The Love Story of Two Penngrove Social Justice Activists
By John Patrick Sheehy and Jack Withington
Karl Yoneda and Elaine Black, 1933 (photo public domain)
As if poultry farming wasn’t hard enough, being questioned by the FBI while vaccinating hens in a chicken coop seems an unnecessary strain for most.
But not Penngrove rancher Karl Yoneda.
A longtime political activist, he was used to living under surveillance, including during his military service in World War II, for which he was awarded a Gold Star.
Karl enlisted in the U.S. Army on December 7, 1942, a year to the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, he was incarcerated along with his wife and three-year-old son in Manzanar, one of ten concentration camps holding 110,000 Japanese Americans during the war. Located in the high desert of Owens Valley close to Mount Whitney, the camp was 200 miles north of Los Angeles, where Karl, the son of Japanese immigrants, was born in 1906.
Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1943-44 (photo by Ansel Adams, Library of Congress)
When he was seven, his family decided to move back to their native village near Hiroshima after his father was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Karl spent his formative years in Japan, during which the country was transitioning into a modern, industrialized colonial empire. By the early 1920s, labor unions and a variety of socialist, communist, and anarchist activists, were mounting public demonstrations for economic and democratic reforms, as well as protesting Japan’s rising militarism.
Idealistic and headstrong, Karl organized his first strike while still in high school, staging a walkout of Hiroshima’s newspaper delivery boys over low pay. At 16, he made his way to Beijing, where he studied for two months with the blind Ukrainian anarchist and Esperanto teacher, Vasili Eroshenko.
Returning to Japan, he committed himself to a life of fighting social injustice, participating in several major Japanese labor strikes and publishing a journal for impoverished farmers.
Karl Yoneda (photo by Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress)
In 1926, to avoid being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, he boarded a freighter for San Francisco. Upon arriving, immigration officials classified him a kibei-nisei—born in the United States and educated in Japan—and locked him up at the Immigration Detention Center on Angel Island for two months. After his release, he went to Los Angeles, where he found work as a dishwasher and window washer.
As the American Federation of Labor (AFL) excluded people of color at the time, he joined the Japanese Workers’ Association, serving as their publication director. Changing his first name from Goso to Karl in honor of Karl Marx, he also began working with the communist-affiliated Trade Union Educational League, organizing migrant field workers in the Central Valley and Fresno.
In 1931, while at a Los Angeles demonstration calling for unemployment insurance in the midst of the Depression, Karl was severely beaten and thrown into jail by the police department’s notorious “Red Squad.”
Yoneda (with arrow in first photo) be beaten by the undercover Red Guard, LA Unemployment Protest, February 1931 (photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times)
Not wanting a dead corpse on their hands, the police called the International Labor Defense—which billed itself as “the legal department of the working class”—to bail him out.
Elaine Black, a young woman who had started working for the ILD just the day before, paid Karl’s bail and rushed him to the hospital. Sparks clearly flew during their initial encounter. A year later, after Elaine was assigned to the ILD offices in San Francisco, Karl showed up at her office, having taken a job in the city as editor of Rodo Shimbun, a Communist Party Japanese-language publication. Defying California’s “Anti-Miscegenation Law” against mixed race couples, the couple moved in together in the city’s Japantown.
A firebrand who mixed her moral fury at injustice with a sense of fashion, Elaine grew up on New York City’s Lower East Side, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, Mollie and Nathan Buchman. Marxist activists, the Buchmans fled their native Russia after Nathan was drafted into the Czar’s army. In 1920, the family relocated from New York to Southern California.
After being accidently caught up in a brutal sweep by the Red Squad, an outraged Elaine took a job with the ILD and joined the Communist Party, adopting the last name Black, initially as an alias when questioned by police. Conservative newspapers labeled her “The Tiger Woman.” Fellow activists dubbed her “The Red Angel” for her tireless work among striking workers, providing them with food, lodging, and bail money.
Elaine Black with “Free the Scottsboro Boys” activists in 1934 (photo People World Archives)
In 1934, Elaine and Karl became involved in the West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, with Elaine serving as the only woman on the strike committee, and Karl leading the effort to dissuade Japanese laborers from crossing the picket line. Both were jailed—Elaine four times, including for seditious utterances and vagrancy when she went to court to bail out other activists. The strike ultimately resulted in the unionization of all of the ports on the West Coast.
In the fall of 1934, Karl made California history as the first Japanese American to campaign for the state Assembly, running unsuccessfully on a platform of racial equality, unemployment insurance, and a living wage. Shortly before election day, the Red Squad arrested him during a campaign speech, charging him with vagrancy and making sure the newspapers highlighted his immoral living arrangement with the Tiger Woman.
In 1935, concerned their “shacking up” together was a political liability, Karl and Elaine boarded a train for Seattle, where they could be legally wed. To avoid being charged with violating the Mann Act, which criminalized transporting someone across state lines for immoral behavior, they rode in separate train cars.
For the remainder of the 1930s, Karl and Elaine pursued their political activism, with Karl forming a union for cannery workers in Alaska, and the two of them picketing Japanese cargo ships on the San Francisco docks that were being loaded with scrap iron for making Japanese military armaments.
In need of a steady income during the Depression, Karl became a longshoreman. In 1939, Elaine gave birth to their son Tom. A few months later, she made an unsuccessful run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, calling for low-cost housing, free childcare for working women, and civil rights.
Then came Pearl Harbor. Two months after the attack, President Roosevelt, bowing to xenophobia, racism, and baseless fears of spies, signed Executive Order 9066, leading to the incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese descent, both American citizens and immigrants, living on the west coast.
Surprisingly, Karl and Elaine initially joined others—many of them Japanese Americans—in publicly supporting Roosevelt’s order. As Communists, they felt that the need to fight fascism outweighed other concerns.
Yoneda family, Elaine, Tom, and Karl, at Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1942 (photo California Historical Society)
Karl and his two year-old son Tommy were sent to the camp at Manzanar. Elaine had to fight her way in, becoming one of only seven Caucasians interned there. Karl initiated a petition at the camp to permit young Nisei—men born in the U.S. to immigrant parents—to volunteer for military service. After eight months at Manzanar—during which they received regular death threats from a small group of pro-Japan fascists known as the Black Dragons—Karl was accepted into the army, and Elaine and Tommy were allowed to return to San Francisco.
Karl was assigned with other Nisei to the psychological warfare team of Military Intelligence Service, whose motto was “Go For Broke.” Deployed to India, Burma, and China, he drafted and edited propaganda to be scattered among Japanese troops and transmitted over radios, often deep behind enemy lines. Karl was usually accompanied by Caucasian soldiers, not only to ensure his protection, but also to keep him from falling into enemy hands by shooting him if necessary.
Karl Yoneda, 2nd from right, with the Military Intelligence Service in Burma, 1944 (photo California Historical Society)
At the war’s end, Karl reunited with Elaine and Tommy, and returned briefly to working on the San Francisco docks before a health issue put him out of work. A group of Jewish chicken ranchers in Petaluma, who knew Karl and Elaine from their socialist circles, urged them to try raising poultry. With financial help from Elaine’s family and a GI loan, the couple were able to buy a six-acre ranch on the Petaluma Hill Road in Penngrove. Elaine’s parents soon joined them from Los Angeles.
Devoting themselves to the hard work of raising meat birds, Karl and Elaine also found time to become engaged in the local community, with Karl joining the board of the Petaluma Cooperative Hatchery, and Elaine serving as county president of the Civil Rights Congress. During the Red Scare of the McCarthy Era, they were routinely kept under observation by the FBI, who even found it necessary to question Karl while he was vaccinating his chickens.
Their son Tom graduated from Petaluma High in 1957. A straight-A student, he lettered in basketball, football, and track, and was elected student body president, winning the Petaluma B’nai B’rith Frankel-Rosenbaum Award for outstanding scholarship, and an academic scholarship to Stanford.
By 1960, Petaluma’s role as the Egg Basket of the World was in serious decline due to the rise of factory farms elsewhere. Karl and Elaine sold their chicken ranch and moved back to San Francisco, where Karl returned to working as a casual longshoreman, and Elaine went to work in the office of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
Elaine and Karl Yoneda, 1980s (photo courtesy of Jack Withington)
They remained engaged activists, traveling to Tokyo as delegates at a nuclear disarmament conference, participating in numerous anti-Vietnam protests, and writing articles and lecturing on labor history. In recognition of their 50th anniversary together in 1983, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors saluted them for dedicating their lives to fighting for the betterment of other people’s lives.
