Petaluma’s Birth in a Devil’s Playground

Heman Bassett, 1870s (photo Philadelphia Studios, courtesy of Kay Bassett)

Heman Bassett arrived in Petaluma in the fall of 1852 in search of redemption. An excommunicated Mormon elder cast “into the buffeting hands of Satan,” Bassett and his family set out across the county in an ox-drawn wagon to settle among some of the people who had earlier persecuted him for his beliefs, among them Petaluma’s founder, George H. Keller.[1]

A failed gold miner from Missouri, Keller had created Petaluma just months before, making an illegal squatter’s claim to 158 acres of a 13,000-acre Mexican land grant called Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. After platting out the town on 40 acres, he began selling off lots from a makeshift general store he erected beside the Petaluma River on Washington Street.[2]

By the time Bassett arrived with his wife and five children, the new town was bustling with activity. Sailing scows laden with potatoes, meat, and grains plied the river to San Francisco. New settlers had erected fifty new homes of rough-hewn redwood. Main Street, laid out by Keller along a former Coast Miwok trading route, hosted a general store, a blacksmith, and three hotels.[3]

Petlauma House (from 1857 map of Petlauma, Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

One of the hotels, the Petaluma House, located at the site of today’s Odd Fellows Lodge, was for sale. Bassett decided to put a stake down and buy it.

Situated across from the river docks where boatloads of aspiring settlers disembarked, the Petaluma House welcomed overnight guests, many looking to catch the morning stage bound for Bloomfield or Santa Rosa’s Green Valley to cash in on the potato boom, and those seeking temporary living quarters until they got established as tradesmen or merchants in town.[4]

A number hailed, like Keller, from Missouri, in fact, 20% of the 560 settlers counted in the 1850 Sonoma County census. They were most likely drawn by word of the area’s rich farmlands and mild climate from Lilburn Boggs, Missouri’s former governor.

Lilburn Boggs (photo courtesy of Missouri Historical Society)

Boggs emigrated to California with his family in 1846, after losing his merchant business in an economic depression, and also surviving a shot in the head from an alleged Mormon assassin.[5] Initially taken in by General Vallejo at the Petaluma Adobe, he settled in the town of Sonoma, where he opened up a dry goods store and became alcalde, or judicial and administrative officer, for Mexico’s Northern California territory. After the Mexican-American War, he dealt in real estate before being elected to the state assembly.[

Bassett knew Boggs from his own time in Missouri. He had moved to Jackson County, Missouri in the early 1830s with Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, after Smith received a revelation it was the New Jerusalem where the Second Coming of Christ would soon occur.

Just a teenager when he first met Smith, Bassett was living in a Christian socialist commune called “The Family” outside Kirtland, Ohio. Smith was accompanied by a group of missionaries on their way to proselytize among American Indians, who they believed to be descendants of the Israelites.[7]

Etching of “The Family” commune outside Kirtland, Ohio (illustration Brigham Young University)

Soon after being baptized in Smith’s new church, Bassett had a vision of being called into the world to preach. Ordained a Mormon elder at 17, he worked the circuit of Mormon revival meetings dressed as a Native American speaking in tongues. His zealous, enraptured style was described as “that of a baboon.”[8] While preparing to accompany Smith to Missouri, Bassett was called out as “a false spirit.”[9]

“Heman Bassett,” Smith told him, “you sit still. The devil wants to sift you.”[10]

Joseph Smith, Jr. (photo courtesy of Dan Larsen, Desert News)

Part of that sifting may have been the watch Bassett took from a Mormon brother and sold. When confronted, Bassett cited the code of community property practiced in the commune. “Oh,” he said, “I thought it was all in The Family.”[11]

Bassett was denied missionary status, but still accompanied Smith to Jackson County in western Missouri, home to Boggs, then a state senator. The influx of Mormons quickly upset the social hierarchy of older settlers in the area, including Keller, who lived in nearby Platte County. They took issue with the Mormons’ abolitionism (Missouri was a slave state), their ecstatic performances dressed as American Indians and speaking in tongues, and their fervent belief they were to inherit the the land of their enemies in Jackson County.[12]

Within a short time, Smith and his followers were driven from the county to parts of northwest Missouri, where tensions with locals continued to mount, finally culminating in the Missouri Mormon War of 1838. At the height of the war, Governor Lilburn Boggs sent 2,500 militiamen to eject all Mormons from the state,signing an executive order calling for their extermination should they refuse to leave.[13]

Missouri Mormon War of 1838 (photo Mormon Musings)

Forcibly driven from their homes, which were then plundered and destroyed, along with their crops and livestock, a number of Mormons died violently or from the hardship of the exodus.[14]

Bassett, along with 10,000 others, fled to Illinois, where Smith set up his new headquarters in the town of Nauvoo. After a new Mormon majority elected him mayor, the local newspaper accused Smith of polygamy. He responded by having the newspaper shut down, for which he was arrested and incarcerated. While awaiting trial, a mob stormed the jail and killed him.[15]

After Smith’s death, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints split into two camps, one headed by Brigham Young, the other by James Strang. Bassett sided with the Strangites, joining them at their headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, where he served as an elder until 1850, when he was excommunicated for his rebellious ways.

Bassett, his wife Mary and their four children set out across the plains for California, stopping in Washoe County for Mary’s birthing of their fifth child. When they arrived in Petaluma, they found Keller and others engaged in California’s new gold rush: land speculation.[16] There was just one hitch—the land wasn’t for sale.

Squatting had become common in the American West thanks to the Preemption Act of 1841, which entitled a squatter to purchase 160 acres in the public domain, after inhabiting the land for 14 months or making improvements to it for five years.[17] But in California, aspiring settlers discovered that most of the land coveted for farming or ranching was privately held in Mexican land grants, protected by the Treaty of Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848.

Due to the laissez-faire legal system on the Mexican frontier, many grants were sketchy, incomplete or, in some cases, fraudulent.[18] In 1851, squatter advocates pushed through Congress the California Land Act, subjecting all Mexican land grant claims to legal review by an appointed Land Commission. Ostensibly created to bring clarity to the legal morass, the act effectively put the grants into play, opening the door to a host of American swindlers and land sharks.[19]

That included Keller, who, with the support of frustrated settlers, made his squatter’s claim to the town of Petaluma.[20] Despite the fact the claim had no legal bearing, his property sales were recorded by Sonoma County’s first recorder of deeds, William Boggs, son of State Assemblyman Lilburn Boggs.[21] 

William Boggs, 1870s (photo Sonoma County Library)

So began the Petaluma land scam, giving birth to one of California’s longest and most contested land grant disputes. Fueled by greed, exploitation, bribery, and fraud, it was a devil’s playground, one that placed Petaluma landowners in legal jeopardy for the next two decades.

Keller’s initial plat extended from the river west to Liberty Street, and from Oak Street south to A Street. In 1853, he sold off a large portion of his remaining claim to Columbus Tustin, an ambitious 26-year old from Illinois, who undertook the first extension of Keller’s development, creating a subdivision called Tustin’s Addition that ran from First to Eighth streets, and A to F streets.[22]

Stricken with money fever, Bassett purchased 40 undeveloped acres from Keller just before he departed town with his spoils for Missouri. Bassett’s Addition extended from Howard Street west to Fair Street, and from Stanley Street south to A Street, with Bassett Street laid out down the middle, adjacent to a large plaza (today’s city hall). Bassett began selling lots from his hotel on Main Street.[23]

Map of Petlauma, Thomas H. Thompson, 1877, Bassett’s Addition at lower left (public domain)
Bassett’s Addition, Map of Petaluma, Thos. Thompson, 1877 (public domain)

In June 1855, the party ended when the Land Commission confirmed the claim of James Stuart, a San Francisco speculator, to the 13,000-acre Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. Another speculator, Thomas Valentine, had filed a counterclaim which he agreed to drop in exchange for Stuart splitting his profits from rancho land sales. Two years later, Valentine sued to reopen the case, setting off 15 years of legal drama in the courts.[24]

Stuart opened a real estate office in Petaluma for residents to repurchase their property from him, regardless of whatever bogus deeds they had been issued by Keller, Tustin, or Bassett.[25]

Map of Petaluma, 1855 (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Shortly after the Land Commission ruling, Bassett’s wife Mary sued him for divorce, settling for $5,000 ($170,000 in today’s currency). Cash strapped, Bassett forfeited his unsold sections of Bassett’s Addition and leased out the Petaluma House. A year later, he opened the Petaluma Family Grocery on Main Street.[26] It didn’t last. In 1860, he declared bankruptcy, and left Petaluma for Sacramento, to join his youngest daughter and her husband.[27]

Over the next decade, he returned to his migratory ways, settling briefly in Half Moon Bay and San Jose, where he again filed for bankruptcy, before heading to Nevada with his two younger sons to work the mines. In 1872, he reunited in Utah with a childhood companion from The Family, Lucy Celesta Stanton, who had once been married to his brother, before becoming a notorious figure in her own right.[28]

After divorcing Bassett’s brother, Stanton married a former Black slave named William McCary and started a fringe Mormon movement with him that embraced not only polygamy, but also sexual threesomes. The two traveled the countryside posing as American Indians, performing at Mormon revivals and temperance meetings in native dress, until they were excommunicated and McCary disappeared. Stanton then opened a native healing clinic in Buffalo, New York.

Lucy Celesta Stanton Bassett (photo in public domain)

Just prior to reuniting with Bassett, Stanton was released from Sing Sing prison after serving nine years for an abortion she performed on a woman who died.[29]

Stanton and Bassett married and lived together in Utah until 1876, when Bassett died while on a transcontinental trip to Philadelphia for the nation’s centennial. He was 67. After his death, Stanton repented her ways and was rebaptized in the Church of Latter-day Saints. Having failed to repent his rebellious ways, Bassett was presumably cast after death into what the church calls “spirit prison.”[30]

********

For more on George H. Keller:

The Search for Petaluma’s Real Founder

For more on Columbus Tustin:

A Bend in the Road: the Legacy of Columbus Tustin

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Notice,” Gospel Herald (Goree, WI), March 21, 1850; Bassett’s arrival in 1852 is confirmed by the marriage license issued on November 18, 1852, for his son Madison H. Bassett to Emily Woodward, by the California Marriage Licenses, 1850-1852, Sonoma County, and by the autobiography of his son Ralph Lowe Bassett, http://www.bassett.net/gendata-o/p15044.htm.

[2] John Sheehy, “History Mystery Solved,” Petaluma-Argus Courier, February 11, 2021; “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876; Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), p. 55.

[3] J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), pp. 263; “Historical: Petaluma’s Birth and Growth,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1892; Munro-Fraser, p. 263.

[4] Munro-Fraser, p. 263; Ad for Petaluma House, Sonoma County Journal, September 1, 1855.

[5] “Donald Edwards, pp. 15-18; “Gaye LeBaron’s Notebook,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 1, 1990; William Boggs, “Lilburn Boggs,” F.A. Sampson, ed., Missouri Historical Review, Vol. IV (October 1909-July 1910), pp. 109; Donald Edwards, “Lilburn Boggs,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016), pp. 15-16.

[6] William Boggs, pp. 109; Donald Edwards, pp. 15-16.

[7] Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (University of Missouri Press, 1990), pp. 10. 17-21.

[8] Christopher C. Smith, “Playing Lamanite: Ecstatic Performance of American Indian Roles In Early Mormon Ohio,” Journal of Mormon History, Vol. 41, No. 3, July 2015, pp. 131-166;  Susan Easton Black, “Heman Bassett,” Doctrine and Covenants Central. https://doctrineandcovenantscentral.org/people-of-the-dc/heman-a-bassett/

Smith, pgs. 131, 151; “Isaac Morley Farm and School House,” Brigham Young University, Idaho. https://emp.byui.edu/satterfieldb/rel341/Isaac%20Morley%20Farm.htm

[9] Black.

[10] Black.

[11] Black.

[12] Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints: Carefully Selected from the Revelations of God, 52:42; Norman F. Furniss,The Mormon Conflict(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 2.

[13] LeSueur, pp. 229-230.

