Category: Petaluma’s Founding

Petaluma’s first death was by potatoes. In the fall of 1851, a farmer named Shirley was thrown from the wagon load of potatoes he was driving to the potato warehouse near today’s Washington Street Bridge, and crushed beneath its wheels.¹

At the time, Petaluma was just coming into existence. The year before, meat hunter Tom Lockwood set up camp at an abandoned Miwok trading village called Lekituit (today’s Cedar Grove) for shipping game to gold rush San Francisco. By the time of Shirley’s death, the encampment had expanded to include a couple of trading posts, a handful of rustic cabins, the potato warehouse, and a combination general store, dining hall, and hostel operated by a disappointed miner from Missouri named George H. Keller.²

Shirley’s death occurred just north of the camp, at what is today the intersection of Petaluma Boulevard North and Skillman Lane. Keller and Lockwood, along with a young man named Columbus Tustin, dug a grave on the hillside of what would become Penry Park, where Keller read the service while the other men laid Shirley to rest in a rough coffin they fashioned out of redwood.³

A few months later, in January 1852, Keller set out to turn the camp into a real town. Staking an illegal squatter’s claim to 158 acres of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, a 13,000-acre, privately-owned Mexican land grant, he hired John A. Brewster to survey and plat a town of 40 acres, extending west from the creek to Liberty Street, north to Oak Street, and south to A Street. Keller called it Petaluma.⁴

After selling off the lots to a growing influx of new settlers, most of them failed gold miners like himself, Keller returned with the proceeds to his farm in Missouri (where, two years later, he became one of the founders of Leavenworth, the first town in Kansas Territory).⁵

Back in Petaluma, the potato boom went bust and much of the wild game was bagged within a year of Keller’s departure. But thanks to the continued growth of hungry San Francisco and to the steady stream of farmers settling in the area, Petaluma quickly became Sonoma County’s primary shipping port for an ever-expanding variety of agricultural goods.⁶

Soon after Keller’s departure, 26-year old Columbus Tustin decided to embark upon one of the first extensions of the downtown development, surveying and platting a subdivision he called Tustin’s Addition, that extended from First to Eighth streets, and A to F streets. He followed Keller’s example of positioning his street grid parallel to the Petaluma Creek (renamed the Petaluma River in 1959).⁷

However, Tustin aligned his grid with a different stretch of the creek, one just south of today’s Turning Basin, placing it at roughly a 45-degree angle to Keller’s grid. Then, instead of extending the street names designated by Keller, he adopted his own sequence of numbers and letters for street names, creating a disjunction where the streets of the two developments met.

Keller’s Kentucky Street (which he named for his native state, a common street naming strategy at the time) turned into Tustin’s Fourth Street; Keller Street (which Keller named for himself) into Fifth; Liberty Street into Sixth; and Main Street into Third (the two streets were combined in 1958 under the name Petaluma Boulevard, with a north and south designation).⁸

Just as Keller had centered his development around Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park)—marking the spot where Shirley was buried—Tustin did the same with the creation of D Street Plaza (renamed Walnut Park in 1896).⁹

Tustin also deeded the northeast corner of Fifth and B streets to the town for its first public educational institution, the Bowers School, which was replaced in 1860 by the Brick School, and in 1911 by Lincoln School (converted later to an office building).¹⁰

Unlike Keller, Tustin chose to stay in Petaluma, partly because he had come to town with his extended family. He built a home in the heart of Tustin’s Addition, at the southwest corner of Fourth and C streets (no longer standing).¹¹

Born in Philadelphia and raised in Illinois, Tustin came west across the plains in 1847 with his parents and eight siblings. The family went first to Oregon, and then to the gold rush town of Sacramento, before settling in 1851 in the Two Rock Valley. By that time, the hardships of the frontier had taken the lives of Tustin’s mother and two of his siblings.¹² Following the creation of Tustin’s Addition, the Tustin family members moved into town.

In 1855, Tustin’s father Samuel opened a lumber supply business in a fireproof stone warehouse, later known as “Steamboat Warehouse,” at the southeast corner B and Second streets, adjacent to the creek.¹³ Across the street from warehouse, Tustin’s sister Barbara Ann and her husband Joshua Lewis owned and operated the railroad depot for Charles Minturn’s Petaluma & Haystack Landing Railroad.

