Who Was Marshall Lafferty?

The Historical Prequel to Petaluma’s Longest Running Land-War Drama

Jerry or Isaac Lafferty, son of Marshall Lafferty, 1872 (photo courtesy of Pete Vilmur Collection at PetalumaPioneers.org)

Kevin Costner is dressed in a tux, carrying a rifle.

Playing the role of land baron John Dutton in the TV series “Yellowstone,” he confronts a group of Chinese tourists on his property. One of them scolds him, calling it obscene that one man should own so much of the earth. He runs them off with a gunshot to the air.

“This is America,” he shouts. “We don’t share land.”

For the past 30 years, Petaluma has endured its own version of “Yellowstone” over Lafferty Ranch on Sonoma Mountain. It began when the city decided to shut down its century-old water works on the property and convert the 270 acres into a public park. Peter Pfendler, the millionaire owner of 800 acres abutting Lafferty, responded by firing off a shotgun brief to City Hall. Local officials naively brushed it off.[1]

“I think this could be a little war up there in the hills,” said one city council member. “Mr. Pfendler has threatened to call in his posse of lawyers, but you can’t keep 45,000 people off their property.”[2]

Police cars and protesters outside entrance to Lafferty Ranch, 2002 (photo North Bay Bohemian)

This is America. With enough lawyers, guns, and money, one can certainly try.

Faced with a costly lawsuit, the city quickly backed down. Years of plot twists followed—public protests, proposed land swaps, property access battles, backroom deals, ballot fraud, polarized elections, rifle shots, environmental damage suits, Pfendler’s death—making “Lafferty” the city’s longest running class-war series drama.[3]

As with “Yellowstone,” the series came with historical prequels featuring two of Petaluma’s early land barons, General Mariano Vallejo and banker William Hill. Land for these men, as for Pfendler, was not only an object of lust but a source of legitimacy, power, and identity. The more they owned, the more they mattered. 

View of Petaluma Valley from Lafferty Ranch (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

It wasn’t always so. Prior to being “discovered” by Europeans, Sonoma Mountain was inhabited for millennia by the Coast Miwok. In their origin myth, it was an island in a primordial ocean at the beginning of time, a place where the world began. They called it Oona-pa’is. [4]

For tribal members, the mountain was a cultivated garden they carefully nurtured and co-existed with. During hunting and gathering seasons, they dispersed from villages on the valley floor to small encampments on the mountain near fresh water sources, including presumably the two springs comprising the Adobe Creek headwaters on today’s Lafferty Ranch.

Illustration of California natives fishing by John Russell Bartlett (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Then came the colonizers. To their eyes, the land appeared as an uncivilized wilderness upon which to project their dreams, aspirations, and greed. First, the Franciscan padres claimed it for their Sacred Expedition, driving the Coast Miwok into mission servitude and conversion, then the Mexican government secularized the mission lands, carving them up for private ranchos.[5]

Vallejo laid claim to the 66,000-acre Rancho Petaluma, stocking it with imported sheep and longhorn cattle. He shipped their hides, tallow, and wool to Europe and New England, where they fetched good prices for making leather goods, blankets, candles, and soap. After the livestock decimated the perennial native fescue, or bunch grass, it was replaced by Mediterranean annual grasses. Better suited for heavy grazing, they turned the hills golden in summer.[6]

Mariano Vallejo, 1875 (photo Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Vallejo lost his herd to American cattle rustlers during the Mexican-American War. To fill his coffers, he ventured into real estate, selling off subdivisions of Rancho Petaluma to land-hungry Americans, many of them disappointed lost boys from the Gold Rush. In 1859, Marshall Lafferty purchased 270 acres on Sonoma Mountain from Vallejo for $52,500 in today’s currency.[7] 

Born in North Carolina in 1808 and raised in Kentucky, Lafferty descended from early colonial stock. At 17, he married Elizabeth Criss from Pennsylvania. The couple had 13 children, eventually settling in Illinois. There, Lafferty served in the U.S. Army during the Black Hawk War, putting down a revolt by Native Americans evicted from tribal land they had secured in a treaty.[8]

In 1850, Lafferty headed west for the Gold Rush, returning home four years later. In 1857, he took his wife and children out to California via covered wagon, initially settling in the city of Vallejo before purchasing property on Sonoma Mountain.[9]

Entrance to Lafferty Ranch Sonoma Mountain (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

Like other “pioneers,” he looked upon the land with the boom-and-bust mentality of a gold miner.[10] The cycle began in the 1850s with a potato boom, which quickly faded because of overproduction and soil depletion. A cattle boom followed, fizzling out in the early 1860s due to overbreeding and competition. Then came the California wheat boom. Accelerating during the Civil War, which cut off Midwest wheat exports to Europe, it went bust in the 1880s due to soil erosion and competition.[11]

The steep terrain of Lafferty’s ranch lent itself more to cattle grazing than farming. Its elevation above the fog line and year-round water supply from Adobe Creek also made it feasible for growing imported fruit trees. The orchard had plenty of sunlight as most of the mountain’s native oaks had been logged out. Cut and piled into large mounds, they were covered with dirt and slowly burned to charcoal, which was shipped to San Francisco as a coal substitute for heating homes, businesses, and steam engines.[12]

In 1867, Marshall Lafferty sold his ranch to his two youngest sons, Isaac Newton Lafferty and Jeremiah Henry Clay Lafferty. Isaac left to pursue a teaching career, eventually becoming a school superintendent in Washington Territory. Jerry maintained the ranch, adding a large vineyard to the fruit orchard, and hosting deer hunting parties as well as social dances, where he played the violin. He eventually married and started a family, while continuing to care for his aging parents.[13]

Illustration of Petaluma, 1857 (Sonoma County Library)

Meanwhile, the thriving river port of Petaluma found itself hindered by water restrictions. Early residents near the river drew their water from wells and natural springs, but those buying into the new hillside developments were dependent upon water cart deliveries. The scarcity created a need for careful planning that clashed with the pioneering spirit of the times.Water became money.[14]

In the early 1870s, two groups of venture capitalists launched competing initiatives to pipe water into town from three creeks on Sonoma Mountain, Copeland, Lynch, and Adobe. By 1877, the two consolidated into the privately-owned Sonoma County Water Company.[15]

Adobe Creek near headwaters on Lafferty Ranch (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

In 1888, the Lafferty brothers sold their ranch for $170,000 in today’s currency, purchasing a new ranch in Glen Ellen, where Marshall Lafferty spent his final years until his death in 1892 at the age of 87.[16]

The Lafferty Ranch was purchased by William Hill, president of the Bank of Sonoma County, one of four locally financed banks in Petaluma. The other three controlled by John McNear, Isaac Wickersham, and Hiram Fairbanks. Together with Hill, they were the wealthiest men in Petaluma and also its largest landowners. Hill’s holdings alone comprised 6,000 acres.[17]

Hill was also president of the Sonoma County Water Company. He first purchased the water rights to Lafferty Ranch in 1887, before purchasing the ranch itself the following year in order to secure the headwaters of Adobe Creek for the water company, which he quickly flipped the property to for a nominal $10. For income, the company leased the ranch out for livestock grazing.[18]

William Hill residence, D & 8th streets, Petaluma (photo Sonoma County Library)

Changing hands a few times, the Sonoma County Water Company served as Petaluma’s main water source until 1959, when it was purchased, along with Lafferty Ranch, by the city. The voter-approved bond used to acquire the waterworks also funded an underground aqueduct for transporting water from a new dam on the Russian River to Petaluma, facilitating the city’s suburban housing boom.[19]

Proposals to convert Lafferty Ranch into a community park began with Petaluma’s 1962 general plan. In the early 1970s, Petaluma schools were allowed to use the ranch for limited educational and environmental purposes. Meanwhile, the city continued leasing out grazing rights to the property.[20]

In 1992, the Sonoma Mountain waterworks were shut down after Lawler Reservoir, which Adobe Creek fed into, was declared vulnerable to earthquakes. The City of Petaluma then decided to convert Lafferty Ranch into a public park, launching the longest running political drama in Petaluma history.[21]

A group of hikers touring Lafferty Ranch (photo by Kent Porter / The Press Democrat)

After Lafferty’s adjacent neighbors sought to block public access to the ranch by claiming ownership of a small strip of land between the ranch and the public road, in 2013 the City filed a lawsuit against them, claiming a historic public easement to the land. In 2019, the City dismissed the lawsuit after Pfendler’s widow, Kimberley Pfendler, agreed to no longer finance the opposition to developing Lafferty as a public park. [22]

In 2022, the city began piloting guided hikes on the property through a partnership with the non-profit LandPaths. Many people on a recent hike said they were seeking an experience of the land before European contact. . [23]

Lafferty Ranch is sadly far from that. It remains scarred from two centuries of being logged out, worked, and grazed upon since the Coast Miwok were driven from the area. The upcoming new season of “Lafferty” will hopefully be a quiet drama, one of gradual restoration and renewed stewardship of the land.

