Petaluma’s Black History

Linda Jones, second from right, first Black contestant for Petaluma Dairy Princess, 1971, standing with other contestants outside the Brown mansion at 920 D Street (photo Sonoma County Library)

The successful and persistent efforts of Black people to reach Petaluma, find jobs, combat discrimination, raise families, create positive images, and become a part of the community represent the creative and heroic aspects of Black history.

While Petaluma’s Black population has historically remained below two percent, it doesn’t mean the city lacks in stories of remarkable Black citizens. Even in the face of persistent racism, Black people have thrived, accumulating wealth, property, political clout, and a legacy that has left an indelible mark on Petaluma as we know it today.

Rivertown Era (1852 to 1900)

The Gold Rush

Black miner during Gold Rush era (photo California History Room, California State Library)

The Gold Rush brought Black people, both those free-born and educated in the North and those enslaved in the South, to California in search of economic and social opportunities. While many of those enslaved were able to purchase their freedom working for their owners in the gold mines, others escaped to freedom.

California’s Fugitive Law of 1852 authorized the return of runaway slaves to the South, placing any Black person who lacked clear legal documentation of their freedom at risk of being kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. Although slaveowners were only briefly allowed to keep their slaves in California, many informally held them until 1864.[1]

While most Black people settled in mining counties or in San Francisco during the 1850s, some chose towns like Petaluma, a small but bustling agricultural river port. Settled largely by Protestant abolitionists from New England, Petaluma was the sole Union outpost in Confederate Sonoma County during the Civil War.[2]

George W. Miller (1825-1873)

Inside a 19th century Black barbershop (photo public domain)

One of the more lucrative occupations for Black men was barbering. Their access to a white clientele provided them with economic and social advantages that conveyed prestige and influence within their communities.[3]

Petaluma’s leading barber was George W. Miller. Born a free man in New Jersey, Miller migrated to San Francisco in 1850, before moving to Petaluma in 1855 and opening a barbershop on Main Street.[4]

Miller continued to commute regularly to San Francisco, where he maintained his membership with prominent Black organizations, including the Olive Branch Lodge of the Black Masons, the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Brannan Guards ceremonial militia. The latter inspired him to establish the Colfax Guard in Petaluma.[5]

Miller was also a contributor to San Francisco’s two Black-owned newspapers, the Pacific Appeal and the Elevator, which provided Black people on the Pacific Coast as sense of community.[6]

He also represented Sonoma County at the four California Colored Conventions held between 1855 and 1865, where members organized to fight for full citizenship rights for Black people, including the right to court testimony, homesteading, publicly-funded schools, and suffrage.[7]

Union African Methodist Episcopal Church

Former Union A.M.E. Church, 109 Howard Street (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

In 1865, the first African Methodist Episcopal church (A.M.E.) in the North Bay was established in Petaluma. Located in a house at 109 Howard Street, the church served as a religious, social, and political center for the town’s small but vibrant Black community, a number of them homeowners.[8]

Reverend Peter Killingsworth, a former slave and A.M.E. circuit preacher, was assigned as founding pastor.[9] In 1865, he accompanied George Miller to the Colored Convention held in Sacramento, serving as the convention’s chaplain. Killingsworth noted in his convention report that Sonoma County had 70 black residents, 58 adults and 12 children. Of the adult men, a dozen were general laborers, ten farmers, seven barbers, two blacksmiths, and two carpenters.[10]

A schism later developed between Killingsworth and the Petaluma church’s more politically cautious trustees—all former slaves—leading to his departure in 1869. That same year, those trustees were among 12 Black residents who signed a petition for woman’s suffrage, on the eve of ratification of the 15th Amendment, which extended voting rights to Black men.[11]

The church operated with visiting preachers before shutting down in 1878 after a large decline in the local Black population.[12]

“Colored School”

“Colored school” in Oakland’s Brooklyn neighborhood, 1870 (photo in the public domain)

In 1864, George Miller spearheaded the opening of a private “colored school,” as it was called at the time. A young Black woman from San Francisco, Mrs. Rachel Coursey, was hired as the school’s first teacher.[13]

Later that year, after the California Supreme Court ruled public school districts were required to provide “separate but equal” schools for Black students, Petaluma’s “colored school” became one of six such schools in the state to be publicly funded.[14]         

In the early 1870s, Miller joined with other members of the Colored Convention’s Education Committee in bringing a case for school integration before the California Supreme Court. Although the court upheld “separate but equal” schooling in Ward v. Flood, committee members convinced most of the cities with “colored schools” to voluntarily integrate.[15]

Petaluma was the lone hold-out, generating national press and serving as a polarizing issue locally.

The city’s “colored school” remained in operation until 1880, at which time the state legislature voted to abolish segregated schools.[16] By that time, the school had only one student, as most Black families had relocated to friendlier communities in Vallejo and Oakland, where jobs were readily available in the shipyards and on the railroads.[17]

Egg Boom Era (1901 to 1945)

Sundown Town

New housing development in Los Angeles, 1950 (photo Irving C. Smith, California Eagle newspaper; California Eagle Photo Collection, Southern California Library, Los Angeles, California)

Having served as an abolitionist, pro-Union enclave during the Civil War, Petaluma became less friendly for Black residents following the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

Abolitionists may have supported the end of slavery, but not all were in favor of providing Black people with equal rights.

Black barbers in town, who had gained wealth, prominence, and influence servicing white clientele, found themselves displaced in the 1880s by German and Swiss-Italian immigrants.[18]

By the beginning of Petaluma’s prosperous egg boom at the turn of the century, the city had become a so-called “sundown town,” intent on excluding non-whites through a combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence.

This was accomplished largely by restricting housing access to Caucasians through both implicit and explicit means. The latter came in the form of institutional racism.[19]

In 1927, the National Association of Real Estate Boards championed the inclusion of legal covenants in property deeds that banned the sale or lease of property to non-whites. The Federal Housing Administration, created in the 1930s to insure home mortgages, also required racial covenants to guarantee loans, a practice better known as “redlining,” referring to the red colored areas on maps they would not insure. [20]

While Petaluma’s population surged with the egg boom in 1920 to 6,226 residents, only 13 of them were Black, and were employed as domestics, porters, chauffeurs, and shoeshine men.[21]

The largest Black presence in town during the 1920s and 30s were traveling Black minstrel troupes and jazz groups performing at the Mystic Theater and Hill Opera House, and Black cowboys at the local rodeos held at the fairgrounds.[22]

Black rodeo champion Jesse Stahl, a frequent visitor to Petaluma (photo public domain)

The 1920s also brought a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, thanks largely to the release of the epic silent film Birth of a Nation, which glorified white supremacism. The local Petaluma KKK chapter staged a recruiting rally in 1925 with a nighttime cross-burning outside the Petaluma Adobe that was visible from the downtown.[23] By 1930, the city’s Black population had dropped to three citizens.[24]

One open-minded group in town was the Men’s Forum of the Congregational Church, led by grain merchant George P. McNear. The forum regularly brought to town Black speakers, including Dr. E.W. Moore, a Baptist preacher and charter member of the NAACP, to educate them on race matters.[25]

Suburban Boom Era (1946 to current)

Housing Discrimination

Chenault House at 32 West Street, only Petaluma home owned by a Black family in 1960 (photo John Sheehy)

The suburban tract housing boom following World War II more than tripled Petaluma’s population to almost 25,000 by 1970. However, the boom however came with restrictive deed covenants redlining by the banks that prevented the sale or resale of homes to “persons of African, Asiatic or Mongolian descent.”[26]

Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such covenants unenforceable in 1948, they were still being used in the North Bay as late as the 1960s, often serving as a means of placing social pressure on white families not wishing to discriminate.[27]

In 1960, a report by a federal commission on civil rights found only one home in Petaluma owned by a Black family, that of Henry and Bessie Chenault. The commission attributed this to a cabal of bankers, realtors, developers, and neighborhood associations who ostracized and financially threatened anyone attempting to sell or rent a home to Black people.[28]

In 1963, the California Fair Housing Act was passed, making it unlawful to discriminate against home buyers and renters. The next year, the California Real Estate Association put forth a successful ballot measure to nullify the Fair Housing Act. The ballot measure was overruled by the U.S Supreme Court in 1967.[29]

Henry Chenault (1895 -1969)

Henry Chenault at his Western Avenue shoeshine stand, 1954 (photo Sonoma County Library)

From the 1940s through the 1960s, Petaluma’s most prominent Blacks were Henry and Bessie Chenault. Actively engaged in politics, they served as officers of Petaluma’s Democratic Club and founding members of the Sonoma County NAACP, where Bessie was elected the chapter’s first treasurer.[30] 

Henry moved to Petaluma in the 1930s, after serving 13 years in Leavenworth Prison for his participation in a deadly uprising of Black soldiers on a Houston army base in 1917.[31]

Keeping his past secret, he operated a sidewalk shoeshine stand at 18 Western Avenue, across from Andresen’s Tavern, until his death in 1969.

Thanks to Henry’s outgoing personality, his stand became a popular downtown crossroads. Among merchants, it served as the city’s “second chamber of commerce.” For local politicians, many of whom relied upon Henry as a trusted advisor, it helped them keep a finger on the pulse of the community.[32]

For many years, Henry was Petaluma’s only Black businessman, and he and Bessie were the city’s sole Black homeowners.[33] Henry was posthumously pardoned in 1972 for his role in the Houston uprising, determined to have been staged by white racists.[34]

Sonoma County NAACP

Sonoma County NAACP leaders meeting in Petaluma, 1970 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The 1950s and 60s marked a period of unprecedented protests against the status of second class citizenship accorded to Black Americans.

The protests took form in civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, marches, protests, boycotts, “freedom rides,” and rallies. There were also continuing efforts to legally challenge segregation through the courts.[35]

In 1955, Platt Williams and Gilbert Gray of Santa Rosa spearheaded organizing the Sonoma County chapter of the NAACP. Henry and Bessie Chenault represented Petaluma as founding members.

One of the chapter’s first actions was closing down the Montgomery Village Lions Club’ annual minstrel charity show, which harkened back to blackface entertainment.[36]

While the chapter supported the national NAACP movement—for example, picketing and boycotting the F.W. Woolworth department stores in Petaluma and Santa Rosa over the chain’s refusal to serve Black people at lunch counters in the South—their primary focus was securing equal treatment in jobs and housing for the county’s Black residents, who by 1960 totaled 916. [37]

That included successfully lobbying for the California Fair Employment Practice Act of 1959 and the California Fair Housing Act of 1963.[38]

Petaluma Blacks for Community Development

Gloria Robinson, 1982 (photo courtesy of Petaluma Argus-Courier, Brant Ward photographer)

Gloria Robinson moved to Petaluma from San Francisco in 1971 with her husband Herbert and four children, attracted by the affordable real estate. She quickly made friends with civil rights activist Bessie Chenault, and began working with the NAACP and Sonoma County People for Economic Opportunity.[39]

Petaluma’s Black population by that time had grown from 11 in 1960 to more than 100, and was on its way toward reaching almost 500 by 1980.[40]

In 1976, Gerald Ford became the first U.S. president to recognize February as Black History Month, an event started 50 years before by Black historian Carl G. Wooden.[41]

Seeing an opportunity to increase Black visibility and representation in town, in 1978 Robinson formed Petaluma Blacks for Community Development. Serving as president, she was joined by founding board members Faith Ross, Ted Morris, and Nadine Lawson.

The group’s mission has been to share Black history and culture with the Petaluma community and bring Black families together for social and educational activities by sponsoring events, speaking engagements, and exhibits.

Their vision is to help “make the Petaluma community free of hate and get rid of those issues that divide us based on color.”[42]

******

FOOTNOTES


[1] Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites (University of California Press, 1990), pp. 12-13; Mike McPhate, “California’s Black Slaves and the Myth of Free Soil,” California Sun, January 23, 2019. Californiasun.com.

[2] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 42; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 47.

[3] Douglas W. Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Sean Trainor, “The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard,” The Atlantic, January 20, 2014.

[4] Advertisements, Sonoma County Journal, August 25, 1855, and September 5, 1856; “Deaths: George Miller,” Pacific Appeal, October 25, 1873.

[5] “Prince Hall Freemasonry,” Freemason Information, freemasoniformation.com; Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 146; “Masonic Notice,” The Elevator, December 21, 1872; “Died,” The Elevator, October 25, 1873; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; “Flag Presentation,” Petaluma Argus, January 1, 1869; “The Picnic,” Petaluma Argus, July 9 1870.