Despite being the third rail line in the state at the time, the tracks extended only two-and-a-half miles south of town to the deeper waters of Haystack Landing, where Minturn’s larger passenger steamboat could dock (Joshua Lewis was killed in an infamous explosion of Minturn’s steam locomotive at the depot in 1866, along with three other people, after which Minturn used draft horses to drawn the railcars along the track).¹⁴

Two of Tustin’s brothers, John and William, became successful inventors of farm machinery, including a self-regulating windmill, a grain reaper, and a gang plow that turned multiple furrows at a time. Their inventions proved popular during the California wheat boom that began in the mid-1850s, spurred by wheat demand first in Australia and New Zealand, and Europe during the Civil War. The boom continued into the 1870s, serving as the main driver of Petaluma’s river town prosperity, thanks to local industrious grain merchants like John A. McNear and his brother George Washington McNear, who was anointed in the 1880s as California’s “Wheat King.” ¹⁵

Columbus however proved the most successful of the enterprising Tustin clan. In addition to Tustin’s Addition, in the 1850s he developed one of Petaluma’s first large-scale nurseries, initially comprising 80 acres west of town at today’s Western Avenue and Chapman Lane. Comprising 75,000 grafted fruit trees, Tustin’s Orchard won the prize for best nursery at the 1860 Sonoma County Agricultural and Mechanical Fair.¹⁶

By that time, the restless Tustin was already looking for new opportunities. Sales in Tustin’s Addition were slow. Property buyers appeared to prefer the north side of town, its hills less prone to winter flooding. Then there was the uncertainty of clear property titles given the legal battle over ownership of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. It hung over Petaluma like a dark cloud.

In 1851, Congress passed the California Land Act, subjecting all Mexican land grant claims to the review of a Land Commission. By then, nearly half of California’s 813 land grants, comprising the best farming and ranching land in the state, had fallen into the hands of either American speculators or else American settlers who married into Mexican families.¹⁷

Ownership of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio was, like a number of the grants, cloudy. Originally awarded in 1838 to Antonio Ortega, General Mariano Vallejo’s major-domo in secularizing the Sonoma mission, the rancho had competing claim that read like a potboiler novel.

The same year he received the grant, Ortega entered into what appears to have been an arranged marriage with a woman 40 years his junior, Francisca Miranda, the 18-year old daughter of Juan Miranda, who had preceded Ortega as major-domo of the Sonoma mission before it was secularized in 1834.

By Mexican law, grantees were required to make the rancho their primary, actively improved the land with livestock grazing or crop cultivation, and not move out of Alta California. Ortega broke all three conditions.¹⁸

Leaving the occupation and running of the ranch to his father-in-law, Ortega, a notorious sexual predator, remained for the most part in Sonoma, where he operated a liquor store of the square. In 1843, soon after discovering his young pregnant wife had been having an affair, Ortega departed for Oregon on a cattle drive to make some money. He was gone for four years.

During that time, his father-in-law made his own claim to the land grant, asserting that Ortega had abandoned the property. Miranda died however before his claim was signed by the Mexican governor.¹⁹

When Ortega returned from Oregon in 1847, he turned over his claim to a Jesuit priest in exchange for educating his children at a school the priest was looking to build. The priest subsequently sold the claim to an American speculator, who died soon after filing his claim with the Land Commission. In 1853, the man’s wife sold the claim to James Stuart of San Francisco.²⁰

Stuart soon discovered the competing claim, which had been filed by Thomas B. Valentine, a 22-year old speculator who purchased Miranda’s unsigned claim from his family in 1850, what many believe was a private rather than a public auction, as it was never advertised. That belief was supported by the fact that Valentine sold off portions of the rancho to his attorney, the court administrator, and the probate judge who approved the sale.²¹

After comparing notes, Stuart and Valentine became concerned that the weaknesses of their respective claims might cancel each other out before the Land Commission. They decided to cut a deal. Valentine agreed to withdraw his claim in exchange for a percentage of the subdivision sales Stuart made from the land grant.²²

In 1855, the Land Commission approved Stuart’s claim to the rancho.²³ He immediately opened a real estate office in Petaluma and began placing notices in the local newspaper, alerting residents of their need to purchase a bonafide deed from Stuart, regardless of whatever bogus deeds they held from Keller, Tustin, or any of the other squatter developers in town.²⁴