Matt McGuire and John Sheehy on Lafferty Ranch (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier July 7, 2023.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “City Opts to Keep Ranch Land,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 17, 1992; “Ranch Access May Be Stalled,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 7, 1992; “Petaluma Land Swap Foes Won’t Give Up,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 11, 1995.

[2] “This is Your Land­—Mostly,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 23, 1992.

[3] M.V. Wood, “Lafferty,” North Bay Bohemian, October 3-9, 2002; “Chronology of the Lafferty Ranch Controversy,” Laffertyranch.org/timeline

[4] M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pgs. 1, 135; Merriam, C. Hart Merriam, editor, The Dawn of the World, Myths and Weird Tales Told by the Mewan (Miwok) Indians of California (Cleveland ,Ohio: Arthur H. Clarke Co, 1910). p. 203.

[5] Anderson, pp. 2-3; Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, “We Feel the Want of Protection: the Politics of Law and Race in California, 1848-1878,” Taming the Elephant: Politics, Government, and Law in Pioneer California, Burns and Orsi, editors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) pp. 96-120.

[6]Alan Rosenus, General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americas (Berkeley: Heyday Press, 1995); Anderson, pp. 76-77; Michael Ellis, “How Our Hills Got Golden,” KQED, July 9, 2010. www.kqed.org/perspectives.

[7] Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 12, page 185, August 1, 1859: sale by Mariano G. Vallejo to Marshall Lafferty for $1,348.75 lot 361 of Rancho Petaluma consisting of 169.75 acres.

[8] Sonoma Index-Tribune, February 20, 1892, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/217655953/marshall-lafferty.

[9] “Prof. I.N. Lafferty,”  An Illustrated History of the State of Washington, by Rev. H.K. Hines, D.D. (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, IL., 1893), pages 473-474.

[10] “Opening Address,” Petaluma Argus, October 8, 1870.

[11] James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-22532010000200002

[12] Arthur Dawson, “The History of Sonoma County’s Woodlands,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 26, 2017;  J. Charles Watford, “Charcoal Making In Sonoma County,” Society for California Archaeology, https://www.scahome.org/publications/proceedings/Proceedings.13Whatford.pdf

[13] Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 21 of Deeds, page 321, June 29, 1867, and Liber 79 of Deeds, page 603, July 3, 1872; “School Statistics,” Marin County Journal, September 24, 1870; “Prof. I.N. Lafferty,” An Illustrated History of the State of Washington, by Rev. H.K. Hines, D.D. (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, IL., 1893), pages 473-474; “Jottings,” Petaluma Courier, February 25, 1880; Jottings,” Petaluma Courier, September 1, 1880; “Agricultural Outlook,” Petaluma Courier, April 13, 1881; “H.C. Lafferty of Glen Ellen Dead,” Sonoma Press Democrat, May 9, 1914.

[14] Alexandra Wormley, Michael Varnum, “Nearly 20% of the Cultural Differences Between Societies Boil Down to Ecological Factors,” The Conversation, June 6, 2023. Theconversation.com.

[15] “Prospect Ahead for Good Water,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1871.

[16] Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 113, pp. 279-81 (pg. 787 in online deeds site), January 11, 1888: deed of I.N. Lafferty of Washington Territory and William Hill for $2,400, for half his interest in lot 361 of 269.75 acres of the Rancho Petaluma; Liber 109, pp.634-635, January 11, 1888, deed of J.H.C. Lafferty to William Hill, for $2,400 half his interest in lot 361 of 269.75 acres of the Petaluma Rancho; Liber 113, pp.184-186, April 29, 1887, sale of water rights lot 361 to on Petaluma Rancho by I. N. Lafferty and J. H.C. Lafferty to William Hill for $500 gold coin. (total sale for land and water rights $5,300).

[17] “Sonoma County National Bank, Petaluma, 50th Anniversary,” Coast Banker, Volume 16, Coast Banker Publishing Company, 1916; “William Hill,” Petaluma Courier, July 31, 1902.

[18] “William Hill,” Petaluma Courier, July 31, 1902; Sonoma County Deeds, Liber 113, page 282, January 25, 1888: deed of William Hill selling Lafferty Ranch to the Sonoma County Water Company: $10 sale for 169.75 acres, Lot 361 of the Rancho Petaluma.

[19] “Petaluma Aqueduct Contract Signed,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, May 10, 1960.

[20] “Petaluma’s New General Plan Aired April 25,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 5, 1961; “Commission Approves Ranch Use,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 1, 1970; “Study Trails Agreement Approved,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 9, 1970.

[21] “Petaluma May Mothball ‘Unsafe’ Lawler Dam,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 22, 1992.

[22] “City Joins Lafferty Ranch Lawsuit,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 19, 2013; “Lafferty Proponents Claim New Evidence in Access Fight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 17, 2013; “Petaluma Forging Ahead with Lafferty Ranch Plans after Dropping Lawsuit,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 6, 2019; Email from attorneys Mike Healy and Lawrence King to John Sheehy.

[23] Sheri Cardo, “Exciting Changes at Petaluma’s Lafferty Ranch on Sonoma Mountain,” Sonoma County Gazette, September 21, 2022.

The Making of Kentucky Street

EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY

Kentucky Street, 1908 (photo California State Library)

This photo of Kentucky Street was taken in 1908, soon after this stretch of Kentucky Street between Washington Street and Western Avenue became a central commercial strip.

The building on the corner was built by Angela Canepa in 1900. She and her husband Giovanni, both Italian immigrants, ran a grocery kitty corner across the street where Bank of America is today. Six months after Giovanni’s death in 1898, Angela purchased the old Washington Stable & Livery at the southwest corner of Washington and Kentucky streets, and hired a San Francisco architect to design a new Victorian commercial building on the site. Louis Solari, a clerk in her store, and his wife Emilia, opened the Golden West, a grocery tavern, on the bottom floor of the new Canepa Building in 1900. Canepa rented the upstairs out mainly to physicians and dentists.

The Healey Manson at Washington & Keokuk streets, built 1903 (Sonoma County Library)

In 1904, an Irish immigrant named Dennis Healey sold the grocery he operated with his wife Maggie on Main Street across from Penry Park, and constructed a new building next door to the Canepa Building for his new Petaluma Furniture Store. The couple had just built the new Healey Mansion at the corner of Washington and Keokuk the year before.

Two doors down from Healey’s furniture store, in 1901, Adolph Bloom, the son of Swiss Italian immigrants, purchased the Petaluma Theater (also known as the Opera House), built in 1870, and hired Brainerd Jones to convert it into retail space and offices.

Petaluma Theater (Opera House), 1870s (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Further down the block, in 1907, a German immigrant named Henry Schluckebier who operated Schluckebier’s Hardware across from Penry Park, moved his home from Kentucky Street to 245 Howard Street across from St. Vincent’s Elementary (currently under major renovation).

Brainerd jones’ Plans for the Telephone Building, 1907 (Petaluma Argus-Courier)

He hired Brainerd Jones to design a new commercial building in its place, extending 117 Kentucky St., where Threads A Boutique is today, to 131 Kentucky Street, where Round Table Pizza now resides. He named it the Telephone Building because the telephone company was his first tenant.

The Birth of Petaluma’s Revival

Downtown Petaluma’s Turning Basin (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

When it came to business opportunities, Skip Sommer was superstitious. If a new venture didn’t include the number six, he approached it warily. If it referenced both six and an eagle, he doubled down.[1]

On May 11, 1975, Sommer drove his tan diesel Cadillac—license plate “Eagle 66”—into downtown Petaluma and pulled up beside the dilapidated Golden Eagle Mill at 6 Petaluma Boulevard North.[2]

Bingo!

Up the street, Petaluma’s statuesque mayor, Helen Putnam, was leading a group of 200 preservationists on a tour of the city’s historic downtown. As the group emerged from the new Lan Mart gallery of shops—Petaluma’s first adaptive reuse of a historical structure—Putnam steered them across the street to the Golden Eagle Mill.[3]

Golden Eagle Mill (former G.P. McNear Mill), 1973 (photo Sonoma County Library)

There, to the fanfare of popping champagne corks, she introduced Sommer, who emerged from a curtain of dusty cobwebs to announce his plan to save the river city. “In the old days,” he told the crowd, “schooners would tie up to the docks of this mill to pick up feed for the horses of San Francisco. Soon, it will be yachts tying up here to visit the new Great Petaluma Mill.”[4]

Skip Sommer inside the Great Petaluma Mill, 1976 (photo by Morrie Camhi, courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

He proceeded to unveil his vision: transforming the old granary into a Victorian-themed arcade of specialty shops patterned after San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square.