[6] https://blackvoicenews.com/2008/07/31/mirror-of-the-times-founded-1857/; “Agents,” Pacific Appeal, January 17, 1863.

[7] Herbert G. Ruffin II, “The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865),” February 9, 2009. BlackPast.com.

[8] “Rudolph Lapp, Afro-Americans in California (San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser Publishing Company, 1987); “Santa Rosa,” The Elevator, July 4, 1865, the first newspaper mention of Rev. Killingsworth at the A.M.E. Church in Petaluma; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; “Notice,” Petaluma Argus, November 30, 1865; “Campbell’s Chapel,” Petaluma Argus, November 30, 1865.

[9] California State Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Sacramento on the 25, 26, 27, 28 of October 1865. Coloredconventions.org; Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 158; “The Appointments of the A. M. E. Church for the Conference,” Pacific Appeal, November 8, 1862; “The Appointments of the A. M. E. Church for the Conference,” Pacific Appeal, September 12, 1863; 1860 U.S. Census, Sacramento, California; 1861 Sacramento City Directory.

[10] http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/268, p. 14.

[11] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 252-253. “Petaluma,” The Elevator, November 1, 1867; “Correspondence of the Elevator,” The Elevator, February 19, 1869; “Petition for Woman’s Suffrage in Senate, March 2, 1870,” Journals of Senate and Assembly of the 18th Session of the legislature of the State of California, Volume II, pp. 14-18, 23-24; Note: the 12 identified Black residents who signed the 1870 woman’s suffrage petition were Charles and Rebecca Montgomery, Peggy Barnes, Alexander and Malvina McFarland, Thomas and Juliana Johnson,  John and Ellen Looney, E. Cooper and Eliza A. Smith, and Mary Espee.

[12] “Sixteen Volume: A.M.E. Appointments,” Pacific Appeal, August 10, 1878; City of Petaluma Deed Records, Lot 276, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library, Ref. 979.418.732: Sold on October 3, 1885 by two trustees of the AME, a religious society not incorporated; includes a small frame structure; states it has been many years since any religious services were held, and that but four or five members of the society remain; remains of the sale to be extended to other A.M.E. churches throughout the state. Last service listed in the Petaluma Argus was August 14, 1878, when Bishop Black of Baltimore preached there.

[13] “Correspondence,” Pacific Appeal December 12, 1863; “Married,” Pacific Appeal June 27, 1863; “Arrivals from the Interior,” Pacific Appeal, February 13, 1864; “School for Colored Children,” Petaluma Argus, December 16, 1863; “Opened,” Petaluma Argus, January 13, 1864.

[14] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864.

[15] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 180-182; “Educational Public Meeting at Bethel Church,” The Elevator, April 27, 1872; “Address of the Educational Committee,” The Elevator, May 11, 1872; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/

[16] “Educational Items,” Petaluma Argus, August 13, 1875; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” Petaluma Argus, May 18, 1876; “Our ‘Colored Schools,’” Petaluma Argus, December 22, 1876; “Our Colored School,” Petaluma Argus, August 11, 1876; “The Negro School,” Petaluma Argus, April 5, 1877; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” Petaluma Argus, May 18, 1877.

[17] Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 58; History of Sonoma County, Sonoma County, CA (Archives History – Books …..Petaluma Township, Part 3 1880); Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 25; John Ford, Journal of the American Association, Volume 6, 1907, p. 84; “The Public Schools,” Petaluma Courier, June 18, 1879.

[18] Douglas Walter Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers on Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009).

[19] Moore, Montojo, Mauri, “Roots, Race, and Place,” Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, University of California, Berkeley, October 2019, p. 22.

[20] “Is There Racism in the Deed to Your Home?” New York Times, August 17, 2021.

[21] 1920 U.S. Census; “Negro Attacked Officer; Arrested,” Petaluma Courier, April 24, 1920.

[22] “At the Theaters, California,” Petaluma Courier, June 19, 1927.

[23] “Initiation of K.K.K. Before Guests,” Petaluma Courier, June 2, 1925.

[24] U.S Census.

[25] The Negro and His Outlook,” Petaluma Argus, March 30, 1925; “Negro Lecturer Returns to Congregational Open Forum,” Petaluma Argus, November 18, 1925; “Solve the Race Problem If We Would Avoid War, Says Noted Authority,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 21, 1932; “Dr. Kingsley Addresses Club,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 8, 1933.

[26] 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.”

[27] Moore, Montojo, Mauri, pgs. 7, 13; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,2017), pgs. 6, 36, 52.

[28] “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. 590.

[29] Moore, Motojo, Mauri, p. 54.

[30] Bill Soberanes, So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 24, 1960; “Santa Rosa Unit of NAACP to Receive Charter,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 2, 1955.

[31] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault,” South Texas College of Law Digital Collection, https://cdm16035.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15568coll1/id/1707

[32] Bill Soberanes, “So They Tell Me” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 19, 1952; Bob Wells, “Everybody Here Knows Henry L. Chenault,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 24, 1954; “A Paragraph for Mr. Chenault,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 29, 1954; Bill Soberanes, “Henry Chenault Was a Petaluma Institution,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 20, 1993.

[33] Bill Soberanes column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 20, 1993; United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1960, p. 588.

[34] Jaime Salazar, Mutiny of Rage: The 1917 Camp Logan Riots and Buffalo Soldiers in Houston (Prometheus eBooks, 2021), p. 51.

[35] “The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship,”Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/abolition.html

[36] “County Negroes are Forming NAACP Unit,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, February 9, 1955; “Santa Rosa Unit of NAACP to Receive Charter,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 2, 1955; “Village Minstrel Show Called Off After Protest,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 16, 1955.

[37] “Picketing by NAACP Continues in County,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 20, 1960; “Negro ‘Test’ Stores Open—Part of the Way,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 9, 1960.

[38] “F.E.P. Bill To Be Discussed,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 29, 1955; Michael C. Tobriner, “California FEPC,” Hastings Law Journal, 1965, Vol. 16, issue 3; Moore, Motojo, Mauri, p. 54.

[39] 1970 U.S. census; Ann Gray Byrd, Glimpses: Santa Rosa African Americans (Santa Rosa, CA, 2003),p. 96; “Gloria Robinson: If Not You, Then Who?” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 3, 2013; “Gloria Robinson Still Active, Still Working for Change,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 16, 2019.

[40] U.S. Census.

[41] “Black History Month,” history.com: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-history-month

[42] Petaluma Blacks for Community Development website: https://pbcd4us.com/about/.

Tall Tales and Rev. Waugh

THE REAL STORY OF WAUGH SCHOOL

Rev. Lorenzo Waugh, circa 1870s (photo by George Ross, courtesy of the Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

The tall tales regarding Reverend Lorenzo Waugh began a month before his death in September 1900, with a story that ran in the Petaluma Argus celebrating his upcoming 92nd birthday.

The Argus reported that Waugh: 1) built the first Methodist Church in Petaluma at Fourth and A streets, hauling lumber from the redwoods north of town with the same team of oxen he used to cross the plains; 2) was gifted with 320 acres by General Vallejo as a reward for his services as a missionary among the Shawnees; and 3) donated the land upon which Waugh School at Corona and Adobe roads was built in 1864.[1]

Over the next century, these and other apocryphal stories grew, fueled by newspaper articles that relied upon twice-told tales. Waugh was credited with not only donating the land for Waugh School, but also with building the 1865 schoolhouse, alleged to be the first country school established in Sonoma County.

Children with their teacher outside Bethel School (later renamed Waugh School), 1908 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The school itself, originally named Bethel, was reported by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat in 1991 to have been initially founded as a religious school in accordance with Waugh’s Methodist beliefs. The paper went on to say it was converted to a public school in 1897, three years before Waugh’s death, at which time it was renamed Waugh School.[2]

None of these stories are true, as the facts assembled below demonstrate.

The Founding of Petaluma’s Methodist Episcopal Church

By all accounts, Rev. Waugh was a moral upstanding and admirable man. Most of what is known about his life however comes from the autobiography he wrote and first published in 1883. None of the 19th century historians who wrote books about Sonoma County— Thompson (1877), Munro-Fraser (1880), Cassiday (1889), Gregory (1911)—mention Waugh in any detail in their biographies of prominent early settlers.

As is true for all autobiographies, Waugh’s life story is selectively depicted through his eyes, with omissions and inaccuracies.

Title page of Waugh’s 1883 autobiography, third edition published in 1885 (public domain)

In the book, Waugh writes that he rode across the plains to California in 1852 with his wife and children in a wagon pulled by a team of oxen. He came not for the gold rush, but for his health, having suffered for years from the long-term effects of malaria, possibly contracted during his time as a missionary among the Shawnee and Kaw tribes in pre-terriotorial Kansas. After spending 20 years as an itinerant Methodist preacher in Ohio and Missouri, Waugh came west with the aim of retiring from the being a circuit rider and taking up farming. [3]

Petaluma’s first Methodist Episcopal Church, constructed in 1856 at Fourth and A streets, was not built by Waugh, nor was he ever one of its resident ministers. He did give sermons from time to time, as well as wed couples and perform burials.

In 1859, he took up what would become his main preoccupation for the next 40 years: traveling the state giving temperance lectures to young people. He also launched that year the Sonoma County chapter of the Settlers’ League, in protest of fraudulent land grant claims and the eviction of homesteaders on the land grants denounced as squatters.[4]

The Gift from Vallejo

After arriving in Petaluma, Waugh purchased 160 acres of farm land near the junction of Davis Lane and East Railroad Avenue in current-day Penngrove, planting a fruit orchard and vineyard. The two men Waugh purchased the land from told him it was government owned, and so available for homesteading.[5]

Under the terms of the Preemption Act of 1841, a squatter had the right to purchase up to 160 acres in the public domain, assuming he resided on the land for at least 14 months or made agricultural improvements to it for five years. [6].

Unfortunately, the men who sold Waugh his property lied about it being in the public domain. When Waugh learned he was actually squatting on part of the 66,000-acre Rancho Petaluma land grant owned by Mariano Vallejo, he asked for a meeting with Vallejo.

According Waugh’s account, Vallejo agreed orally to sell him the farm in recognition of his missionary work on the Shawnee and Kaw tribes reservations back in pre-territorial Kansas. But first, Vallejo said, they had to wait for the California Land Commission to survey the boundaries of his land grant as part of their legal review of his claim.[7]

Mariano Vallejo, circa 1870s (photo Sonoma County Library)

Since Vallejo was actively selling off other parcels of Petaluma Rancho without awaiting final claim review from the Land Commission, it’s likely his concern with Waugh’s farm was that it bordered the Rancho Cotate land grant, raising some uncertainty as to its exact boundaries.[8]

In 1856, the commission approved Vallejo’s land grant claim (although, like most of the commission’s decisions, the approval was subjected to years of court appeals), clearing the way for Waugh to purchase his farm. For unknown reasons, Waugh failed to make the purchase.

Instead, on October 25, 1858, two years after the commission’s approval, and six years after Waugh first squatted on the Rancho Petaluma, Vallejo sold Waugh’s farm to two of his sons, Antonio and Jose, as part of a larger 1,039-acre land acquisition.[9]

In his autobiography, Waugh blamed the sale on Vallejo’s lawyer, whom he claimed stealthily exercised his power of attorney during a period in which Vallejo was away in Monterey County, tending to the death of his brother. Vallejo’s brother died in 1856, and while it’s true Vallejo temporarily moved to Watsonville to tend to his brother’s estate, by the fall of 1858 he had returned to his home in Sonoma. His signature, not his lawyer’s, is on the county deed record of the sale.[10]

Three weeks after purchasing the 1,039 acres for $100 from their father, Vallejo’s sons flipped the property for $8,500 to George L. Wratten, the lawyer who served as the notary public on their original deed transaction with their father. A week later, Wratten sold 501 acres of his new purchase at a profit to a real estate agent named George W. Oman. Included in the sale was Waugh’s farm. [11]

A month after acquiring the land, Oman sold off Waugh’s 150-acre farm to a settler named Jacob Adamson for $1,500, and filed a lawsuit to evict Waugh from the property.[12]The property had been reduced from 160 to 150 acres following the Land Commission’s survey of the Petaluma Rancho and Cotate Rancho land grant boundaries).