Stuart’s claim applied only to the west side of town. The land east of the creek was part of the 66,000-acre Rancho Petaluma land grant awarded to Mariano Vallejo. In 1853, Vallejo sold 327 acres of what became early East Petaluma to a settler named Tom Hopper, who would go on to become a prominent banker and one the largest landowners in the county.²⁵

More than 200 Petaluma residents paid Stuart an average of $350 ($10,000 in today’s currency) for their lots, resulting in a total take of $70,000 ($2 million in today’s currency).²⁶ Tustin, it appears, partnered in purchasing unsold lots in Tustin’s Addition with Isaac Wickersham, a Pennsylvania lawyer who settled in Petaluma in 1853. Wickersham would go on to become a major land developer and banker, establishing Petaluma’s first bank in 1865.²⁷

Although Stuart split his Petaluma earnings down the middle with Valentine, the division of spoils wasn’t to Valentine’s liking. When Stuart’s claim went before the U.S District Court on appeal—a standard procedure for most Land Commission decisions—Valentine refiled his original claim, including depositions that spotlighted the weaknesses of Stuart’s claim, including that the Mexican governor’s signature on Ortega’s grant was postdated when the claim was submitted to the Land Commission.

In 1857, the District Court upheld Stuart’s claim, after which Valentine filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.²⁸ Meanwhile, the town of Petaluma, having grown to a population of 1,300, decided in 1858 to officially incorporate as a city, accepting Stuart’s assurances that his ownership of the rancho would withstand Valentine’s appeals.²⁹

Tustin’s father, an active participant in early civic affairs, was elected to Petaluma’s founding Board of Trustees (city council).³⁰

In 1861, Tustin set off to seek his fortunes in the newly discovered Comstock silver mines of Nevada. Accompanying him were three partners of a wagon-making business in Petaluma—William Zartman, John Fritsch, and Nelson Stafford. The men settled among 4,000 prospectors in the boomtown of Washoe City, just south of Reno, where they invested in mining operations and also constructed a mill for extracting silver ore from quartz they called the Petaluma Quartz Mill.³¹

After corporate bankers began assuming control of the Comstock mines and shifting milling operations to company-owned plants, the men sold their interests in 1864 and returned to Petaluma.³²

While they were away, Valentine’s persistent court appeals resulted in an 1864 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated both his and Stuart’s claims to the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, releasing the land into the public domain.³³ Under the Preemption Act of 1841, that meant Petaluma residents were granted first right of refusal in purchasing their property from the government at a nominal fee of $1.25 per acre ($21 in today’s currency).³⁴

The large number of claims however presented an bureaucratic bottleneck. Prompted by Petaluma’s predicament, Congress in 1865 passed the General Townsite Bill, which provided for the government to survey and plat a city (for a fee), after which land patents could be easily obtained by citizens for their property.³⁵

A committee of five men, including Tustin, appointed by Petaluma’s Board of Trustees, raised $3,000 ($50,000 in today’s currency) for a government survey of the city.³⁶ Within a year of the survey’s completion, roughly 2,500 people had purchased pre-emptive claims on the 13,000-acre Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio.³⁷

In 1867, Congress strengthened Petaluma’s position by passing a bill ceding to the city all government-owned land within city limits.³⁸ Valentine however persisted in lobbying Congress for a court review of his claim. Finally, in 1872, he succeeded. Two years later, after favorable review in the Ninth District Court, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, who surprisingly approved Valentines’s claim of the rancho.

In lieu of the actual Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio however, Congress stipulated as a condition of the review, that should he be successful, Valentine would be compensated with land scrip that he could be applied toward the purchase of property in the public domain anywhere else in the country. With that, the cloud that had hung over Petaluma since its founding by Keller in 1852, was lifted for good.³⁹

Tustin, meanwhile, had moved on from Petaluma. In 1868, he and his former mining partner, Nelson Stafford, purchased 1,360 acres of the 63,000-acre Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana in Orange County, splitting the property between them.⁴⁰ Tustin surveyed and platted 100 acres of his half into a new town he called Tustin City.

