READING SONOMA COUNTY’S EARLY SUBSCRIPTON HISTORIES
When I was a boy, my great-uncle Will Casey took me on walks around Petaluma, filling my head with local lore. One day we stopped across from the town clock to gaze upon the 1880s cast-iron front buildings lining Western Avenue.
“When I was your age,” Uncle Will said, “I stood here and watched them build those.”
That bit deep.
A retired town merchant, Uncle Will was one of Petaluma’s popular storytellers in his old age. For me, his stories always brought the past alive, giving me a sense of place and continuity. But once I grew older and started researching Petaluma history, I learned his tales weren’t all that factual, which might be what made them so memorable.
“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story,” Mark Twain said, or is reputed to have said.
People often conflate lore with history. But as meaning-making creatures, humans tend to be more interested in meaning than truth, which is where lore and history part ways.
Lore functions much like memory, which, according to playwright Tennessee Williams, “takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is predominantly seated in the heart.”[1]
That same dim interior protects lore from cognitive dissonance with contrary facts.
Coalescing around objects, sites, and monuments, lore is passed down from generation to generation as sacred and absolute.[2] History, by contrast, is secular. No one has a monopoly on its narrative. Multiple, conflicting perspectives are part of its truth.
STORYTELLING
Like a detective investigating a cold case, trained historians take a critical and skeptical view of all human motive and action. Vigilant about making mistakes, they question everything, including their sources and their own perspectives, which they struggle to root in the contextual complexities of the times they are investigating.[3]
According to historian David McCullough, history’s attraction is driven by two of life’s most absorbing mysteries—time and human nature.[4]
Hilary Mantel, prize-winning author of the historical novel Wolf Hall based on the life of Thomas Cromwell, had a similar take. “History is what people are trying to hide from you, not what they’re trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through a landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.”[5]
That is also where some of the most compelling stories can be found. As the current popularity of genealogy demonstrates, the more you learn, the more you want to know. Thanks to recent advances in digital access, sifting through the landfill is becoming more efficient than ever.
But for the historian, gathering research is merely the first step. As with a composer assembling notes, one ultimately needs to make music. Which is where storytelling comes in.
“You have to be clear and you have to be interesting,” Barbara Tuchman, author of The Guns of August, wrote in her classic essay, “The Historian as Artist.” Her secret: “Tell stories.”[6]
Unlike stories of lore, historical narratives are not restricted to sacrosanct scripts owned by groups and communities. Their fundamental plot—the unfolding story of change—tracks with how life itself plays out: ever changing and open to interpretation. What the historian brings to the plot are insights into the consequences of past decisions made and actions taken.[7]
Some offer those insights from a distance, as though chronicling history from a mountaintop. Others, like Tuchman and McCullough, prefer to view it from within, bringing characters from the past back to life in stories. Those stories serve to engage others in a meaningful pursuit of the truth in documenting human nature over time.[8]
Yet, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”[9] In the marketplace of meaning making, history’s inherent complexity often leaves it victim to the simplified storylines of lore, especially when tailored for commercial purposes.
SONOMA COUNTY SUBSCRIPTION HISTORIES
Nowhere is that more evident than in the early histories of Sonoma County, specifically the seven subscription-based history books published in 1877 (Thompson), 1880 (Munro-Fraser), 1889 (Cassiday), 1898 (Reynolds & Proctor), 1911 (Gregory), 1926 (Tuomey), and 1937 (Finley).[10]
Top, left to right: Robert A. Thompson, J.P. Munro-Fraser; Middle, left to right:Samuel Cassiday, William D. Reynolds, Thomas A. Proctor; Bottom, left to right: Tom Gregory, Honoria Tuomey, Ernest L. Finley (photos credits: Sonoma County Library, Oregonian newspaper, subscription histories)
These books have played a powerful role in sculpting the county’s historical landscape, one that continues to resonate to this day. The early 19th century histories in particular serving as foundations for the histories that folowed.
However, as informative as these books are in many regards, their commercial origins as subscription histories—books pre-sold before publication by door-to-door salespeople—compromise their integrity as official narratives.
Title pages of 1877 and 1898 Sonoma County atlases
Architects of desire, these histories were factory produced and intentionally shaped by what people wanted to hear and experience. Neatly aligning beginnings with ends and causes with effects, they are full of omissions and fabrications created to cover them. Their biographies, illustrations, and historical mentions were customarily paid for by the farmers and business owners they showcased.[11]
Title pages of 1880, 1889, 1911, 1926, and 1937 Sonoma County subscription histories
Their underlying ideological purpose was to lend a false inevitability to Sonoma County’s creation and early development as the embodiment of “Manifest Destiny.”
A national propaganda initiative, Manifest Destiny promoted a belief in America’s divine duty to conquer, settle, and prosper in the promised land of the west. Its patriotic call to action appealed to those looking for a brighter future, justifying their break with the familiar and comfortable to plunge into the unknown and make the hazardous journey west, where they dedicated themselves to the hardships of developing farms and towns.[12]
Given that context, the appeal of subscription history books at the time is understandable.
By the late 1870s, settlers to Sonoma County had endured three decades of surprises and uncertainty, including land grant and homesteading legal challenges, agricultural booms and busts, cataclysmic fires and floods, resistant Natives, unwanted immigration, a Civil War, and a national recession. They needed a narrative to affirm it had been worthwhile, one that celebrated them as pioneers in the successful service of Manifest Destiny.
For that reason, the series of manufactured histories of early Sonoma County are best viewed as a study in human meaning making, with a skeptical eye toward historical source material. As such, when taken with a grain of salt, they no longer hinder our ability to look to the county’s past as a means of better understanding its present.
******
A version of this story appeared in the Sonoma Historian, Winter 2026 edition
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Tennessee Williams, Stage Directions for Scene 1 of The Glass Menagerie (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1945), page 1.
[2] David Blight, “History and ‘Memory,’” Commonplace, the Journal of Early American Life, Issue 2.3, April 2002.
[3] “Statements on Standards of Professional Conduct,” American Historical Association, January 2023. https://www.historians.org/resource/statement-on-standards-of-professional-conduct/
[4] McCullough, pgs. 5, 146.
[5] Hillary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost (NY: Picador, 2004).
[6] Barbara Tuchman, Practicing History: Selected Essays (NY: Knopf, 1981), p. 45; David McCullough, History Matters ( Simon & Schuster, 2025), p. 5.
[7] David Blight, “History and ‘Memory,’” Commonplace, the Journal of Early American Life, Issue 2.3, April 2002.
[8] McCullough, p. 37.
[9] Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Dover Thrift Editions, R.R. Donnelley, 2016), p. 6.
[10]T.H. Thompson, Historical Atlas Map of Sonoma County (Oakland, CA: Thos. H. Thompson Company, 1877); J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco, CA: Alley, Bowen & Company, 1880);Samuel Cassiday, An Illustrated History of Sonoma County (Chicago, IL: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1889);Tom Gregory, History of Sonoma County (Los Angeles, CA: Historic Record Company, 1911).
[11] How ‘Tis Done: A Thorough Ventilation of the Numerous Schemes Conducted By Wandering Canvassers Together with the Various Advertising Dodges for the Swindling of the Public (Chicago: Fidelity Publishing Co., 1879); Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
[12] Anders Stephenson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (NY: Hill & Wang, 1995).