Waugh’s original farm (circled), lot 376 of Vallejo Township near Penngrove, was sold in 1859 to Jacob Adamson (1877 Thompson Atlas map courtesy of of Sonoma County Library)

Waugh claims he approached Oman with a counter offer, but was turned down. Given that Waugh’s net worth according to the 1860 U.S. census was only $600, it’s possible the terms of his offer came up short.

In 1860, with the eviction lawsuit still making its way through the courts, Waugh again approached Vallejo. According to Waugh, Vallejo offered him 320 acres of lots 286 and 287 in the Vallejo Township as recompense for selling his farm out from under him.

Waugh claimed Vallejo gifted him the property, however the deed records show a murkier series of transactions. [13]

Vallejo first sold the 320 acres to Hereziah Bisel Wilson, a workingman in San Francisco, for $1. A week later, Wilson sold the land to Waugh for $3,200. Given Waugh’s net worth at the time, it’s possible the land was in fact a gift, and that Vallejo used the intermediary sale to Wilson as a means of hiding that from county officials. The terms of transaction remain a mystery however. [14]

1866 map shows in circle Lots 286 and 287, comprising the 320 acres Waugh received from Vallejo, of which he gifted half, lot 287, to his son John; the arrow points to Bethel School (listed as “Waugh School”) at the southwest corner of Adobe Road and Corona roads (1866 Bowers Map courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

The Founding of Bethel School (Waugh School)

In the early 1850s, American settlers in rural areas outside Petaluma created public school districts as a means of taxing themselves to build country school houses, and also to qualify for county and state school taxes in operating them.

Bethel School was most likely established in 1853 or 1854. While one of Sonoma County’s earliest country schools, it was not the first. That honor goes to Iowa School near Two Rock, established in 1852. [15]

Bethel was originally one of three rural schools established in the Vallejo Township, which extended east from the Petaluma River to Sonoma Mountain, north to current day Cotati, and south to San Pablo Bay, comprising the western portion Vallejo’s Rancho Petaluma and the southeastern portion of Cotate Rancho.

Waugh was appointed one of three school trustees to oversee the Vallejo’s Township’s initial schools, along with Judge Stephen Payran and County Supervisor Alexander Copeland, both of whom lived in the township.

Because of the township’s large size, the county board of supervisors decided by 1855 to divide it into three school districts, each named after a founding trustee: District No. 1, the Payran District; No. 2, the Waugh District ; and No. 3, the Copeland District. [16]

Bethel School was the only school in Waugh School District during the 19th century and most of the 20th century. From early on, the schoolhouse served as the district’s election precinct as well as a community center for festivals, lectures, elections, political gatherings, and fraternal groups.[17]

Men outside Bethel School on election day, circa 1890s (photo Sonoma County Library)

The location of the Bethel Schoolhouse in the 1850s and early 1860s is uncertain, as no property transaction could be found in the county’s deed records. It most likely wasn’t located on Waugh’s original farm, lot 386 of the Vallejo Township, as country school houses were usually centrally located within school districts for commuting purposes.

Waugh’s farm resided at the far western edge of the Waugh School District, bordering both the Eagle School District in current-day Penngrove to the west and the Copeland School District to the north.

1877 map of the Waugh School District (in tan), with a star marking location of Bethel School and an arrow pointing to Waugh’s first farm at the edge of the district, adjacent to the Eagle School District of Penngrove (map Sonoma County Library)

Bethel School most likely sat originally at the same place it occupied throughout the 19th century—the southwest corner of Adobe and Corona roads, which served as the main crossroad of the Waugh School District, Corona Road being its primary thoroughfare to Petaluma.

The property the school sat on was originally part of a 160-acre parcel purchased in 1853 from Mariano Vallejo by Judge Philip R. Thompson, an elected associate county judge.[18]

Born into a prominent Virginia family in 1797, Thompson came to California during the gold rush.[19] He was soon joined by his nephews, Thomas and Robert Thompson, who went on to edit and publish Petaluma’s first newspaper, the Sonoma County Journal, and then Santa Rosa’s Sonoma Democrat, as well as write some of early history books of Sonoma County.

Judge Thompson, along with two other elected judges, served as the initial judicial body of Sonoma County, whose population in 1851 numbered only 561. Along with their judicial powers, the three were responsible for dividing the county into townships and school districts, and establishing county-owned buildings.[20]

Despite Bethel School’s lack of deed records, it appears likely Thompson donated a small portion of his property for the Bethel School soon after purchasing it in 1853.

As the school-age population in Waugh School District grew, by the early 1860s a larger school house was needed. Waugh’s term as trustee apparently ended sometime in the mid-1850s. The district’s subsequent three trustees—Lorenzo Jackson, John Hardin, and George W. Frick—held a successful tax election in March 1863 to raise $1,650 to construct a schoolhouse that would accommodate 60 to 70 students.[21]

Judge Thompson, who became a real estate agent in Petaluma after retiring from the bench in the mid-1850s, sold his farm due to failing health in September 1864 to an English immigrant named Mark Carr, who had originally settled in California during the gold rush. A month after the sale, Thompson died.[22]The new Bethel schoolhouse opened that fall.[23]

Arrow points to Bethel School (listed here as “Waugh Dist. Schl.”) at the corner of Adobe and Corona roads in 1877 map, directly across from Waugh’s 40-acre farm (1877 Thompson Atlas map courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

The 320-acre ranch Rev. Waugh acquired from Vallejo in 1860 sat directly across the street from the Bethel School property, on the southeast corner of Adobe Road and Hardin Lane.[24]No deed records have been found of Waugh having owned the property the school sat on, nor of his donating it to the school district.

In the 1860s, Waugh gave or sold all but 40 of his 320 acres to his three children, building a home for himself and his wife on remaining acreage at 1515 Adobe Road. In 1890, three years after his wife died, he sold his 40 acres and moved to San Francisco to live with his granddaughter.[25]

The boarded up remains for Waugh’s 1860s house at 1515 Adobe Road (photo public domain)

The Bethel School was often referred to in the newspapers during the 19th century as the “Waugh School.” In 1925, the school was formally renamed the Waugh School, after residents of the Waugh School District approved a $10,000 school bond to erect a new schoolhouse. [26]

Waugh School, 1925-1991 (photo in public domain)

The old Bethel schoolhouse was divided into two structures, and moved to the nearby chicken ranch of Thomas King at 1055 Adobe Road, where it was repurposed as an egg house and a shop.[27]

The new school Waugh School remained in operation until 1991, after which it was sold as a private residence, which it remains today. [28]

******


Thanks to Simone Kremkau of the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library for her research assistance.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Lorenzo Waugh Visits Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, August 3, 1900.

[2] “Pioneers Bought Vallejo’s Land,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1955; “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 9, 1963; “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 13, 1963; “Mumbly peg’ and ‘Giant Stride,’” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 7, 1991; “Waugh School the Way it Was,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 27, 1991; “Larry Reed and Cinda Gilliland Have Converted the Former Waugh School into Their Residence,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, February 19, 2011.

[3] Lorenzo Waugh, Autobiography of Lorenzo Waugh (Oakland, Calif.: Pacific Press, 1883), pgs. 135, 189; “A Long Life: Short Historical Sketch of Rev. Lorenzo Waugh,” Daily Commonwealth, August 27, 1884.

[4] J.P. Munro-Fraser, “Methodist Episcopal Church,” History of Sonoma County (Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), pp. 311-12; Waugh autobiography, pp. 218-220; “The Temperance Cause,” Marysville Daily Appeal, June 1, 1860; “M.E. Church in Windsor,” Russian River Flag, June 10, 1869; “Settlers’ Meeting,” Sonoma Democrat, March 24, 1859.

[5] Waugh, pp. 208-209; According to deed records, Waugh’s farm was lot 276 in Vallejo Township of Bower’s 1866 map of Sonoma County.

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

[7] Waugh, p. 212.

[8] Note: Waugh’s ranch was originally 160 acres. It sat on lot 376 of the Vallejo Township. The sale of lot 376 at 150 acres by Vallejo to his sons is listed as a partial sale, implying the additional 10 acres may have extended into the adjacent Cotate Rancho, and hence were cut from the lot in Rancho Petaluma.

[9] “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book 7, page 763, index image 390, October 25, 1858,” Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org.

[10] Killed,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 29, 1857; Allan Rosenus, General M.G. Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), pp. 215-218; Waugh autobiography, p. 213. Note: Waugh also erroneously states he lived on the land for 9 years, not the actual 6 years (1852-58), before Vallejo sold the farm.

[11] “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book 7, page 764, index image 390, November 19, 1858”; November 24, 1858; Book 7, page 795-6, index image 407; Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org.

[12] “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book 9, page 123, index image 840,” Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org.

[13] Waugh autobiography, p. 216.

[14] “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book 10, page 583, index image 428, September 29, 1860,” and “Book 10, page 604, index image 4439, October 11, 1860,” Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org.

[15] “Iowa School Built Way Back in 1852,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1955; Note: the report that Bethel was the first country school house built in Sonoma County most likely goes back to an erroneous news item in the July 17, 1863, edition of the Sonoma County Journal entitled “Laudable Enterprise,” reporting on the initiative of the Waugh School District to pass a tax to build a new schoolhouse for Bethel School.

[16] “Schools in Vallejo (Township),” Sonoma County Journal, February 26, 1858; “Our Public Schools,” Sonoma County Journal, December 19, 1856; “County School Funds,” Sonoma Democrat, January 28, 1858; “Apportionment,” Sonoma Democrat, July 14, 1859; “County School Funds,” Sonoma Democrat, January 28, 1858; “Apportionment,” Sonoma Democrat, July 14, 1859.

[17] “Sonoma County Elections, Sonoma County Journal, August 18, 1855; “Union Meeting at Bethel School House,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, October 13, 1864; “Bethel League,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 9, 1865; “May Day Festival,” Sonoma Democrat, May 13, 1865.

[18] “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book K, pages 176-77, index image 138,” Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org; Note: Unfortunately, Book K is not included in the digitized database of deeds previously on microfilm, so this is an assumption that Thompson, who located to the Vallejo Township at that time, purchased lot #269 from Vallejo, and that it totaled 160 acres. This assumption is reinforced by newspaper ads from the 1850s that cite Judge Thompson’s ranch as a landmark in the Vallejo Township.

[19] Thompson’s younger brother, Robert A. Thompson, Sr., a former U.S. Congressman, followed him to Petaluma in 1853, before moving to San Francisco where he served on the justices’ court in the 1870s. Two of Robert A. Thompson’s sons, Robert Jr. and Thomas Larkin Thompson, became newspapermen in Sonoma County. Thomas  founded the Sonoma County Journal and was the longtime editor and publisher of the Sonoma Democrat, and later a U.S. congressman and ambassador to Brazil. Robert Jr. served as the county’s longtime county clerk, and also wrote a history of the county in 1877 (Sources: Robert A. Thompson (1805-1876), findagrave.com; “Thomas L. Thompson,” Petaluma Courier, February 1, 1898; “R.A. Thompson,” Petaluma Courier, August 4, 1903).

[20] Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), p. 47.

[21] “To the Electors of the Waugh School District,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 11, 1863; “Enterprising,” Sonoma County Journal, March 27, 1863.

[22] “Deaths,” The Sacramento Daily Bee, October 28, 1864; “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book 15, page 254, index image 180,” Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org; “Pioneers Bought Vallejo’s Land,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1955: this article states that Mark Carr donated the land for Bernal School from his property, but no records of that donation or sale was found in the Sonoma County database of deed transfers; The deed of sale lists the property—lot 289 in the Vallejo Township— at 145 acres, which is also how it is also reflected on the 1866 A.B. Bowers map of Sonoma County. At some point not found in the deed records, Thompson reduced his property by 15 acres from the original 160 acres he purchased from Vallejo.

[23] “To the Electors of Waugh School District,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, April 20, 1865; “May Day Festival,” Sonoma Democrat, May 13, 1865.

[24] “Index to Grantees, Vols. 1-7, 1835 to 1888, Book 10, page 604, index image 439,” Deeds of Sonoma County 1847-1901, familysearch.org.