[14] LeSueur, p. 19; “The Mormon Difficulties,” Niles National Register, October 6, 1838, October 13, 1838; Smith, pp. 159-160; “The Bloody History of Mormonism in Jackson County,” NPR Kansas City, February 12, 2015. https://www.kcur.org/show/central-standard/2015-02-12/the-bloody-history-of-mormonism-in-jackson-county

[15] LeSueur, p. 180-181.

[16] 1850 U.S. Census, Racine, WI; “Notice,” Gospel Herald (Goree, WI), March 21, 1850; Autobiography of Bassett’s son Ralph Lowe Bassett, http://www.bassett.net/gendata-o/p15044.htm.

[17] The Preemption Act of 1841, 27th Congress, Ch. 16, 5 Stat. 453 (1841), accessed from www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org; Paul W. Gates, The California Land Act of 1851, California Historical Society, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Dec., 1971), pp. 395–430.

[18] David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (October., 1979), p. 437.

[19] Pisani, pp. 291-292.

[20] Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pgs. 21, 29; “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876; Robert Allan Thompson, p. 55.

[21] Donald Edwards, “Lilburn Boggs,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016), pp. 15-16; “Deeds of Sonoma County, 1847-1901,” film #008117705, LDS FamilySearch database. familysearch.org.

[22] Munro-Fraser, pp. 259-260; 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; the boundaries of Tustin’s Addition defined in Thos. H. Thompson, Map of Sonoma County, 1877. 

[23] “Delinquent Tax List,” SCJ, November 25, 1859; the boundaries of Bassett’s Addition defined in Thos. H. Thompson, Map of Sonoma County, 1877.

[24] Robert Lee, p. 266.

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

[26] Ad for Petaluma House, Sonoma County Journal, September 1, 1855; “Legal Notice,” Sonoma County Journal, December 29, 1855; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, May 1, 1857.

[27] “A Card,” Sonoma County Journal, January 28, 1859; “Married,” Sonoma County Journal, January 6, 1860; 1860 U.S. Census, Sacramento; “Legal Notice,” Sacramento Bee, January 5, 1861.

[28] Ralph Low Bassett Autobiography; “Insolvent Notice,” Times Gazette (San Mateo County), October 6, 1866.

[29] Angela Pulley Hudson, Real Native Genius: How and Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), pp. 1-16.

[30] Ralph Low Bassett Autobiography; “Died,” Petaluma Argus, July 28, 1876; Hudson, pp. 166-169.

Penry Park

A snapshot history of Petaluma’s first park

Penry Park (Hill Plaza Park), 1900 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

Penry Park was established as Main Street Plaza in January 1852, when Petaluma’s founder George H. Keller first laid out the town.

Early settlers weren’t pleased however with leaving a fallow piece of land at the heart of town, deriding it as “a waste and a nuisance.” Elected officials left the park barren for decades, with no paths, benches, trees, or water. Overrun by wild chickens, it was sarcastically called “Chicken Hill.”

The city made numerous attempts to convert it into something “useful,” including homes, businesses, a city hall, a courthouse, a high school, and a jail. In 1886, they constructed a stone wall along its eastern edge to end complaints of winter mudslides clogging up Main Street (Petaluma Boulevard North).

Egg Day Parade float outside Penry Park (Hill Plaza Park), 1920 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

In 1896, the Ladies Improvement Club took it upon themselves to landscape the park with trees and paths, renaming it Hill Plaza. They maintained the park until 1911, when the city created  a parks commission.

In 1929, a memorial with a cannon was erected in tribute to Petalumans lost in WWI, leading to the nickname “Cannonball Park.” The cannon was melted down for metal during WWII, and replaced by two anti-aircraft guns.

Penry Park (Hill Plaza Park) with WWI memorial, 1958 (photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

The city council persisted in their efforts to convert the park into something useful, mounting unsuccessful efforts in 1948 and 1960 to turn it into a parking lot.

In 2001, Hill Plaza Park was renamed Penry Park in honor of hometown Medal of Honor winner Richard Penry.

Penry Park, 2022 (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

The Petaluma Incubator Company

A snapshot history of 230-242 Petaluma Blvd. North

1895 photo of the Petaluma Incubator Company at 230-236 Petlauma Blvd North (photo Sonoma County Library)

Few sites are etched into Petaluma history deeper than the Petaluma Incubator Company, the engine behind the city’s reign as the World’s Egg Basket. Yet, thanks to urban renewal efforts in the 1960s, nothing remains of the building today other than a rock wall lining Brewster’s Beer Garden.

The incubator company had its genesis in 1877, when Isaac Dias, a young Jewish dentist from New Orleans invented an incubator capable of maintaining a steady temperature of 103 degrees, the same as a brooding hen’s body. By accelerating the hatching of newly laid eggs, the incubator freed the hen from her maternal nesting duties, allowing her to lay more.[1]

Dias patented his invention, and was joined in marketing it in 1882 by one of his patients, Lyman Byce, a 26-year-old medical student from Canada, who came to visit a sister in Petaluma, seeking the health benefits of the area’s Mediterranean sea breezes.[2]

Lyman Byce, circa 1890 (photo Sonoma County Library)

That same mild climate, along with the valley’s rich, alluvial soil, would set the stage for the chicken mania that followed.

In 1881, Byce—the Steve Jobs to Dias’ Steve Wozniak— joined Dias in forming the Petaluma Incubator Company, soon setting up their factory in a former armory near the Washington Street Bridge.[3]

After Dias’s mysterious death in an 1884 duck hunting accident, Byce employed his marketing talents in taking the Petaluma Incubator Company to new heights. Positioning himself as the “father of chickendome,” he wrote Dias out of the story.[4]

1890s photo of Petaluma Incubator Factory in the Hopper Building at 230-236 Main Street (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1889, Byce moved the incubator factory to the Hopper Building at 230-236 Main Street, beside George P. McNear’s Oriental Mills & Feed Store. After a fire burned down McNear’s building in 1902, Byce purchased the lot at 238-242 Main, and constructed a modern new factory in its place.[5]

Aftermath of 1902 fire destroying the McNear Oriental Mills and scorching parts of the Petlauma Incubator Company (photo Sonoma County Library)
New Petaluma Incubator Factory on former site of McNear’s Oriental Mills, 1912 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Overexpansion and distressed sales during World War I forced Byce to declare bankruptcy in 1919, and move to a smaller factory on East Washington Street. His former building was converted into a poultry packing plant by the Petaluma Poultry Company.[6]

1948 view of the Petaluma Milling Company, the white building on left (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

In 1938, the poultry company sold the building to Petaluma Milling Company, a feed and mill store. It operated until 1967, when the city, championing urban renewal, condemned both buildings that had once housed the Petaluma Incubator Company, 230-236 and 238-242, giving the owners the choice of either rehabilitating them or tearing them down. They buildings were demolished in 1968.[7]

2022 view of Brewster’s Beer Garden (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

The lots remained vacant until 2016, when Brewster’s Beer Garden created an open air facility on their ground floor facing Water Street, leaving a hole in the street landscape of Petaluma Boulevard North, a reminder of good intentions gone bad.[8]

******

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Thea Lowry, Empty Shells (Manifold Press, Novato, CA, 2000), p. 33

[2] Lowry, pp. 33-34.

[3] Lowry, p. 33; “Petaluma Incubator,” Petaluma Argus, October 3, 1883; A Gold Medal,” Petaluma Argus, November 22, 1884.

[4] Lowry, pp. 33-37.

[5] Ad, Petaluma Courier, August 25, 1888; “A Happy New Year,” Petaluma Argus, December 28, 1888; “Petaluma Industries,” Petaluma Courier, May 29, 1889; “A Midnight Blaze,” Petaluma Courier, June 11, 1902; “A Business Deal,” Petaluma Courier, August 29, 1902

[6] “Petition in Solvency,” Petaluma Argus, September 23, 1919; “Big Auction Sale Today,” Petaluma Argus, February 3, 1920; “Will Open a Monster Plant,” Petaluma Argus, March 25, 1920.

[7] “Milani Bldg. Bought by L. Hozz,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 20, 1938; “Petaluma Milling Company Closes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 2, 1967; “Council Orders Action,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 2, 1967; “City Budget,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 7, 1968.

[8] “Water Street Rising,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 5, 2016.

Petaluma’s Carriage & Car Heritage Site

A snapshot history of 217 Petaluma Blvd North

1901 photo of Robinson & Farrell Blacksmiths & Wagonmakers, 271 Petaluma Blvd. North (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

In Petaluma’s history of moving vehicles, 271 Petaluma Boulevard North is a local heritage site. Located between Martha and Prospect streets just north of Penry Park, people have been making, selling, and repairing wagons, buggies, and automobiles here since 1859, when Simon Conrad opened his blacksmith and carriage maker shop.

A native of Pennsylvania, Conrad not only gained a reputation as one of the finest carriage makers in the state, he also became a city leader, elected to the city’s Board of Trustees (city council), and serving as board president, or mayor. [1]

Upon his death in 1873, a former employee, John Loranger, took over the shop. Loranger’s buggies and blacksmithing won him top prizes at the Sonoma-Marin Fair. In 1879, he rented out to Isaac Dias a second story room in the shop, where he invented and patented a new egg incubator, partnering in 1882 with Lyman Byce to market it, kicking off Petaluma’s egg boom.[2]

After being elected to the city’s Board of Trustees in 1880, Loranger sold his shop to one of his blacksmiths, William F. Farrell and William Robinson. They secured an exclusive franchise to sell Studebaker buggies. Farrell bought out in 1901. Four years later, he replaced Simon Conrad’s original building with building that stands on the site today.[3]

1906 photo of Farrell Carriages, Buggies & Wagons, 271 Petaluma Blvd. North (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

After automobile sales came to Petaluma in 1903, Farrell expanded to selling and repairing them. Like his predecessors, he was a prominent civic leader, serving as fire chief and a member of the board of education. After his death in 1916, his sons Hamilton and William J. Farrell took over the business.[4]

In 1920, they became a dealership for Dodge cars, moving their showroom and auto repair shop next door to the north side of Prospect Street. Will Farrell became a city councilman in 1922, and was elected mayor in 1929. He resigned in 1934 after being accused of covertly profiting from servicing city vehicles at his shop.[5]

1944 photo of Inwood Auto Parts, 271 Petaluma Blvd. North (photo Sonoma County Library)

The building at 271 Main was occupied by a rotation of auto-related businesses until 1933, when William Inwood established his tire and auto repair business there. Upon his death in 1948, Jack Dunaway, who joined the firm in high school, assumed management of the shop, purchasing it from Inwood’s widow in 1952.[6]

His son Mike joined him in managing Dunaway Auto Parts in the 1970s, eventually taking over the business. In 1996, the company transitioned to Dunaway Auto Paints, which it remains today.[7]

2022 photo of Dunaway Auto Parts/ Auto Paint, est. 1952, 271 Petaluma Blvd. North (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

SOURCES:

[1] Sonoma County Journal, July 18, 1862; “Death of Simon Conrad,” Petaluma Argus, April 25, 1873.

[2] “Wagon Making,” Petaluma Argus, May 8, 1873; “John Loranger’s Manufactory,” Petaluma Argus, February 27, 1874; Petaluma Argus, October 15, 1875; Petaluma Argus, October 3, 1879; Ed Mannion’s Rear View Mirror, Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 22, 1960.

[3] “New Firm,” Petaluma Argus, December 9, 1881; “Notice of Dissolution, “Petaluma Courier, November 14, 1901; Carriage Repository,” Petaluma Courier, March 3, 1905; “Briefs,” Petaluma Courier, April 26, 1905.

[4] “W.F. Farrell Dies at His Old Home,” Petaluma Courier, December 19, 1916; “The Whole City Mourns the Death of W.F. Farrell, Petaluma Argus, December 18, 1916; “Notice,” Petaluma Courier, December 24, 1916.

[5] “Farrell Bros. Now Agents for Dodge,” Petaluma Courier, Mary 26, 1920; Moved into New Building,” Petaluma Courier, July 17, 1920; “Certificate of Partnership,” Petaluma Argus, July 30, 1924; “Beautiful New Home of Farrell Bros.,” Petaluma Argus, July 28, 1928; “W. Farrell Councilman,” Petaluma Courier, May 6, 1922; “Mayor Farrell, Four Aides, Quit Office,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 27, 1934.