Elaine died in 1988, a day after taking part in a San Francisco demonstration for peace in Nicaragua with Jesse Jackson. Karl died eleven years later.
In 2011, members of Karl’s all-Japanese Military Intelligence Service unit were honored with the nation’s highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal.
******
C0-author Jack Withington is the author of Historical Buildings of Sonoma County. A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.
SOURCES:
Books, Journals, Websites
Displaced: Manzanar 1942-1945, edited by Evan Backes (T. Adler Books, 2018).
Vivian McGuckin Raineri, The Red Angel: The Life and Times of Elaine Black Yoneda, 1906-1988 (New York: International Publishers, 1991).
Rachel Schreiber, Elaine Black Yoneda (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022).
Tim Wheeler, “Karl Yoneda and Elaine Black—star-crossed lovers in a class war,” People’s World, November 19, 2020; https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/karl-yoneda-and-elaine-black-star-crossed-lovers-in-a-class-war/
Bill Yenne, Rising Sons: The Japanese American GIs Who Fought for the United States in World War II (New York: Macmillan, 2007).
Karl G. Yoneda, Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (University of California Los Angeles, Asian American, Studies Center, 1983).
“Congressional Gold Medal Presented to Nisei Soldiers of World War II,” United States Mint, November 2, 2011. https://www.usmint.gov/news/press-releases/20111102-congressional-gold-medal-presented-to-nisei-soldiers-of-world-war-ii
Los Angeles Times: “Riots Mark Nationwide Red Demonstrations,” February 11, 1931; “Elaine Black Yoneda, 81; ‘The Red Angel’ of the 1930s,” May 29, 1988.
San Francisco Examiner: “Couple Battled the Prejudices of Politics and Race,” August 2, 1978; “Friends Salute Labor Activist,” May 21, 1988; “Labor and Socialist Activist Yoneda,” May 14, 1999.
The Los Angeles Mirror: Les Wagner, “The Mirror Daily” column, August 21, 1950.
The Miami Herald (AP): “‘War Forces’ Hit by Leftists,” August 3, 1960.
Oral Histories
“Oral History with Karl Yoneda,” CSU Fullerton Center for Oral and Public History, March 3, 1974;
The Groundbreaking Trial of Penngrove’s Mary Ann Kenney
By John Patrick Sheehy & Jack Withington
Penngrove Rail Station, circa 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)
To Sarah Looney, it looked like cold-blooded murder.
On the afternoon of July 18, 1872, Looney was standing outside her Penngrove ranch house watching William Cummings, a 20-year-old Irish laborer, leave the ranch with a wagonload of wood pulled by a team of horses. The wagon’s bed creaked as the wagon turned onto Adobe Road, heading for the Lavin Ranch half a mile to the south, where Cummings was regularly employed.
As the wagon passed Bannon Lane, Looney spotted John Bannon’s daughter, Mary Ann Kenney, walking across her family’s ranch toward Adobe Road. She was carrying a double-barreled shotgun in her hands. After jumping over the picket fence next to the road, the 17-year-old Kenney approached Cummings’ wagon from behind and leveled the shotgun at his back.
Looney couldn’t make out any conversation between the two, only the first shotgun blast, which missed Cummings. As Cummings turned in his seat, Kenney again leveled the gun and pulled the trigger. The second shot took off the top of Cummings’ head. The horses bolted, throwing Cummings back onto the wagon’s load of wood as they raced down the road.
Penngrove’s Main Street, circa 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)
Upon hearing the gunshots, Looney’s husband Robert came running out of the house in time to see the petite, five-foot Kenney walking back to the picket fence, where she carefully placed the shotgun on the top rail, took hold of two pickets, and vaulted over the four-foot high fence in a single bound. Picking up the gun, she calmly walked toward her parents’ house.
When the horses pulling Cummings’ wagon arrived at the Lavin Ranch, they found the gate closed. As they swerved to avoid it, the wagon lurched to one side, throwing Cummings onto the road. Ranch owner Tim Lavin found him there, breathing his last gasps, the top of his skull blown off.
1877 Map of Penngrove, with the Bannon, Looney, and Lavin ranches (courtesy of Thompson’s 1877 Sonoma County Atlas)
By that time, John Bannon was driving his daughter in a carriage to Petaluma, where she surrendered to James Knowles, the town marshal. She explained to Knowles that Cummings left her no choice. Despite her warnings, he persisted in spreading lies and slander about her virtue, leading her to painfully separate from her newlywed husband Thomas.
Knowles placed her under arrest at his home until an inquest hearing could be held two days later.
At the inquest, Kenney appeared, her face hidden by a veiled Shaker bonnet. On the advice of her lawyer, she refused to testify. After listening to the testimony of Sarah Looney and a few character witnesses, the grand jury, with Robert Looney as its foreman, charged Kenney with first degree murder.
Penngrove rancher and county supervisor John O’Hara served as a jury member at Mary Ann Kenney’s inquest hearing (photo Sonoma County Library)
In terms of the law, the case was cut-and-dried. The only justification for homicide was either self-defense or the defense of one’s home. Neither seduction nor slander qualified. However, small town society at the time was merciless to young women whose reputations had been blemished by sexual scandal. Once disgraced, their options for marriage or honorable work often became severely limited.
As a result, in the court of popular opinion, or “highway law” as it was called, deadly retribution was viewed as justifiable in cases where a young woman had been seduced, sexually assaulted, or had her virtue slandered, assuming such retribution was carried out by one of the woman’s male relatives. Likewise, in cases where a husband discovered another man making love to his wife, or else boasting about making love to her, he was viewed as justified in killing the man. What made Kenney’s case unusual was that she had meted out the deadly vengeance herself.
The case attracted a flock of reporters from San Francisco. Their stories were carried on the wires around the country, setting off a national debate as to whether women had rights equal to men when it came to exercising highway law.
Article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 2, 1872
To add some celebrity sparkle, Kenney was identified in news reports as the niece of the famous Irish prizefighter and New York congressman, John Morrissey.
Mary Ann Kenney’s uncle, legendary prizefighter and congressman John Morrissey (photo Library of Congress)
Kenney’s bail was set at $20,000 ($450,000 in today’s currency). It was posted by her father and 16 of his friends, including Petaluma coroner Kelly Tighe who had performed the autopsy on Cummings’ body. A barrel-chested, loquacious man with a booming Irish accent, Tighe operated the Brooklyn Hotel at the corner of Kentucky and Washington streets, site of today’s Hotel Petaluma. The hotel’s saloon, The Reading Room, was a popular gathering place for Irish immigrants.
On the Fourth of July, two weeks before Cummings’ murder, Kenney and her husband Thomas ventured into town to celebrate with friends. It was their first trip off the Bannon Ranch since their wedding five months earlier. Kenney’s parents had surreptitiously worked to keep the newlyweds secluded in Penngrove in an effort to protect them from Cummings’ vicious rumors.
Four of July parade on Main Street, Petaluma, circa 1880s (photo Sonoma County Library)
Once in town, the couple split up, with Mary Ann going off to visit her girlfriends, and Thomas joining a group of fellow farmhands at The Reading Room. No sooner had he ordered a beer, than an inebriated Cummings sauntered up to the bar and began making salacious remarks about Mary Ann. Thomas threw his beer in Cummings’ face, and the two began to fight.
Thomas’s friends quickly separated them, hurrying Thomas out to the street, where they told him about the slanderous stories Cummings had been spreading—that his wife was a common prostitute with whom he, and other men he could name, had engaged in sex with since she was 12 years old.
On their carriage ride home that night, Thomas told Mary Ann what he had heard and asked if any of it was true. Bursting into tears, she denied it all as lies. Once they reached the ranch, Mary Ann’s parents encouraged the couple not to pay any attention to the foul slanders, that they would die out with time.
Main Street leading into Penngrove, circa 1890 (photo Sonoma County Library)
A week passed. During that time, Thomas brought the matter up with Mary Ann a couple of times, leading to fights between the couple. Finally, concerned that her husband did not believe her assertions of innocence, Mary Ann insisted they separate and not reunite until her name was cleared. Thomas reluctantly left the ranch to take a job working for the railroad in Sonoma Valley.