[25]Index to Grantors, Vols. 8-12, 1888-1901: March 14, 1890, Book 125, page 330, image 418, Lorenzo Waugh, grantor, John Caltoft, grantee; San Francisco Directory, 1891 to 1892: Rev. Lorenzo Waugh, 1605 Mission Street, along with Edwin and Franklin Waugh; “Peggy’s Pencilings,” Courier, October 1, 1890: Waugh returned to his property on Adobe Road to remove the remains of his young son who died 20 years before, and move the body to Cypress Hill Cemetery; Source of boarded up Waugh home photo at 1515 Adobe Road: “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 9, 1963.

[26] “Contract for School at Waugh is Let for $8,114,” Petaluma Courier, June 26, 1925; “New Waugh School to Open November 1,” Petaluma Courier, October 16, 1925; “Waugh P.T.A. Plans Old Fashioned Dance, Petaluma Courier, October 15, 1925.

[27] “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 9, 1963.

[28] “New Use for Old Waugh School,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 13, 1991.

Yoneda and the “Red Angel”

The Love Story of Two Penngrove Social Justice Activists

By John Patrick Sheehy and Jack Withington

Karl Yoneda and Elaine Black, 1933 (photo public domain)

As if poultry farming wasn’t hard enough, being questioned by the FBI while vaccinating hens in a chicken coop seems an unnecessary strain for most.

But not Penngrove rancher Karl Yoneda.

A longtime political activist, he was used to living under surveillance, including during his military service in World War II, for which he was awarded a Gold Star.

Karl enlisted in the U.S. Army on December 7, 1942, a year to the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, he was incarcerated along with his wife and three-year-old son in Manzanar, one of ten concentration camps holding 110,000 Japanese Americans during the war. Located in the high desert of Owens Valley close to Mount Whitney, the camp was 200 miles north of Los Angeles, where Karl, the son of Japanese immigrants, was born in 1906.

Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1943-44 (photo by Ansel Adams, Library of Congress)

When he was seven, his family decided to move back to their native village near Hiroshima after his father was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Karl spent his formative years in Japan, during which the country was transitioning into a modern, industrialized colonial empire. By the early 1920s, labor unions and a variety of socialist, communist, and anarchist activists, were mounting public demonstrations for economic and democratic reforms, as well as protesting Japan’s rising militarism.

Idealistic and headstrong, Karl organized his first strike while still in high school, staging a walkout of  Hiroshima’s newspaper delivery boys over low pay. At 16, he made his way to Beijing, where he studied for two months with the blind Ukrainian anarchist and Esperanto teacher, Vasili Eroshenko.

Returning to Japan, he committed himself to a life of fighting social injustice, participating in several major Japanese labor strikes and publishing a journal for impoverished farmers.

Karl Yoneda (photo by Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress)

In 1926, to avoid being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, he boarded a freighter for San Francisco. Upon arriving, immigration officials classified him a kibei-nisei—born in the United States and educated in Japan—and locked him up at the Immigration Detention Center on Angel Island for two months. After his release, he went to Los Angeles, where he found work as a dishwasher and window washer.

As the American Federation of Labor (AFL) excluded people of color at the time, he joined the Japanese Workers’ Association, serving as their publication director. Changing his first name from Goso to Karl in honor of Karl Marx, he also began working with the communist-affiliated Trade Union Educational League, organizing migrant field workers in the Central Valley and Fresno.

In 1931, while at a Los Angeles demonstration calling for unemployment insurance in the midst of the Depression, Karl was severely beaten and thrown into jail by the police department’s notorious “Red Squad.”

Yoneda (with arrow in first photo) be beaten by the undercover Red Guard, LA Unemployment Protest, February 1931 (photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times)

Not wanting a dead corpse on their hands, the police called the International Labor Defense—which billed itself as “the legal department of the working class”—to bail him out.

Elaine Black, a young woman who had started working for the ILD just the day before, paid Karl’s bail and rushed him to the hospital. Sparks clearly flew during their initial encounter. A year later, after Elaine was assigned to the ILD offices in San Francisco, Karl showed up at her office, having taken a job in the city as editor of Rodo Shimbun, a Communist Party Japanese-language publication. Defying California’s “Anti-Miscegenation Law” against mixed race couples, the couple moved in together in the city’s Japantown.

A firebrand who mixed her moral fury at injustice with a sense of fashion, Elaine grew up on New York City’s Lower East Side, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, Mollie and Nathan Buchman. Marxist activists, the Buchmans fled their native Russia after Nathan was drafted into the Czar’s army. In 1920, the family relocated from New York to Southern California.

After being accidently caught up in a brutal sweep by the Red Squad, an outraged Elaine took a job with the ILD and joined the Communist Party, adopting the last name Black, initially as an alias when questioned by police. Conservative newspapers labeled her “The Tiger Woman.” Fellow activists dubbed her “The Red Angel” for her tireless work among striking workers, providing them with food, lodging, and bail money.

Elaine Black with “Free the Scottsboro Boys” activists in 1934 (photo People World Archives)

In 1934, Elaine and Karl became involved in the West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, with Elaine serving as the only woman on the strike committee, and Karl leading the effort to dissuade Japanese laborers from crossing the picket line. Both were jailed—Elaine four times, including for seditious utterances and vagrancy when she went to court to bail out other activists. The strike ultimately resulted in the unionization of all of the ports on the West Coast.

In the fall of 1934, Karl made California history as the first Japanese American to campaign for the state Assembly, running unsuccessfully on a platform of racial equality, unemployment insurance, and a living wage. Shortly before election day, the Red Squad arrested him during a campaign speech, charging him with vagrancy and making sure the newspapers highlighted his immoral living arrangement with the Tiger Woman.

In 1935, concerned their “shacking up” together was a political liability, Karl and Elaine boarded a train for Seattle, where they could be legally wed. To avoid being charged with violating the Mann Act, which criminalized transporting someone across state lines for immoral behavior, they rode in separate train cars. 

For the remainder of the 1930s, Karl and Elaine pursued their political activism, with Karl forming a union for cannery workers in Alaska, and the two of them picketing Japanese cargo ships on the San Francisco docks that were being loaded with scrap iron for making Japanese military armaments.

In need of a steady income during the Depression, Karl became a longshoreman. In 1939, Elaine gave birth to their son Tom. A few months later, she made an unsuccessful run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, calling for low-cost housing, free childcare for working women, and civil rights.

Then came Pearl Harbor. Two months after the attack, President Roosevelt, bowing to xenophobia, racism, and baseless fears of spies, signed Executive Order 9066, leading to the incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese descent, both American citizens and immigrants, living on the west coast.

Surprisingly, Karl and Elaine initially joined others—many of them Japanese Americans—in publicly supporting Roosevelt’s order. As Communists, they felt that the need to fight fascism outweighed other concerns.

Yoneda family, Elaine, Tom, and Karl, at Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1942 (photo California Historical Society)

Karl and his two year-old son Tommy were sent to the camp at Manzanar. Elaine had to fight her way in, becoming one of only seven Caucasians interned there. Karl initiated a petition at the camp to permit young Nisei—men born in the U.S. to immigrant parents—to volunteer for military service. After eight months at Manzanar—during which they received regular death threats from a small group of pro-Japan fascists known as the Black Dragons—Karl was accepted into the army, and Elaine and Tommy were allowed to return to San Francisco.

Karl was assigned with other Nisei to the psychological warfare team of Military Intelligence Service, whose motto was “Go For Broke.” Deployed to India, Burma, and China, he drafted and edited propaganda to be scattered among Japanese troops and transmitted over radios, often deep behind enemy lines. Karl was usually accompanied by Caucasian soldiers, not only to ensure his protection, but also to keep him from falling into enemy hands by shooting him if necessary.

Karl Yoneda, 2nd from right, with the Military Intelligence Service in Burma, 1944 (photo California Historical Society)

At the war’s end, Karl reunited with Elaine and Tommy, and returned briefly to working on the San Francisco docks before a health issue put him out of work. A group of Jewish chicken ranchers in Petaluma, who knew Karl and Elaine from their socialist circles, urged them to try raising poultry. With financial help from Elaine’s family and a GI loan, the couple were able to buy a six-acre ranch on the Petaluma Hill Road in Penngrove. Elaine’s parents soon joined them from Los Angeles.

Devoting themselves to the hard work of raising meat birds, Karl and Elaine also found time to become engaged in the local community, with Karl joining the board of the Petaluma Cooperative Hatchery, and Elaine serving as county president of the Civil Rights Congress. During the Red Scare of the McCarthy Era, they were routinely kept under observation by the FBI, who even found it necessary to question Karl while he was vaccinating his chickens.

Their son Tom graduated from Petaluma High in 1957. A straight-A student, he lettered in basketball, football, and track, and was elected student body president, winning the Petaluma B’nai B’rith Frankel-Rosenbaum Award for outstanding scholarship, and an academic scholarship to Stanford.

By 1960, Petaluma’s role as the Egg Basket of the World was in serious decline due to the rise of factory farms elsewhere. Karl and Elaine sold their chicken ranch and moved back to San Francisco, where Karl returned to working as a casual longshoreman, and Elaine went to work in the office of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

Elaine and Karl Yoneda, 1980s (photo courtesy of Jack Withington)

They remained engaged activists, traveling to Tokyo as delegates at a nuclear disarmament conference, participating in numerous anti-Vietnam protests, and writing articles and lecturing on labor history. In recognition of their 50th anniversary together in 1983, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors saluted them for dedicating their lives to fighting for the betterment of other people’s lives.

Elaine died in 1988, a day after taking part in a San Francisco demonstration for peace in Nicaragua with Jesse Jackson. Karl died eleven years later.

In 2011, members of Karl’s all-Japanese Military Intelligence Service unit were honored with the nation’s highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal.

******

C0-author Jack Withington is the author of Historical Buildings of Sonoma County. A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.

SOURCES:

Books, Journals, Websites

Displaced: Manzanar 1942-1945, edited by Evan Backes (T. Adler Books, 2018).

Vivian McGuckin Raineri, The Red Angel: The Life and Times of Elaine Black Yoneda, 1906-1988 (New York: International Publishers, 1991).

Rachel Schreiber, Elaine Black Yoneda (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022).

Tim Wheeler, “Karl Yoneda and Elaine Black—star-crossed lovers in a class war,” People’s World, November 19, 2020; https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/karl-yoneda-and-elaine-black-star-crossed-lovers-in-a-class-war/

Bill Yenne, Rising Sons: The Japanese American GIs Who Fought for the United States in World War II (New York: Macmillan, 2007).

Karl G. Yoneda, Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (University of California Los Angeles, Asian American, Studies Center, 1983).

“Military Intelligence, Densho Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Military%20Intelligence%20Service/

“Congressional Gold Medal Presented to Nisei Soldiers of World War II,” United States Mint, November 2, 2011.  https://www.usmint.gov/news/press-releases/20111102-congressional-gold-medal-presented-to-nisei-soldiers-of-world-war-ii

“Japanese American Soldiers Will Receive Congressional Gold Medal,” Army.mil, November 4, 2011.https://www.army.mil/article/66904/japanese_american_soldiers_will_receive_congressional_gold_medal

Newspapers

Los Angeles Times: “Riots Mark Nationwide Red Demonstrations,” February 11, 1931; “Elaine Black Yoneda, 81; ‘The Red Angel’ of the 1930s,” May 29, 1988.

San Francisco Examiner: “Couple Battled the Prejudices of Politics and Race,” August 2, 1978; “Friends Salute Labor Activist,” May 21, 1988; “Labor and Socialist Activist Yoneda,” May 14, 1999.

The Los Angeles Mirror: Les Wagner, “The Mirror Daily” column, August 21, 1950.

The Miami Herald (AP): “‘War Forces’ Hit by Leftists,” August 3, 1960.

Oral Histories

“Oral History with Karl Yoneda,” CSU Fullerton Center for Oral and Public History, March 3, 1974;

https://cdm16855.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16855coll4/id/38194

A Champagne Toast to Topsy

The wedding of Topsy Hicks and Jim Agius, 1946. My father, Bob Sheehy is standing third from the right (photo courtesy of the Agius family)

While attending the funeral of my beloved godmother, Topsy Agius—a powerhouse of a woman and a Petaluma legend—I found myself reflecting on how much alike birth and death seem to be—indeed, as the writer Isabelle Allende noted, they are made of the same fabric.

A lot of that reflection was Topsy’s doing.