[6] Ads, Petaluma Argus, September 7, 1920, June 16, 1921, 1922 “J.A. Cline, Dealer” selling used cars there; Ad listing, Petaluma Argus, April 24, 1926, June 14, 1927: Inwood & Greene auto repair at  267-271 Main; Ad for Inwood & Flohr, Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 14, 1932: listed at 304 Main Street; “Inwood & Flohr Have Fine New Store,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 20, 1933; “Wim. A. Inwood, Businessman, Dies From Heart Ailment,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 25, 1948; “Jack Dunaway Buys Inwood Auto Parts,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 1, 1952.

[7] Ad, Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 27, 1974; “Petaluma Access,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 8, 1996.

Tribute to a Mentor—Ardie Fortier

Ardie Fortier, 1924-2029 (photo courtesy of Brigham Denison)

Today marks what would have been the 93rd birthday of my mentor Ardie Fortier, who died last fall.

When we’re young, some of us have the good fortune of finding a mentor—someone who sees a potential in us others don’t, and who is willing to provide us with a guiding light toward helping us realize it.

The word “mentor” comes from the name of a character in Homer’s book The Odyssey. Mentor was the person entrusted with the education of Odysseus’ son while Odysseus went off to fight the Trojan War, and then spent 10 years wandering the world before making it back home.

In my case, the roles were somewhat reversed—I left home shortly after graduating from high school, and set off for Europe with a backpack for four years. Along the way, I took as my mentor an incarnation of Odysseus in the lovely form of a woman named Ardie Fortier.

I had a passing acquaintance with Ardie growing up in my hometown of Petaluma, as she was the mother of one of my classmates, Carrie Steere. But when I first encountered her and her husband Joe during my travels in their little cottage overlooking the Shannon River in West County Clare, our connection as kindred souls was instantaneous.

View of the Shannon River from Joe and Ardie’s cottage in Knock, Ireland, 1974 (photo courtesy of Brigham Denison)

We spent hours in the kitchen—the only warm room in an Irish cottage—talking about everything under the sun—history, literature, philosophy, religion, politics, and psychology—all infused with Ardie’s contagious enthusiasm, curiosity, and good humor.

For an aspiring autodidact like myself, out to study the world first hand and not on some college assembly line, it was pure heaven.

Not long after that visit, Ardie and Joe moved to Munich, where Joe took a teaching position at an extension of the University of Maryland, and Ardie took a job at the nearby headquarters of the company that ran the PXs on American military bases in Europe.

Their Munich apartment became my refuge from the road, where I could recharge and reengage with Ardie and Joe in far-reaching discussions around the kitchen table. Some evenings, Joe’s faculty colleagues—an eclectic group of intellectuals from around the globe—would join us, and we’d have a literary salon of sorts with Ardie as host, employing her gracious humor and infectious laughter to keep things from going off the rails.

Ardie (right) with friend at Bavarian farmhouse, 1977 (photo John Sheehy)

After a couple years of hitchhiking around Europe, working odd jobs, studying history, literature, and culture, I hit a wall, both broke and burned out. I made my way back to Munich, where Ardie helped me find a place to live and a clerical job at the PX headquarters where she worked. In a weird twist of fate, some months later, I was made an office supervisor, managing a group of people twice my age, including Ardie.

Now, for most people, having to report to a scruffy 21-year old road bum you’ve just helped scrape off the streets, would be awkward, to say the least. But not Ardie.

She stepped in as a mentor, sharing her incredible wealth of emotional intelligence in coaching me on how to manage the crazy bunch of Germans and American expatriates in the office. Because she had a master’s degree in psychology and Joe was a psychology professor, that included a deep dive into the study the Myers-Briggs typology to understand how to work with others.

Ardie’s type was INFP—introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceptive. Mine type was similar—except I was typed as a thinker instead of a feeler, meaning that, while Ardie relied upon feelings to sort out the value of what she was intuitively taking in, I turned to analysis.

Joe and Ardie walking in Munich’s Englischer Garten , 1976 (photo John Sheehy)

Joe also conducted tests to determine which professions Ardie and I were best suited for. In Ardie’s case, I believe it was nursing, which she eventually gravitated to later in life. For me, it was writing and reporting. My least suitable occupation was business management.

When I finally did get around to pursuing a career, it was indeed as an editor at a literary magazine in New York City. But within a couple of years, I gravitated to the least of my talents in becoming the magazine’s publisher. I went on to spend the next 35 years running media companies, with no business management training whatsoever aside from those tutorials with Joe and Ardie, and Ardie’s on-the-job coaching at the office in Munich.

The author riding the rails in Europe, 1974 (photo courtesy of Brigham Denison)

It was same with education. I hated the idea of going to college, but as an aspiring autodidact, I was a complete failure, overwhelmed with information. Ardie and Joe helped me to see that the “T” for thinker in my Myers-Briggs profile meant I needed some formal training in critical thinking to make sense what I was taking in.

Once again, Ardie was there as a mentor. She had attended Pomona College for two years before marrying her first husband, Jim Steere, a big animal veterinarian. After the first two of her six children were born, the family moved to Oregon, where Ardie enrolled at Reed College in Portland to complete her undergraduate degree. There she found her intellectual home, and absolutely thrived. She thought I would too.

Ardie, second from left, as a student at Reed College, 1955 (photo Reed Griffin yearbook)

As fate would have it, Reed had only one study-abroad program, and it was at the University of Munich. After hanging out with the Reed students there, I realized Ardie was right—I had found my people.

With Ardie’s help, I applied to Reed—it was the only college I ever applied to—and was surprisingly accepted. While Reed accepted me, they would not provide me with any financial aid, as they considered me a “spice student,” there to add a different life experience to the student body, but not expected to last long. I continued working in Munich for another year to save up the money for my first year of tuition.

Today, thanks to Ardie, I am not only a Reed graduate, but a long-serving member of the college’s board of trustees.

Ardie and Joe eventually returned to the states. After Joe passed away, Ardie joined the Peace Corps in Costa Rica at age 60. Upon her return, we found ourselves near neighbors in San Francisco.

Ardie in Costa Rica with the Peace Corps, 1990 (photo Steere family)

Ardie and I started volunteering together at a local food bank, making monthly food deliveries to people in need, mostly in the projects. I carried in the food, while Ardie greeted everyone with her generous smile and upbeat manner, mentoring me once again in the characteristics that opened doors wherever she went—courage, curiosity, and compassion.

“On the path laid out before you,” wrote the poet Gary Snyder, another Reed alum, “others have already been that way and picked all the berries. In order to get your own berries, you need to leave the path and make your own trail.”

On her personal odyssey in this life, Ardie not only carved out her own trail, and got her own berries, she inspired me, and I’m sure countless others, to do the same, for which I am eternally grateful.

******

A link to Ardie’s obituary in Reed College alumni magazine:

https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam/obituaries/2022/ardeth-owen-steere-fortier-1955.html

Petaluma’s Days as a Roadside Attraction

Petaluma’s Main Street looking north from Western Avenue, 1930 (photo courtesy of Dan Brown)

On September 3, 1925, an auto caravan of 40 “cavemen” clad in the skins of mountain lions, panthers and wildcats, set off from Grants Pass, Oregon, to take possession of Petaluma, California. Before departing, they made sure to book 26 rooms at the Hotel Petaluma, requesting permission to set up a cave in the lobby.1

The cavemen were bound for a convention promoting the Redwood Highway, a new auto route extending from the Oregon Caves Monument outside Grants Pass to the docks of Sausalito. The name “Redwood Highway” was coined in 1921 by A.D. Lee, a Crescent City hotelier, who believed the new scenic thoroughfare too lucrative to be designated by merely a number.2 Regardless, in 1926 it would officially become part of U.S. Highway 101.

Lee’s inspiration for the name came from a conservationist group called Save the Redwoods League, who in 1918 mounted a campaign to preserve what remained of California’s old growth redwood groves by making them state parks.3

Members of the Save the Redwoods League, 1920s (photo Humboldt County Historical Society)

The conservationists’ call of the wild spoke to a new wave of automobility sweeping the country. No longer hampered by wretched roads, the limited speed and endurance of the horses pulling wagons and stages, or the inflexible timetable of steam locomotives, motor-savvy Americans were setting out aboard their gas-powered “vacation agents” for road trips to the wildest and most natural places on the continent.4

Auto tourists on the Redwood Highway, 1920s (photo public domain)
Petaluma’s Bungalow Auto Camp, 711 Petlauma Boulevard North at Cherry Street, 1928-1975 (photo Sonoma County Library)

To capitalize on the craze, Lee and a group of fellow entrepreneurs in Del Norte, Humboldt, and Mendocino counties launched the Redwood Highway Association.5 For help in convincing other counties to get on the bandwagon, Lee reached out to fellow “booster extraordinaire” Bert Kerrigan, secretary of Petaluma’s Chamber of Commerce.6

Known for putting Petaluma on the map as “The World’s Egg Basket,” Kerrigan specialized in the sort of razzle dazzle stunts that attracted filmmakers screening newsreels in movie houses across the country.

His National Egg Day was full of eye-catching visuals like the Egg Parade, Egg Queen, Egg Ball, Egg Day Rodeo of hens and horses, and a “chicken chase” down San Francisco’s Market Street accompanied by a biplane dropping chicken feathers affixed with coupons for free Petaluma eggs.7

Bert Kerrigan, Secretary of Petaluma’s Chamber of Commerce and local egg booster, 1920 (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

The opportunity to position Petaluma as one of the last civilized outposts before driving off into the woods captivated Kerrigan. He went to work convincing Petaluma merchants to be among the first to adopt the use of “Redwood Highway” in their advertising, followed by the Sonoma County Board of Trade and the mayor of San Francisco.8

By the time Lee and 150 other members of Redwood Highway Association gathered at the Hotel Petaluma in 1925, Kerrigan had been shown the door as Petaluma’s ringmaster, having bled the Chamber of Commerce dry with his flamboyant stunts.9

His Redwood Highway legacy however lived on in the steady stream of autos and “auto stages” passing through town on summer weekends, bound for what travel brochures described as “the world’s most scenic Paradise Wonderland, 100 miles of giant redwood trees, primeval, primitive, and untrammeled, with streams full of fish and woods full of game.”10

1921 map of the new Redwood Empire route (illustration courtesy of the San Francisco Examiner)

The majority of the auto tourists were from Southern California. That led the Redwood Highway Association to believe they had a shot at displacing Highway 99—the future Interstate 5 running up the Sacramento Valley—as the main trunk between San Francisco and Oregon, and raking in some of the estimated $2 million ($32 million in today’s dollars) spent at roadside attractions along the way.11

Turning to tourist conquest, they changed their name to the Redwood Empire Association.12

Brochure for Auto Stage Tour of Redwood Empire, 1928 (photo public domain)

The keynote speaker at their 1925 convention was Harvey Toy, California’s commissioner of state highways. Thanks to a recent two cent per gallon gasoline tax imposed by the state, Toy informed the group he had the funds to iron out the kinks in the Redwood Highway, making it a safe and efficient thoroughfare.13

The association’s treasurer, Santa Rosa banker Frank Doyle, who was part of a group advocating construction of a bridge across the Golden Gate, updated the group on the impact the bridge would have on tourist traffic north. To avoid becoming a bottleneck, Petaluma would need to widen its Main Street from two to four lanes.

Frank Doyle, president of The Exchange Bank (photo public domain)

The prospect gave local merchants pause. Main Street was not only the town’s main artery of commerce, but the heart of its social connections and celebrations, with ample 12 foot wide sidewalks and convenient diagonal parking lanes.

Petaluma’s Lower Main Street late 1920s, where Center Park replaced carriage hitching posts (photo courtesy of Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

The city had bent over backwards to assimilate the automobile since its arrival in 1903, paving Main Street’s bumpy cobblestones with asphalt, converting hitching posts to parking lanes, replacing liveries and stables with garages and filling stations. But reducing the width of the sidewalks and imposing parallel parking so as to accommodate four lanes of through traffic, struck many as a death knell for Main Street.

In 1935, with construction of the Golden Gate Bridge finally underway, the chief engineer of the state highway commission, Col. John Skeggs, paid Petaluma merchants a visit. Either widen Main Street to four lanes, Skeggs told them, or else the state would reroute Redwood Highway to the flats east of town.14

The Golden Gate under construction, 1935 (photo public domain)

Merchants proposed a compromise. They were willing to reduce the sidewalk widths from 12 to 9 feet to create a center third lane for making left turns, while retaining diagonal parking.