As crazy as it might have sounded, Putnam let it be known that Sommer’s scheme had her full support. The stakes were simply too high to fail.

Sprawling housing developments were overwhelming Petaluma’s infrastructure. The city’s attempt to pump the brakes—capping new housing units at 500 per year and imposing a greenbelt around the city—was met with a lawsuit from developers. After losing the first round in court, the city was granted an appeals hearing.[5] Optimistic about a favorable outcome, Putnam unleashed her side maneuver: revitalizing the downtown.

“The type of growth I’m interested in,” she declared, “is growth that retains Petaluma’s rank as a first-class city, not as a bedroom community.”[6]

For Putnam, that meant staging a comeback of the Petaluma River.[7]

Mayor Helen Putnam beside the Turning Basin (photo Sonoma County Library)

For more than a century, the river served as the lifeblood of the city, its downtown banks dotted with grain mills and warehouses. Following World War II, the rise of large factory farms in Central California and elsewhere decimated the local poultry and dairy industries, leading to a sharp decline in commercial river traffic. Then came the opening of the freeway in 1956, placing Petaluma within easy commuting distance of San Francisco.[8]

Tract homes quickly sprang up across the flats east of town, accompanied by shopping centers, restaurants, and motels, all draining foot traffic from the downtown. No longer able to command premium rents, commercial landlords let their timeworn buildings slowly deteriorate, leaving the town pockmarked with boarded-up eyesores.

The Wickersham Building, 170 Petlauma Boulevard North, 1973 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In the mid-sixties, the city began tagging old buildings as safety hazards. In most cases, demolishing them was cheaper than bringing them up to code for earthquake and fire risks. That opened the door to urban renewal, the federally funded movement sweeping America.

The wrecking ball began swinging in 1965, its first victim the original Golden Eagle Mill built in 1888 along the east side of the Turning Basin. Before the mill’s destruction, Golden Eagle moved its operations into the former G.P. McNear Feed Mill at Petaluma Boulevard and B Street, which it purchased in 1958.[9]

The original Golden Eagle Mill, East Washington Street, 1954 (Sonoma County Library)

Once the mill was razed, Novato developer Walter Kieckhefer began planning construction of the Golden Eagle Shopping Center (today’s River Plaza Shopping Center) in its place.[10]

Putnam, first elected mayor in 1965, supported urban renewal, overseeing the expansion of Washington Street, the sole traffic artery to the burgeoning eastside, into a four-lane thoroughfare. That began with the demolition of three blocks of historic buildings at the intersection of Washington Street and Petaluma Boulevard.[11]

In the late sixties she backed the Core Area Plan, a federally funded redesign of the downtown that called for converting Kentucky Street between Western Avenue and Washington Street into a closed-off mall, and demolishing all the buildings along the east side of Petaluma Boulevard from D to Oak streets to install a six-lane thoroughfare along the river.[12]

Mayor Helen Putnam (center) displaying illustration of proposed Core Plan on the Washington Street Bridge, 1969 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Two months before the Core Area Plan was put before voters, Petaluma’s urban renewal bulldozer hit a speed bump. The Healey Mansion, a stately Queen Anne Victorian at the corner of Washington and Keokuk streets, utilized for half a century as a funeral parlor, was torn down for a new gas station. Its leveling became the rallying cry of a local historic preservation movement.[13]

In June, voters rejected the Core Plan bond issue while reelecting Putnam to a second mayoral term by a slim margin. Deftly, she pivoted her downtown stance afterward from destruction to restoration, and began chasing federal tax credits for adaptive reuse—retrofitting old buildings for new uses.[14]

The trend began in 1964 with the transformation of San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory into a historically themed center of shops and eateries.[15] Two years later, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, giving communities some means of protecting their historic fabrics from the slash-and-burn of urban renewal. Grants and tax credits followed.[16]

National Ice & Cold Storage Building, E. Washington & Lakeville streets, c. 1950. (photo Sonoma County Library)

Lakeville Shopping Center at E. Washington & Lakeville streets (photo public domain)

Petaluma’s first attempts at adaptive reuse began in 1972. Developer Kieckhefer set out to convert the National Ice and Cold Storage Building, built in 1908 at the corner of East Washington and Lakeville streets, into a local Ghirardelli Square. Once he saw the price tag for seismic upgrading, he changed his mind, and instead tore the building down to erect the Lakeville Shopping Center in its place.[17]

That same year, Victor and Marisa DeCarli recombined the two Gross Buildings, extending from Petaluma Boulevard to Kentucky Street, to create the Lan Mart Center of boutique shops.[18] Their initiative inspired Putnam to marshal a crusade to revive Petaluma’s historic downtown waterfront, using the old Golden Eagle Mill as her cornerstone.

Lan Mart Building, 35 Petlauma Blvd North, 1977 (photo Sonoma County Library)

What she needed was someone to lead the charge, not just a developer, but a charismatic ringmaster like Bert Kerrigan. Hired as a front man for the Chamber of Commerce in 1918, Kerrigan unleashed upon the town an energetic, three ring circus atmosphere that boosted Petaluma’s prosperity and fame as the “Egg Basket of the World.”

For help, Putnam reached out to an old friend, Bill Murray, chairman of the Bank of Marin, who had started his banking career in Petaluma during the 1950s. He had just the man for the job: Ralph “Skip” Sommer, a former stage actor and IBM salesman turned theme developer. Growing up in Michigan, Sommer spent his summers driving horse-drawn carriages of tourists around Mackinac Island, a Victorian-era resort that still bans automobiles. He understood history as an economic engine. [19]

Skip Sommer aboard horse and buggy, Mackinac Island, 1950 (photo courtesy of Skip Sommer)

Murray, whose bank had financed two of Sommer’s conversions of historic buildings into shops and restaurants in Marin, drove him up to Petaluma for his first visit.[20] Lured by federal tax credits and Murray’s financial backing, Sommer jumped at the opportunity. With Putnam’s assistance, the proposal was fast-tracked through the city planning commission, bypassing the need for an environment impact report.

Then came the deal killer: $275,000 for seismic upgrading ($1.4 million in today’s currency). Sommer blinked, until Murray told him the bank would finance it.[21]

Sommer staged the grand opening of the Great Petaluma Mill in October 1976 with the razzle dazzle of Harold Hill in “The Music Man.” Soon, he was piloting his yacht, The Great Eagle II, up the Petaluma River to proclaim the Turning Basin the new port of call for recreational boating. The press ate it up, dubbing him the “new business czar of the downtown waterfront area.”[22]

Great Petaluma Mill, 1980s (photo Sonoma County Library)

That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand the ruling of a lower appeals court which had granted Petaluma the right to preserve the city’s character and open spaces “by growing at an orderly and deliberate pace.”[23] Putnam’s two pronged approach—sustainable growth paired with a revitalized downtown—­­­had worked.

In the first year of the Great Petaluma Mill’s operation, downtown sales taxes increased by 30% thanks to increased foot traffic. A restoration fever soon overtook the downtown with developers of adaptive reuse flocking to town.[24]

But Putnam wasn’t finished. She wanted to anchor the new recreational Turning Basin with the warmth of Victorian homes.

In 1976, the Wendy’s hamburger chain purchased the Burns-Farrell house at East Washington and Wilson streets with plans to demolish it for a burger joint. Putnam negotiated a deal to have Sommer buy the house for $1, and then move it to an empty lot on the Turning Basin, where he converted it into a restaurant called the Farrell House (today’s River House).[25]

Burns-Farrell House being moved from E. Washington Street to the Turning Basin, 1979 (photo courtesy of Skip Sommer)

Burns-Farrell House (today’s River House) on Turning Basin (photo Scott Hess)

The next year, she did the same with the Pometta House, a Victorian on Petaluma Boulevard South between C and D streets, slated for destruction for a new bank parking lot. Sommer moved it to 1 C Street, beside today’s Petaluma’s Yacht Club, converting it into an office building.[26]

Pometta House, Petaluma Blvd South, between C & D streets, 1977 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Pometta House in foreground at C & 1st streets on the Turning Basin, 2023 (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

In 1979, Sommer sold the Great Petaluma Mill in order to help fund his next adaptive reuse performance out on the coast and his producer, Mayor Putnam, began her newly elected term as a Sonoma County supervisor. Petaluma would never be the same.[27]

Petaluma Turning Basin (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

*******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 12, 2023.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “He’s Not Your Typical Developer,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 28, 1975; Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives.