Her funeral was held at St. Vincent’s Catholic Church, where, on the same date 75 years before, she wed Jim Agius, the childhood best friend of my father, Robert Sheehy (he is the tall fellow standing third from the right in Jim and Topsy’s wedding photo above). Topsy was 18 at the time, having recently graduated from Petaluma High.

St. Vincent’s Church (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

Eight years later, in that same church, I was baptized in the loving arms of Jim and Topsy as my godparents.

A few months later, Jim and Topsy went into business with Jim’s brother Frank and Frank’s wife Chick, taking over Mickelsen’s Grocery on the corner of Bodega and Eucalyptus avenues in the country, with an adjoining beer and wine tavern, and a pair of gas pumps out front. Jim and Frank operated the grocery, while Topsy and Chick oversaw the bar.

The gas pumps were handled by Jimmy Terribilini, a short, colorful man who wore bib overalls with a pocket full of pens and pencils in the top pocket. Fondly known as “The Sheriff,” Terribilini lived in a small room at the back of the store.

Blessed with the gift of gab, Topsy helped to make the mom-and-pop store a friendly crossroads for the ranching families between Petaluma and Two Rock, engaging with people stopping in to pick up a quart of milk or loaf of bread, or maybe stop off for a beer and catch up on news of the area.

The store was also a popular stop for people headed to and from Tomales Bay, Dillon’s Beach, or Bodega Bay on the Sonoma Coast. The two Agius couples operated the store until they all retired in 1992.

A week before Topsy died, I received an envelope from her in the mail. There was no note inside, merely an old newspaper clipping of a column written by Petaluma’s illustrious three-dot journalist, Bill Soberanes, who had attended St. Vincent’s High School with my father and Jim.

In the first part of the clipping, Soberanes describes himself wandering around town on a Tuesday morning between 1 and 2 a.m., in search of news for his column the next day. Among the sources he meets is Jim Agius, who advises him to “Have a glass of champagne”—a veiled reference to a large champagne party that had been underway for a good seven hours.

The second part of the clipping is what Soberanes used to fill his column the next day: an announcement of my birth at Petaluma General Hospital, and the all-night champagne celebration party that followed.

Clipping sent by Topsy of Bill Soberanes Column, December 1, 1954

This clipping was the last communication I received from Topsy. A few days later, she slipped and fell, and within two days was gone.

I am toasting the sad passing of this wonderful woman at 93 in the same manner she toasted my joyous arrival so many years ago—with a glass of champagne. RIP.

The Making of Mr. Petaluma, Bill Soberanes

Soberanes and his pipe, 1940s (photo courtesy of Soberanes Archives)

My mother first met Billy Soberanes in the summer of 1944, while he was home on leave from the Merchant Marine. Single, her fiancé having been killed while fighting in the Pacific, she was working behind the soda fountain at Pete Fundas’ Candy Store beside the Mystic Theater. She thought he was handsome and good-hearted, but somewhat jittery, speaking in such excited bursts she had trouble following what he was saying. That wasn’t unusual, as a number of men home on leave from the war seemed rattled.

After striking up a conversation, Soberanes invited her out for dinner and a movie. She accepted, thinking it was the least she could do before he returned to sea. Following the movie, he took her to the top of the hill west of town to view the stars above the evening fog layer. He drove like he talked—fast and skittish. They were still shrouded in fog when they reached the top of the hill. He parked the car and awkwardly leaned over to kiss her. She slapped him across the face, and ordered him to drive her home.

A few weeks later, Soberanes smashed up the family car before returning to sea.[1] He never drove again. Neither did he ever date my mother again, although they became lifelong friends, bonding over a shared love of local gossip.

Soberanes was, by most measures, an odd duck. My father, a classmate of his at St. Vincent’s Academy, regarded him as something of a buzzing fly, firing off stray ideas and offbeat jokes with the rapidity of a machine gun. My aunt, who also attended school with him, said he was a mischievous prankster who nervously ate through a pencil a day at school. As a grown man, Soberanes traded in his pencils for a briar pipe, although he often smoked more matches than tobacco, incessantly tamping down and relighting his pipe.[2]

Born in 1921, William Caulfield Soberanes grew up in Petaluma’s Old East neighborhood extending from the railroad tracks to Payran Street, among an enclave of Irish relatives orbiting around the home of his grandfather, Thomas A. Caulfield, on East Washington Street between Wilson and Lakeville streets. Caulfield, who immigrated to California from Ireland in 1876, was Petaluma’s top cattle dealer, with a 32-acre stockyard operation that extended along Lakeville Street from Wilson Street to Caulfield Lane.[3]

In 1900, one of Caulfield’s three daughters, Maggie, married Ed Soberanes, an accountant for a shoe manufacturer that had recently relocated a new factory from Oakland to the Old East.[4] A native of St. Helena, Soberanes descended from a family of early 19th century Californios with ties to General Mariano Vallejo, who built the Petaluma Adobe in 1836.[5]

Ed and Maggie purchased a house at 421 East Washington Street, two doors down from Thomas Caulfield’s home. The Old East was then a working-class neighborhood, populated largely by Italian and German immigrants, many of whom worked in Petaluma’s eastside factory district, the railroad yard, the grain mills, and the shipping docks of McNear Canal. On the corner across the street from the Soberanes house sat the Tivoli Hotel, whose restaurant, bar, and backlot bocce ball court served as an Italian hub in the neighborhood.

The Soberanes home at 421 East Washington Street (Photo Sonoma County Library)

Ed Soberanes eventually became manager of the shoe factory. He and Maggie had five children, of which Bill was fourth in the birth order, born ten years after their third child. After the shoe factory closed in 1927, Ed went to work for his two brothers-in-laws, Will and Tom Caulfield, Jr., who had taken over their father’s cattle trade business and also opened a chain of local meat markets, one of which sat beside the Tivoli, directly across from the Soberanes house.

Ed died when his son Billy was 15. He was looked after by his uncles on the block, in particular Tom Caulfield, who, in addition to trading cattle, was one of the town’s preeminent storytellers and vaudeville performers. He also judged rodeos and refereed boxing matches throughout the state, both of which Soberanes engaged in as a young man.

After graduating from high school in 1941, Soberanes briefly followed his two older brothers and cousins into the family cattle business. Then came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. After initially enlisting in the National Guard, in 1943 Soberanes joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, whose ships kept overseas troops armed and fed during the war.[6]

Soberanes (at top) with Merchant Marine crew (Photo courtesy of Soberanes Archives)

It was undoubtedly a colorful experience for the young Soberanes. With most able-bodied men enlisted in the military, the Merchant Marine was forced to lower their standards, filling out their civilian crews with drunks, idlers, thieves, brawlers, and card sharps who went by nicknames like Low Life McCormick, No Pants Jones, Screwball McCarthy, Foghorn Russell, and Soapbox Smitty.[7]

Following the war, Soberanes tried his hand at a variety of jobs around Petaluma, including buying and selling hay, and working for his uncles in the cattle business. But nothing caught his fancy. “The trouble with work,” he told a friend, “is that it stops a fellow from talking.”[8]

That wasn’t the case at Gilardi’s Corner, the town’s swanky cocktail lounge at the northeast corner of Washington and Kentucky streets where talking was the primary pastime, when one wasn’t rolling bar dice or placing discreet bets on horse races and boxing matches in the back room. The atmosphere in Gilardi’s was relaxed, playful, and open to possibilities. Men wore fitted suits and narrow ties, while women were dressed in high heels and cocktail dresses.

Gilardi’s Corner, circa 1950 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

Together with the Hotel Petaluma’s Redwood Room across the street, Gilardi’s comprised Petaluma’s “night club row,” where the post-war “smart set” gathered to listen to jazz, dance, and imbibe highballs served by mixologists like “Happy” Merango, “Red” Cockrill, and “The Sheik” Sheehy, my father.[9]

“Diamond Mike” Gilardi opened the lounge in 1937, looking to bring a touch of class to the cluster of local bars and taverns opening up after Prohibition. Having refashioned himself from the son of a Swiss-Italian dairy rancher in Hicks Valley into one of the town’s preeminent Dapper Dans, Gilardi became a mentor to the young Soberanes.[10]

The bar at Gilardi’s Corner, late 1940s (Photo Sonoma County Library)

But while Soberanes was naturally drawn to the glamour and excitement of night club row, his quirky nature and awkwardness with women left him somewhat on the periphery. That is, until he found his way to the inside through the camera.

As a boy, Soberanes redeemed a bunch of cereal box tops through the mail to help purchase his first Brownie camera.[11] Photography soon became not just a hobby but an obsession, the attraction not in the aesthetics of what he captured on film, but in the charged excitement of people he caught in the spotlight.

With the predatory instincts of a paparazzo, Soberanes began covering sporting competitions, political rallies, theatrical events, music performances, parades, and even fires, coaxing his way into some events, sneaking into others.[12] As a charm offensive, he employed his natural sense of curiosity, learning a little about practically everything, just enough to ask seemingly informed questions of boxers, baseball players, rodeo cowboys, politicians, movie stars, labor leaders, poets, policemen, gamblers, and outlaws.

Soberanes with camera, 1950s (Photo courtesy Soberanes Archives)

Once he photographed them, he posed to be photographed with them, like a hunter showing off his trophy kill. Those who refused his cameo request, he photobombed.[13]

By 1950, Soberanes was ready to turn his avocation into a full-time profession. Assisted by his cousin Nettie Rose Caulfield, a freelancer who wrote for rodeo and motorcycle racing publications, as well as Cat Fancy magazine, he began writing a weekly column for the Petaluma News, a local newspaper.[14]

Called  “So They Tell Me,” the column featured Soberanes’ photographs paired with short, snappy items readers could quickly skim. A cornucopia of scoops, sightings, sports, social events, politics, personalities, and historical trivia, it bristled with as many names as he could squeeze in, having learned that readers scanned for either their name or the name of someone they knew for a bit of gossip to share with friends over lunch.

Logo for Soberanes’ column in the Petaluma News (courtesy of Petaluma Argus-Courier Archives)

As his model, Soberanes turned to popular San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, whose rapid-fire “three-dot journalism”—named for the ellipses separating his column’s short items—was itself a blatant imitation of Walter Winchell, the syndicated American newspaper gossip columnist and radio news commentator known for having turned journalism into a form of entertainment.

Soberanes used his new column as a launch pad for his first big public campaign: building a second firehouse in town on the east side. A new, postwar suburban housing boom had descended upon Petaluma, beginning with subdivisions along Payran and Madison streets, inundating the Old East neighborhood with new young families. That created an access issue for the fire department located on the west side of the Petaluma River, which was sometimes hampered by raised drawbridges at D and Washington streets due to riverboat traffic.

For Soberanes, the campaign held personal meaning, as his father had been a long-serving fire commissioner. After the bond issue passed in June 1951 for constructing a new firehouse at Payran and D streets, the 29-year-old Soberanes was honored by town leaders at a special banquet dinner. He was now in the spotlight himself.[15]

Petaluma Fire Station No. 2, Payran & D streets (Photo Sonoma County Library)

A few months later, the Petaluma News closed down. Soberanes’s weekly column was quickly picked up by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, who expanded it to three times a week.[16] He now had a profession, but not a lucrative one, as he was paid no more than $5 a column.[17] To get by, he continued living at home with his mother and older sister Margaret, a teacher at McKinley School.

In 1954, the “So They Tell Me” column moved to the Petaluma Argus-Courier. In his first column on June 2nd, Soberanes announced his intentions: “We will tell you about local happenings, about the many people we chance to meet from all walks of life, the famous, near famous, the characters, and the everyday citizen.”[18]

Soberanes on on his beat, 1954 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

Since he no longer drove, Soberanes made his daily rounds around town on foot. Nattily dressed in suit and tie, a camera bag slung over his shoulder, coat pockets filled with pens and spiral-bound notebooks, a pipe held between his teeth or left smoldering in his coat pocket, he covered an average 20 miles a day, checking in with his network of tipsters.[19]

Able to get by on little sleep, Soberanes devoted the wee hours of the morning to sitting down at his Royal typewriter and, with two fingers, pounding out his column from a pocketful of notes.[20] Although he was careful to avoid expressing malice toward anyone, his column was largely hearsay, and not fact-checked. He relied on readers to set him straight, happily publishing their letters, in the belief that a complaining reader was better than no reader at all.