The matter remained at a standstill until May 1937, when the new bridge opened.

Cars lining up for the Sausalito ferry at Hyde Pier, San Francisco, 1937 (photo public domain)

The flood of through traffic the first two weekends convinced merchants they had no choice but to surrender to the motoring hordes of the Redwood Empire, converting Main Street to four narrow lanes and parallel parking.15

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

Twenty years later, Kerrigan’s two lingering Petaluma legacies came to an abrupt end. The advent of poultry-raising factory farms throughout the country emptied the Egg Basket of the World, and the Redwood Highway abandoned Petaluma’s sluggish Main Street for the breezy new U.S. 101 freeway constructed east of town in 1957.

Into the vacuum poured thousands of auto commuters, who, thanks to the new freeway and Golden Gate Bridge, found San Francisco within easy driving distance from Petaluma. As the ranchlands east of town began filling up with suburban tract homes, Petaluma found itself transformed into a bedroom community.

While the new freeway alleviated through traffic on Main Street, it also dealt a blow to the hotels, restaurants, bars, and gas stations that catered to it. In an effort to attract freeway travelers, in 1958 the city changed the name of Main Street to Petaluma Boulevard North. Third Street, which extended from B Street to the new freeway entrance south of town, was renamed Petaluma Boulevard South.16

It wasn’t enough. New shopping malls on the eastside drained the downtown of foot traffic. By the 1960s, Petaluma Boulevard was pockmarked with empty shops and old, dilapidated buildings, forcing the city to impose an ordinance requiring owners to bring them up to code or else tear them down.17 Many chose the latter.

Boards on the windows of Wickersham Building on Petaluma Boulevard North, 1970s (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1969, the city put before voters an urban renewal proposal calling for the demolition of all the buildings on the east side of Petaluma Boulevard from B to Oak streets, for the installation of a six-lane thoroughfare. Voters rejected it.18

In the mid-1970s, the city turned to historic restoration as a means of reviving the downtown, beginning with the Great Petaluma Mill, an abandoned grain mill downtown converted by Skip Sommer into a gallery of boutique shops and restaurants.

Great Petaluma Mill’s B Street entrance, 1978 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In a town besieged by homogenous housing developments, garden-variety business parks, and uniform chain stores, the unique character of Petaluma’s historic downtown proved the catalyst of its rebirth as a trendy nightlife and shopping district.19 That brought with it increased traffic and accidents, most of them sideswipes of parked cars due to Petaluma Boulevard’s inherently narrow travel and parking lanes.20

In 2003, city planners proposed a traffic calming measure known as the “road diet.” Much like the city’s 1935 compromise proposal, it called for reducing the number of travel lanes from four to two, with a center third lane for making left turns.21

But unlike in 1935, many merchants opposed it, worried it would reduce downtown traffic. Like a gradual approach to healthy eating, the city administered the road diet in three stages, beginning in 2007 and 2013, with the final stage along Petaluma Boulevard South scheduled for completion in fall 2022.22

Studies show the road diet has reduced collisions while maintaining the same level of pre-diet traffic, meaning that, a century after Kerrigan surrendered Main Street to the traffic of the Redwood Highway, Petaluma has finally recaptured the pedestrian-friendly heart of its downtown.23

Petaluma Boulevard today with road diet (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 22, 2022

FOOTNOTES

[1] “Men to Boost Highway Here,” Petaluma Courier, August 29, 1925; “Oregon Cavemen Coming, Bringing Their Own Cave,’” Petaluma Argus, September 2, 1925; “Will Stop at Hotel Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, September 2, 1925.

[2] The basic routing for what became “Legislated Route Number 1” was defined in the 1909 First Bond Act, as part of a route from San Francisco to Crescent City. It was extended to the Oregon border by the 1919 Third Bond Act. Ground was broken for the route in August 1912. LRN 1 corresponds to present-day US 101 and US 199, which were assigned in 1926, between the Golden Gate and the Oregon border. https://www.cahighways.org/ROUTE001.html#LR001; “Redwood Highway Suggested for Hiway,” Petaluma Courier, July 11, 1921; A.D. Lee referred to as the “Father of the Redwood Highway”: “Officers are Elected by Highway Assn.,” Petaluma Courier, October 25, 1925; “Wanted—A Dozen More, The Del Norte Triplicate, March 26, 1920.

[3]“Redwood Highway Opens Vast Scenic World to Autoist,” San Francisco Examiner, July 21, 1921; Save the Redwoods League website, https://www.savetheredwoods.org/about-us/mission -history/

[4] Peter J. Blodgett, “How Americans Fell in Love With Taking Road Trips,” Time magazine, August 15, 2015. https://time.com/3998949/road-trip-history/

[5] The seven counties officially formed the North of Bay Counties Association to promote the highway, of which the Redwood Highway Association appears to have been a subsidiary, referenced as early as February 1922; “Great North of Bay Development Program Outlined at S.R. Session,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 6, 1921; “North of Bay Association is Formed,” Weekly Calistogan, November 18, 1921; “Redwood Highway to Traverse Scenic Wonderland,” Cloverdale Reveille, January 27, 1922; “Petaluma C. of C. Urge Highway Completion,” Petaluma Courier, February 19, 1922.

[6] “C.C. Endorses Naming of State Highway and Boulevard Road District,” Petaluma Courier, September 9, 1921; “Redwood Highway Booster is Here,” Petaluma Argus, October 21, 1922.

[7] John Benanti, “The Man Who Invented Petaluma,” Petaluma Museum Association Newsletter, Spring 2013, pp. 9-10.

[8] “C.C. Endorses Naming of State Highway and Boulevard Road District,” Petaluma Courier, September 9, 1921; “Pamphlets Advertising Sonoma County and Redwood Highway,” Petaluma Courier, June 22, 1922; San Francisco Press to Boost  Petaluma Egg Day and Sonoma County Fair,” Petaluma Courier, July 9, 1922.

[9] “Kerrigan Resigns as Secretary of the C.C.,” Petaluma Argus, June 4, 1924; Benanti, p. 10.

[10] “Transit Company Plans Tours on Redwood Highway,” Petaluma Courier, November 7, 1924.

[11] “North of Bay Association is Formed,” Weekly Calistogan, November 18, 1921; “Big Increase in Redwood Highway Use,” Petaluma Courier, October 20, 1925; “Redwood Highway Association Ends in Meeting with a Banquet,” Petaluma Courier, October 26, 1925;

[12] “’Redwood Empire’” is New Assn Name,” Petaluma Courier, October 3, 1926.

[13] “Officers are Elected by Highway Assn.,” Petaluma Courier, October 25, 1925; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Department_of_Transportation;

[14] “Parking Bar to Petaluma Projects,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 25, 1935.

[15] “Improved Highway Facilities,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1937; “Petaluma Bottlenecks Doomed,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 11, 1938; “Traffic Lanes are Painted,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 8, 1938; “Active Council Works for Petaluma Progress,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 15, 1938.

[16] “Old Redwood Highway Renaming,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 23, 1958. “Supervisors Vote to Change Name of Old U.S. 101,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 9, 1958.

[17] “Dangerous Building Code Action by Council,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 21, 1967.

[18] “Measure D is Most Vital,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 5, 1969; “Only One Bond Issue Survives Election,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 11, 1969.

[19] “Mill Played a Key Role in Downtown Revitalization,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 9, 1980; “Bill Murray and Mayor Putnam,” Petaluma Post, February, 2014.

[20] “Boulevard ‘Road Diet’ to Begin in September,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 8, 2007; “Downtown Road Diet Nixed,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 8, 2009.

[21] “Boost in Economy, Increase in Traffic Downtown Anticipated,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 8, 2003; “Boulevard ‘Road Diet’ to Begin in September,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 8, 2007; “Downtown ‘Road Diet’ Narrowly Approved,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 2010.

[22] Petaluma Boulevard Road Diet Funded,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 18, 2017; Petaluma Boulevard Road Diet, https://cityofpetaluma.org/pet-blvd-s-road-diet/

[23] “Have No Fear For Road Diets,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 14, 2016; “Petaluma Boulevard Road Diet Funded,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 18, 2017; “Petaluma Road Diet Nearly Finished,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 12, 2007; “Downtown ‘Road Diet’ Narrowly Approved,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 2010; “Road Diet Begins Again,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 2, 2013.

Beau Bridges’ Search for His Petaluma Roots

Beau Bridges crossing Washington Street to the Phoenix Theater in his search for local family roots (photo Crissy Pascual, Petlauma Argus-Courier)

The actor Beau Bridges was in town last week ostensibly to shoot a movie—“A Christmas Mystery” with Petaluma filmmaker Ali Afshar— but while on location he found himself inexplicably drawn to local history, specifically that of his father, the legendary film and TV actor from Petaluma, Lloyd Bridges.

Accompanied by his wife Wendy and French bulldog Buster, Beau began his inquiry leafing through old yearbooks at Petaluma High School, from which his father graduated in 1930. They then set out to find the house his father grew up in, which they believed to be somewhere on the hillside behind the high school.

Driving along Hill Boulevard, Beau spotted an old schoolmate of mine, Harry Lewis, standing outside his house, and randomly pulled over to ask his help. Harry contacted me, and I agreed to do some quick research and meet with the Bridges the next day at Volpi’s Restaurant, where Harry tends bar on the weekends.

What unfolded in Volpi’s historic back barroom the next day was a Petaluma version of the popular TV show, “Finding Your Roots.” A curious and congenial raconteur, Beau made it clear he wasn’t looking for the dry facts of genealogy—a family member had already undertaken that task—he wanted to hear the stories.

Publicity photo of Lloyd Bridges starring in TV series Sea Hunt, 1958 (photo public domain)

That included stories about Volpi’s, which, during his father’s teen years in the 1920s, was an Italian grocery with a backroom speakeasy. He was also eager to hear about the Phoenix Theater across the street, where he understood his grandfather, Lloyd Vernet Bridges, Sr., had worked as a movie projectionist in the ’20s when it was the California Theater. His father used to watch screenings of the same film over and over when he was young to study acting techniques. [1]

Beau Bridges tossing a signed dollar bill to ceiling of Volpi’s Bar (photo John Sheehy)

Harry and I were more than happy to oblige his request. Growing up in Petaluma in the 1960s, we were both big fans of “Sea Hunt,” the adventure TV series Lloyd Bridges starred in, as well as his many films, including the classic western “High Noon” and the madcap comedy “Airplane.” After sharing local tales and initiating Beau in the Volpi’s tradition of signing a dollar bill and affixing it to the bar’s ceiling, we got down to discussing his family roots.

Lloyd Bridges, Jr.—“Bud” as he was known in Petaluma—moved to town when he was 10, along with his mother Hattie and older sister Belle. His parents had divorced a decade earlier, a year after Bud was born, with Hattie citing her husband’s relentless “amusement” with prize fights, baseball games and automobile rides, while Lloyd Bridges, Sr. complained of her monotony. [2]

Lloyd Sr. remained in San Francisco, where ran a hotel and boarding house, while Hattie moved with the children to San Rafael initially, and then to Petaluma in 1923, purchasing a home near the high school at 11 Spring Street, named for a natural spring on the site. [3]

11 Spring Street today (photo public domain)

Petaluma was in the midst of its heady reign as “The Egg Basket of the World.” Bud quickly distinguished himself as a gifted singer—performing at Sunday services in the Congregational Church at Fifth and B streets—and a talented performer in plays and musicals staged at the high school and at the California Theater. Local critics noted he had “a natural talent for the stage, a flair for comedy, and knack for serious acting as well.” [4]

Eleanore Hawthorne, Lloyd Bridges, and Jewel Johnson in the 1929 school play, “Captain Applejack” (photo 1930 Enterprise Yearbook, Petaluma High School)

His best friend was Art Parent, who would later go on to serve as Petaluma’s mayor and owner of Parent Funeral Parlor. Art noted that Bud was always the star in their plays together, because unlike Art, he could improvise. One night while they were performing at the California Theater, Bud fell coming up the back stage steps and knocked himself out, leaving Art to recite his lines over and over until Bud finally came to. [5]

Art Parent and Lloyd Reynolds at Petaluma High, 1930 (photo 1930 Enterprise Yearbook, Petaluma High School)

“Oddly,” said Beau, “what my dad talked most about growing up in Petaluma was playing basketball.”