[2] Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives.

[3] “Unique Development Announced,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 12, 1975.

[4] “Unique Development Announced,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 12, 1975.

[5] “Design Plan Passes; Is Effective at Once,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 28, 1972; “Good Case for Housing Limit,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 26, 1973; “City Growth Ordinance Outlawed,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 29, 1974; Growth Suit Decision Not Expected for Some Time,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 15, 1975.

[6] “Helen Putnam, First Woman Ever to Seek Office of Mayor,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 25, 1965.

[7] “River May Be Making a Comeback,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 28, 1975.

[8] “Cotati Man is First Fatality on Freeway,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 17, 1856.

[9] “Golden Eagle Completes McNear Deal,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 17, 1958; “Mayor Discusses Golden Eagle’s Present Property,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 24, 1964 “Golden Eagle’s Century Old Mill Site,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 13, 1965.

[10] “Golden Eagle, Once Towering Over Petaluma, Like a Phoenix Reborn,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 26, 1975.

[11] “Rezoning Aids Expansion Central Business District,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 17, 1967; “Our Most Important Need,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 11, 1967.

[12] “More Parking Would Boost Downtown Area,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 3, 1968.

[13] “Money to Decide Mansion’s Fate,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 1, 1969; “Thanks for the Effort,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 13, 1969.

[14] “Putnam Wins, Bonds Lose,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 11, 1969.

[15] “Old, Familiar Glow,” San Francisco Examiner, November 30, 1964.

[16] Historic Preservation & Development, September 20, 2006, U.S. Department of  the Interior.

https://www.doi.gov/ocl/hearings/109/historicpreservationdevelopment_092006

[17] “Center Project Proceeds,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 14, 1972; “New Building to Follow Razing,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 17, 1973.

[18] “Lan Mart Stores are Commercial Experiment,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 15, 1973; “Lan Mart Center Has Grand Opening,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 6, 1973.

[19] Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives; “He’s Not Your Typical Developer,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 28, 1975.

[20] “Skip Sommer’s Ideas Pay Off Very Well at Lark Creek Inn,” San Rafael Daily Independent, October 13, 1972; “Old Western Look,” San Rafael Daily Independent, October 30, 1974.

[21] “Great Petaluma Mill Needed Quake-proofing,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 1, 1976; Interview with Skip Sommer by John Sheehy, December 23, 2022, Sonoma County Library Archives.

[22] “Reviving a Turn of the Century Town Center,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1977; Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 25 1977.

[23] “Growth Review Denied,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 23, 1976.

[24] “Ambitious New Business Owners See Potential in Old Buildings,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1977; “Mill Played a Key Role in Downtown Revitalization,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 9, 1980.

[25] “Historic Home to Become Restaurant at New Site,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 6, 1976.

[26] “House on Wheels,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 5, 1978.

[27] “Putnam Elected Supervisor,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1978: “Marin Investors Buy Great Petaluma Mill,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 19, 1979.

The Petaluma Dime Museum’s Lost Treasure

THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF NATIVE AMERICAN ARTIFACTS

Johnny B. Lewis displaying his mortars & pestles collection , 1890s (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

In January 1849, a young merchant named Johnny B. Lewis set off for the California gold mines, only to discover he had failed to book advance reservations.

Having boarded a ship in New York City with a “stock company” of other aspiring miners funded by investors, Lewis sailed with his company to the Isthmus of Panama. After making their way overland to the Pacific Coast, the group found a line of 4,000 other treasure hunters waiting for a ship to San Francisco.[1] 

Stuck in port for four months, Lewis obtained a large tent and earned money by renting it out as a restaurant and lodging house. When he finally secured passage to California, it was aboard the Humboldt, a refitted coal ship packed with 400 other passengers, for $200 per ticket ($7,500 in today’s currency).[2]

Yerba Beuna Cove, San Francisco, 1851 (public domain)

When Lewis finally disembarked in San Francisco after 102 grueling days at sea, he found himself cured of gold fever. Purchasing a horse and cart, he became a teamster, making a small fortune hauling freight around town for $25 a day ($1,000 in today’s currency) to help pay back the stock company that funded him. Expenses in the Gold Rush city ran equally high. In his spare time he channeled his lust for buried treasure into digging for “Indian curios.”[3]

Over the next half century, Lewis assembled one of the largest collections of Native American artifacts in California, all proudly displayed at his Dime Museum in Petaluma.[4]

Street parade outside Lewis’s Dime Museum, East Washington Street (Sonoma County Library)

While looting archaeological sites had been popular since antiquity, it became something of an American pastime in the 19th century, after the British Empire began ransacking countries for trophies of its colonial triumph. Private museums of exotic artifacts proliferated as wealthy men turned collecting a competitive sport and middle class hobbyists began assembling collections to enhance their social status.[5]

In California, relic hunters found Native American villages and burial grounds easy pickings, as the state’s indigenous population had been reduced an estimated 150,000, or half of what it had been at first European contact 80 years earlier. Driven first by the Spanish and Mexicans into mission servitude, and then labor camps like Fort Ross and the Petaluma Adobe, many Natives were worked to death, infected by European-transmitted diseases like syphilis, measles, and smallpox, or else killed outright by soldiers.[6]

Petaluma Adobe, 1902 (Sonoma County Library)

After the U.S. claimed California as a spoil of the Mexican-American War in 1848, Americans began streaming into the state under the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny,” believing they were divinely ordained to settle the West and remake it in their own image. For some, that meant first eradicating what remained of the indigenous population.[7]

“That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected,” California’s first governor Peter Burnett explained to state legislators in 1851.[8]

California’s first governor, Peter Burnett (public domain)

To expedite his belief, he signed an act facilitating the removal and displacement of Natives from their traditional lands and indenturing Native adults and children to White settlers. He also set aside state money to arm local militias for undertake killing expeditions as needed. As a result, by 1870 California’s Native population had been reduced to an estimated 30,000.[9]

Against this backdrop, in 1856 Lewis purchased a 300-acre cattle and dairy ranch in Lakeville, seven miles downriver from Petaluma.[10] As luck would have it, the ranch was near Lakeville’s namesake—Tolay Lake. (Full disclosure: In 1863, my great-grandfather John Casey purchased a ranch bordering the north end of Tolay Lake).

Tolay Lake, 2023 (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

No more than 20 feet in depth, the lake was actually a sag pond encompassing 300 acres. The Alaguali, a Coast Miwok tribe whose main village bordered San Pablo Bay, made use of it for drinking, bathing, and cooking. They also cultivated roots of the lake’s sedge beds for basketmaking and hunted migrating fowl drawn to its waters. But the lake’s most significant use for Natives was as a sacred spiritual center and medical depository for charmstones.[11]

Mostly two to three inches long, the stones varied in shape from oblong to round and squat. Natives believed they carried mystical power, allowing doctors to extract illness from the sick and injured, after which the stones were drowned in the lake to fully eradicate the illness. Some of the charmstones found in the lake were later determined to be more than 4,000 years old, originating from as far away as Mexico and Washington state.[12]

Native American charmstones from coastal California (public domain)

Such archaeological knowledge was largely lost on relic hunters like Lewis, who mistook the stones for “sinkers” used in weighing down fishing nets.[13] That wasn’t unusual. Most hobbyists operated within an informational vacuum, their fixation on collecting overriding both curiosity and concern for the sites they excavated.[14]

In 1859, Tolay Lake was purchased by a wealthy German immigrant named William Bihler. In 1870, he dynamited the natural dam at the lake’s southern end, allowing the water to drain out into San Pablo Bay. He then planted potatoes in the lakebed. Each year’s plowing of the field brought new charmstones to the surface.[15]

Johnny B. Lewis, c. 1900 (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

By the turn of the century, Lewis claimed to have secured half of the thousands of charmstones gathered at Tolay. He also noticed the Natives stopped coming around after Bihler drained the lake.