As he had done in Petaluma, Tustin laid out the street grid using numbers and letters as street names. True to his arborist roots, he planted trees throughout the city, leading to its distinction as Southern California’s “City of Trees.”⁴¹

Before leaving Petaluma, Tustin sold his residence at Fourth and C streets, along with the rest of the block it sat on, to grain merchant John A. McNear, who constructed an elaborate estate on the site in 1867.⁴²

Tustin Orchards was split between W.W. Chapman and Ezra Cleveland, who named their respective roads to the property Chapman Lane and Cleveland Lane.

The Tustin Stone Warehouse at B and 2nd streets, which Tustin inherited after his father died in 1863, was purchased by Charles Minturn, owner of the Petaluma & Haystack Landing Railroad, along with the adjacent railroad depot. Following Minturn’s death in 1873, W.D. Bliss purchased the property, renaming it the Bliss Warehouse (site today of Ayawaska Restobar, 101 2nd Street, across from the Great Petaluma Mill).⁴³

Tustin City found soon itself in the middle of the emerging orange belt of Southern California. Tustin’s grand vision for the city however was undermined when Southern Pacific Railroad rejected the city as the site of its southern terminus, choosing nearby Santa Ana instead.

Consequently, Santa Ana grew into a large city, while Tustin (the “City” was dropped from the name in 1892) remained a relatively small agricultural town. Tustin died in 1883 at the age of 57, reportedly a disappointed man.

Much like in Petaluma, Tustin found itself transformed following World War II into a suburban bedroom community, growing to a current population of 80,000.⁴⁴

In 1876, the coffin of the potato farmer named Shirley, who Tustin and Keller buried in 1851, was discovered during preparations in Main Street Plaza (Penry Park) for the city’s celebration of America’s centennial. They were respectfully moved to the John McNear’s new cemetery at Cypress Hill.⁴⁵

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Footnotes:

¹“Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876.
²J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), pp. 258-259; John Sheehy, “History Mystery Solved,” Petaluma Argus Courier, February 11, 2021.
³“Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876; Letter regarding Theodore Skillman’s Magnolia Hotel, Petaluma Courier, May 7, 1879.
⁴Munro-Fraser, pp. 259-260.
⁵Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), p. 55; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pgs. 21, 29; Henry Miles Moore, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the City and County of Leavenworth,” Western Life (Leavenworth, KS), August 3, 1900.
⁵Heig, pgs. 69-70; Munro-Fraser, p. 263; “Early Hunters,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1855; David Wharff letter to A.P. Behrens, dated April 26, 1918, page 18, from personal collection of Lee Torliatt.
⁷Sonoma County Deed Records, show two grants in 1853 from Columbus Tustin, one to Edward S, Jones, May 16, 1853, and the other to Fred Starkey, August 12, 1853, indicating that he was selling lots; the boundaries of Tustin’s Addition defined in Thos. H. Thompson, Map of Sonoma County, 1877.
⁸“Goodbye Main Street; It’s Petaluma Boulevard Now,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 26, 1958.
⁹The plaza appears in maps of Petaluma from 1865 and 1871. It was apparently under private ownership until 1873, when I.G. Wickersham sold it to the city of Petaluma; “Miscellaneous,” Petaluma Argus, December 26, 1873. It was renamed apparently by the newly formed Ladies Improvement Club. First newspaper listing under the new name Walnut Park: “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, September 22, 1896.
¹⁰“Former Resident Here,” Petaluma Courier, May 25, 1904
¹¹“Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, November 23, 1898.
¹²Munro-Fraser, p. 350; “Tustin’s Family Traced,” The Tustin News, March 25, 1982.
¹³Ads for Tustin’s Lumber Yard with the start date of December 18, 1855, first appeared in the Sonoma County Journal December 19, 1856; This was on lot 157, sold in 1870 to Charles Minturn by Columbus Tustin, after Samuel Tustin died in 1873. “Changed Hands,” Petaluma Argus, July 16, 1870; Sonoma County Deeds: Columbus Tustin grantor to Minturn, grantee, June 14, 1870; liber 20, p. 147.
¹⁴Heig, p 76.; “Married,” Sacramento Transcript, April 18, 1850; “Mrs. Lewis Called,” Petaluma Argus, February 15, 1900; “Petaluma Old Landmarks Going,” Petaluma Courier, August 2, 1912; “Ed Mannion’s Rear View Mirror” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 14, 1963; Ed Mannion, “Historian Recalls Earlier Incident,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 5, 1967.
¹⁵“Sixth Annual Fair of the State Agricultural Society,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 22, 1859; “Tustin’s Newly Invented Self-raking and Double-acting reaper and Mower,” California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences, September 7, 1860; “Railroad Accident,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, October 30, 1869.
¹⁶“Sonoma Co. A&M Society,” Sonoma County Journal, April 22, 1859; “Sonoma County Agricultural Fair,” Daily Alta California, September 3, 1860; “Nursery for Sale,” Sonoma County Journal, October 26, 1860; “Sonoma County Fair,” Petaluma Weekly Argus,” October 3, 1867; “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, August 1, 1883.
¹⁷Paul W. Gates, “California’s Embattled Settlers,” California Historical Society Quarterly, June, 1962, Vol. 41, No. 2, p. 104.
¹⁸Transcript of the legal appeal in the District Court for the Northern District of California of “White vs. The United States,” December Term, 1863; George Tays, “Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Sonoma: A Biography and History,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sep., 1937), p. 237.
¹⁹“White vs. The United States” transcript; George, Tays, pp. 240-241.
²⁰“White vs. The United States” transcript.
²¹Robert Lee, “Valentine Scrip,” South Dakota State Historical Society, 1972, pp. 263-264; “Report in the Matter of Juan Miranda,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 2, 1865.
²²“After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863; “Supreme Court Decisions, Sacramento Daily Union, April 4, 1860.
²³“After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863.
²⁴Ad for “Office Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio,” Sonoma County Journal, October 27, 1855.
²⁵“Ancient Land History,” Petaluma Courier, November 30, 1912; Tom Gregory, History of Sonoma County, California (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1911), pgs. 433-437.
²⁶“The First Fight of the Lobby,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 25, 1863.
²⁷Ad for “Desirable Property for Sale,” Sonoma County Journal, December 24, 1858; Gregory, pgs. 271-272.
²⁸“After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863.
²⁹Thos. Thompson, p.20.
³⁰Munro-Fraser, p. 284.
³¹Munro-Fraser, p. 551; “Things at Washoe,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, May 14, 1861; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, April 18, 1862: Stephen Madler and Kelly Tighe lease the carriage firm of Fritsch, Zartman & Co.; “Petaluma Mill,” Gold Hill Daily News, January 4, 1864; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, September 25, 1863: Fritsch & Stafford open wagon shop at old stand on Keller and English, having bought out Zartman; “Thanks,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, August 12, 1863; “Consolidated Gold and Silver Mining Company,” Gold Hill Daily News, November 27, 1863.
³²“Washoe City Fades from View,” Northern Nevada Business Weekly, September 10, 2019; “John Fritsch,” Petaluma Courier, June 2, 1902.
³³Robert Lee, p. 266; Transcript of the legal appeal in the District Court for the Northern District of California of “White vs. The United States,” December Term, 1863. https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/US/68/68.US.660
³⁴“Citizens Lookout,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, December 7, 1865;
The Preemption Act of 1841, 27th Congress, Ch. 16, 5 Stat. 453 (1841) Text of the law, accessed from www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org
³⁵“Legislation for California,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 16, 1865; “The Miranda Case Defeated,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, April 3, 1865.
³⁶“Settler’s Meeting, Petaluma Weekly Argus, June 23, 1864; Citizens Lookout,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, December 7, 1865.
³⁷“Cause for Rejoicing,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, May 17, 1866; “Opposed to Miranda,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, April 26, 1866.
³⁸Thirty-Ninth Congress Records, Session 2, 1867, page 418. www.loc.gov/law.
³⁹Robert Lee, p. 272.
⁴⁰“About to Leave Us,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, December 25, 1869.
⁴¹“Traces of Tustin’s Founding Family Still Visible in Town,” Orange County Register, August 30, 2012. ⁴²“Former Resident Here,” Petaluma Courier, May 25, 1904.
⁴³“For Sale at Great Bargain,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, May 14, 1868; “Changed Hands,” Petaluma Argus, July 16, 1870; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, June 7, 1878; “Tustin’s Family Traced,” The Tustin News, March 25, 1982.
⁴⁴“Tustin History,” Tustin Area Historical Society, https://www.tustinhistory.com/tustin-history.htm; “Bill Soberanes Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 29, 1974.
⁴⁵“Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876.