A fierce competitor, Bud lettered in four sports and served as captain of the basketball team. After finishing high school, he took a brief job at the local Bank of America, before enrolling in UCLA to pursue a political science degree. He spent much of his time however on the basketball court and the stage. [6]

Lloyd Bridges, center, captain of 1930 Petaluma High basketball team (photo 1930 Enterprise Yearbook, Petaluma High School)

While Bud was in high school, his mother got remarried to Clarence Breuillot, a state contractor. In the late 1930s, Breuillot was appointed foreman of the newly constructed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and the couple left Petaluma for Berkeley. [7]

After UCLA, Bud spent five years working in New York theater, before being signed as a stock actor with Columbia Pictures in 1941. The same year, he and his wife welcomed their first child, Lloyd Vernet Bridges III, whom they nicknamed “Beau” after a character in “Gone with the Wind.” Beau’s first visit to Petaluma came three years later, when his parents visited Art Parent. [8]

A dogged performer, Bud appeared in more than seven dozen films, most of them potboilers and B-movies, before finally getting his big breakthrough in a film called “Home of the Brave,” in 1949. That same year, his second son, Jeff Bridges, was born. He would go on to become an Academy Award-winning actor.

In 1951, a budding young Petaluma newspaper columnist named Bill Soberanes arranged to stage the West Coast premiere of Bud’s latest movie, “The Whistle Stop at Eaton Hills,” at Petaluma’s Mystic Theater (then called the State Theater).

Poster for the film “The Whistle at Eaton Falls,” which had its west coast premiere at the State Theater in Petaluma in 1951 (photo public domain)

Soberanes arranged for a police escort from the city limits to bring Bud into town and to the Hotel Petaluma, where a banquet with 75 of his old friends and former teachers from Petaluma High awaited him. Art Parent served as master of ceremonies, and the city’s mayor read a proclamation declaring it Lloyd Bridges Day. Bud was then publicly sworn in as a member of the National Good Egg Club, taking an oath to “give due respect to the egg.” [9]

“I feel like I’m in high school all over again,” beamed Bud. He then lauded his music teacher, Agnes Bravo, for helping him learn his first operetta. [10]

Screening party for “The Whistle at Eaton Falls.” premiere in 1951. From left, Bill Soberanes, Hattie Breauillot (Lloyd’s mother), Lloyd Bridges, and Petlauma Mayor Leland Myers (photo Petaluma Argus-Courier)

Art remained Bud’s Petaluma connection over the years, as did Soberanes, who later enlisted him in helping to promote the World Wristwrestling Championship Tournaments. [11] When a TV show came to Petaluma in 1985 to film Bud’s early beginnings, Art filled in for Bud, who was on location as usual, taking the film crew on a tour to the Bridges home, the Phoenix Theater, and Fundas’ Candy Store beside the Mystic, where Bud and Art competed in high school for the attention of Dorothy Beidleman—a contest Art won, eventually convincing her to marrying him. [12]

After Harry and I concluded our roots presentation with Beau, we escorted him, Wendy and Buster across the street to meet Phoenix Theater manager Tom Gaffey, who started working at the theater when he, Harry and I were in high school together.

Beau Bridges crossing Washington Street to the Phoenix Theater in his search for local family roots (photo Crissy Pascual, Petlauma Argus-Courier)

Gaffey told us Soberanes was the source of the story that Beau’s grandfather had been the projectionist at the California Theater when Bud was growing up. To Beau’s disappointment, I had to dispel that lore.

Lloyd Sr. had owned a movie theater in San Leandro, where Bud was born in 1913. [13] But the next year he returned to the family hotel business in San Francisco. Shortly after Bud graduated high school, Lloyd Sr. took over the legendary Vance Hotel in Eureka, and lived out his days as a local hotelier and real estate mogul. [14]

As a consolation, Gaffey informed Beau—a three-time Emmy, two-time Golden Globe, and one-time Grammy Award winner—that as a legacy performer at the theater, he was entitled to make free use of the Phoenix for theatrical or musical productions. Beau appeared to give the offer serious consideration, expressing his love of serendipitous opportunities.

Beau Bridges inside the Phoenix Theater (photo Crissy Pascual, Petlauma Argus-Courier)

Before Beau and Wendy left to view the Bridges family home, Beau shared how he and his father bonded over playing tennis and one-on-one basketball together. In his father’s footsteps, Beau attended UCLA, where he joined the basketball team coached by the legendary John Wooden.

“My dad was always extremely competitive. But as he grew close to my age now—I’m 80—I realized I could handily beat him anytime I wanted. So to make it even, I started tanking balls into the net, but carefully, so he wouldn’t know what I was doing. One day, after three sets of tennis on a hot summer day, I looked at him sitting tired and slumped over on the bench, and I was overcome with a wave of melancholy.

Beau Bridges and Lloyd Bridges at the 44th Emmy Awards, August 1982 (photo credit Alan Light, public domain)

“Dad,” I said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”

There was a long pause. “What makes you think I’m going to go first?” he said. There was a little piece of a smile on his face, but he was dead serious.

Petaluman Lloyd Bridges died in 1998 at the age of 85, after starring in dozens of TV series and more than 150 feature films. [15]

******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 24, 2022.

RESPONSES FROM LOCALS

Menu at the Little Hill Banquet on Main Street following State Theater premiere of The Whistle at Eaton Falls” (courtesy of Melissa Musso James)

Beau Bridges’s search the local roots of his father, the actor Lloyd Bridges, prompted an outpouring of reminiscences from locals. Many people with family members who went to school with Lloyd dug out the old yearbooks they still keep from that era.

A number of people shared that their mother, grandmother, or aunt laid claim to being Lloyd’s date at the 1930 Petaluma High senior prom. Yvonne (Armour) Cornilson, who appeared in school musicals with Lloyd, appears to be the most likely candidate.

Tammie Tower-Snider said her grandmother told stories about riding to school on the handlebars of Lloyd’s bike when they were young. As the school was only a half a block away from his house on Spring Street, it must have been a short ride.

Marion Johnson said her mother recounted how Lloyd carried her books home from school for her. Lauri Carlson’s grandmother taught at Petaluma High in the 1920s, and had Lloyd for study hall.

Linda Parker shared that A Tale of Two Cities was required reading when Lloyd was in high school. You had to write your name on a list pasted in the back. When she was a student 30 years later, they were still using the same old copies. She got the one with Lloyd’s signature in it, and never gave it back.

Betty Prior remembered Lloyd’s return to Petaluma in 1951 for the West Coast premiere of a movie he was starring in, and visiting her and other students at Petaluma High.

Melissa Musso James shared the menu from her parents’ Little Hill restaurant on Main Street, where Lloyd Bridges was feted following the West Coast premiere of his 1951 film The Whistle at Eaton Fall at the State Theater.

Joe, the chef at the Little Hill restaurant ,and Lloyd Bridges, 1951 (photo courtesy of Melissa Musso James)

Some people shared that their fathers and uncles telling stories about attending school with Lloyd. Melinda Webb Zerrenner said her father, longtime Petaluma judge Rollie Webb, was a schoolmate of Lloyd’s, and took the family to see him whenever they visited Los Angeles.

Gig Schuster Jones said her grandfather Cap Schuster was Lloyd’s high school physical education teacher. When the family sat around watching Lloyd in his hit TV series Sea Hunt, her grandfather often boasted that he was the one who taught Lloyd to snorkel.

FOOTNOTES:

  1. “TV and Film Actor Lloyd Bridges Dies,” Washington Post, March 11, 1998.
  2. “Prize Fight Cause of Rout of Cupid,” Oakland Tribune, September 13, 1914.
  3. “Will Move Here from San Rafael,” Petaluma Argus, January 18, 1923; “Sold 7th Street Property,” Petaluma Courier, September 18, 1926; Katie Watts, “Names of Streets and Places,” Petaluma Argus Courier, March 26, 2008.
  4. “Lloyd Bridges Stars in High School Play,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 5, 1929.
  5. Bill Soberanes, “Art Parent: A Petaluma Legend,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 20, 1991.
  6. “Lloyd Bridges in Film at ‘Cal’,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 20, 1936; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Bridges
  7. “Local Couple Are Wedded,” Petaluma Courier, July 26, 1927; “Daughter Arrives for Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Stout,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 16, 1933; “Fire Damages 11 Spring Street,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, December 2, 1938 “Real Estate Deals Closed,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 21, 1941; “Clarence Breuillot Obituary,” Los Gatos Times, October 23, 1970.
  8. “Recent Guests at Arthur Parent Home,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 25, 1944.
  9. “Wonderful to be Back,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 2, 1951.
  10. “Wonderful to be Back,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 2, 1951.
  11. Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 2, 1981; “Petaluma Memories of the Late Lloyd Bridges,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 24, 1998.
  12. Bill Soberanes column, “Lloyd Bridges TV Special,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 26, 1985.
  13. “Motion Picture News: Best Theater, San Leandro,” Oakland Tribune, November 22, 1913.
  14. “Lloyd Bridges Sr. Dies,” Humboldt Standard, May 1, 1962.
  15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Bridges

Oyster Shells: Petaluma’s “Secret Sauce”

Gunerius “George” Aanunsen, standing center, in the first Aanunsen Oyster Shell Yard at the southwest corner of the D Street Bridge, with brother Pete seated on wagon, 1906 (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

On the evening of September 9, 1909, Gunerius Aanunsen sailed up the Petaluma River on his schooner the Fearless with a cargo of oyster shells, docking at his supply yard beside the D Street Bridge. Returning the next morning, he found the boat submerged. During evening low tide its hull, weighted by the shells, cracked on a hidden silt mound.1

The sinking of the Fearless illustrated the perils of using a tidal estuary as a shipping channel. The genesis of Petaluma’s founding, the waterway came with a congenital birth defect—instead of flowing like a stream, it rose and fell with the ocean tides twice each day, making it prone to silting up.

At the time of the mishap, only the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers exceeded the estuary as a waterway for shipping commercial tonnage in California.2 Two steamers and more than 60 flat-bottomed schooners plied its 18 miles to and from San Pablo Bay with an annual 200,000 tons of goods, including 100 million eggs, Petaluma’s new agent of wealth as the self-proclaimed “Boss Chicken Town of the Pacific Coast.”3

Steamer Gold steamer traveling up the Petaluma River, circa 1900 (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

But with economic prosperity came more silt. The expansion of farmlands led to the elimination of wetlands and rechanneling of tributary streams, sending erosion from the plowed fields into the estuary during rainy seasons, where it trapped boats like the Fearless in its muddy grasp. 4

Having a clogged artery at the heart of town raised the perennial question, according to local historian Skip Sommer, as to whether Petaluma wanted to be known as a river town or a mud town.5 For more than a century, the answer turned on the secret sauce of the Boss Chicken Town—oyster shells.

The arrival of oyster shells coincided with the Army Corps of Engineers’ first dredging of the estuary in 1880. Petaluma previously funded two dredgings of the upper channel north of Haystack Landing in 1859 and 1866, along with cuts made by ferryboat operator Charles Minturn.6 The arrival of the San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad in 1870 however made dredging an existential imperative.  