“When I came here in the early fifties,” he wrote, “there used (to be) large numbers of Indians go by my ranch in the fall, down the Petaluma creek to catch sturgeon and dry them, and they always went back by the way of the lagoon and stayed a day or two and had some kind of pow-wow.”[16]

Anthropologist Peter Nelson notes that they were most likely concerned with the dangers of being exposed to charmstones exposed in the dry lakebed.[17]

Along with charmstones, Lewis also gathered from the area stone axes, hatchets, chisels, spear- and arrowheads, string beads made from shells and teeth, and human skulls found near the Petaluma Adobe.[18] But the bulk of his collection consisted of mortars and pestles used by Natives for milling acorns, an essential food source, into flour.[19]

Coast Miwok basalt mortar & pestle found near Petaluma (photo Worthpoint.com)

In his digs, Lewis discovered different types of mortars confined to certain areas. Those with straight sides and flat bottoms he found near Sonoma Mountain, where boulders of basalt were common. But in the sandy hills in the west side of Petaluma, the mortars were  pointed or urn-shaped.

Lewis with his mortars and pestles display at his Lakeville ranch, 1890s (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

To display his artifacts, Lewis built a museum on his ranch. It became a regular attraction, drawing people out to Lakeville on weekend carriage rides, as well as serving during the 1890s bicycling craze as the finish line for races from Petaluma.[20]

In 1900, “Uncle Johnny,” as he was fondly known, leased out the ranch and moved into Petaluma to live with his son, Charles, who operated a bicycle and general repair shop on East Washington Street (across from today’s River Plaza Shopping Center). In the storefront beside Charles’ shop, Lewis opened the Dime Museum for his collection. A 19th century phenomenon, dime museums showcased collections of artifacts and oddities for the entrance fee of a dime.[21]

Site of Dime Museum and C.W. Lewis’ Repair Shop (left), East Washington Street, 1912 (Sonoma County Library)

In 1907, an ailing Lewis decided to close the museum and sell off his collection. A private collector in Missouri purchased his charmstones, while Charles H. Culp, a friend and fellow relic hunter in Pacific Grove, acquired his 227 mortars and pestles. Added to the 250 mortars Culp had already amassed from Central California, it reportedly made for the largest collection of Native mortars in the country.[22]

Charles Culp’s collection of mortars and pestles, Pacific Grove Museum (photo courtesy of Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History)

Lewis died in January 1909 at the age of 84. A few months later, Culp shipped his expanded collection to Seattle for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, where he opened a “California Indian Museum” along the exposition’s “Pay Streak Amusements” midway. Similar to a world’s fair, the exposition featured romanticized exhibits of Native Americans, Alaska and Yukon Natives, and Pacific Islanders. Running from June through October, it drew more than 4 million visitors, including collectors and museum directors. [23]

Charles Culp’s California Indian Museum, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle, 1909 (photo University of Washington Libraries)

Among them was George G. Heye, a New York banker in the process of assembling the world’s largest private collection of Native American artifacts. In 1917, Heye opened the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City to showcase his collection.[24]

George G. Heye outside the National Museum of the American Indian, New York City, 1917 (public domain)

It’s unclear whether Heye purchased any of Culp’s collection at the Seattle exposition. The Smithsonian, which assumed ownership of Heye’s museum in 1990, has record of only a dozen mortars attributed to Culp, all of them originating from Central California.[25]

The last reported sighting of Culp’s mortars collection after the exposition was in 1911, when it was on loan to the Pacific Grove Museum. The museum has no record of the collection after that date. It most likely ended up in the hands of private collectors.[26]

J.B. Lewis, Dime Museum card (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Archaeologists often refer to pillaged archaeological sites as “pages torn from our history book.”[27] In an attempt to return some of those missing pages, in 1990 Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It required that Native American cultural items found on federal or tribal lands or in museums receiving federal funding be returned to federally recognized tribes upon request. California enacted a similar law a decade later.[28]  

Some public collections, notably those of the University of California, have subjected repatriation requests to a slow-moving and wildly obtuse process. Private collectors are another matter. Many of them have adopted a position of free enterprise, claiming such artifacts belonged not to the people they came from, but to the relic hunters who moved them.[29]

As long as such lingering attitudes of Manifest Destiny remain, characterizing Native people and culture as though they are in the past tense, the artifacts collected by relic hunters like Johnny B. Lewis remain pages torn from history.[30]

******

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “J.B. Lewis is Dead,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1909.

[2] “J.B. Lewis is Dead,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1909. “Uncle Johnny Lewis,” Petaluma Argus, June 17, 1901; “84 Years Sunday,” Petaluma Courier, March 16, 1908; Lewis A. McArthur “The Pacific Coast Survey of 1849 and 1850,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sep., 1915), pp. 246-274.

[3] “J.B. Lewis is Called Home,” Petaluma Argus, January 7, 1909; Robert M. Robinson, “San Francisco Teamsters at the Turn of the Century,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 35.1, March 1956: Letters from J.B. Lewis to his wife Elizabeth, October 30, 1850, and November 30, 1850, Petlauma Historical Library & Museum.

[4] “Uncle Johnny Lewis,” Petaluma Argus, June 17, 1901; “84 Years Sunday,” Petaluma Courier, March 16, 1908;

[5] Michael W. Hancock, “Boffin’s Books and Darwin’s Finches: Victorian Cultures of Collecting,” master’s dissertation, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, 2006. DigitalCommons@IMSA, digitalcommons.imsa.edu/engpr/5/; Robert J. Mallouf, “An Unraveling Rope: The Looting of America’s Past,” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2, (Spring, 1996), pp. 197-208. https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/mallouf.pdf

[6] George E. Tinke, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 5; Benjamin Madley, American Genocide (Yale University press, 2017), p. 3.

[7] “Manifest Destiny and Indian Removal,” Smithsonian Institute, https://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Manifest-Destiny-and-Indian-Removal.pdf.

[8] Peter H. Burnett, “Governor’s Annual Message to the Legislature, January 7, 1851, Journals of the Senate and Assembly of the State of California, at the Second Session of the Legislature, 1851-1852, p.15. ; Journals of the Legislature of the State of California 1851.

[9] Madley, p. 3; Kimberly Johnston-Dodds, “Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians,” California State Library, September 2002. https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/IB.pdf

[10] “84 Years Sunday,” Petaluma Courier, March 16, 1908; “J.B. Lewis is Called Home,” Petaluma Argus, January 7, 1909.

[11] Peter Nelson, “Indigenous Archaeology at Tolay Lake,” graduate dissertation, UC Berkeley, p. 6; Warren K. Moorehead, The Stone Age of North America, Vol. II (The Riverside press, Cambridge, MA, 1910), p. 106-112.

[12] Greg Sarris, “The Charms of Tolay Lake Regional Park,” Bay Nature Magazine, July-September, 2017; Interview with Steve Estes and Claudia Luke, February 23, 2016, Osborn Oral History Project, Center for Environmental Inquiry, Sonoma State University; “Tolay Lake Regional Park: Cultural and Natural History,” www.sonoma-county. Org/park/pk_history.html, County of Sonoma Regional Parks Department; Nelson, p.1.

[13] Moorehead; John Sharp, “Charmstones: A Summary of the Ethnographic Record,” Sonoma State University, 1994, Society for California Archaeology, https://www.scahome.org/publications/proceedings/Proceedings.13Sharp.pdf

[14] Mallouf, p. 199.

[15] “Bihler’s Lake Farm,” Petaluma Argus, June 13, 1873; Nelson, p. 1.

[16] Moorehead; Nelson, p. 6.

[17] Nelson, p. 8.

[18] “J.B. Lewis’ Museum,” Petaluma Courier, February 24, 1902; “Dime Museum,” Petaluma Argus, September 5, 1902; Petaluma Courier, July 12, 1902; “J.B. Lewis,” Petaluma Argus, October 5, 1903.

[19] Michael A. Glassow, “The Significance to California Prehistory of the Earliest Mortars and Pestles,” Pacific Coast Archaeology Society Quarterly, No. 32(4), Fall 1996. https://pcas.org/Vol32N4/324Gla.pdf

[20] “The Road Race,” Petaluma Courier, April 20, 1896; “Watermelon Run,” Petaluma Courier, August 22, 1899.

[21] “Uncle Johnnie Coming to Town,” Petaluma Argus, July 6, 1900; 1907 Sanborn map of Petaluma; “J.B. Lewis is Dead,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1909; “Dime Museum,” Showhistory.com, https://showhistory.com/show-type/dime-museum.

[22] “Purchased Indian Mortars,” Petaluma Courier, April 29, 1907; “Sold His Curios,” Petaluma Courier, January 8, 1908; “For Sale,” Petaluma Courier, December 21, 1908.