Kenney’s murder trial was held at the county courthouse in Santa Rosa. A number of her Penngrove neighbors who had known her since she was a child, testified to her modest chastity, describing her as intelligent, quiet and retiring, with a good-natured disposition. A bold horsewoman, she was known for her physical prowess, taking charge of plowing the fields of her family’s 140-acre ranch while still a teen.
Sonoma County Courthouse, Santa Rosa, circa 1875 (photo Sonoma County Library)
William Cummings had come to live on the ranch five years before, when Mary Ann’s father hired him as a young ranch hand. He quickly became enamored with Mary Ann, asking her parents repeatedly for her hand in marriage, which they refused. Instead, another Irish laborer on the ranch, 30-year-old Thomas Kenney, won her heart.
After Mary Ann’s parents accepted his proposal to marry their daughter, Cummings left the ranch to work on the Lavin Ranch down the road. Following the wedding of Mary Ann and Thomas on Feb. 4, 1872, Cummings announced to friends he would dedicate himself to separating the couple before the year was out.
It took the jury only 50 minutes of deliberation to return with a verdict of not guilty in the case. Public opinion also sided with the verdict, extending their approval of a wronged woman’s right to deadly revenge. Wrote one local newspaper: “The tongue of her slanderer is silent forever. Not only she, but everybody else is safe from his malice.”
Three months after Mary Ann’s acquittal, Thomas filed a legal notice that his wife had abandoned him. “She left me,” he told reporters, “because she was conscience-struck.”
Unidentified couple at their Penngrove ranch, circa 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)
Mary Ann continued to live and work on the family ranch in Penngrove for the rest of her life. In 1899, at the age of 43, she married Jens Thomsen, a Danish chicken rancher, who joined her on the ranch until his unexpected death in 1906. She herself died in 1932 at the age of 76.
*****
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 15, 2023, as well as in Jack Withington’s book, Looking Back at Penngrove, published in 2023.
SOURCES:
Newspapers
Cloverdale Bee: “Our Petaluma Letter,” August 3, 1872.
Daily Alta California: “Mrs. Kinney’s Case,” July 27, 1872.
Petaluma Argus: “Terrible Tragedy,” July 20, 1872; “The Cummings Murder,” July 27, 1872; “Examination of Mrs. Kinney,” July 27, 1872; “The Petaluma Tragedy,” July 27, 1872 (reprinted in the Weekly Butte Record); “Notice (of abandonment),” February 26, 1873; “Nonagenarian Passes Away,” January 22, 1917.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Loved Pioneer Woman Called,” January 28, 1932.
Petaluma Courier: “Local News: Bannon Estate,” December 31, 1891.
Petaluma Crescent: “The Petaluma Tragedy,” July 19, 1872 (reprinted in the Cloverdale Bee, July 27, 1872); “Verdict in the Petaluma Case,” July 20, 1872 (reprinted in the Daily Alta California, July 21, 1872); “Why the Woman Shot Her Slanderer,” July 27, 1872 (reprinted in the Weekly Colusa Sun).
Sacramento Bee: “Slander and Killing,” July 23, 1872.
San Francisco Chronicle: “The Petaluma Tragedy,” July 21, 1872; “Not Guilty,” October 27, 1872.
San Jose Mercury News: “Pacific Coast Items,” July 25, 1872.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Sonoma Ranches Change Hands,” August 29, 1900.
Illustration of the David Wharff Ranch, Penngrove, current site of the Green Mill (from Thos. Thompson’s Historical Atlas of Sonoma County, 1877)
In August 1849, shortly after arriving in Sacramento from a six-month voyage around Cape Horn, David Wharff watched as a man in a gambling hall walked up to a faro table and casually placed $10,000 in gold nuggets ($315,000 in today’s currency) on the queen of spades. A game of chance, faro was more popular than poker in gold country because the odds were better.
As a crowd of awed onlookers gathered around the table, the faro dealer made nine consecutive draws from a deck of cards, with each draw turning one card over for himself and another for the gambler. On the tenth draw, as a matching queen card fell to the gambler’s side of the table, the crowd erupted with a roar. The gambler, a local merchant named Sam Brannan, pocketed his winnings, bought drinks for the house, and strolled out into the night.
Sam Brannan (photo courtesy of Utah Historical Society)
For Brannan, the wager may have seemed like small change, but to Wharff and the other Forty-niners in the hall it captured the high stakes gamble they had undertaken, deserting their families, jobs, and farms to sail around the world or trek across the country to California with hopes of hitting the jackpot. Brannan was among those who made a fortune enabling their California dream.
In 1848, while working in his dry goods store in Sacramento, then called Sutter’s Fort, Brannan sold some goods to a group of men who paid in gold nuggets. They had discovered the nuggets while constructing a sawmill for John Sutter along the South Fork of the American River.
With foresight, Brannan quickly converted his store into a mining supply center, the only one between San Francisco and the Sierra foothills. By 1849, 50,000 gold seekers had descended upon the area, and Brannan’s store was generating $150,000 a month in sales (almost $4.7 million in today’s currency), making him California’s first millionaire.
Illustration of Sam Brannan’s store at Sutter’s Fort, 1848 (photo Gutenberg Project)
But while Brannan and others made fortunes selling goods and services—one prostitute claimed to have made $50,000 ($1.5 million in today’s currency) after a year’s work—the majority of the Forty-niners came away from the gold fields empty handed, left to retreat back to the lives they discarded or, like David Wharff, redirect their California dream to a new wager with better odds, like farming.
Born into a colonial family in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Wharff inherited the stern demeanor of his Protestant ancestors, as well as a close attention to the value of a dollar. After finishing grammar school, he moved to Boston at age 14 to apprentice as a carpenter. By the time he turned 20, he was earning a journeyman’s wage of $1.25 a day ($40 in today’s currency), not enough to marry and settle down with the girl of his dreams, Olive Densmore from Nova Scotia. When word reached Boston of a gold strike in California, it resounded like a shot across the bow for frustrated men like Wharff.
Ad for Clipper Ship to Gold Rush (photo in the public domain)
Unable to afford a ticket on a first class clipper ship, Wharff and six of his friends pooled their money to book passage on a small, battered brig, the Christiana, departing Boston on February 15, 1849, among a flotilla of more than 500 vessels leaving eastern ports, packed with “Argonauts”—named for the band of heroes in Greek mythology who accompanied Jason on a sea quest for the golden fleece—undertaking the 15,000-mile voyage around Cape Horn to San Francisco and the golden state.
Wharff and the other nine passengers on the Christiana passed their time gambling, playing checkers, smoking, drinking, telling stories, and daydreaming of how to spend their gold. After subsiding for two months on salted meat that went bad, butter and lard that turned rancid, hard bread that became laced with bugs, and cheese nibbled on by rats, they put in for ten days just south of Rio de Janeiro for fresh water, provisions, and new sails.
“We could buy oranges, $1 a thousand; wine, 10 cents a gallon,” Wharff wrote.
Then came the most perilous leg of the journey, rounding Cape Horn. After 55 days braving monstrous waves, terrifying winds, and frigid temperatures, the ship docked at Valparaiso, Chile, where Wharff and his friends spent five days ashore watching Spaniards bet stacks of gold doubloons on horse races, further fueling their desire to reach California.
Valparaiso, Chile, 1850 (photo in public domain)
Finally, on the morning of August 16, 1849, six months after leaving Boston, the Christiana sailed through the Golden Gate alongside twenty other windjammers. The crew deserted the moment the ship docked. During the two days it took the captain to find replacements, Wharff and his friends took in the night life of the mushrooming metropolis, more than 500 bars and 1,000 gambling dens.
San Francisco, 1851 (photo Library of Congress)
At establishments like the Parker House or the El Dorado, women dealt the cards, brass bands or banjo musicians performed, and gold nuggets sat piled high on the gambling tables. They could eat at places like the Fly Trap or Monkey Warner’s Cobweb Palace, which was decorated with whales’ teeth. After six months of boredom cooped up in close quarters at sea, it was like entering a carnival.