He also regularly featured reports in his column from anonymous “correspondents,” using pennames like Desert Dan Delaney, The Dreamer, Turkeylegs Thomas, and Fast Walking Charley.[21] To help keep Petaluma tangentially connected to the national stage, he took regular trips to San Francisco, returning with first-hand gossip and trophy pictures of himself with high-profile actors, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities.[22]

Soberanes and Jayne Mansfield at the Flamingo Hotel, 1950s (Photo courtesy of Pierre Ehret, Flamingo Hotel)

In 1954, he began hosting a weekly 15-minute show on KAFP, the local radio station located at the south end of town, whose call letters were anecdotally said to stand for “Krowing Always For Petaluma.”[23] He interviewed sports figures and colorful local characters like Pop Pickle, an old woodsman who responded to his questions with a variety of bird calls.[24] Soberanes himself was often introduced as the “man who talks faster than the speed of sound.”[25]

Soberanes interviewing Pop Pickle at KAFP radio station, 1954 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

On good days, Soberanes’ column offered everything one might expect from an entire newspaper—only in 1,100 words. Much as John Steinbeck said about Herb Caen, Soberanes made a many-faceted character of Petaluma.[26] It wasn’t long before people were calling him the “Walter Winchell of Petaluma.”

That proved a valuable service during the 1950s and 1960s, as Petaluma transformed from an agriculturally based town of 8,000, into a sprawling suburb of more than 30,000. The poultry and dairy industries that had powered the city’s prosperity for half a century were declining due to the rise of factory farms elsewhere, and the downtown business district was being decimated by new shopping malls erected on the east side of town.

A city used to proudly punching above its weight, first as the third busiest river port in the state, and then as the Egg Basket of the World, Petaluma suddenly found itself facing an existential crisis. For Soberanes, that spelled opportunity. Despite his love of old-time Petaluma, he wasn’t interested in living in a museum, he relished the excitement of the new too much.

To help stave off the city’s fear of becoming ordinary, he devoted his column to celebrating all that was eccentric, wonderful, and unique about Petaluma. In doing so, he provided long-time residents with reassurance that their small-town values remained intact, and offered newcomers an introduction to the town’s idiosyncratic nature as well as a path to local acceptance—to be mentioned in Soberanes’ column was to have arrived in the clubby city.

Soberanes playing bocce ball behind the Tivoli Hotel, 1950s (Photo courtesy of the Petaluma Argus-Courier)

The one thing missing for him was excitement, the sort local promoter Bert Kerrigan had brought to town following World War I, when he put the city’s chicken industry on the map nationally.[27] Kerrigan advised Soberanes not to “put all his eggs in one basket”—while reminiscing about the past was fun, one couldn’t base one’s future on it, as change was inevitable.[28]  

One evening in the fall of 1954, Soberanes dropped by Gilardi’s Corner to find two men preparing to engage in a common barroom bout of wristwrestling. As he watched customers lay down their bets and cheer on the two competitors, he had an idea.

Jack Homel, a trainer for the Detroit Tigers baseball team, wintered in Boyes Hot Springs during the off-season and was a frequent Gilardi’s patron. Soberanes had heard him boast many times of having never lost a wristwrestling match, despite having faced hundreds of opponents, including football players, boxers, steel workers, and longshoremen. The same claim was made by Lakeville rancher Oliver Kullberg who, at two-hundred-and-something-pounds, was reputedly the strongest man in Petaluma.

Soberanes proposed to Gilardi they pit Homel and Kullberg against each other in a fundraising match during the annual Sports Show that raised money for the March of Dimes.

On the evening of January 27, 1955, Homel and Kullberg sat down for their match at a round table in the back room of Gilardi’s Corner and clasped hands. For almost three minutes, the two men struggled to best one another before the table reportedly collapsed beneath them. The referee declared the match a draw.

Oliver Kullberg, left, and Jack Homel, right, compete in first wristwrestling match at Gilardi’s Corner, as Soberanes (behind Kullberg) and Mike Gilardi (behind Homel) look on, 1955
(Photo Steve Farley, courtesy of the Petaluma Argus-Courier)

In the days following, wristwrestling became the most talked about sporting event in town. People clamored for more. Happy to oblige, Soberanes, Gilardi, and Homel formed a three-man committee to create an annual wristwrestling tournament, with Soberanes’ cousin, Nettie Rose Caulfield serving the tournament’s secretary.

Within a few years the tournament’s popularity outgrew Gilardi’s Corner, moving first to Hermann Sons Hall and then to the Petaluma Veterans Memorial Building, where it played to thousands of attendees, including a variety of movie stars, public officials, and celebrity athletes recruited by Soberanes.[29] In 1969, ABC’s Wide World of Sports began televising it.[30]

Wristwrestling, Petaluma’s answer to the Calaveras frog jumping contest, became the biggest thing to happen to the town since Bert Kerrigan declared it the Egg Basket of the World.[31]

Its success spawned a more annual events for Soberanes—the Walkathon from Sonoma to Petaluma, the Whiskerino Contest, Petaluma River Rowboat Contest, the Table Tennis Championship Tournament, the Ugly Dog Contest, and the Harry Houdini Séance—but none of them matched the worldwide appeal of the Wristwrestling Tournament.[32]

Left to right: Ross Smith, Jim Withington, and Soberanes at Old Adobe Fiesta Boat Race, 1970 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1964, at the age of 42, Soberanes married his longtime girlfriend, 39-year-old Jane Edgerton Turner, and began dividing his time between Jane’s house in Santa Rosa and his mother’s house on East Washington Street.[33]

Like many others, my mother would always stop to give him a lift when she spotted him shuffling along the street. He would climb into the car with his camera bag and pipe, the two of them engaged in a breakneck exchange of gossip as we rode along.

Soberanes was a regular guest at my parents’ cocktail parties, his rapid-fire voice carrying throughout the house to my bedroom. Some nights he would showed up unannounced at the family dinner table, regaling us with a scattershot of news he’d gathered that day mixed with memories of people and places from the old days in Petaluma.

After dinner, my parents retired to the living room to watch television, leaving my sister and me to clean up in the kitchen while Soberanes smoked his pipe and rambled on. Growing up in an Irish family, I was used to colorful raconteurs, but nothing prepared me for his erratic, pinball manner of storytelling—except perhaps watching a Marx brothers movie.

Soberanes photo-bombing Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford at Lake Tahoe, 1950s (Photo courtesy of Petaluma Argus-Courier)

The 1970s marked a turning point in Soberanes’ reporting. After two decades on the beat, many of his reliable tipsters had aged into retirement or the grave. A number of his old haunts were likewise gone, including Gilardi’s Corner, torn down in 1967 to make way for a new bank’s parking lot.[34]

In 1971, he changed the name of his column from “So They Tell Me” to simply “Bill Soberanes,” and increasingly turned his focus to local history and nostalgia, creating a new running feature called “My Fascinating World of People,” which featured a personality profile of someone he had interviewed in the past, along with a photo taken of himself with the subject.[35]

Bill Soberanes with “Diamond Mike” Gilardi at the Soberanes Room in the Hideaway Bar, 1971 (photo courtesy of Anthony Tustler, Sonoma County Bugle)

Commonly referred to as “Mr. Petaluma” by this time, he sought to distinguish himself from other columnists by coining the term “peopleologist,” which he defined as a person who studies people from all walks of life. Unlike a traditional journalist who tries to remain invisible behind the camera, a peopleoglogist liked to be in front of the lens, taking part in the action.[36] To underscore the point, he began laying claim to having been photographed with “more famous, infamous, usual and unusual people than anyone in the world.”[37]

Soberanes photo-bombing the Beatles at San Francisco press conference, 1966 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

In his own way, Soberanes was rebranding himself with the times, which was seeing the rise of a “new journalism” practiced by writers such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, who placed themselves in the stories they reported.

In 1983, he moved back to town with his wife, taking up residency in a house his father had built beside the family home at 421 East Washington Street, which was now occupied by just his sister Margaret, his mother having died a decade before.

Much had changed. East Washington Street was now a four-lane artery connecting the east and west sides of town. The Tivoli Hotel was gone, as was Caulfield’s Meat Market and Thomas Caulfield’s house on the corner. The old block Soberanes had grown up on was now host to a gas station, a carpet store, and a couple of fast food restaurants.

Soberanes on the porch of 423 East Washington Street, 1999 (Photo by Leena Hintsanen, courtesy of the Petaluma Argus-Courier)

When not making his rounds around town, Soberanes spent his days sitting on the front porch of his house with his pipe and typewriter, entertaining visitors and waving to people as they honked their horns while driving past. When with my mother and I visited him, he was much the same as I remembered him as a boy, jumping around from topic to topic like a pinball. Having created a many-faceted character of Petaluma, I realized he had also created a character of himself. At the end of the day, I wondered if anyone could say they actually knew him beneath the mask.

On January 27, 2003, my mother unexpectedly died of a sudden heart attack. In his column that week noting her passing, Soberanes recalled her working behind the soda fountain at Pete Fundas’ Candy Store, whose slogan was “We hire the prettiest girls in town.”[38]

Four months later, on June 2, 2003, Soberanes died of congestive heart failure. It was 49 years to the date that he published his first column in the Petaluma Argus-Courier. In all those years, he never missed a deadline, including for his final column, a remembrance of his meeting with the comedian Bob Hope.[39] The column’s title, “Thanks for the Memories,” was a fitting farewell for the man known as Mr. Petaluma.

Soberanes on the beat along Kentucky Street, 1980s (Photo Sonoma County Library)

*****

FOOTNOTES:


[1] “News of Our Men and Women in Uniform,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 13, 1944;

“Personal Items,” Petaluma Argus-Courier July 15, 1944.

[2] DFL Miller, “Sixteen Years of Columns,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1970.

[3] “A Son Arrived at the Ed Soberanes Home, Petaluma Argus, October 20, 1921; “T.A. Caulfield Called by Death,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 19, 1928.

[4] “Shoe Factory to Pass into History,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 16, 1927.

[5] “Searching for the Elusive Howes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 25, 1997.

[6] “E.T. Soberanes Claimed by Death,” P, January 3, 1938; “St. Vincent High School Graduation,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 1941; “Billy Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 7, 1943; “California State Assembly Resolution by the Honorable Bill Filantes, M.D., 9th Assembly District; Relative to commending Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 1988.

[7] William Geroux, “The Merchant Marine Were the Unsung Heroes of World War II,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 28, 2016.

[8] “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968.

[9] Bill Soberanes, “Petaluma Landmark Closes Doors,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 1, 1967; Bill Soberanes, “Colorful Fifties in Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 22, 1969.

[10] “People You Should Know,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 30, 1937;

[11] “Bill Soberanes: Columnist, Petaluma Booster,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 1988.

[12] “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968.

[13] “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968.

[14] Bill Soberanes, “Colorful Fifties in Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 22, 1969; Bill Soberanes, “Nettie Rose’s Writing Boosted Morale of WWII Servicemen,” AC, July 2, 1986; “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968.

[15] “Thanks Given to Bill Soberanes in Promoting Fire Sub-Station,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 30, 1951.

[16] “Soberanes’ Column Now Three Times a Week,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 6, 1952.

[17] Interview with Lee Torliatt, fellow Press-Democrat columnist in 1954, September 2021; Torliatt reported they were paid 20 cents an inch.

[18] “So They Tell Me” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 2, 1954.

[19] DFL Miller, “Sixteen Years of Columns,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1970; Prescott Sullivan sports column, San Francisco Examiner, January 30, 1963.

[20] “Soberanes ‘Best Known’ Citizen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1968; “Bill Soberanes” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 31, 1996; “About Bill: Facts and Trivia,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 25, 2003.

[21] Prescott Sullivan sports column, San Francisco Examiner, January 26, 1966.

[22] “How Does Soberanes Manage to Get All Those Photos?” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 7, 1988.

[23] “Sunday Column is Missed,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, October 9, 1951; “KAFP Program—1490,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 23, 1954.

[24] Bob Wells, “Pop Is 70 but Spry as a Cricket,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 23, 1954.

[25] DFL Miller, “Sixteen Years of Columns,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 15, 1970.

[26] “Cool Gray City Found its Voice in Herb Caen,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 2, 2002.

[27] “1925 Egg Day Festival,” Petaluma Argus, August 8, 1925.

[28] “Bill Soberanes” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1984.

