County Archives; “Zion Conference Appointments, The Elevator, April 7, 1877. (Note: McFarland is not listed in the May 18, 1869 legal agreement, but is listed as a trustee on the city deed records for the church entered January 25, 1869; he also is listed as a church trustee along with Cooper Smith the recorded sale of the church property October 3, 1885—from deed records at the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library).

[58] “Uncle Aleck Dead,” Petaluma Argus, August 4, 1886. “Melvina & Alexander McFarland,” Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library archives.

[59] “Death of a Septuagenarian,” Petaluma Argus, January 21, 1871.

[60] Katherine Rinehart research papers, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library archives. Regarding Cooper Smith: Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 42.

[61] Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 42.

[62] The Elevator: “Masonic Notice,” December 21, 1872; “Died,” October 25, 1873. “Prince Hall Freemasonary,” Freemason Information, freemasoniformation.com

[63] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 146.

[64] “Commissions,” San Francisco Examiner, July 19, 1869; Petaluma Argus: “Target Excursion and Ball,” October 23, 1869. “Target Practice,” October 30, 1869.

[65] Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p.133. Ovando James Hollister, Life of Schuyler Colfax (Funk & Wagnalls, 1886) p. 257; Schuyler Colfax, 17th Vice President (1869-1873), https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/vice-president/VP_Schuyler_Colfax.htm.

[66] “Processiana,” New Orleans Cresent, September 13, 1868; “The Grand Demonstration,” New Orleans Republic, September 15, 1868; Miscellaneous,” The Daily Standard (Raleigh, NC), October 18, 1869.

[67] Petaluma Argus: “Flag Presentation,” January 1, 1869; “The Picnic,” July 9 1870.

[68] Petaluma Journal & Argus: “Celebration,”, February 25, 1870; “Jubilant,” April 2, 1870; “Celebration of Our Colored Citizens,” April 9, 1870; Ralph E. Shaffer, “California Reluctantly Implements the Fifteenth Amendment: White Californians Respond to Black Suffrage,” Cal Poly Pomona, 2020. https://www.cpp.edu/class/history/faculty/documents/shaffer15thamend.pdf

[69] Petaluma Argus, “They Voted,” April 23, 1870; Registration of the Domicile Inhabitants, County of Sonoma, 1872: George Miller listed as first registering to vote in 1870.

[70] “Nigger in the Pit! Put Him Out!” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1871.

[71] 1870 Population Census.

[72] “Married,” The Elevator, June 26, 1868.

[73] 1870 census records; “Died,” Petaluma Argus, January 6, 1972.

[74] “Young Jessup Wins,” Napa Register Weekly, July 5, 1889; “Jessup Contest,” Napa Register Weekly, September 19, 1890; “Estate of Gershom P. Jessup, Deceased,”  Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, by California Superior court (San Francisco Probate dept., James Vincent Coffey, Bancroft-Whitney, 1909). Pp. 476-509.

[75] “Deaths,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 27, 1902.

[76] “Resolutions of Thanks,” Pacific Appeal, September 2, 1871;

[77] The 1870 census doesn’t list Richard Jessup in the Miller house but instead a child born in 1866 named “Richard Robinson,” most likely an alias to hide Jessup’s identity from his birth mother).

[78] Petaluma Argus: “Our Public Schools,” June 3, 1871; “Our Public Schools,” January 6, 1872; “Educational,” March 9, 1872; “The Public Schools,” July 20, 1872.

[79] Petaluma Argus: “Our Public Schools,” July 18, 1873;

[80] Petaluma Argus, “The Colored School,” November 7, 1873.

[81] Petaluma Argus: “Educational Notes,” July 17, 1874; “Colored Schools Elsewhere,” April 27, 1877. (E.S. Lippitt confirms that the “colored school’ was on the northeast corner of Fifth and B streets in An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt, p. 42.)

[82] Petaluma Argus: “Our ‘Colored Schools,’” December 8, 1876.

[83] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) pgs. 178-179.

[84] The Elevator: “Educational Public Meeting at Bethel Church,” April 27, 1872; Address of the Educational Committee, May 11, 1872.

[85] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/

[86] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; Jo Ann Williamson, Lori Rhodes, Michael Dunson, “Chapter 7 A Selected History of Social Justice in Education,” Review of Research in Education, November 15, 2016, Vol. 31 (1), pp. 195–224; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/

[87] Petaluma Argus, “Educational Notes,” June 25, 1875; “Educational Notes,” July 9, 1875.