From San Francisco, a pilot boat guided the Christiana up the river to their final destination, Sacramento. By the time Wharff stepped off the boat, he was down to his last 25 cents. Spotting a house under construction near the wharf, he approached the foreman, who, after learning he was a carpenter, hired him on the spot for $20 a day.
Sacramento waterfront, 1850s (photo courtesy of Bancroft Library Collection)
Wharff and his Boston friends formed a company to share in the collective spoils of their gold diggings, purchasing an empty lot in Sacramento for $10 upon which to erect a small, prefabricated house they had brought with them on the Christina, to serve as company headquarters. However, within a couple of weeks of watching Forty-niners return to town with $3,000-$4,000 in gold dust ($95,000 to $125,000 in today’s currency), the collective fell apart, as each man set off on his own for the foothills.
After Wharff earned $300 ($9,500 in today’s currency) working 15 days as a carpenter, he paid a driver with an ox team $80 ($2,500 in today’s currency) to haul him, his equipment and provisions up to Weaver Creek in El Dorado County, where he quickly learned squeezing gold out of rocks was harder work than he imagined. Not only were living conditions primitive and costs high, the work itself—digging, pickaxing, shoveling, clawing, scraping, shifting, and panning—was tedious, with little success. The first piece of gold he found was the size of a pin head.
Prospectors working gold placer, 1850 (photo in public domain)
Teaming up with three other men, Wharff moved on to the South Fork of the American River, where they built a cofferdam of sandbags to divert the water around a small stretch of river bottom. For two days they risked their lives in ice cold water from the snow pack, blocked by a sandbag wall teetering on the verge of collapse, to extract $800 of gold nuggets ($25,000 in today’s currency), which they divided up and then went their separate ways. Wharff traveled to Marysville to pan for gold, and then to Shasta County, where he joined 16 other men on a mining crew.
Finally, after more than two years working the riverbeds and mines, Wharff decided to call it quits. He had witnessed his fair share of casualties, men broken by exhaustion and fatigue, as well as those whose lives were taken by disease, murders, fights, and mining accidents. He returned to San Francisco with a full belt of gold dust strapped to his waist, not enough to make him a wealthy man, but enough to stake a claim in starting a new life. For Wharff, that meant returning to Boston to claim the hand of his sweetheart.
On December 15, 1851, he purchased a $200 ticket ($6,200 in today’s currency) aboard a steamer of 650 passengers departing San Francisco for New York via Nicaragua. The overland route across Nicaragua, similar to the route across the Isthmus of Panama, trimmed 8,000 miles and five months of travel time off the voyage around Cape Horn. The tradeoff was a risk of contracting a deadly tropical disease, such as malaria, yellow fever, or cholera.
1849 ad for Nicaragua route on California Steam Navigation Company (photo in public domain)
After sailing to the port of San Juan del Sur on Nicaragua’s west coast, Wharff and the other passengers were greeted by a long line of mules waiting to take them on an 11-mile trail to Lake Nicaragua. At night they slept on elevated wooden benches to protect them from poisonous centipedes on the ground.
Nicaragua route of the California Steam Navigation Company (map in the public domain)
In the morning, they rode a ferry across the lake, disembarking to walk around a set of rapids down to the San Juan River, where they boarded steamers on a 100-mile river journey through dense forests of mangrove trees, dazzling tropical flowers, and exotic animals such as crocodiles, parrots, and jaguars. At the port of Greytown on the Caribbean coast, they transferred to a steamer bound for New York, arriving on January 15, 1852, only one month after leaving San Francisco.
Wharff, bewhiskered and in rough miner’s garb, was unrecognizable to his family when he showed up in Boston. Only his voice was familiar. After shaving and donning a new suit of clothes, he called on the girl he’d left behind.
Illustration of David Wharff, 1852 (courtesy of Sacramento Bee)
But after two and half years in California, Boston felt tired and slow. Carpenters were still working for $1.25 a day compared to the $20 he was able to earn in Sacramento. Within a few days, he was ready to return to the gold fields. His older sister Mary Jane stepped in, agreeing to go with him, but only on the condition he marry Olive and bring her with them.
Court Street in Boston, 1850 (photo in public domain)
The couple wed on February 19, 1852 and, along with Mary Jane, departed for California on March 1st. The steamers using the Nicaragua and Isthmus of Panama routes were booked through mid-summer, so Wharff paid $900 ($28,500 in today’s currency) for three tickets aboard the Sam Appleton, a large windjammer sailing around the Horn.
A windjammer sailing to San Francisco, 1850s (photo in the public domain)
The ship made only one stop in Valparaiso and arrived in San Francisco on July 22nd. Sailing on to Sacramento, Wharff took the two women to the company house he and his Boston friends built. Only one of the of men was there, the rest were working in the mines.
“My wife and sister,” wrote Wharff, “thought it was a hard-looking place. I had never seen a broom in the house since we put it up in ’49, so you can judge how clean it was.”
Sacramento was experiencing a heat wave so hot the women refused to accompany Wharff to the diggings. Instead, he had to content himself with carpentry work around town, even though the day rate had dropped to $12. That may have been for the best.
By 1852, an estimated 250,000 people had flooded into California, making for the largest migration in U.S. history. With most surface deposits exhausted, the days of the miner with a pick, shovel, and wash pan were ending, replaced by well-capitalized mining companies operating with deep power drills and hydraulic water jets that blasted away mountainsides.
California hydraulic mining, 1850s (photo miningartifacts.org)
Mary Jane and Olive prevailed on Wharff to move them out of the company house into a nearby rental, while he built a new house on the same lot. No sooner had he finished than a fire (later known as the Great Conflagration) swept through Sacramento on November 2, 1852, burning down more than 80 percent of the city’s structures.
A wind-blown ember set fire to the floor joists of the new house, but two men passing by— Sacramento merchants Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington, who a decade later would team up with Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker to form the Central Pacific Railroad as “the Big Four”—extinguished the blaze, saving the house.
Collis P. Huntington, 1860 (photo courtesy of Huntington Library), and Leland Stanford, 184 ( photo courtesy of Stanford Archives)
The following morning, a merchant approached Wharff with an offer to buy his house and move it down the street. Having spent $300 to construct it, he sold the house and some furniture in it for $2,200 ($70,000 in today’s currency). He and Olive, who was four months pregnant with their first child, promptly boarded a steamer for San Francisco, where they rented a small house on Washington Street. Mary Jane, who was making a good living as a dressmaker, stayed behind in Sacramento, where she soon married Frank Green, a Forty-niner from Boston.
After four months in San Francisco, Wharff ran into a Boston man who had returned from the east coast with three large bundles of fruit trees. Having earlier purchased land in Sonoma County, he asked Wharff to accompany him there to help construct the floor and doors of a wall tent he was planning to install as temporary living quarters. Ever adventurous, Wharff boarded a small schooner with the man and sailed up a winding creek to Petaluma.
Established as a trading post two years earlier by meat hunters shipping game down to San Francisco, by early 1853 Petaluma consisted of two hotels, roughly 50 houses, a dry goods store, and a potato warehouse. As Sonoma County’s main shipping port, it found itself at the center of the area’s first agricultural boom—potatoes.
First introduced by an Irish immigrant named John Keyes out at Bodega Head in 1850, potato farming was well-suited to the area’s coastal climate. Quick to grow, easy to transport and store without refrigeration, potatoes became a staple for the burgeoning population of San Francisco.
The Cash Store in Bloomfield, 1850s (photo Sonoma County Library)
Farmers hauled wagonloads of their spuds into Petaluma via Potato Street (renamed Prospect Street in the 1860s), storing them at the warehouse until they could be loaded onto “potato boats” bound for the city. Each planted acre of potatoes generated $1,200 annually ($37,000 in today’s currency). For disappointed Argonauts like Wharff, those seemed like better odds than panning for gold.
After disembarking in Petaluma, Wharff and his friend stayed overnight at the American Hotel on Main Street (site of today’s Putnam Plaza). The hotel’s proprietor, George Williams, a Forty-Niner from Maine and the father-in-law of future Petaluma grain merchant John McNear, also operated a freight service with a wagon and three oxen. In the morning, for $10 ($300 in today’s currency), he hauled the wall tent and lumber out to the new farm six miles north of town.