Having bypassed Petaluma, the railroad created its own shipping terminus on the estuary south of town near Lakeville. Fearing a transportation monopoly, local business leaders successfully lobbied Congress in 1880 for $28,000, or $875,000 in today’s currency, to have the Army Corps dredge the estuary and re-channel some of its 80 serpentine bends.7

The dredging coincided with the invention in Petaluma of an efficient egg-hatching incubator by Isaac Dias, a dentist from New Orleans. He was later joined in perfecting and marketing it by one of his patients, Lyman Byce.8

In 1880, Christopher Nisson, a Danish immigrant, purchased one of Dias’ incubators, and employed it to launch the country’s first commercial egg hatchery on his ranch in Two Rock.9

Christopher Nisson’s Pioneer Hatchery Ranch in Two Rock (Sonoma County Library)

The one ingredient Nisson lacked in his transformation of the chicken from pastoral farm animal to egg assembly line was calcium. If his hens were to dramatically increase their egg production, they needed many times their natural amount of calcium to avoid brittle bones and soft-shelled eggs. For a calcium supplement, Nisson turned to oyster shells.10

Crushed oyster shells were already being used in feed for backyard chickens, but not on the industrial scale he envisioned. Fortunately for Nisson, large mounds of ancient oyster shells, or middens, had been preserved beneath the waters of the South San Francisco Bay near San Mateo, built up by indigenous tribes over thousands of years.11

Sacks of “Egg Food” with oyster shells being loaded for delivery at George P. McNear’s Oriental Flour Mill on Petlauma Boulevard North across from Penry Park, 1895 (Sonoma County Library)

In 1880, Nisson persuaded Petaluma grain merchant George P. McNear to ship oyster shells up the estuary from the South Bay. The shells enabled him to quickly increase his flock to 2,000 hens, and begin selling incubated baby chicks to his neighbors.12 Within a decade, six additional hatcheries were operating in Petaluma, drawing hundreds of aspiring chicken ranchers to the area.13

Gunerius “George” Aanunsen immigrated to San Francisco from Norway in 1889.14 At the turn of the century, he and his brother Pete opened a supply yard in Petaluma for oyster shells, coal, and wood at the southwest corner of the D Street Bridge. The brothers dissolved their partnership un 1907, with Pete retaining the coal and wood supply business while Gunerius opened the South Bay Shell Company on the southeast side of the D Street Bridge. The site would remain an oyster shell facility for the next 110 years.15

Schooner on Petaluma River just north of D Street Bridge, circa 1900 (Sonoma County Library)

In 1907, the brothers dissolved their partnership, with Pete retaining the coal and wood supply business while Gunerius opened the South Bay Shell Company on the southeast side of the D Street Bridge.16 The site would remain an oyster shell facility for the next 110 years.

The opening of Aanunsen’s new shell yard coincided with the third major dredging of the estuary by the Army Corps, the second having taken place in 1892.17 In the River and Harbor Act of 1904 Petaluma was provided a $7,500 ongoing annual appropriation for dredging ($234,000 in today’s currency).18 The Army Corps recommended accumulating the annual allocation to fund a thorough dredging of the channel every four or five years.19

Dredger on the Petaluma River, 1920s (Sonoma County Library)

But, as the Fearless’ sinking demonstrated just two years later, Petaluma couldn’t wait that long. After only one or two heavy rain seasons, enough silt filled the estuary’s upper channel to make it a mud trap for vessels at low tide. As a result, the annual funding allocation was eaten up by regular maintenance dredging. The exception was the River and Harbor Act of 1930, which allocated $200,000, or $4.4 million in today’s currency, to fully dredge and straighten parts of the estuary to Cloudy Bend.20

1930 also saw Aanunsen’s retirement from the oyster shell business. After resurfacing the sunken Fearless, he converted it into a sloop-rigged barge, purchasing a tugboat to pilot it up and down the creek.21 The tugboat also served as his home. For the next 30 years, he helped keep the Boss Chicken Town supplied with shell as annual egg production soared to half a billion eggs.22

Gunerius “George” Aanunsen aboard his tugboat Solano docked in Petaluma, circa 1930 (Sonoma County Library)

At the age of 70, Aanunsen set sail for the San Diego Bay, where he devoted a year to collecting sea shells for museum collections before his body was found floating in the bay, the apparent victim of an unsolved murder.23

Aanunsen’s shell yard beside the D Street Bridge changed hands a few times before being purchased in 1948 by the Pioneer Shell Company, which constructed a processing plant on the site capable of crushing 10 to 12 tons of oyster shell an hour. By then, oyster shells were being used not only for poultry feed, but horse feed, fertilizer, and landscaping.24

Pioneer Shell Company plant, southeast corner of D Street Bridge, 1954 (Sonoma County Library)

Other shipments on the estuary were decreasing however, due to the rise of trucking and the demise of Petaluma’s chicken industry. After World War II, more efficient caged factory farms were springing up around the county, putting the area’s small chicken ranches out of business.25

In an attempt to turn the tide, Petaluma presented Congress with two bold proposals. The first was a name change for the estuary from the Petaluma Creek, which it was commonly called, to the Petaluma River. Contrary to popular lore, the name change was not required to maintain federal funding for the dredging. Instead, Petaluma believed that “river” would carry more prestige than “creek” in helping the town attract new industries in need of water transportation.26

Site of the oyster shell plant beside the D Street Bridge (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

The second proposal, which carried a price tag of $6.5 million ($58 million in today’s currency), called for a major reengineering of the estuary in hopes of attracting new commercial traffic and also recreational boats.27 Congress quickly passed the name change in 1959, but the reengineering proposal was eventually ruled out as cost prohibitive.28

The city succeeded however in attracting a handful of enterprises that used the river for transporting heavy construction materials like gravel and concrete. Together with the oyster shell plant, then owned by Jerico Products who diversified to also transporting sand for construction, there was sufficient commercial tonnage to qualify for continued dredging by the Army Corps.29

Mitch Lind, owner of Jerico Products (later renamed Lind Marine), at the oyster shell plant beside the D Street Bridge, 1981 (photo courtesy of Murray Rockowitz)

After the Corps’ dredging in 2003, the Petaluma River was classified as a “low use” waterway, placing future dredging in jeopardy. At that time, barge traffic was largely dependent on just two companies, a concrete plant and the oyster shell plant. In 2006, the concrete plant closed, leaving only oyster shells to justify future dredging.30

It wasn’t enough. Lind Marine, the new name of Jerico Products, steadily reduced the tonnage of shells and sand on their barges to navigate the increasingly shallow channel until 2017, when it proved no longer profitable to do so.31

By then, river traffic consisted almost entirely of recreational boats which, while contributing tourism revenues to the city, didn’t figure into the Corps’ criteria for dredging. By 2020, even they were unable to safely navigate the muddy channel. Thanks to local lobbying, the Army Corps returned that year for a $9.7 million dredging of the river, with the understanding that it would be their last.32

By that time, most of the industrial sites on the riverfront that once neighbored Aanunsen’s oyster shell yard had been converted to infill housing, shopping malls, and office space, reflecting Petaluma’s transformation from an agricultural shipping hub to a suburban community.

In 2022, Lind Marine announced plans to replace its historic shell plant with an infill housing development called Oyster Cove.33

Proposed design of new Oyster Cover development at the southeast corner of the D Street Bridge (courtesy of Urban Design Associates)

******

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 20, 2022.

Video of Proposed Oyster Cove Development:

FOOTNOTES

[1] “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Courier, December 1, 1902;“Schooner Fearless Sinks,” Petaluma Argus, September 7, 1909.

[2] Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 78.

[3] 200,000 annual tons is cited in “Saw the Engineers,” Petaluma Argus, January 18, 1908, but 155,000 annual tons in “Official Report of Government Engineer on River Improvements,” Petaluma Courier, November 24, 1909; egg production volume is from an advertisement from the Petaluma Chamber of Commerce, Pacific Rural Press, April 10, 1910; “Boss Chicken Town of the Pacific Coast” was first used in an 1898 issue of the Petaluma Weekly Budget, as cited in Thea  Lowry’s Empty Shells: The Story of Petaluma, American’s Chicken City (Novato, CA: Manifold Press, 2000), p. 27.

[4] Petaluma Valley Historical Hydrology and Ecology Study”. SFEI Contribution No. 861, 2018. https://www.sfei.org/documents/petaluma-valley-historical-hydrology-andecology-study.

[5] “Petaluma River Dredging Due,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 1, 1983.

[6] “Approved,” Sonoma County Journal, April 15, 1859; “Improvement of the Creek,” Sonoma County Journal, October 14, 1859: “Act to Improve the Creek,” Sonoma County Journal, April 13, 1860; “Straightening the Creek,” Petaluma Argus, February 11, 1862; “Notice To Contractors,” Petaluma Argus, August 23, 1866; “Contract Awarded,” Petaluma Argus, August 30, 1866.

[7] “Petaluma Creek,” Petaluma Argus, December 4, 1876; “Straighten the Creek,” Petaluma Courier, January 1, 1879; “Petaluma Creek,” Petaluma Argus, December 5, 1879; “Of Interest to Us,” Petaluma Courier, March 8, 1880; “Improvement of Petaluma Creek,” Petaluma Argus, August 27, 1880; “Work Commenced,” Petaluma Argus, October 8, 1880; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, October 22, 1880; “Important Change,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1881; “Petaluma Creek,” Petaluma Courier, November 15, 1882; “Petaluma Township,” Petaluma Argus, January 5, 1884. “Petaluma Creek,” Petaluma Argus, August 9, 1884.

[8] Lowry, pp. 33-34 (after Dias’s death in a mysterious 1884 hunting accident on the estuary, Byce wrote him out of the incubator’s origin story).

[9] Lowry, pp. 49-51; p. 146; “Nisson’s Famous Poultry Yard,” Petaluma Courier, November 11, 1891.

[10] Lowry, p. 156.

[11] N.C. Nelson, “Shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Region,” University of California Publications in Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 7, No. 4, Berkeley, The University Press, 1909, pgs. 337, 346. https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/anthpubs/ucb/text/ucp007-006-007.pdf; Lydia Lee, “Olympian Dreams,” Alta magazine, January 4, 2022. https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a38325907/west-coast-native-oyster-lydia-lee/ Charles H. Townsend, “Report of Observations Respecting the Oyster Resources and Oyster Fishery of the Pacific Coast of the United States,” Report of the Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries for 1889 to 1891,United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, 1893. https://penbay.org/cof/cof_1889_91.html;

[12] “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, March 18, 1881; “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, August 31, 1881.

[13] Lowry, p. 50; “Nisson’s Famous Poultry Yard,” Petaluma Courier, November 11, 1891.

[14] Ancestry.com: Norway Select Baptism 1634-1927 (Gunerius Aanunsen’s birth: May 10, 1862, Ostre Moland, Aust-Agder, Norway); Hamburg Passenger Lists (Hamburg departure date: May 2, 1889); San Francisco Directory, 1889.

[15] Note: It appears that the Aanunsens formed their first shell yard along the river near Washington Street Bridge by 1902, before moving to the First and D street location a few years later; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Courier, December 1, 1902; “Briefs,” Petaluma Courier, August 31, 1906; “Has Sued for Accounting,” Petaluma Argus, October 21, 1907.

[16] “Briefs,” Petaluma Courier, July 24, 1907; “Has Sued for Accounting,” Petaluma Argus, October 21, 1907; Ad, Petaluma Courier, January 22, 1908; “Opinion in Local Case,” Petaluma Argus, April 24, 1908; The 1914 Petaluma City Directory lists George Aanunsen as owner of the South Bay Company, Petaluma Historical Library & Museum.

[17] “Local News,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 9, 1889; “Local Brevities,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 3, 1891; “Official Report of Government Engineer on River Improvements,” Petaluma Courier, November 24, 1909.

[18] “Official Report of Government Engineer on River Improvements,” Petaluma Courier, November 24, 1909; “Who Got the Money,” Petaluma Argus, October 22, 1914; “City Dredging Woes Date to 1890,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 7, 1983.

[19] “Official Report of Government Engineer on River Improvements,” Petaluma Courier, November 24, 1909.

[20] “Saw the Engineers,” Petaluma Argus, January 18, 1908; “Official Report of Government Engineer on River Improvements,” Petaluma Courier, November 24, 1909; “River & Harbor Committee Reports to the C. of C. Board,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 10, 1930 “Dredging Crew Start $200,000 River Cut Here,” AC, January 24, 1933; “Extensive River Improvements Coming to River Channel,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 4, 1959.

[21] “Schooner Fearless is Now a Sloop Rigged Barge,” Petaluma Argus, April 29, 1910; “Briefs,” Petaluma Argus, October 8, 1908.

[22] Heig, p. 115; “Poultry Industry in Upward Trend,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 4, 1929.

