The Petaluma River Watershed has been a stage for the passing exploits of land stewards and pillagers, community builders and adventurers, boosters and steely-eyed entrepreneurs, immigrants and suburban commuters. In making a living space of the watershed, their efforts extend from the inspiring to the dispiriting, the noble to the disgraceful, the sublime to the ridiculous. In other words, a microcosm of much of California as a whole.
Over time, the watershed has been carved up into a crazy quilt of borders, ranging from tribal areas to Mexican rancherias, county lines, city limits, property lines, and community separators. Over the last two centuries the watershed’s resources have been subjected to extraction and exploitation, leaving behind a legacy of good as well as bad.
This blog seeks to “re-story” the landscape of the Petaluma River Watershed by digging beneath the legends, folklore, and myths to learn like a history detective what’s either been hidden from the common narrative or else lost to time, in hopes of enlarging our collective understanding of Petaluma and, in doing so, deepening our roots as a community.
The more we come to hear the stories of those who have passed this way before us, the more we find ourselves beckoned to a sense of belonging that extends beyond our lifetimes.
Communities that lose their collective memory often lose their sense of meaning and identity.
— John Sheehy