Illustration of the American Hotel and Wells Fargo Express office, Main Street, Petaluma, 1850s (photo Sonoma County Library)
At the time, there were only two other settlers on the 16-mile stretch between Petaluma and Santa Rosa, Tom Hopper and Almer Clark. Hopper would go on to become one of the wealthiest landowners in the county, and Clark would soon open a popular stagecoach stop, the Valley House along Petaluma Hill Road. Along the way, Williams pointed out to Wharff 160 acres of land for sale in what is today downtown Penngrove.
“I thought I had hit a gold mine,” Wharff wrote.
After helping his friend construct the wall tent, Wharff hurried back to Petaluma to purchase his new farm before sailing back to San Francisco to share the news with Olive, who, during his absence, had given birth on March 31st to a baby daughter, Mary.
David and Olive Wharff (photos courtesy of Lee Torliatt)
Anxious to get his potato crop in, Wharff sailed back to Petaluma with lumber and a wall tent, as well as six dozen laying hens he purchased from a Frenchman in the Presidio for $225 ($7,100 in today’s currency).
George Williams hauled everything out to the new farm, where Wharff built a chicken coop directly onto the tent, to protect his valuable hens from preying coyotes. Returning to San Francisco for Olive and Mary, he once again hired Williams to transport them and their worldly possessions to the farm. As the made their way through the deserted valley, Olive nervously asked where exactly they were going.
“Home,” Wharff said.
After setting up Olive and the baby in the tent, Wharff traveled to Tomales, then a booming shipping port, where he purchased two tons of seed potatoes from Henry McCleave for $400 ($12,000 in today’s currency). That summer, while waiting for the potato crop to come in, the Wharffs made money by selling their eggs in town for $1.50 a dozen ($47 in today’s currency), becoming the first poultry producers in the area.
Illustration of Tomales, 1850s, by Richard Shell (photo Sonoma County Library)
What Olive made of life on the farm, her husband didn’t say, except to note there were only three other women living in Petaluma at the time, and that Olive went for six months without seeing the face of another white woman.
In September 1853, a month before the fall potato harvest, one of Wharff’s neighbors, upset his potato patch was being trampled by grazing cattle from the nearby ranch of Tom Hopper, set fire to the dry grasses on his property. As the wind came up, the fire quickly extended across the valley, and by evening had burned over to the top of Sonoma Mountain. Having earlier cleared the grasses and wild oats from around his tent home and potato patch, Wharff was spared any damage.
The following month, he harvested his potatoes, bagging them in sacks he purchased for $16 per 100, and hauled them to Petaluma’s potato warehouse, to eventually be loaded aboard “potato boats” bound for San Francisco. Unfortunately, the potato buyer at the warehouse had bad news—the market had crashed due to an overabundance of spuds that fall. He advised him to store his 20 tons of potatoes at the warehouse for $200 ($6,300 in today’s currency) until early spring, when prices would hopefully rebound.
By February, as it became clear that the boom was over, a victim of overplanting, soil erosion, and increased competition, the manager of the warehouse asked Wharff to remove his potatoes which were beginning to sprout. Wharff told him to move them himself, which he did, dumping them in the Petaluma Creek.
Disappointed, Wharff sold his ranch for $200 to a man named Brad Baily, and sailed with his family back to San Francisco, where he built a new house on the corner of Pacific and Leavenworth streets.
San Francisco’s Montgomery Street, 1850 (photo in the public domain)
After less than a year in the city however, Wharff was lured back to Sonoma County by the idea of starting a cattle ranch with his new brother-in-law Frank Green. A former neighbor told him 160 acres were for sale adjacent to Wharff’s former potato farm. Wharff paid the owner, Tet Carpenter, $200 for the property, which came with a small two-room house.
Back in San Francisco, he purchased twelve head of cattle from a rancher near the Mission Dolores for $480 ($14,000 in today’s currency), herding them aboard a new steamer Charles Minturn, the Ferryboat King of San Francisco Bay, had recently installed on the Petaluma Creek to Haystack Landing just south of Petaluma.
Ferryboat King Charles Minturn standing in front of his paddle steamer, E.Corning, on San Francisco docks, early 1850s (photo Sonoma County Library)
Wharff wrote he thought the ranch land was in the public domain, allowing him and Green to purchase it without a deed. That belief was rooted in the Preemption Act of 1841, which allowed settlers to purchase from the federal government up to 160 acres of any land in the public domain, assuming they had either lived on it for at least 14 months or made improvements to it for five years. In either case, it wasn’t necessary for a settler to hold actual title to the land while establishing homesteading rights.
California, however, presented a problem for aspiring homesteaders, as most of the desirable farming land was held in Mexican land grants, ownership of which was legally protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 that ended the Mexican-American War. For squatters like Wharff and Green, that would soon become a rude awakening.
The average Mexican land grant measured 17,000 acres. Owners with clear title, like General Mariano Vallejo, whose 66,000-acre grant extended from the east side of the Petaluma Creek all the way to the town of Sonoma, spent the 1850s selling off parcels of their land holdings to newly arriving American settlers. But a number of the land grant had changed hands so many times since the Mexican-American war that their legal trails were cloudy, with competing or even fraudulent claims.
Map of Marin and Southern Sonoma Land Grants, 1860 (excerpted from Map of the Country 40 Miles Around San Francisco by Lelander Ransom, courtesy of BLR Antique Maps)
In response, California created a land commission to review the legal status of the state’s 813 land grants. The reviews, which ran from 1852 until 1856, ultimately confirmed 514 of the 813 claims filed. Almost all of land commission’s decisions were appealed in the courts, creating a bureaucratic quagmire that added to the uncertainty and confusion of grant ownership, opening the door to speculators and land sharks.
Prospective settlers were faced with two choices: either purchase land from a claimant whose claim might be challenged and reversed by the land commission or courts in years to come, or else squat on the land illegally, hoping the land commission would eventually void the claim, placing the land in the public domain for purchase under the Preemption Act.
The extent to which Wharff and Green made this “pre-empt” squatter’s gamble is unknown. Although their land purchase was not recorded with the county, tax records indicate that in 1855 they paid state and county property taxes. By that time, the land commission had already ruled on the claim of the Rancho Cotate land grant they were squatting on.
Totaling 17,000 acres, Rancho Cotate had been originally granted in 1844 to Captain Juan Castenada, a secretary of Mariano Vallejo. At the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846, Castenada sold the grant to Thomas Larkin, the U.S. Consul to Mexico’s Alta California. In 1849, Larkin sold it to an American trader, Joseph S. Ruckle, who held it for only two months before selling it to Dr. Thomas S. Page, an expatriate American physician practicing in Valparaiso, Chile.
Map of Rancho Cotate and adjacent land grants, 1877 (from Thos. Thompson’s Historical Atlas of Sonoma County)
Page remained in Chile after the purchase, making him an absentee landlord and subjecting his land grant, which would one day encompass Cotati, Rohnert Park and Penngrove, to illegal squatters, including Wharff and Green. In 1852, he filed his claim with the new land commission. The claim was approved in August 1854, around the same time Wharff and Green purchased their land from the squatter Carpenter. As with most land grants, the land commission’s ruling was immediately appealed, leaving the land in legal limbo until the courts dismissed the appeal in March, 1857.
As one last formality, a survey of the land was scheduled to be undertaken in August 1857 before Dr. Page could assert his claim. What happened next illustrates the gambling mentality of former gold miners at the time.
Before the surveyors arrived, Wharff and Green sold their 160 acres to a man for $500 ($14,000 in today’s currency) and squatted on an adjacent 161-acre parcel. Whether or not they were looking to make a quick profit is unknown.
Dr. Thomas S. Page, Cotati, 1870 (photo Sonoma County Library)
In February 1858, after a patent was issued to Dr. Page, giving him clear and legal title to Rancho Cotate, he began immediately selling off 160-acre parcels to settlers, beginning with the squatters already in place. The settler who purchased the Wharff and Green ranch the year before for $500 paid Page $1,800 ($50,000 in today’s currency) to obtain legal deed to the property, bringing his total outlay for the land to $2,300 ($70,000 in today’s currency).
Wharff and Green purchased the 161 acres they had recently squatted on from Page for $1,610 ($45,000 in today’s currency). A short while later, they also bought back their former ranch from the man they sold it to, paying him $2,500 ($75,000 in today’s currency).