[23] “Has Taken Over Shell Business,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 28, 1930; “George Aanunsen Meets Mysterious Death in San Diego Bay,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 10, 1931; Findagrave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/142750468/george-aanunsen

[24] Note: Aaunensen sold his shell yard to William Cartensen. Jerry Hannigan purchased it in 1939, renaming it Jerry’s Shell Yard. In 1945, he moved the yard across the river to 735-741 Third Street. In 1948, Pioneer purchased the yard; Ad, Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 20, 1939; Ad, Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 4, 1945; “City Council,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 5, 1948; “Oyster Shell Processing Plant Opens In Petaluma,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, February 22, 1950.

[25] “Poultry Must Organize,’” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 2, 1959; Lowry, Empty Shells, pp. 229-233.

[26] “Creek Naming and Dredging Supported,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 14, 1959; “Miller Submits Bills, Works on More,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 23, 1959; “River Name Bill Sails To Senate,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 16, 1959.

[27] “Creek Naming and Dredging Supported,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 14, 1959; “Extensive Improvements Coming to River Channel,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 4, 1959.

[28] “Petaluma Might Get River Yet,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 20, 1959; “International Scoop,” So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 24, 1959; “River Dredging Should Be Completed by September,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 8, 1964; “River Project Gets a Boost,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 26, 1965; “City records Progress and Problems in 1967,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 30, 1967.

[29] “Oakland Firm Given Contract to Dredge the River,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 1964; “River Project Gets a Boost,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 26, 1965 “City Records Progress and Problems in 1967,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 30, 1967.

[30] “The Ebb and Flow of the River Industry,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 19, 2006:

[31] “Nearly $10 million Petaluma Dredging Project Begins after 13-year Wait,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 5, 2020; “River Dredging Crucial for City,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 27, 1992; Katherine J. Rinehart, “Processing Oyster Shells Along the Petaluma River,” Sonoma County Farm Bureau Newsletter, February 11, 2022. https://sonomafb.org/processing-oyster-shells-along-the-petaluma-river/

[32] “Nearly $10 million Dredging Begins After 13-year Wait,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 5, 2020; John Shribbs, “Dredging,”2021,  Petaluma Wetlands Alliance, petalumawetlands.org. https://petalumawetlands.org/dredging/

[33] “Oyster Cove Project,” a video presentation by UrbanMix Development and Urban Design Associates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTg6JZcx1Ms&list=PLtMVX2ASLE4rwOq9VROofcEcGpFkfnk6e&index=2

Women of the Wheel

Fashion, Sex, and Suffrage During the 1890s Bicycle Craze

Two young Petaluma women with their safety bicycles, circa 1890s (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

On July 4, 1896, Petaluma found itself anointed the new “bicycling Mecca” of the West Coast, as a reported 6,000 people turned out at the city’s new Wheelman Park for the annual divisional meet of the League of American Wheelmen.

Among the 18 Northern California teams competing were two comprised entirely of women—San Francisco’s Alpha Cycling Club and Petaluma’s own “women of the wheel,” the Mercury Cyclists.

Their presence embodied perhaps the greatest social disruption of the 1890’s bicycle craze: women were no longer dependent upon men for their transportation.

Women’s cyclist club, 1890s (photo public domain)

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling,” Susan B. Anthony told New York World reporter Nellie Bly in 1896. “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

Female liberation came thanks to introduction of the “safety bicycle” in the early 1890s. Its predecessor, the high-wheel, had been strictly a masculine pursuit. With its enormous front wheel and small back wheel, both made of rubber-lined wood, the bike was nicknamed the “boneshaker” for its jarring and often dangerous ride.

Men with their highwheelers, 1880s (photo public domain)

The safety, with its two equal-sized wheels and inflated rubber tires, not only provided a smoother ride but was easier to mount, making it accessible to women in dresses, who dubbed it the “freedom machine.”

Petaluma’s first safety bicycles went on sale in 1892 at Joe Steiger’s Gunsmith Shop on Main Street, across from current day Putnam Plaza. The following year, a group of young men led by Frank Lippitt formed a local chapter of the League of American Wheelmen called the Petaluma Wheelmen.

By 1894, the national bicycle craze was in full swing. New dealerships started popping up in hardware stores around town. Lyman Byce, the entrepreneur behind Petaluma’s booming new egg industry, opened one at his Petaluma Incubator Company across from today’s Penry Park. The bikes weren’t cheap. Byce’s popular Erie model sold for $100 ($3,150 in today’s currency).

Lyman Byce’s Petaluma Incubator Company and Eric Bicycle shop, 1896 (photo Sonoma County Library)

A popular novelty among Petaluma’s younger, middle-class set, bicycles also found early adopters among some older residents, including the city’s leading capitalist, 63-year old John A. McNear. After purchasing a bicycle from Byce, McNear was convinced by Petaluma’s “father of chickendome” to build a local velodrome for racing events. With bicycles at Byce’s incubator factory selling as fast as he could stock them, Byce assured McNear he would make his money back within a year.

In 1895, McNear converted an old baseball stadium he owned on the city’s east side (now the site of the Petaluma Public Library) into Wheelman Park. After building a quarter-mile race track with six-foot-high banked curves, he surfaced it with hard-packed decomposed granite, making it conducive to speed. He then doubled the seating capacity of the baseball bleachers to accommodate 2,500, leaving ample room for standing spectators as well as those who wished to watch from their parked carriages.

John McNear on bicycle alongside a Sonoma Express wagon of chickens (photo Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

Shortly before the track was completed, a group of young women led by Gertrude Hopkins and Florence Mauzy formed the Mercury Cyclists, joining a number of women’s cycling clubs starting up around the country

“The bicycle,” wrote the League of American Wheelmen, “has taken those old-fashioned, slow-going notions of the gentler sex, and replaced them with a new woman, mounted on her steed of steel.”

As the Mercury Cyclists and other wheelwomen took to their steel steeds, they ran into some cultural speed bumps from conservative Victorians, who wanted to know where they were riding to.

When the question was put to women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton by American Wheelman magazine, she succinctly replied: “To suffrage.”

San Francisco’s Liberty Cycling Club, 1895 (photo California Historical Society)

Victorians believed otherwise. For them, women were stationary, and men mobile. Any female intrusion into the outdoor world of travel, athleticism, or free movement threatened their world order. The only place women were riding to, in their opinion, was heavenly disgrace and eternal destruction.

“As a chivalrous gentleman,” a newspaper article asked of Victorian men, “do you tremble at the revolution of bicycling women?”

Actress Mabel Love with bicycle, 1897 (photo public domain)

The answer was complicated, especially for men grappling with conflicted feelings of repulsion and attraction. A man’s poem in the San Francisco Examiner in 1895 conveyed their dilemma.

“The Bicycle Girl, oh, the Bicycle Girl, /with a spinnaker skirt and a sleeve like a furl; / such a freak on the wheel, such a sight on the tire, / I am certain I never will love or admire.”

Within a few lines of this dismissive opening, the poet fell into a head-turning swoon.

“The sound of her bell and the hum of her wheel / Is enough to make any man’s cranium reel . . . And why did she smile as she lightly spun by? . . . The Bicycle Girl, oh, the Bicycle Girl, / she has tangled my heart in her mystical whirl.”

The introduction in 1895 of tandem bicycles for sale at Joe Steiger’s shop created a small sensation in town. As moonlight rides in the countryside began to usurp dates to dances and musical concerts, some men looked to the bicycle as a revealing test of character.

The popular song Daisy Bell, or Bicycle Built for Two, was written by Harry Dacre in 1892 (Illustration in public domain)

“The woman you see is seldom the woman you think you see,” wrote a man in the Petaluma Courier in 1896. “Mounted upon bicycles, most women have to tell the truth about themselves. One can distinguished at a glance the daring, willful beauty from the timid, tender girl. A woman’s health, vigor of mind and body are apparent. I will even go so far as to advise a man not to get married until he has seen the object of his choice disport herself upon a bicycle.”

Victorians disagreed. The only character trait they believed a woman revealed on a bike was a proclivity for sin and fast living. A woman out cycling without male supervision was not only placing herself in danger, she was exposing herself to the temptations of sexual stimulation, caused according to medical professionals by the protruding pommel of bicycle saddles.

The fear of unleashed female sexuality led bicycle manufacturers to introduce special “hygienic” saddles with little or no pommels, along with high seat stems and upright handlebars that supported a more dignified and ladylike riding position than the bent over, “camel back” style, which required women to provocatively lean forward in the saddle.

Ad for bicycle saddle with reduced pommel for women, Ladies Home Journal magazine, April 1896.

The break with tradition most disturbing to Victorians was fashion. At a time when middle-class women rarely challenged fashion’s dictates, the practicality of bicycling offered them an opportunity to rethink their clothing.

Shedding the restrictive Victorian corsets and large, billowy dresses, women wheelers adopted for riding the “divided skirt,” or baggy trouser cinched at the knee. Originally championed in a dress reform movement led by suffragist Amelia Bloomer, the divided skirts were commonly known as “bloomers.” Their appeal rapidly spread beyond the practicalities of bicycling to women who didn’t ride.

Ad for Continental Bicycle Tires (photo courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

When asked about bloomers in her interview with Nellie Bly, Susan B. Anthony was blunt.

“Dress to suit the occasion. A woman doesn’t want skirts and flimsy lace to catch in the wheel. Safety, as well as modesty, demands bloomers or extremely short skirts. You know women only wear foolish articles of dress to please men’s eyes anyway.”

The male gaze gladly overlooked the bloomers’ practical modesty, as the trousers scandalously exposed a woman’s ankles, raising an outcry form Victorians.

The hotly contested fashion battle that ensued forever altered public perceptions of female athleticism and proper female behavior. Bloomers permitted women cyclists to jettison the heavy, drop-frame bicycles designed for riding in a dress, and jump aboard the much lighter, diamond-framed bicycles ridden by men, making the women viable competitors in races like Petaluma’s meet on Independence Day in 1896.

Women competing in cycling race in Buffalo, NY, 1897 (photo courtesy of BnF–Bibliothèque nationale de France) 

Disappointingly, no records were broken that day at the new Wheelman Park by men or women cyclists. Likewise, while the new safety bicycle technology was liberating for women, it failed to place them on the fast track to suffrage. Their right to vote wasn’t secured in California until 1911, and not on a national scale until 1920.

Bicycling mania itself proved to be short-lived, dying off before the turn of the century, as production improvements dramatically lowered bike prices and the novelty wore off among the younger middle class.

In 1903, Joe Steiger’s Gunsmith Shop sold the first automobile in Petaluma, after which the moral panic over women finding liberation on a bicycle shifted locally to women finding liberation behind the wheel of a car. 

A joke from the time captured the challenge women faced:

Jack and Jill have just climbed a steep hill on their tandem bicycle, with Jill riding in front. “Phew, that was a tough climb,” Jill said, leaning over, breathing hard. “The climb was so hard, and we were going so slow, I thought we were never going to make it.”

“Yeah,” said Jack, “good thing I kept the brakes on, or we would have slid all the way back down!”

Couple riding a tandem bicycle, 1890s (photo in public domain)

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier on March 3, 2022.

SOURCES:

Newspapers

Los Angeles Herald: “Sports of the Day,” February 10, 1895.

Lincoln (Nebraska) Courier: “The Bicycle as a Reformer,” August 17, 1895.

New York World: Nellie Bly, “Champion Of Her Sex: Miss Susan B. Anthony,” February 2, 1896.

Petaluma Argus: “Two New Automobiles for Petaluma People,” October 31, 1903.

Petaluma Courier:  “Bicycling,” April 1, 1893; “Here and There,” August 13, 1893; “The New Track,” April 30, 1894; “The Bicycle Trade,” July 18, 1894; “The Riders,” July 25, 1894; “The New Track,” June 22, 1895; “Out of Door Life for Women,” June 22, 1895; “The Wheel: a Test of Character,” September 12, 1895; “Bicycle Chat,” September 13, 1895; “The Mercury Cyclists,” October 16, 1895; “Local Counsel,” November 15, 1895; “For the Fourth of July,” December 19, 1895; “The League Meet,” January 29, 1896; “Bicycle Notes,” February 12, 1896, June 24, 1896; “Bicycle Races,” May 13, 1896; “Getting Ready,” June 24, 1896; “The Day,” “The League Meet,” July 8, 1896; “Osen Does Some Sprinting,” July 22, 1896.

San Francisco Call: “Wheel Races at Petaluma,” July 5, 1896; “Lady Cyclists Indignant,” August 28, 1896.