[29] “Dimes Parade, Sports Show, Kick Off Tonight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 13, 1954; Bill Soberanes, “So They Tell Me” column, Petaluma Argus-Courier: October 23, 1954, December 11, 1954, December 15, 1954, January 30, 1962, March 29, 1967, September 28, 1977; “The Early Days of Wristwrestling in Petaluma: How a Game Became a Sport,” ArmwrestlersOnly.com, December 5, 2013; “Dimes parade, Sports Show, Kick Off Tonight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 13, 1954;

[30] “Big Show’s Tonight,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 2, 1969.

[31] “The City,” Dick Nolan column, San Francisco Examiner, January 22, 1959.

[32] “Remembering Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 18, 2003.

[33] “Marriage Licenses,” San Francisco Examiner, March 13, 1964; DFL Miller, “Sixteen Years of Columns,” Petaluma Argus-Courier,  June 15, 1970

[34] Bill Soberanes, “Petaluma Landmark Closes Doors,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 1, 1967.

[35] “Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 29, 1971; “Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 16, 1972, February 14, 1973.

[36] Carl Nolte, “Big Put Down at Petaluma,” San Francisco Examiner, February 12, 1967; Bill Soberanes, “A Columnist Reflects,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 20, 1971.

[37] “Bill Soberanes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 6, 1973.

[38] Bill Soberanes, “Go Fly a Kite,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 19, 2003; “Sweet Memories of Pete Fundas,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 19, 2000; “Bill Sobernes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 2, 1995.

[39] Katie Watts, “Bill ‘Mr. Petaluma’ Soberanes Dies,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 2003; “Thanks for the Memories,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 2003.

Petaluma’s Spooky House

The High Life and Low Times of a 19th Century Victorian Mansion

By John Patrick Sheehy & Katherine Rinehart

Clark Mansion,11 Hill Drive, 1977 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1967, attendees of Petaluma’s second annual Beauty Conference were treated to a bus tour around town, looking for areas in need of a facelift. The major blemishes they identified were dozens of abandoned chicken houses, decrepit remains of Petaluma’s heyday as Egg Basket of the World.1

But old chicken shacks weren’t the only eyesores marring the city’s good looks. The west side was pockmarked with timeworn Victorians, many of them carved into apartments during the Depression and World War II.

Following the tour, the city’s Beautification Committee, appointed by Mayor Helen Putnam to help spruce up the town, began a vigorous campaign to burn down the dilapidated chicken houses. By Christmas, 25 had been torched.2

Dilapidated Petaluma chicken house (photo public domain)

The committee then turned its attention to the aging Victorians.

Facing decades of deferred maintenance, many Victorian landlords found it stylish—and less costly—to encase the houses in stucco, aluminum, or asbestos siding. Others merely covered up the polychromatic palettes of their ornamental houses with a single color of paint, commonly white with green trim.

During Petaluma’s suburban housing boom in the fifties and sixties, developers began bulldozing the Victorians and replacing them with modern ranch style homes. With their open floor plans and long, close-to-the-ground profiles, ranch houses offered a more informal and casual living style than the ornate, multi-floored Victorians, which struck many people as creepy and old-fashioned.

That was, until the sixties counterculture rediscovered their beauty.

Stick Style Victorian, 908 Steiner Street, San Francisco, painted by Maija Gegeris, 1967 (photo courtesy of San Francisco Heritage)

Among the most striking visual icons of San Francisco’s legendary “Summer of Love” in 1967 were the old Victorians. A band of artists known as “the colorist movement” proudly reasserted their ornamentation and design in a dazzling array of hues as “Painted Ladies,” rekindling a love of Victorian architecture.3

That love soon spread to Petaluma. In February 1968, a group of local women, inspired by Mayor Putnam’s call to beauty, formed an advocacy group for the preservation and restoration of Victorians. They called themselves the Heritage Homes Club.4


Shirley Butti, center, with Lillian Fratini and Kay Stack, at Heritage Home meeting, Petaluma Woman’s Club (photo courtesy of Petlauma Argus-Courier, March 18, 196

The club held its second meeting at the Victorian home of their newly elected president, Shirley Butti.5 A fourth-generation Petaluman, Butti and her husband Plinio were in the process of restoring the long neglected Queen Anne mansion they had purchased at 11 Hill Drive. Locally known as “The Spooky House,” it was originally built in 1886 for Michigan lumber baron Melvin Clark and his wife Emily6

Clark Mansion, 11 Hill Drive, 1979 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The Clarks began wintering in Petaluma in 1874, after Mrs. Clark’s father and stepmother, Edward and Sarah Ann Jewell, moved out from Michigan with their four children for Edward’s health. The Jewells apparently chose Petaluma because a nearby relative, Omar Jewell, owned a 680-acre dairy ranch in Olema.7

Melvin Clark operated a large wholesale grocery business in Grand Rapids with his brother. Planning to escape to Petaluma during Michigan’s snowy winters, Clark and his wife purchased a large Victorian for the family at the northwest corner of Liberty Street and Western Avenue.8

For reasons unknown, they sold the house after a year, and returned with the Jewells to Grand Rapids, where Melvin Clark ventured into the lumber business, soon becoming one of the largest lumber barons in the county, with thousands of acres of timber and mineral land, and a series of mills in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Puget Sound area.9

After Edward Jewell’s health took a turn for the worse in 1880, he returned with his family to Petaluma. The Clarks also returned, purchasing house on D Street.10 In 1885, they decided to build their own home, purchasing John McGrath’s 87-acre ranch extending across Petaluma’s west hills from Western Avenue to near Hayes Lane. The next year they erected a 14-room, three-story Victorian mansion—the future “Spooky House”—at the top of Western Avenue overlooking Petaluma.11

The house’s two and half storeys had irregular roof forms, with windowed gablets and two corner towners. The upper story was clad in fish scale shingles, and the lower in shiplap siding. The windows were long and tall, with colored squares of “flash glass” around the upper sashes. The veranda over the entrance included a small impediment with the letter “C” for Clark.

Clark Mansion turret, colored flash glass attic window, and triangle gable above portico with “C” for Clark (photo courtesy of Ken Butti)

The features were similar to other Queen Anne Victorians designed that same year in town by a young local architect named Ed Hedges, the A.L Whitney home on Sixth Street and the David Tibbitts home on Post Street, which indicate that Hedges may have been the architect.12

For 14 years, the Clark family wintered at the ranch, while the Jewells lived there year round, growing oats and barley.13 After Edward Jewell’s death in 1900, his widow and children relocated to Oakland, and the Clarks’ visits from Grand Rapids became less frequent.14 In 1905, they sold the mansion and ranch to the Hillside Land Company, a local development group headed by Alexander B. Hill.15

A scion of William Hill, one of Petaluma’s early bankers, “Allie” Hill joined his father’s banking firm in 1886. After his father’s death in 1902, he inherited a great fortune that reputedly made him the wealthiest man in Sonoma County. He also faced a period of personal turmoil, when in 1903, his wife Hattie, daughter of Hiram Fairbanks, another wealthy local banker, and the mother of his three children, divorced him in a very public court case.

A year later, in a surprising turn of events, Hill married Hattie’s sister Elizabeth, and soon after moved into the 8,500 square foot Victorian mansion of his in-laws, the Fairbanks, at 758 D Street.16

In the fall of 1904, he assisted his widowed mother, Josie Hill, in erecting the Hill Opera House on Keller and Washington streets—site of today’s Phoenix Theater—as a tribute to his father.17

A few months later, Hill and his partners purchased the Clark Ranch, and set about subdividing it into small lots for into small lots for “hillside villas, to be anchored by street named Hill Boulevard that stretched from Western Avenue to D Street. 18Hill selected a spot at the top of Bassett Street upon which to build a mansion for himself and his new bride.19

1910 Sanborn map of Hill’s street layout for Hillside Tract in section of map not colored, extending south from Western Avenue along Webster Street to B Street (map courtesy of Library of Congress)

Directly behind the Clark Mansion, Hill opened a quarry to provide crushed rock for the development’s roads and sidewalks. He left the mansion itself vacant, renting out a small white house beside it to the quarry’s foreman, German immigrant Louis Neilsen and his family.20

Aside from its unfortunate fate of residing upon a formation of valuable basalt, the mansion’s abandonment may have also been related to changing tastes. The egg boom overtaking Petaluma at the turn of the century gave rise to a professional class of doctors, lawyers, and merchants, who had little interest in the stylistic excesses of the Victorian era.

While Queen Anne style houses still held some appeal—especially those designed with large rooms and round turrets—buyers were drawn to the new Tudor and Colonial Revival homes, as well as the Craftsman and Shingle Style houses of the Arts & Crafts movement, with their emphasis on natural woodwork, large rooms in a horizontal orientation, and logical floor plans.

Sales for Hillside Tract were slow to manifest. Lots in the flats along Webster Street quickly sold out, but those on the hillside failed to attract buyers, despite Hill’s significant investment in roads and water and sewer mains. A discouraged Hill never built his dream mansion, instead remaining at his in-laws’ mansion on D Street.

Finally, in 1919, Hill asked the city council to abandon the proposed street layout for the hillside they had approved earlier, and allow him to reconfigure the area into 5-acre farms, which, given the egg boom, were in high demand.21 He sold the Clark Mansion and 20 adjoining acres to the Neilsens for $10,350 ($163,000 in today’s currency).22

Hilma and Louis Neilsen outside Clark Mansion,1920s (photo courtesy of Shirley Neilsen Blum)

Three years later, Hill died, leaving an estate of $22 million in today’s currency. The remaining undeveloped parts of the Hillside Tract development were sold off to speculators.23

It wasn’t until after World War II that his vision for the development became a reality. With Petaluma’s egg boom in decline following the rise of factory farms in the Central Valley, the city began transforming into a housing suburb of San Francisco. One of the first suburban tracts built after the war was on Melvin Street (named for one of Neilsen’s sons), between Dana and English streets, by Blackwell Brothers in 1947.24

Two of the Neilsen’s sons, Elmer and Leo, on south side of Clark Mansion with a cow (photo courtesy of Ken Butti)

After purchasing the abandoned Clark Mansion in 1920, Louis and Hilma Neilsen set about restoring it with the help of their four sons. To help pay the mortgage, they converted the upstairs into a five-room apartment rental, and sold dairy cows, hens, kale for chicken feed, and goldfish they raised in a pond that had formed in the abandoned quarry. Hilma Neilsen also took in young children for day care.

In the mid-20s, they began subdividing their 20 acres into lots for sale, extending from the road to the mansion they now called Hill Drive, presumably in honor of Alexander Hill, down to Webster Street and across to Dana Street.25

After Louis Neilsen died in 1929, Hilma divided the downstairs of the Clark Mansion into two apartment units, living in one of the units until her death in 1943. Her sons Carl and Leo lived in the other unit. Her son Melvin, who became a doctor in town, built a house for his family at the top of Dana Street in 1941.26

Hilma Neilsen with son Leo on front porch of Clark Mansion, c. 1920 (photo courtesy of Shirley Neilsen Blum)

In the mid-50s, the family sold the house to Aloysius W. Boron and his wife. By that time it was well known as “The Spooky House,” which the Borons attempted to lay to rest, saying the ghosts were now guardian angels of the place. 27

Carl Neilsen claimed the rumor stemmed from the ghostly rattling of chains in the quarry, which lulled him to sleep at night as a boy.28 Eleanor Welch Ameral, who lived in the upstairs apartment in the 1940s, said the rumor started when Melvin Neilsen began studying late nights in the attic, leaving a light shining through the colored glass window, while the rest of the house was dark.29

In 1963, Shirley and Plinio Butti purchased the Clark Mansion for $13,000, or $116,000 in today’s currency, and reunited it into a single home. By that time, the mansion’s lot had been reduced to one-third of an acre, leaving it cheek-by-jowl with other homes on Hill Drive and Melvin Street.30

Shirley, a homemaker who would later open an antique store on Kentucky Street, and Plinio, a lumberman who soon became foreman of the Petaluma Co-operative Creamery, restored the exterior of the house in an array of colors, as well as the upstairs, where they lived with their three sons. They put off restoring the downstairs, which Shirley used for storing her vast collection of antiques.31

The Clark Mansion 1979 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In the spring of 1968, Shirley Butti assumed leadership of the Heritage Homes Club. A year later, one of Petaluma’s most prominent Queen Anne style homes, the Healey Mansion at the corner of Washington and Keokuk streets, designed by J. Cather Newsom, was torn down and replaced with a gas station. Built in 1903 by Petaluma merchant and city councilman Dennis J. Healey, it was converted in 1919 into a funeral parlor, which it remained until its destruction.32

The demolition of the Healey Mansion became a rallying cry that ignited the local preservation movement, eventually transforming Butti’s club into Heritage Homes of Petaluma. Over subsequent decades the organization helped to bring a number of Victorians—and their pretty colors—back to life, documenting and branding homes of historical significance with “Heritage Home” brass plaques, issuing preservation recognition awards, and hosting home tours.33

Healey Mansion at Washington and Keokuk streets, in the eve of its destruction, 1969 (photo Sonoma County Library)

The Buttis’ restoration of the Clark Mansion came to a halt after Plinio died in 1981. In 1987, Shirley moved into the house of her recently deceased mother on Eighth Street, and ten years later into a local senior living center. For 30 years the Clark Mansion sat vacant, except for Shirley’s antiques. After her death in 2018, her family sold the house for $949,550 to Karen Maxwell of San Francisco, who has since begun its next restoration.34

Clark Mansion interior, 2018 (photo courtesy of realtor.com)

Shirley’s antiques collection was another matter. While she was alive, she guarded it closely, not allowing anyone to touch it. Despite fears of being cursed for doing so, her family sold the collection in bulk to J.W. McGrath Auctions of Sebastopol. Within weeks of moving the collection to their store and warehouse, the McGrath Auctions building caught fire and burned down.35

The Spooky House had spoken.