1858 Land Sale by Thomas S. Page to David Wharff (Sonoma County Deed Records, LDS Family Search Database)
The escalating land values had to do with a flood of new settlers to the area in the late 1850s. By 1860, Sonoma County had 12,000 residents, most of them farmers, living on 756 farms, with more than 200,000 acres under cultivation. The primary driver of that expansion was the California wheat boom.
Wheat schooner sailing down the Petlauma River (photo Sonoma County Library)
After the Crimean War cut off Russian wheat exports in the 1850s, Australia and New Zealand turned to California for wheat supplies, setting off a minor boom. The boom went into overdrive in the 1860s, following the disruption of Midwest wheat exports to Europe during the Civil War. By 1867, 80 percent of the wheat grown in Sonoma County was being shipped around the Horn to Europe’s central grain market in Liverpool, England, making Petaluma not only a thriving river town, but also an international shipping port.
In addition to riding the wheat boom, on their two ranches Wharf and Green also raised barley and oats, and annually produced 600 pounds of butter, 100 tons of hay, 400 pounds of honey, along with poultry and cattle. A tobacco chewer, Wharff was known for nailing the lids of his Star Tobacco tins to his barn, which was covered in them.
In 1871, Mary Jane and Frank Green decided to move to San Francisco. Wharff and Green sold the 161-acre ranch they had been living on, the one they purchased together directly from Page, to James and Lydia Goodwin, owners of a furniture store in San Francisco, who operated it as a second residence. They retained their original ranch, which was located along Old Redwood Highway near where the Green Mill Inn was erected in 1932.
1877 map of Penn’s Grove, Wharff and Goodwin ranches upper left (map from Thos. Thompson’s Historical Atlas of Sonoma County)
In the mid-1870s, the California wheat market began to decline due to an international recession and increasing competition from the Midwest. Like many of his neighbors, Wharff shifted to planting apples and grapes as part of a new fruit boom.
Olive and David Wharff, circa 1910 (photos courtesy of Penngrove Proud)
After the restless Argonaut odyssey of his twenties, Wharff ultimately found his golden fleece in Penngrove, settling with Olive for 55 years on the same ranch, where they raised seven children. Only three of whom survived beyond childhood, the others falling victim to diphtheria and scarlet fever. They were surrounded by family, as two of Olive’s brothers, George and John Densmore from Nova Scotia, joined them to settle in the area, and Mary and Frank Green eventually moved back to Penngrove in 1893, as the area began to experience a new egg boom, filling the countryside with chicken houses.
Wharff house built circa 1858 on ranch sold to the Goodwins in 1871. The house was moved in 1902 from where it had resided at 2368 Goodwin Avenue, to 1291 Elysian Road in Penngrove, where it sits today (photo courtesy of Chuck Lucas)
In 1905, the Wharffs leased their ranch and farmhouse to a neighbor, Antone Ronsheimer, who with his half-brother John Formschlag had purchased in 1865 the farm in downtown Penngrove where Wharff first grew potatoes in 1853. The Wharffs built a small cottage on the ranch for themselves and lived there until 1909, when they left Penngrove to live with their daughter Belinda Hoadley in San Francisco’s Mission District. Olive died there in 1913 at age 85, and David in 1918 at age 89.
By that time, swaggering, opportunistic Argonauts like Wharff had been recast in local lore as Pioneers, a little flamboyant perhaps, but always purposeful in channeling the wild exploitations of the Gold Rush into building California. Wharff’s daughter Belinda maintained that her father was not the adventurous, “harum scarum” type of Argonaut, but a quiet family man of tenacious courage, whose feet, like thousands of others who tilled the land, were firmly placed on the soil.
She clearly hadn’t seen him in his youth.
*****
Thanks to Lee Torliatt, Chuck Lucas, Katherine Rinehart, and Rich Wharff for their research assistance.
SOURCES:
Newspapers & Magazines
Petaluma Argus: “Personal and Social,” May 5, 1883; “A Bit of Penngrove History,” November 28, 1901; “Has Read the Argus for Over Fifty Years,” March 31, 1906; “The Death of Mrs. F. B. Green,” February 5, 1909; “Celebrated 57th Wedding Anniversary,” February 20, 1909; “Celebrate Sixtieth Anniversary of Their Marriage Tuesday,” February 20, 1912; “David Wharff Passes Away,” September 16, 1918.
Petaluma Courier: “Their Golden Anniversary,” February 20, 1902; “Celebrate Anniversary,” February 18, 1909; “Ancient Land History,” November 30, 1912; “Mrs. O. Wharff Enters Rest,” April 20, 1913; “Frank B. Green, Penngrove Pioneer, Found Dead in Kitchen at Country Home,” November 9, 1913.
Sacramento Bee: Harry P. Bagley, “From Sedate Boston to the Wild Gold Country of California,” September 12, 1942.
Sacramento Daily Union: “From the South (Page’s deed),” October 4, 1852.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “A Pioneer Woman of Petaluma Dead,” April 20, 1913.
Scientific American, “Agriculture in California,” November 27, 1852 (price of potatoes). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/agriculture-in-california/
Sonoma Democrat: “Patents Received in Sonoma (Page grant),” April 1, 1858.
Books, Journals, Websites, Other
Paul Bailey, Sam Brannan and the California Mormons (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1943), p. 124.
Christopher Warren Haskins, The Argonauts of California, Being the Reminiscences of Scenes and Incidents that Occurred in California in Early Mining Days (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1890) p. 462.
Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982).
Katherine Johnson, “West Penngrove Historical Resources Survey,” Master of Arts Thesis, Sonoma State University, 1994. https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/g445cg87h?locale=en
John Haskell Kemble, “The Gold Rush by Panama, 1848-1851,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, Rushing for Gold (University of California Press, February, 1949), pp. 45-56.
“Central America: Nicaragua,” The Maritime Heritage Project. https://www.maritimeheritage.org/ports/centralAmericaNicaragua.html
J.P. Munro-Fraser, “George B. Williams,” History of Sonoma County (Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), pp. 604-605.
Thor Severson, Sacramento: An Illustrated History, 1839 to 1874 (California Historical Society, 1973).
Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream 1850-1913 (Oxford University Press USA, 1973), pp. 49-68.
Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch Of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pgs. 18, 24, 55.
Lee Torliatt, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2002) pp. 18-20.
David Wharff letter to William Farrell, dated April 10, 1914. From personal collection of Richard Wharff.
David Wharff letter to A.P. Behrens, dated April 26, 1918. From personal collection of Lee Torliatt.
Rich Warff, “David Wharff,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016) pp. 115-122.
Luzena Stanley Wilson, 49er: Her Memoirs as Taken Down by Her Daughter in 1881 (Mills College, Calif., Eucalyptus Press, 1937). www.digitalhistory.uh.edu.
The former Cook Ranch along Lichau Road on Sonoma Mountain (photo public domain)
One June day in 1887, while delivering a wagonload of fresh strawberries to merchants along Petaluma’s Main Street, Frank Roberts ran into a neighbor from Sonoma Mountain, “French Louie” Marion, who was also delivering strawberries. The two got into a heated argument that ended when Roberts grabbed a handheld plowshare and whacked French Louie across the head with it, inflicting a large, bloody gash.
Arrested for assault and battery, Roberts was tried in court twice, with both cases ending in a hung jury. Although Petaluma had grown by the 1880s to a town of more than 3,000, a spirit of frontier justice still prevailed, with people often left to settle scores on their own.
And settle them they did, especially on Sonoma Mountain, where, in addition to physically accosting each other, neighbors were often in court, battling each other over deeds, property boundaries, water rights, livestock, and trespassing. But strawberries?
Illustration of Petlauma, 1877 (illustration courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
First introduced to Sonoma County in the 1850s, strawberry cultivation thrived in Petaluma’s Mediterranean climate. Farmers looking to get a premium price for their berries—25 cents per pound in 1887 ($7 in today’s currency)—relied upon branding, especially in June, when a number of local churches and temperance organizations held annual strawberry festivals, serving up berries and ice cream.
The town’s main influencers were the two newspapers, the Argus and the Courier, whose editors were plied with free baskets of berries by growers looking to have theirs declared the largest, reddest, and most delicious of the season.