[23] “J.B. Lewis is Called Home,” Petaluma Argus, January 7, 1909; “Collection of Mortars,” Monterey Daily Express, April 30, 1907; “Indian Collection for Seattle,” Monterey Daily Express, January 10, 1909; Kate C. Duncan, 1001 Curious Things (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), p. 78; “The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition,” University of Washington Special Collections, https://www.lib.washington.edu/specialcollections/collections/exhibits/ayp

[24] Rita Cipalla, “Ye Olde Curiosity Shop (Seattle),” History Link.org, August 26, 2022. https://www.historylink.org/File/22526

[25] History of the Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation, Smithsonian Institution,

https://sova.si.edu/record/NMAI.AC.001; “Charles Culp: Mortars and Pestles, 1917, Box 212, Folder 15,” Archives of the Museum of the American Indian.

[26] “Museum Contains World of Knowledge for Visitors,” Monterey Daily Cypress, February 19, 1915; Email from Nate King, Collections and Research Manager, Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, February 2, 2023.

[27] Mallouf, p. 200.

[28] CalNAGPRA, https://nahc.ca.gov/calnagpra/

[29] “UC Inexcusably Drags Its Feet Returning Native American Remains and Artifacts,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 26, 2022; Audit Report of Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,https://www.auditor.ca.gov/reports/2019-047/summary.html; Tarisai Ngangura, “The Colonized World Wants Its Artifacts Back,” Vice. com.

[30] “To Share Native American Culture and History the Right Way, Artifacts Should Always be Returned to Tribes,” San Diego Union Tribune, November 27, 2022.

Petaluma’s Real Main Street Video Presentation, Part II

In Part II of this video presentation sponsored by the Petaluma Historical Museum and the Sonoma County Library, historian John Sheehy explores how a diverse community of Irish, Black, and German merchants in the 19th century made Petaluma’s Main Street such a bustling melting pot.

Real Main Street Video Presentation, Part I

Part I of this video presentation series explores Petaluma’s early Jewish, Chinese, and Swiss Italian communities.

Petaluma’s Land of the Dead

HOW DEATH DEFINED THE BIRTH OF A COMMUNITY

Cypress Hill Cemetery (photo Gail Sickler, Petlauma Argus-Courier)

Petaluma’s first death was by potatoes. In the fall of 1851, a farmer named Shirley was thrown from a wagon of potatoes and crushed beneath its wheels.[i]

Petaluma was just coming into being. The year before, a meat hunter named Tom Lockwood set up camp at an abandoned Coast Miwok trading village along the Petaluma Creek to ship wild game to hungry gold seekers in San Francisco.[ii]

By the time of Mr. Shirley’s death, a local potato boom, launched by the Irishman John Keyes, made a squatters hamlet of the encampment. Along with a couple of trading posts, a potato warehouse and a handful of rustic cabins, the hamlet featured a makeshift general store, hostel, and eating house erected by George H. Keller, a disappointed gold miner from Missouri.[iii]

Keller, Lockwood and a young man named Columbus Tustin buried Shirley’s body on the hillside across from Keller’s store, where Penry Park sits today. Keller read the service while the other men laid Shirley to rest in a coffin fashioned from redwood. A few months later, on January 3, 1852, Keller decided to turn the hamlet into an actual town.[iv]

Making an illegal claim to 158 acres of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio—a privately-owned, 13,000-acre Mexican land grant extending east of the Petaluma Creek into Marin County—Keller hired a surveyor named J.A. Brewster. With Lockwood’s help, Brewster platted a town on 40 acres running from the creek west to Liberty Street, and from Oak Street south to A Street.

At the center of town, on the hillside where Shirley was buried, Keller set aside land for Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park).[v]

Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry park), 1900 (Sonoma County Library)

Opening a real estate office at his store, he began selling lots in California’s new gold rush: land speculation. Among those buying was Tustin, who developed the town’s first subdivision, Tustin’s Addition, extending from First to Eighth streets, and A to F streets.[vi] After selling his bogus landholdings, Keller returned to his farm in Missouri.[vii]

1855 map of Petaluma (Sonoma County Library)

His founding of Petaluma wasn’t as much a land scam as a collective agreement among frustrated settlers. Prevented from homesteading on the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio—whose legal ownership was in dispute—they willingly engaged in Keller’s charade in hopes of benefitting from a mutually profitable enterprise.

That Keller’s property sales were recorded by Sonoma County’s first recorder of deeds, William Boggs—the son of Sonoma County state assemblyman Lilburn Boggs—spoke to the extent of complicity in the charade, as did the federal appointment of Keller’s son Garret as Petaluma’s first postmaster.[viii]

The pursuit of gold, which drew most early settlers to California, was no different. Gold itself has no intrinsic value. It is a lie agreed upon. Its true value resides in the enthusiasm it ignites among people who believe in it.[ix] As David Starr Jordan noted, that enthusiasm ignited an ethos of “whatever is not nailed down is mine, and whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”[x]

The final nailing came, as with most things, in death and the courts.

In the spring of 1854, a young woman known only as Miss Smith—daughter of a popular Petaluma settler named John Smith—died unexpectedly. Her death prompted townspeople to create a cemetery where Oak Hill Park resides today. In doing so, they expressed their shared desire to put down roots of generational continuity in the town.[xi]

At the time, Petaluma had grown to a population of 400 residents. Within three years, that figure would more than triple to 1,338 residents, 38% of whom were women.[xii] Their influence, along with the creation of five churches and two fraternal lodges—the Odd Fellows and Masons—helped to domesticate and civilize what had been a rough-and-tumble town. That included showing proper respect for the dead.[xiii]

Although the average life expectancy at the time was only 38, much of that was due to childhood mortality. Those who lived to the age of 20, had a life expectancy of 60.[xiv]

Oak Hill (photo Victoria Webb, Petaluma Argus-Courier)

The eight acres for Oak Hill Cemetery were donated to the town by James and Mary Thompson, owners of Thompson Bakery on Main Street. Their daughter Josephine was the first settler’s child born in town on August 25, 1852.[xv]

The Thompsons purchased the Oak Hill property from Keller. A year after Miss Smith was buried, ownership of the cemetery reverted, along with the rest of Petaluma, to James Stuart, a San Francisco land speculator deemed the legal owner of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio by the California Land Commission. A legal challenge to the commission’s decision was dismissed in court.[xvi]

J.S. Stuart’s office of Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, Main Street, 1855 (Sonoma County Library)

Stuart promptly opened a real estate office in town—Office of Arroyo de San Antonio—for residents to purchase a legal property deed from him, regardless of whatever bogus deeds they held from Keller, Tustin, or other squatters.[xvii] More than 200 residents shelled out a total of $70,000 ($2 million in today’s currency) to repurchase their lots from Stuart.[xviii]

After overproduction put an end to the potato boom, Petaluma’s economy began to grow in the mid-1850s with the new California wheat boom. By 1858, the townspeople decided it was time to incorporate as a city, allowing for taxation of its citizens for things like schools, roads, and cemeteries.[xix]

Oak Hill Cemetery by that time was something of a mess, neither ornamented nor enclosed, the dead buried without any apparent order. The newly elected city trustees, or city council, set out to change that. They began by asking Stuart to donate the existing eight acres of the cemetery to the city, along with 20 additional acres for future expansion. Stuart agreed to the existing eight acres, but balked at surrendering more of his prime real estate.[xx]

In 1866, local grain merchant John A. McNear, who had made a fortune on the California wheat boom, lost his wife Clara to an early death. She died during an exceptionally rainy January, and McNear, worried about her grave flooding, set off to find high ground upon which to bury her.[xxi]

John A. McNear (photo Petaluma
Historical Library & Museum)
Clara McNear (photo Petaluma
Historical Library & Museum)

Or so the story goes.

As Oak Hill Cemetery sat atop a hill, it seems more likely McNear recognized an opportunity at hand. For Clara’s final resting place, he purchased 40 hilly acres along Magnolia Avenue. Beyond the city limits at the time, it was not hindered by residential development like Oak Hill. After burying Clara on the hilltop, he laid out the rest of the grounds as Cypress Hill Cemetery and began selling plots. Ownership of the cemetery would remain in the McNear family until 1957.[xxii]

McNear Family plot, Cypress Hill (photo public domain)

Two local religious communities followed his lead, establishing their own cemeteries along Magnolia Avenue. The Salem Cemetery Association, established in 1857 by German Jewish merchants, purchased 8 acres from McNear at the south end of Cypress Hill Cemetery in 1870 (today’s B’nai Israel Cemetery).