[88] The Colored School,” Petaluma Courier, April, 12, 1877. Petaluma Argus: “Cozy Barber Shop,” April 23, 1875; “Died,” September 3, 1879; “Our Colored School,”

[89] Petaluma Courier: “The Colored School,” April, 12, 1877; “Letter from a Citizen,” April 19, 1877. Petaluma Argus: “The Colored School,” April 6, 1877; “The Colored School,” April 20, 1877; “Personalities,” August 31, 1877;  “How is This?” August 24, 1877.

[90] “The Election,” Petaluma Courier, September 6, 1877. “In the Assembly,” San Francisco Examiner, January 28, 1884.

[91] “A Splendid Testimony,” Petaluma Argus, June 25, 1870.

[92] Petaluma Courier, “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877.

[93] An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p. 43.

[94] Petaluma Argus: “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877.

[95] Petaluma Argus: “Our ‘Colored Schools,’” December 22, 1876; “Educational Items,” August 13, 1875; “Our Colored School,” August 11, 1876; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” May 18, 1877; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” May 18, 1876.

[96] Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 58.

[97] Petaluma Argus: March 30, 1877; “Our Colored School,” March 23, 1877.

[98] “Our Public Schools,” Petaluma Argus, June 14, 1878 (listed her as teaching for two months the spring). “Married,” Petaluma Courier, July 18, 1878.

[99] Petaluma Courier, “Election of Teachers,” June 19, 1878; “Teachers Elected,” January 8, 1879.

[100] Petaluma Courier, “The Public Schools,” June 18, 1879; History Of Sonoma County, Sonoma County, CA (Archives History – Books …..Petaluma Township, Part 3 1880).

[101] 1880 Population Census, Sonoma Country History and Genealogy.

[102] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 25.

[103] “Local Dots,” Petaluma Courier, July 21, 1880.

[104] Petaluma Argus: “School Census Report,” June 2, 1882;  “School Census,” June 6, 1885.

[105] “Sixteen Volume: A.M.E. Appointments, Pacific Appeal, August 10, 1878. Per the City of Petaluma Deed Records, Lot 276, Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library, Ref. 979.418.732: Sold on October 3, 1885 by two trustees of the AME, a religious society not incorporated; includes a small frame structure; states it has been many years since any religious services were held, and that but four or five members of the society remain; remains of the sale to be extended to other A.M.E. churches throughout the state. Last service listed in the Petaluma Argus was August 14, 1878, when Bishop Black of Baltimore preached at the A.M.E. Church.

[106] “Petition of Wm Zartman et al.,” February 24, 1879, Sonoma County History and Genealogy Library archives.

[107] City of Petaluma Deed Records, Lot 276, Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library, Ref. 979.418.732.

[108] Sean Trainor, “The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard,” The Atlantic, January 20, 2014; Douglas Walter Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers on Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009).

[109]

[110] “Married,” Petaluma Argus, October 28, 1871. “Peggy’s Pecilings,” Petaluma Courier, May 13, 1891. McKenney’s District Directory for 1878-9 of Yolo, Solano, Napa, Lake, Marin, and Sonoma Counties, p. 274, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library: Miller as listed as working in the Union Hotel, which at the time had a barbershop operated by Charles Whitehead, called Whitehead Shaving Saloon); it’s possible that Miller was working for Whitehad. “Miller and wife running board house . . .” Katherine Rinehart, biography of Frank V. Miller, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.

[111] “Deaths: George Miller,” Pacific Appeal, October 25, 1873. “Grand Ball.” The Elevator, March 28, 1874 (one of many listing for Alexander Dennsion representing Petaluma).

[112] “Call for a State Convention,” Pacific Appeal, November 15, 1873. “Pacific Coast Dispatches,” San Francisco Examiner, November 26, 1873.

[113] “Estate of Gershom P. Jessup, Deceased,”  Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, by California Superior court (San Francisco Probate dept., James Vincent Coffey, Bancroft-Whitney, 1909). Pp. 476-509.

[114] “Dancing Party,” Napa Register Weekly, November 30, 1883; “Real Estate Transfers,” Napa Register Weekly, March 5, 1885; “Local Brevities, Napa Register Weekly, April 1, 1886; Local Brevities, Napa Register Weekly, August 5, 1887.

[115] “Jessup Jr Wins,” Napa Register Weekly, March 9, 1888; “Richard Jessup’s Money,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 11, 1893;“Death Comes to Senator Mahoney,” San Francisco Examiner, December 24, 1897.

[116] “Local Briefs,” Napa Valley Register, January 17, 1890; “Personal,” Napa Valley Register, August 14, 1891; “Letters,” The Sacramento Record Union, October 11, 1897.

[117] “Death of Edward Hatton,” Napa Register Weekly, May 11, 1897; “Deaths,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 9, 1897; “Deaths,” Napa Valley Register, August 27, 1902; “Deaths,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 27, 1902; “Deaths,” San Francisco Examiner, December 28, 1928.