Argus office in McCune Building on northeast corner of Main & Washington streets; Courier office a few doors down on Main Street across from Mary Street and Penry Park (photos courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
The honor, previously held by Roberts, was bestowed upon French Louie in June 1887.
One of only a handful of French immigrants on the west slope of Sonoma Mountain—most early French immigrants settled in either Sonoma Valley or Healdsburg, many of them operating hotels and resorts—French Louie left his native Normandy while still a teenager in the early 1870s, fleeing like many other French immigrants the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Working on a ship bound for America, he befriended a young shipmate named Peter Torliatt who was either escaping the French military draft or running away from his village near the Italian border after being caught throwing rocks at a priest.
Once their steamer docked in San Francisco, the two young men jumped ship, and eventually made their way to Penngrove, where they were hired by Ned McDermott to work on his ranch along Lichau Road atop Sonoma Mountain. Like many of the mountain’s early settlers, McDermott was Irish, Sonoma County’s first large immigrant group.
Evart Produce Company on Penngrove’s Main Street, 1902 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
The Irish were drawn to the mountain by its springs, which provided year-round irrigation, as well as the notion that wheat—California’s first major boom crop in the mid-1800s—would grow better on the mountain’s rolling slopes than on the valley floor below.
In 1882, French Louie married McDermott’s only child, 20-year-old Minnie McDermott. Four years later, not long before French Louie’s brutal encounter with Frank Roberts, Minnie died in childbirth. By that time, both French Louie and Torliatt were leasing their own ranches along Lichau Road on the mountain. With the wheat boom having gone bust by the 1880s, the two men, like most Petaluma ranchers, turned to dairy ranching, supplementing their income with eggs from pastoral chickens and market vegetables and fruits, including strawberries.
1890s dairy ranch outside of Petaluma (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
The attraction of cultivating strawberries was that, unlike grain crops, which were planted and harvested only once a year, strawberries reproduced steadily through spring and summer, providing the highest income per acre of any crop in the area. In 1887, an acre of strawberry plants yielded $400 in annual income ($11,500 in today’s currency).
For growers on Sonoma Mountain the yields were even better. Thanks to the mountain’s year-round springs and freedom from the frosts that plagued the valley floor, they were able to reap a second season, harvesting strawberries in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Losing his crown as the mountain’s strawberry wizard, was no small thing apparently for a wealthy rancher like Frank Roberts. Born to early Santa Rosa settlers, Roberts married Mary Hopper, the youngest daughter of one of Sonoma Mountain’s largest landowners, Tom Hopper.
Tom Hopper (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
Having come to California from Missouri in 1847, Hopper found success in the mines during the gold rush before settling in 1852 on Sonoma Mountain, where he eventually expanded his ranch to 2,360 acres.
In September of 1853, a neighbor of Hopper, looking to keep Hopper’s cattle out of his potato fields, touched off a fire to burn the grasslands on his ranch. The wild oats in the field, which stood six feet tall and were dry as timber in early fall, blazed furiously. By evening time, the fire had burned over the top of Sonoma Mountain, inflicting heavy losses on several neighbors.
Thanks to further real estate investments, Hopper went on to become one of the wealthiest men in the county. After becoming president of the Santa Rosa Bank in 1878, he moved to Santa Rosa, dividing his Sonoma Mountain ranch between his daughters Eliza and Mary.
Eliza married Isaac Fountain “Fount” Cook, who came to the area from Indiana as a child with his parents in 1854. The Cook Ranch sat halfway up the mountain along Lichau Road. Mary married Frank Roberts. Their Roberts Ranch, which included a lucrative rock quarry as well as a strawberry patch, extended from Petaluma Hill at Roberts Road up the mountainside to the Cook Ranch.
View of the former Cook Ranch along Lichau Road atop Sonoma Mountain (photo public domain)
After French Louie recovered from Roberts’ head bashing, he sent for his sister Pauline back in France. To his surprise, Adrienne, his other sister, showed up, having intercepted the money he sent Pauline for ship passage. After being in the country for only two months, she married Peter Torliatt, French Louie’s neighbor. It would be a troubled relationship.
Peter Torliatt (photo courtesy of Lee Torliatt)
In 1889, French Louie married the daughter of another of his Irish neighbors, 19-year-old Nellie Crilly. Nellie’s parents, Ellen and Nicholas Crilly, had established a ranch near the top of Lichau Road in the late 1860s. Like other settlers, they endured a number of bitter disputes with neighbors on the mountain. In 1872, while involved in a lawsuit filed by their neighbor James O’Phelan, the Crillys took a family trip to San Francisco. While they were away, someone burned down their house.
Six months later, Ellen Crilly took out her revenge on O’Phelan in an encounter recounted in the Petaluma Argus:
“There was considerable excitement created on the Sonoma Mountains one day last week, growing out of a dispute on boundaries of the lands of James O’Phelan and Nicholas Crilly. Crilly, it seems, ran a fence through the premises of the neighbor O’Phelan, who after taking counsel in the matter, determined to tear [the] same down.
He was in the act of removing the fence, assisted by a hired man, when Mrs. Crilly appeared from a buckeye bush and with a handful of rocks and the “sprig of shelalah,” commenced a vigorous warfare. One rock struck the hired man on the head, inflicting an ugly scalp wound, which rendered him “hors de combat.” She then directed her attack against O’Phelan, and administered a severe blow upon his “cronk” with her stick. This let [sent] him out and left the woman in possession of the field.
A warrant was sworn out for her arrest, and Deputy Sheriff Hedges was two days scouring the hills in search of the combative Amazon. It appears that after her splendid feat at arms she became frightened and took to the brush, and up to date the place of her retreat remains a mystery.”
In 1881, Nicholas Crilly died unexpectedly, leaving Ellen a widow with ten children to run the dairy. Shortly after French Louie married her daughter Nellie, Ellen was pulled into a new violent dispute on the mountain with a neighbor named Puckett.
An unidentified rancher and his wife heading into Penngrove by buckboard, circa 1900 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
A teetotaler with strongly held opinions, Edward Puckett settled on the mountain in 1854 after coming across the plains from Missouri. In addition to operating a 186-acre dairy, he was known for growing some of the best apples and Picholine olives for making olive oil in the area. In 1867, he married Mary Meany, a Petaluma schoolteacher and poet, originally from Ireland. The couple had one son, Alfred, an inspiring writer, who, under his mother’s tutelage, became known at a young age as the “poet of Sonoma Mountain.”
In 1872, Puckett had provided an easement across his property for Lichau Road, named after one of the mountain’s earliest settlers. Puckett however reserved the right to maintain two gates on the road in order to keep his cows from wandering off the ranch. Neighbors living further up the road—the Crillys, Todds, Jordans, and Duersons—complained to the county for years about the nuisance of Puckett’s gates on a public thoroughfare. Puckett, in turn, offered to take them down if the neighbors would build a wooden fence on his property along both sides of the road.
1898 map of Todd and Puckett ranches (circled) along Lichau Road (map courtesy of Sonoma County Library)
The dispute was still going on in 1890, when James M. Todd, who owned an adjacent ranch, entered Puckett’s farm one evening to retrieve a stray calf that had wandered through a break in the fence. Todd claimed the break had been created by Puckett’s hogs. He brought with him three young stepsons—Willy, Melvin, and Adelbert Cook—and one of Ellen Crilly’s sons, 16-year-old John.
They were met on the property by Puckett and his 21-year-old poet son Alfred. After exchange of some “rough language,” Todd and Puckett began to brawl.
Willy Cook, 19, pulled out a revolver and fired a shot at Puckett, barely missing his head. Puckett’s son Alfred attempted to wrestle the gun away from Willy, while Todd and the other young men ganged up on the elder Puckett. During the tussle with Alfred, Willy fired the gun three times, hitting Alfred in the shoulder and abdomen. While he lay bleeding, John Crilly egged on Willy to shoot Puckett as well. Fortunately for Puckett, Willy’s gun was out of bullets.
Charged with attempted murder, Willy Cook pleaded self-defense and was acquitted in a jury trial. Alfred Puckett eventually recovered from his wounds and went on to become a noted local historian.
In 1894, Frank Roberts made a small fortune when the Southern Pacific Railroad announced they were purchasing the entire inventory of his rock quarry, along with the quarries of four of his neighbors, amounting to 350,000 basalt blocks, to pave the streets of San Francisco’s Potrero District.