Entrance to B’nai Israel Cemetery (photo public domain)

The next year, St. Vincent’s Catholic Church purchased 12 adjacent acres for Calvary Cemetery.[xxiii]

Calvary Cemetery (photo John Sheehy)

In 1879, city trustees voted to close Oak Hill Cemetery to further burials, citing a problem with rainwater draining into the downtown, creating a health hazard. They directed new burials of non-Jews and non-Catholics to Cypress Hill.[xxiv] City Hall watchdogs pointed out the rainwater from the cemetery flowed north, away from the downtown, running down Howard Street to West Street, and eventually emptying into the same seasonal creek as rainwater from the cemeteries along Magnolia Avenue.[xxv]

The trustees stood by their decision, pressing residents to move family members buried in Oak Hill to Cypress Hill, with financial incentives from McNear. Those unwilling or unable to afford doing so, were forced to leave their family members at Oak Hill, alongside the bodies of those buried far from home or whose families had left the area.[xxvi]

In 1900, the city decided to convert Oak Hill Cemetery into a park. By that time, thieves were stealing the marble tombstones and selling them to fish markets for counters. The city gave families six months to remove bodies still buried at Oak Hill before they leveled the grounds.

Oak Hill Park, 1905 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The Odd Fellows paid to move former members to their plot at Cypress Hill, including Thomas Baylis, who opened one of the town’s first trading posts in 1851.[xxvii]

A number of bodies remained behind. That became evident in 1947, when the city designated Oak Hill Park for the site of a new hospital. First, they were required to remove of all human remains from the grounds.[xxviii] Before excavations could begin, the city killed the project after failing to secure the necessary government funding. A decade later, Hillcrest Hospital was built at the top of B Street instead of Oak Hill Park.[xxix]

In 1876, a group of workmen leveling part of Main Street Plaza discovered the redwood casket of Mr. Shirley buried there by Keller, Lockwood, and Tustin. Shirley’s decaying bones were transferred to a new coffin, and reverently laid to rest in Cypress Hill Cemetery, where they remain today.[xxx]

******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 13, 2023.

SOURCES:

[i] “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876; Our Oldest Pioneer,” Petaluma Argus, November 28, 1901; Note: J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 261 (Note: Munro-Fraser identifies the farmer as a Mr. Fraser, not Mr. Shirley).

[ii] Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), p. 54.

[iii] Robert A. Thompson, pgs. 24, 55; “History Mystery Solved,” Petaluma Argus Courier, February 11, 2021.

[iv] “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Argus, March 31, 1876; “Territorial Legislature of 1857-58,” Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, edited by George W. Martin, p. 211; Robert A. Thompson, p. 55.

[v] David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (October., 1979), p. 439; Thompson, p. 55; Munro-Fraser, p. 186.

[vi] Thos. H. Thompson, Map of Sonoma County, 1877; Sonoma 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 by that time. 

[vii] Henry Miles Moore, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the City and County of Leavenworth,” Western Life (Leavenworth, KS), August 3, 1900; “History Mystery Solved,” Petaluma Argus Courier, February 11, 2021.

[viii] A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United States, 1853: Petaluma Postmasters,” p. 510, United States, Department of State; “Deeds of Sonoma County, 1847-1901,” film #008117705, LDS FamilySearch database. familysearch.org. (Note: Garret V. Keller is mistakenly identified by both Munro-Fraser and Robert A. Thompson in their books as Petaluma’s founder; he was only 21 years of age in 1852).

[ix] David Milch, A Life’s Work (New York: Random House, 2022) p. 154.

[x] The quote is attributed to Stanford University’s founding president David Starr Jordan, quoteinvestigator.com.

[xi] “The First,” Petaluma Argus, July 20, 1877; “Our Oldest Pioneer,” Petaluma Argus, November 28, 1901; Munro-Fraser, p. 262. (Note: the deceased is identified as “Miss Smith” in Munro-Fraser’s book and likewise Tom Lockwood’s recollections, but as Mrs. Stuart, the daughter of John Smith in the Argus’ 1877 article. Neither is listed in the 1854 death records of Sonoma County).

[xii] Robert A. Thompson, p. 56.

[xiii] Faiths Represented in Petaluma Churches,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1956 (Note: the five churches were the Baptist Church founded 1854, Methodist Church, 1856, Episcopal Church, 1856, St. Vincent’s Catholic Church, 1857, and Congregation Church, 1857); “Organizations-Clubs-Lodges,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1955 (Note: the Odd Fellows Lodge was established 1854, and the Masonic Lodge established in 1855).

[xiv]https://www.infoplease.com/us/health-statistics/life-expectancy-age-1850-2011; https://priceonomics.com/why-life-expectancy-is-misleading/.

[xv] “Our Oldest Pioneer,” Petaluma Argus, November 28, 1901; “Celebrated Birthday,” Petaluma Courier, August 27, 1921; “Death Claims Josephine Polk,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 16, 1940. (Note: Munro-Fraser states in his book on p. 251 that Robert Douglas, Jr. and his new bride Hannah Hathaway had the town’s first-born child, who only lived 12 days; however Douglas also states they weren’t wed until December 31, 1852, which was after Josephine Thompson’s birth in Petaluma on August 25, 1852).

[xvi] “The Cemetery,” Sonoma County Journal, December 24, 1858; “After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863.

[xvii] Ad for “Office Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio,” Sonoma County Journal, October 27, 1855.

[xviii] “The First Fight of the Lobby,” Petaluma Argus, February 25, 1863.

[xix] Thos. Thompson, p.20.

[xx] “The Cemetery,” Sonoma County Journal, December 24, 1858.

[xxi] “Died: Clarinda ‘Clara’ Damen Williams McNear,” Sacramento Bee, January 19, 1866; “High Water,” Petaluma Argus, January 25, 1866; Matriarchs of Local History, Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 26, 1997; “Get to Know Some of Petaluma’s Legendary People,” Butter & Eggs Day Special Section, Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 25, 2013, p.27.

[xxii] “Our Real Estate Transactions,” Petaluma Argus, April 27, June 8, July 20, 1872; “Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, November 16, 1877; “Cypress Hill Sold to Locals By McNears,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 27, 1957

[xxiii] “Salem Cemetery Association,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1932; “Organizations-Clubs-Lodges,” Petaluma Argus Courier, August 18, 1955; “Catholic Cemetery,” Petaluma Argus, February 18, 1871; “Consecrated,” Petaluma Argus, April 29, 1873.

[xxiv] “Board of Trustees,” Petaluma Courier, May 29, 1878.

[xxv] “Re-Burial of the Dead,” Petaluma Argus, June 14, 1878; “A Protest,” Petaluma Argus, June 28, 1878; “Ordinance No. 122,” Petaluma Courier, June 13, 1879.

[xxvi] “Board of Trustees,” Petaluma Courier, May 29, 1878.

[xxvii] “Desecrating the Graves,” Petaluma Courier, December 27, 1895; “Swiped Tombstones,” Petaluma Courier, November 7, 1899; Petaluma Courier, March 21, 1900; “Depopulating Oak Hill,” Petaluma Courier, May 18, 1900; “Oak Hill Park,” Petaluma Courier, October 3, 1901.

[xxviii] “Council Takes Steps to Make Oak Hill Available for Hospital,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 22, 1947; “A History of Petaluma Medical Facilities,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 30, 2015.

[xxix] “Petaluma Hospital District First to Organize, Dropped to 26th Place for State, Federal Aid,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 8, 1950; “Hillcrest Dedication End of Long Labors,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 29, 1956; Jim Johnson, who participated in creating a stone labyrinth in Oak Hill Park in 1999, noted that they used a number of granite stones they found on the site, which they believed was from stores stones at the cemetery to be made into tombstones;”Labyrinth Gets Finishing Touches,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 16, 1999.

[xxx] “Centennial resurrection,” Petaluma Argus, March 31, 1876; there is no record of Shirley’s burial in either 1851 or reburial in 1876 in Sonoma County Cemetery Records, 1846-1921 (published by the Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 1999); Lucy Kortum notes Shirley was buried at the northwest corner of the Calvary Hill Cemetery set aside as a potter’s field, an that any markers that might have once existed are gone and the land is overgrown with trees and brush: Lucy Kortum, “Petaluma Cemeteries,” Petaluma Historical Museum, Update, v. 12 no. 1, p. 4.

Petaluma’s Lower Main Street

A history snapshot of Petaluma Boulevard North from B Street to Western Avenue

Lower Main Street looking north from B Street, 1903 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Lower Main Street (extending from Western Avenue to B Street) was largely comprised in the mid-1800s of grain warehouses, a hitching post, a workingman’s hotel, and Petaluma’s Chinatown, filled with laundries, groceries, and living quarters.