San Francisco Chronicle: “Petaluma’s Day to Shine,” June 26, 1896; “Wheelmen Race at Petaluma,” July 5, 1896; Gary Kamiya, “Sex and Cycling,” October 18, 2019.

San Francisco Examiner: “Wheelmen Make Merry,” July 4, 1896; “Greeting the Wheelmen,” July 2, 1890.

Magazines & Websites

Adrienne LaFrance, “How the Bicycle Paved the Way for Women’s Rights,” The Atlantic, June 26, 2014.

Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Reframing the Bicycle: Advertising-Supported Magazines and Scorching Women,” American Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 1 (John Hopkins University Press, March 1995), pp. 66-101.

Liz Murphy, “Women’s (Bike) History: Amelia Bloomer;” Carolyn Szczepanski, “March is Women’s (Bike) History Month!” The League of American Bicyclists. https://bikeleague.org/content/march-womens-bike-history-month

Matt Reicher, “Photography, the Bicycle, and the Women’s Movement of the 1890s,” Medium, February 12, 2020. medium.com.

Michael Taylor, “Rapid Transit to Salvation: American Protestants and the Bicycle in the Era of the Cycling Craze,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 9, No. 3 (July 2010), pp. 337-363.

Petaluma’s Days as a Sundown Town

Yosemite Hotel, East Washington and Copeland streets, 1950 (Photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

One Sunday evening in December 1919, two Black men, Arthur Davis and Harry Crosby, entered the Yosemite Soda Fountain Emporium across from the Petaluma railroad yard. Located on the first floor of the Yosemite Hotel, a boarding house for cowhands, hay balers, and railroad workers on the corner of Copeland and East Washington streets, the Emporium was a working man’s soda fountain.[1]

The soda jerk that evening was George Delehanty, an Irish immigrant with a history of assault charges, including a shootout in a Bodega saloon that left two men dead, one of them shot five times in the chest.[2] Delehanty’s recent transition from bartending to soda jerking was dictated by the Wartime Prohibition Act, a temporary measure passed by Congress during World War I to conserve grain used in the making of alcohol.

By the time the act was implemented July 1, 1919, the war had ended, the 18th Amendment indefinitely banning the making and sale of alcohol had been ratified, and Prohibition was set to commence on January 17, 1920.[3] Rather than nullify the temporary act, Congress let it stand as a soft launch of banning alcohol.

“Last call” in Detroit before the Wartime Prohibition Act went into effect on July 1, 1919 (Photo courtesy of Wayne State University)

While most Petaluma’s saloons were forced to close on July 1st, a handful like the Yosemite converted to soda fountains. At least publicly. Privately, many surreptitiously added jackass brandy to the sugary syrup used in making sodas with carbonated water drawn from a spigot, giving birth by necessity to the fizzy cocktail.[4]

But serving booze under the table wasn’t the Yosemite’s only concealed practice—it also had an implicit “whites only” policy, as Crosby and Davis discovered the evening they walked into the soda fountain, when Delehanty grabbed them by their collars and began dragging them to the door.[5]

Davis was relatively new to town, having operated a sidewalk shoeshine stand for three months outside the Ecker Barbershop in the Washington Hotel, which wrapped around either side of the Bank of Sonoma County building on the northwest corner of Main and Washington streets. He boarded at the hotel.

Entrance to Washington Hotel under awning on Washington Street, with the Petaluma Hotel in the background, 1928 (Photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

Crosby worked as a chauffeur for Dr. Arthur Lumsden, a prominent physician in town. He and his wife Josie, who worked as a domestic for the doctor and his family, lived in the doctor’s household at 301 Sixth Street.[6]

Davis and the Crosbys were among only 13 Blacks living in Petaluma at the time, out of a total population of more than 6,000.[7] While the city served during the Civil War as Sonoma County’s abolitionist enclave with a small but vibrant Black community, by the turn of the century it had become what was known as a “sundown town,” excluding non-whites through some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, or violence.

Its racial barriers were maintained institutionally through legal covenants inserted in property deeds banning the sale or rental of homes to “persons of African, Asiatic or Mongolian descent,” as well as more informal means, such as the reception Crosby and Davis received the night they entered the Yosemite.[8]

In Delehanty’s effort to eject them, a scuffle ensued that left Delehanty with a deep, eight-inch wound down his left arm. Crosby and Davis promptly fled the soda fountain, with Davis running up East Washington Street toward the Washington Hotel, and Crosby speeding home in Dr. Lumsden’s sedan.

Hillside Hospital, 223 Kentucky Street, 1920s (Photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

Delehanty was rushed to Hillside Hospital, a repurposed Italianate-style Victorian house at 223 Kentucky Street across from Penry Park, to be stitched up.

Police Chief Mike Flohr and Officer Otto Rudolph arrived at the scene in a cab, as the police force lacked patrol cars. The two quickly set out after Davis, arresting him in Penry Park across from his hotel.[9]

Taxi fleet outside Prince Building at northwest corner of Kentucky Street and Western Avenue, circa 1920 (Photo courtesy Sonoma County Library)

Charges against Davis and Crosby were dropped a few days later at their arraignment for lack of evidence. Police were unable to locate the knife used in the stabbing, or find anyone in the Yosemite that night willing to testify to having witnessed the incident.[10] As became clear in coming months, when it came to enforcing the town’s racial boundaries, some Petalumans preferred to take a vigilante approach.

Part of that had to do with the high level of national racial tension at the time. The release of Birth of a Nation, a 1915 epic silent film glorifying white supremacism, had spawned a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which grew to more than two million members nationwide. Petaluma’s KKK chapter made its presence known in 1925 with a giant burning cross at a nighttime rally held near the Petaluma Adobe, so large it was visible from the downtown.[11]

The period also saw the beginning of The Great Migration as Blacks left the South for urban areas in the North, seeking to escape the violence and oppression of living under Jim Crow. In a number of Northern cities their arrival was met with attacks, violent riots, and lynchings in what came to be known as The Red Summer of 1919.[12]

The national unrest was relayed to Petaluma that summer by the city’s two newspapers, which depicted America in the midst of a racial war.[13]

Davis and Crosby left Petaluma shortly after their arraignment, no doubt fearing for their safety.[14] Davis’ position at the shoeshine stand outside the Ecker Barbershop was filled by a Black man from San Francisco named Sidney Smith. Like Davis before him, he lodged at the Washington Hotel.

Smith had only been in town a month when rumors began circulating that he was making “slurring remarks” about young white women in town. One night an angry mob assembled in the hall outside his hotel room, violently threatening him. They had just knocked him to the floor when Flohr arrived, and took custody of Smith, escorting him to the police station in City Hall at Fourth and A streets.

Police Chief Mike Flohr sitting behind desk with fellow officers and secretary in police station, 1924 (Photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

Smith was detained for half an hour while police searched for someone willing to press charges against him. Finding no one, Flohr had no choice but to release him.

The mob was waiting for Smith outside the police station. They escorted him on foot to the city limits, warning him not to return.

City Hall from intersection of Western & Kentucky streets, 1920 (Photo courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

The next afternoon, a defiant Smith returned to work at his shoeshine stand. That night, a large mob gathered for him outside the Washington Hotel. Flohr met with the mob’s leaders, requesting they swear out a warrant against Smith, allowing the chief to arrest him. They refused.

At 10 p.m. Flohr and Rudolph rushed Smith out of the hotel and into a waiting taxi. As they sped off, members of the mob secured other taxis and gave chase, raising alarm as they raced through the streets of the city. They failed to overtake the taxi carrying Smith and the police as it headed south into Marin County.

A few days later, one of Smith’s customers from Petaluma ran into him outside the Ferry Building in San Francisco, where Smith asked him to buy him a meal, as everything he owned was back at the hotel, which he was unable to return to.[15]

By 1930, Petaluma’s Black population had dropped to just three residents. It would remain in the single digits for the next two decades. In 1960, a federal commission on civil rights found only one home in town owned by a Black family, that of shoeshine operator Henry Chenault and his wife Bessie at 32 West Street. Their daughter Nancy had been the only Black student in Petaluma High School when she graduated in 1950.[16]

Home of Henry and Bessie Chenault, 32 West Street (photo public domain)

Petaluma’s Black population would not increase significantly until after passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, reaching 136 in 1970.[17]

By that time, the Yosemite Hotel was targeted for demolition. Three months after the incident with Crosby and Davis, the soda fountain was shut down by federal marshals, who arrested Delehanty and the Yosemite’s owners after finding liquor on the premises. The establishment operated as a speakeasy throughout Prohibition, and then as an Italian restaurant and bar until 1966, when it was shuttered for good.

In 1971, the entire hotel was demolished for the widening of East Washington Street.[18]

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 10, 2022.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Yosemite Opened,” Argus, April 4, 1905; Bill Soberanes, “Petaluma Loses Well-Known Landmark,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 14, 1971.

[2] “Blood at Bodega,” Petaluma Courier, July 18, 1894; “Delehanty,” Sonoma Democrat, October 13, 1894; “Delehanty Acquitted,” Healdsburg Tribune, October 18, 1894.

[3] Michael A. Lerner, “Going Dry,” Humanities, The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, September/October 2011, Volume 32, Number 5.

[4] “The Great Drought Begins at Midnight,” Petaluma Argus, June 30, 1919; Tristan Donovan, Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), pp. 89-98.

[5] “Stabbing Affray Sunday,” Petaluma Argus, December 15, 1919; “Man Stabbed by a Negro,” Petaluma Courier, December 16, 1919.

[6] 1920 U.S. Census.

[7] 1920 U.S. Census.

[8] “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; “Notice,” Petaluma Argus, November 30, 1865; “Flag Presentation,” Petaluma Argus, January 1, 1869; “The Picnic,” Petaluma Argus, July 9 1870; “Uncle Aleck Dead,” Petaluma Argus, August 4, 1886; Moore, Montojo, Mauri, “Roots, Race, and Place,” Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, University of California, Berkeley, October 2019, p. 22; Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 58; James E. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: Touchstone Books, Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 3-5; An example of the covenants can be found in the Sonoma Deeds of Record, Book 293, Page 330, April 13, 1931, for the sale of property by Willian and Marie J. Deiss to Clifford B. and Minnie J. Murphy: “FOURTH: That prior to the first day of October, 1990, no persons of African, Asiatic or Mongolian descent shall be permitted to purchase or lease said property, or any part thereof and this restriction shall bind, whether such attempted purchase shall be made at any execution sale, foreclosure sale or in any other manner.”

[9] “Stabbing Affray Sunday,” Petaluma Argus, December 15, 1919; “Man Stabbed by a Negro,” Petaluma Courier, December 16, 1919.

[10] “Dismissed at the Hearing,” Petaluma Argus, December 18, 1919.

[11] “Initiation of KKK Before Guests,” Petaluma Courier, June 2, 1925.

[12] “Racial Violence and the Red Summer,” African American Heritage, The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/wwi/red-summer

[13] “Race War in Washington,” Petaluma Argus, July 21, 1919; “More Die in Race War in Chicago,” Petaluma Courier, July 31, 1919;“Race War Deaths Now Total 33,” Petaluma Argus, October 13, 1919.

[14] “Case Dismissed for Lack of Evidence,” Petaluma Courier, December 18, 1919.

[15] “Negro Threatened by Angered Citizens,” Petaluma Courier, June 2, 1920; Brief Item, Petaluma Courier, June 5, 1920.

[16] “Ex-Petaluman Honors King: As a Girl, She Was the Only Black Student,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 19, 1993; U.S. Census; United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Hearings held in Los Angeles, California, January 25, 1960; San Francisco California, January 27, 1960, January 28, 1960 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960), p. 588, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hearings_Before_the_United_States_Commis/fUXVAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

[17] U.S. Census.

[18] “8 Violators of ‘Prohi’ Law Arrested,” Petaluma Courier, December 30, 1925; “Two Are Fined $500 Each and One Case Pending Following Federal Raid,” Petaluma Argus, June 22, 1926; “Abatement Proceedings Against East Petaluma Hotel,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 19, 1927; “Federals Start Abatement Suits Here,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 18, 1931; Bill Soberanes column, “Petaluma Loses Well-Known Landmark,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 14, 1971.