The former Roberts Ranch along Petaluma Hill and Roberts roads (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)
The deal made Roberts one of the wealthiest men in the county. That however didn’t stop him from battling with a neighbor over a $57 bill for a broken water pipe.
Water rights on them mountain were even more precious than land. In the early 1870s, three of the mountain’s large landowners—Tom Hopper, William Hill, and Henry Hardin—secured water rights to the springs that fed Copeland and Lynch creeks. Forming the Sonoma County Water Company, they piped the water, along with water from Adobe Creek, into Petaluma, serving as the town’s main water source. In exchange for running their pipes across the ranches on the mountain, they provided ranchers with access to the water as well as stock in the company.
The water pipe running across Robert Forsyth’s ranch developed a leak that spilled out onto the adjacent Roberts Ranch. Roberts had the leak repaired, sending the $57 bill to Forsyth, who refused to pay it. Roberts responded by suing Forsyth, making it clear that the money was immaterial, it was the principle that mattered.
Frustrated with the slow pace the lawsuit was taking in the courts, Roberts resorted to fisticuffs, not once but twice. In the first encounter, he wielded a cane at Forsyth, who fought him off with a knife. In the second showdown, Roberts wielded an axe, while Forsyth fought him off with a club. Each man filed charges of assault and battery against the other, all of which were eventually dropped, along with Roberts’ lawsuit for the $57.
Contemporary strawberry farm on Stony Point Road (photo courtesy of Stony Point Strawberry Farm)
By the 1890s, the strawberry competition between Roberts and French Louie had been put to rest by Peter Torliatt, who had ascended to being the area’s strawberry wizard. Torliatt was leasing the 518 acres that remained of the Cook Ranch after Eliza Cook and her husband moved to Santa Rosa. In addition to operating a dairy on the ranch, he maintained a 2-acre strawberry patch.
But Torliatt had domestic problems. In 1898, Adrienne filed for divorce and custody of their four children, before reconciling with her husband.
Peter and Adrienne Torliatt with two of their four children, Marie and Teresa, 1890s (photo courtesy of Lee Torliatt)
A year later however, the couple fell into a raging fight. Two of their children, fearing for their mother’s safety, ran to the adjacent ranch of David Horne for help. Horne, a Scotsman who had been feuding with Torliatt over water rights, went to the Torliatt house with another neighbor, William Duerson.
As they approached the house, a shot rang out. They loudly announced their presence, after which another shot whizzed by their heads. Retreating, they contacted the sheriff, who traveled up tp the mountain to arrest Torliatt for assault with a deadly weapon.
At his court trial, Torliatt maintained that he had been shooting at an owl in a tree that had been disturbing his chickens, and that he wasn’t aware of the presence of Horne and Duerson by the ranch house. As evidence, he introduced a dead owl to the court, the body still suspiciously warm a week after the incident. The case was eventually dropped.
In August of 1900, Adrienne Torliatt once again filed for divorce. That same month, Torliatt received an eviction notice from Eliza Cook, exercising a clause in the lease that allowed her to sell the ranch at any time, assuming it was after the annual harvest. Cook sold the ranch that month to L.L. Cannon, a breeder of champion racehorses, but Torliatt refused to vacate, maintaining that his second strawberry harvest wouldn’t be over until after Christmas.
Cook took Torliatt to court, where a number of experts were called in, including horticulturalist Luther Burbank, to testify on the nature of strawberry cultivation, particularly in regard to the second season on Sonoma Mountain. The judged ultimately ruled in Torliatt’s favor.
Horticulturalist Luther Burbank, 1901 (photo courtesy of book “The World’s Work,” archive.com)
The next spring, Torliatt purchased a 30-acre ranch on Ely Road east of Petaluma, where he relocated his famed strawberry plants. By the early 1900s, he was earning $5,000 a year ($144,000 today) from three acres of what many considered the finest strawberry patch in the county.
Adrienne, who had dropped her second divorce suit, would file for divorce three more times, citing cruelty as the reason. She eventually separated from her husband and moved into Petaluma with her two daughters, while the couple’s two sons remained with their father on the ranch. The courts denied her divorce suit each time, noting that both parties were in acting in bad faith as the fight was really over dividing up their community property. They remained in a standoff until Torliatt’s death in 1916.
French Louie continued to grow strawberries on Sonoma Mountain until 1911, when he and Nellie decided to move into town due to his declining health. French Louie had just finished moving their furniture into their newly rented house at 23 Post Street, when he died. He was 57.
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Full disclosure: the author John Sheehy’s Irish great-grandparents settled on Sonoma Mountain in 1863, although thankfully not along Lichau Road, but instead at the bottom of the range outside Lakeville.
SOURCES:
Newspapers
Petaluma Argus: “Strawberries and Cream,” May 17, 1866; “Dwelling Burned,” January 27, 1872; “War on the Sonoma Mountains,” June 1, 1872; “The Festival Last Evening,” May 2, 1873 “Died: Nicholas Crilly,” May 27, 1881; “Notice: Frank G. Roberts to Mary E. Roberts,” August 12, 1881; “That Mountain Nuisance,” October 4, 1884; “Fine Apples,” December 5, 1885; “Strawberries,” April 16, 1887; “Strawberries for Christmas,” December 10, 1887; “Brevities,” April 11, 1899; “Roberts Brings Suit Against Forsyth,” February 20, 1905; “Delicious Strawberries for Easter,” April 14, 1906; “First of the Season,” February 27, 1908; “Denied Divorce,” November 20, 1908; “Third Case is Dismissed,” October 10, 1911; “Strawberries in the Market,” April 13, 1912; “Finest Strawberries on Christmas Day,” December 8, 1912; “Sudden Death of A.J. Puckett,” March 9, 1926.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: Emily H. Kelsey, “Pioneers Bought Vallejo’s Land,” August 17, 1955.
Petaluma Courier: “A Mountain Nuisance,” October 1, 1884; “Courierlets: Roberts and Marion,” July 27, 1887; “Courierlets: Marion,” February 1, 1888; “Petaluma Entire Paving Block Supply Purchased,” September 26, 1894; “Strawberry Culture,” May 27, 1896; “Courierlets: Puckett,” December 7, 1898; “A Penngrove Suit: Horne,” March 30, 1900; “A Letter from Penngrove Way,” August 8, 1900; “Petaluma Case Tried Wednesday,” November 16, 1900; “Peter Torliatt Gets the Decision,” November 22, 1900; “Mary Catherine Puckett,” Courier, July 2, 1901; “Frank Roberts Assaulted,” December 17, 1904; “Another Pioneer Passes: Puckett,” September 11, 1907; “Pioneer of Olden Days Called: McDermott,” October 13, 1909; “Pioneer of Petaluma Dead: Ellen Crilly,” March 29, 1911; “I.F. Cook is Summoned at Santa Rosa,” February 11, 1917; “Contested to Be Filed in Cook Will,” February 28, 1917.
Sacramento Bee: “From Sedate Boston to the Wild Gold Country of California (Wharff profile),” September 12, 1942.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Torliatt Held to Answer,” February 10, 1899; “He Shot at an Owl,” February 11, 1899; Gaye LeBaron, “French Among the Important Early Immigrants,” November 7, 1993.
Sonoma County Journal: Ad for strawberry vines, January 19, 1856; “Strawberries,” May 27, 1859.
Sonoma Democrat: “Another Tragedy: Alfred Puckett is Shot on Sonoma Mountain,” December 13, 1890; “Cook Acquitted,” October 31, 1891; “Same Couple Figure Four Times in Divorce Court,” April 28, 1911.
Books, Journals, Websites, Documents
Thomas Jefferson Gregory, History of Sonoma County, California, With Biographical Sketches of Leading Men and Women (Historical Record Company, Los Angeles, 1911), p. 433.
Scott Hess and John Sheehy, “Sonoma Mountain,” On a River Winding Home (Ensatina Press, 2018), pp. 60-64.
Lee Torliatt, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2001), pp. 22-27.
1881 Copeland Creek Easement between Thomas Hopper and M.J. Miller. Courtesy of Michael Healy personal collection.
Letter from David Wharff to A.P. Behrens, April 26, 1918. Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.