In the 1880s, the new Masonic Lodge at the corner of Main and Western Avenue, along with the banishment of the Chinese from town, lead to an expansion of Main Street’s commercial area to B Street, anchored by the first McNear Building in 1886.

Lower Main Street looking north from B Street, circa 1930 (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

In 1922, the popularity of the automobile lead to the replacement of the hitching post with Center Park, as Lower Main filled up with shops, hardware stores, and groceries.

The decline of the poultry and dairy industries in the 1960s, along with the new shopping malls in East Petaluma, left downtown Petaluma pockmarked with empty shops, shuttered grain mills, and dilapidated old buildings.

Lower Main Street looking north from B Street, 1953 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In the mid-1970s, Mayor Helen Putnam championed historic restoration as a means of revitalizing the downtown, beginning with conversion of the Lan Mart and the Great Petaluma Mill into boutique malls of shops and restaurants.

Thanks to her efforts, Petaluma’s downtown evolved into the trendy nightlife and shopping district it is today. A set of architectural design guidelines were adopted by the city in 1999 to preserve the downtown’s historical legacy.

Lower Main Street looking north from B Street, 2022 (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

Petaluma’s Central Main Street

A history snapshot of Petaluma Boulevard North from Washington Street to Western Avenue

Main Street looking north from below Western Avenue, circa 1900 (photo Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

With the construction of the Masonic Lodge and the town clock in 1882, the center of town moved to Main Street and Western Avenue.

As the California wheat boom drew to an end in the 1880s, Petaluma agriculture transitioned to poultry and dairy ranching. By the late 1910s, Petaluma was the self-proclaimed “Egg Basket of the World,” providing residents with one of the highest incomes per capita in America.

The city’s prosperity filled Main Street with a profusion of professional offices—doctors, dentists, insurance agents, lawyers, real estate agents, and a chicken pharmacy.

Main Street looking north from below Western Avenue, circa 1930 (photo courtesy of Dan Brown Collection)

The first automobiles appeared in town in 1903. Five years later, the cobblestones of Main Street were paved in asphalt to provide for smoother driving. By 1920, Main Street was trafficked almost exclusively by automobiles.

The inclusion of Main Street as part of the new Redwood Highway in 1925, brought new business from a tourists, vacationers, and traveling salesmen.

Main Street looking north from below Western Avenue, circa 1950 (photo Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

With the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, Main Street was widened from two to four lanes to accommodate increased through traffic. That diminished with the opening of the freeway in 1957, after which Main Street was renamed Petaluma Boulevard.

The street returned to two lanes in the 2010s as part of a “road diet.”

Main Street looking north from below Western Avenue, 2022 (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

Petaluma’s Upper Main Street

A history snapshot of Petaluma Boulevard North at Washington Street

Main Street looking south from Washington Street, circa 1890s (photo Sonoma County Library)

Petaluma was founded in 1852 by George H. Keller, a failed gold miner from Missouri, who laid out Main Street between Oak and B streets on what had originally been part of a Coast Miwok trading route.

Main Street looking south from Washington Street, 1911 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The intersection of Main and Washington streets, from which these shots were taken over time, served as the initial center of town, a crossroads for carriage traffic and wagons from outlying farms. Citizens gathered in nearby Hill Plaza (today’s Penry Park) for community events.

Main Street looking south from Washington Street, 1950 (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

From the docks of the Petaluma River behind the street, flat-bottom scow schooners plied the Petaluma River to San Francisco, laden with potatoes, meat, and grains. Grain mills and warehouses lined both upper Main Street north of Washington Street, and lower Main Street from Western Avenue to B Street.

Construction in 1882 of the Masonic Lodge, capped by a town clock, shifted the center of town to Main Street and Western Avenue.

Petlauma Boulevard North (formerly Main Street) looking south from Washington Street, 2022 (photo courtesy Scott Hess)

Derby Building

A  snapshot history of the Derby Building at 199 Petaluma Blvd. North

Derby Building, 1875, 199 Petaluma Boulevard North (Photo Sonoma County Library)

The Great Petaluma Fire of 1872 changed the face of the gateway into town. The wooden buildings on both the northwest and southwest corners of Petaluma Boulevard and Washington Street were destroyed. Developers quickly swooped in to fill the void. [i]

On the northwest corner, wheat merchants John and George W. McNear erected a large Italianate building to house both the Bank of Sonoma County and the Washington Hotel.

Bank of Sonoma, 1885 (photo Sonoma County Library)

On the southwest corner, Andrew B. Derby used the same elegant style for his Derby Building. [ii]

Italianate architecture was all the rage in the 1870s. To emulate the opulent homes of the Italian countryside, architects applied mass-produced cast-iron ornamentation to the buildings. The new McNear and Derby Italianate buildings set the trend for Petaluma’s Main Street architecture for the next two decades.

Like the McNears, Derby arrived in Petaluma from New England in the late 1850s, and quickly became as a dealer in local real estate.[iii] Before the 1872 fire, his main tenant on the corner of Main and Washington streets was a newspaper and magazine shop. The new Italianate building attracted a classier clientele.[iv]  

Derby Building merchants, 1875: A.J. Snow’s Dry Goods Store on left, and A. Morris’ Cigars & Tobacco on right (photo Sonoma County Library)

For many years, Morris Cigar Store anchored the corner storefront, with a grocery or dry goods store in the Main Street storefront, and the Petaluma Courier newspaper and its presses in the Washington Street storefront. Upstairs was filled with the offices of dentists and doctors and a hall for performances, social gatherings, and community meetings. [v]

After Derby’s death in 1896, his heirs maintained the building until 1922, when it was purchased by John McNear’s son, George P. McNear. In 1925, McNear tore the Derby Building down, replacing it with a new Italian Renaissance style building to house the Sonoma County National Bank and the Petaluma Savings Bank. Covered in terra cotta tiles, the building was distinguished by its 28-foot high, cathedral-like ceiling, a popular style of banks at the time.[vi]

Bank of Sonoma in 1943, built 1928, purchased by Bank of America 1930 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1928, the Bank of America purchased the building to serve as its regional branch. Two years later, the Bank of America also purchased the Bank of Italy across the street on the northwest corner of Main and Washington streets to serve as its Petaluma branch.[vii]

The Bank of America operated both corner locations until 1968, when it combined the two branches into a new building on the northwest side of Washington Street and Petaluma Boulevard.[viii]

The former Sonoma County National Bank building on the southwest corner served as a real estate office in 1970s and 80s, a rug and antiques store in the 1990s and 2000s, and headquarters of The Seed Bank, an heirloom seed company, from 2009 to 2018. Since that time it has remained vacant. [ix]

Bank of Sonoma Building, 2002 (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

FOOTNOTES:

[i] “Real Estate in Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, March 30, 1872.

[ii] “Work Progress,” Petaluma Argus, April 20, 1872.

[iii] Ad, Petaluma Argus, March 18, 1869; “A Sudden Summons,” Petaluma Courier, December 9, 1896.

[iv] The News Depot was originally operated by G.C. Codding until 1866, when Derby took it over, apparently for Codding’s indebtedness, and Codding moved across the street. Derby sold the business in 1867 to Mose Korn: Ad, Petaluma Argus, June 7, 1866; Ad, Petaluma Argus, June 21, 1866.

[v] Ad, Petaluma Argus, March 17, 1873; “New Firm-New Store,” Petaluma Argus, September 11, 1874; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, September 10, 1880; “Par Excellence Club,” Petaluma Argus, September 13, 1872; “Entertainment To-Night,” October 31, 1872; “Woolen Mill Meeting,” Petaluma Argus, April 18, 1873.

[vi] “M. Goldman Buys Derby Block,” Petaluma Courier, January 5, 1922; “National Bank to Have New Home,” Petaluma Courier, February 2, 1923; “Doors of New Bank Building to Be Thrown Open to Public Tomorrow,” “The Marble Work for New Bank is a Real Work of Art,” Petaluma Argus, April 24, 1926; “Big Corner Deal Formally Closed and Bank of Italy Now in Possession,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 1, 1927.

[vii] Local Banks Merged with Bank of America,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 4, 1928; “A.P. Gianni to Merge Banks,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 4, 1930.

[viii] “Bank Opening,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 10, 1969.

[ix] Ad for Westgate Realty, Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 15, 1972; “Westgate Merges, Moves Across Town,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 12, 1987; “Setting Up Shop,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 10, 1995; “Ad for Monarch Interiors, Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 7, 2007; “Old Bank Building ‘Goes to Seed,’” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 11, 2009; “Seed Bank Leaving Iconic Petaluma Bank Building,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 4, 2018.