*****

Thanks to Ken Butti, Shirley Neilsen Blum, and Amy Hogan for their assistance with the research for this story.

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.

Footnotes:

[1] Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Beautification Plan Will Not Up Taxes,” September 28, 1967; “Assessor Clouds Issue on Chicken Houses,” October 23, 1967.

[2] “Cleaning Up Area Must Come First,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 18, 1967.

[3]Victoria Maw, “Restoration of San Francisco’s Victorian ‘Painted Lady’ Houses,” The Financial Times, October 11, 2013; “Rainbow Victorians and The Colorist Era,” S.F. Heritage, April 17, 2020. https://www.sfheritage.org/features/colorfully-painted-victorians/

[4] “Heritage Homes Meeting Friday,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 11, 1968.

[5] “So They Tell Me Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 1, 1968.

[6] Emails from Ken Butti to John Sheehy, August 2021; Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Lillian Tobin Claimed by Death,” February 9, 1950; “So They Tell Me Column,” June 4, 1958; “Obituaries: Lillian Helman Tobin,” October 20, 1977; “Obituaries: Plinio Butti,” April 22, 1981.

[7] Petaluma Weekly Argus, “Farms in Marin County,” November 17, 1873; “Frightful Accident,” July 16, 1875; “From Michigan,” December 1, 1876; Findagrave.com: Omar Jewell died January 1, 1875 at age 53, buried at Cypress Hill.

[8] Petaluma Weekly Argus: “Real Estate Sale,” August 14, 1874; “Petaluma Cheese Factory” February 27, 1874; “Petaluma Cheese,” June 19, 1874; “From Michigan,” December 1, 1876.

[9] Petaluma Weekly Argus: “Local Brevities,” February 25, 1875, April 9, 1875; “M.J. Clark is Summoned,” November 26, 1909; Ernest B. Fisher, Grand Rapids and Kent County, Volume 2 (Robert O. Law Company, 1918), pp. 84-85; Biography of Melvin J. Clark, http://www.migenweb.org/kent/white1924/personal/clarkmj.html

[10] “Personal,” Petaluma Argus, June 11, 1880; “Real Estate Transactions,” Petaluma Courier, February 22, 1888; “M.J. Clark is Summoned,” Petaluma Argus, November 26, 1909. Note: they sold the house at 920 D Street to Catherine Farley Brown in 1888, who then built the current Queen Anne Victorian on the property in 1893.

[11] Petaluma Courier: Real Estate Transactions,” March 18, 1885; “Fine House,” March 13, 1886.

[12] Dan Petersen, Petaluma’s Architectural Heritage” (Santa Rosa, CA: Architectural Preservation Associates, 1978), p. 52; Information on Ed Hedges homes built in 1886 provided by Katherine Rinehart.

[13] Petaluma Courier: “Courierlets,” February 10, 1882, May 1, 1889 May 22, 1897, April 18, 1898.

[14] “M.J. Clark is Summoned,” Petaluma Argus, November 26, 1909; Petaluma Courier: “A Good Man Gone,” June 12, 1900; “Courierlets,” July 28, 1900; “About People,” February 19, 1897, April 23, 1902, May 15, 1902, November 4, 1904.

[15] “Hillside Villa,” Petaluma Courier, March 3, 1905; “Ties Are Severed,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 2, 1903.

[16] Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Ties Are Severed,” April 2, 1903; “Betrothal Causes Surprise,” May 26, 1904. Note: Hill was living at his parents’ house at 106 7th Street until 1906, when he moved into the Fairbanks Mansion.

[17] “A.B. Hill is Taken by Death at His Home,” Petaluma Courier, June 14, 1922.

[18] “Clark Place Sold,” Petaluma Courier, February 11, 1905.

[19] “Hillside Tract to Aid Our Greater Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, March 3, 1905.

[20] “Hillside Tract to Aid Our Greater Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, March 3, 1905; 1910 U.S. Census, Petaluma, Louis William Neilsen; Interview with Shirley Neilsen Blum, August 27, 2021; “Hilma Marie Neilsen,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 11, 1943; Ad for L. Neilsen, chicken houses for sale, Petaluma Argus, June 9, 1909; Ad for L.W. Nielsen, hens and roosters for sale, inquire at hillside rock crusher, Petaluma Courier, May 11, 1912; Anna Keyes Neilsen, The Book of Anna, privately published memoir, 1999, pp. 31-35, courtesy of Shirley Neilsen Blum; Petition for Naturalization, U.S Department of Labor: Louis William Neilsen, no. 1502, November 13, 1928; Interview with Shirley Neilsen Blum, August 27, 2021.

[21] “To Abandon Hillside Tract,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1919; “The Action Will be Regretted,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1919; Ad by realtor D.W. Batchelor for Hill subdivision tracts, Petaluma Courier, August 8, 1919.

[22] Signed receipt for down payment and purchase terms, signed by realtor D.W. Bachelor, dated May 5, 1919; “Record of Survey: Being a Portion of the Lands of Jason Ferus Blum as Described by Deed Recorded Under Document No. 2002-101193, Sonoma County Records, 2017.

[23] “A.B. Hill is Taken by Death at His Home,” Petaluma Courier, June 14, 1922.

[24] “18 New Homes to Be Built In Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 11, 1947.

[25] Ads placed by the Neilsens, Petaluma Courier: September 20, 1920, April 7, 1925, May 10, 1927, March 22, 1922, May 11, 1927.

[26] Interview with Shirly Neilsen Blum, August 27, 2021; Interview with Ken Butti, August 2021; Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Hilma Marie Neilsen,” October 11, 1943.

[27] “So They Tell Me Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 31, 1958.

[28] “So They Tell Me Column,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 4, 1958.

[29] Email to Katherine Rinehart from Eleanor Welch Ameral, July 28, 2008.

[30] Emails from Ken Butti to John Sheehy, August 2021.

[31] Emails from Ken Butti to John Sheehy, August 2021.

[32] Petaluma Courier: “Left for San Francisco,” June 4, 1903; “Certificate of Use of Fictitious Name,” June 14,1919.

[33] “Heritage Homes,” Petaluma Historical Library & Museum. https://www.petalumamuseum.com/heritage-homes/

[34] Interview with Ken Butti, August 2021.

[35] “Sebastopol Business Fire Causes Chaos, Damage,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, May 10, 2018; Emails from Ken Butti to John Sheehy, 2021.

Black Sonoma County’s Political Birth

Sonoma Historian, Autumn 2021 issue

1870 illustration of 15th Amendment celebration (image in public domain)

On April 1, 1870, Sonoma County’s Black militia, the Colfax Guard, gathered at noon in Petaluma’s Hill Plaza Park to celebrate passage of the 15th Amendment. Their 30-gun salute—one for each of the 30 states to ratify extending voting rights to Black men—marked the first celebration of the amendment held in California.

The festivities continued into the evening at Hinshaw Hall, beginning with a rousing performance by the Petaluma Brass Band, a prayer from the white minister of the First Baptist Church, and a reading of the new amendment by George W. Miller, captain of the Colfax Guard. The evening’s featured speaker, Edward S. Lippitt, then stepped to the stage.

President of the Sonoma County Republican Party, the eloquent Lippitt began his oration with a quote from the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

Excerpt from preamble to the Declaration of Independence

Once the cheering died down, he launched into a sermon about God-given rights, making a sharp distinction between political and social rights, and arguing that the right to vote did not, in any way, imply nor grant to Blacks social equality or integration. The social order, he told the crowd, would remain unchanged.1

Lippitt’s belief reflected a political calculus on the part of Republicans. The end of slavery also meant an end of the Three Fifths Compromise to the Constitution, which allowed Southern states to count slaves as partial humans for purposes of congressional apportionment and votes in the Electoral College.

The change to counting emancipated Blacks as full citizens ironically increased the electoral power of the recently defeated Southern states and of their predominantly Democratic congressmen. To create a numerical counterbalance, Republicans extended the franchise to Black men, assuming the majority would vote for their party, the party of Lincoln.2

Lippitt closed his talk with a call to Blacks to “educate up their race” in meeting their new responsibilities as voters. It was another area that the erudite Lippitt, a longtime educator, believed best addressed by racial segregation.

Petaluma’s Brick School at the corner of B and 4th streets, built in 1860 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1863, six months after he moved to Petaluma to assume the role of superintendent of schools, Lippitt found himself faced with a new California Supreme Court ruling that required public school districts with more than ten Black students to fund “separate but equal” schools.3

In Petaluma, a Black barber named George W. Miller had opened a private Black school just a few months earlier. Lippitt quickly agreed to fund Miller’s school, making Petaluma one of six California cities with a state-supported “colored school.”4

The next year, Miller set out to establish Sonoma County’s first African Methodist Episcopal Church in town. Lippitt, who, in addition to his duties as school supervisor, served as minister of Petaluma’s Methodist Episcopal Church, offered the support of his abolitionist congregation, taking time himself to teach Sunday school at the new church.5

Petaluma map with Union African Methodist Episcopal Church (“Colored”) highlighted in yellow (map courtesy of Katherine J. Rinehart)

Miller’s alliance with Lippitt was typical of many Black barbers of the time—their access to an exclusive white clientele provided them with economic and social advantages in assisting their Black communities. (In Santa Rosa, barber John Richards played a similar role).

19th century Black-owned barbershop in Baltimore (photo in public domain)

Born and educated a free man in New Jersey, Miller spent a good deal of time in San Francisco, then a center of Black intellectual and social activity, as a member of the Black Freemasons, the Bethel A.M.E. Church, and the California Colored Citizens Convention, a prominent group of activists working to rescind the state’s Black restriction laws.6

Colored Citizens Convention announcement, June 3, 1870 (The Elevator newspaper)

He was also sergeant of San Francisco’s Black militia, in the Brannan Guard. In 1869, as the 15th Amendment was making its way through the state ratification process, Miller decided to form a local Black militia, the Colfax Guard, named for Ulysses S. Grant’s newly elected vice-president, Schuyler Colfax.7

As previously the Speaker of the House, Colfax helped to shepherd through Congress the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and the 14th Amendment protecting the civil rights of former slaves. In 1865, Speaker Colfax came to Petaluma to visit his uncle, Elias Matthews, and made an inspiring address outside the American Hotel (site of today’s Putnam Plaza), directly across from Miller’s barbershop.8

U.S. Vice President Schuyler Colfax (Photo by Library of Congress)

After proudly assembling the Colfax Guard for their 30-gun salute on April 1st, Miller’s hopes of an easy political birth were quickly dashed, when the county clerk refused to register Black men to vote.9

With the exception of Petaluma, Sonoma County was politically dominated at the time by the Democratic Party, which also held the governor’s seat and control of the state legislature. State Democratic legislators, having made California just one of seven states to reject ratifying the 15th Amendment prior to its passage, now invoked, with the governor’s support, states’ rights in denouncing the amendment as unconstitutional.

The Democratic state attorney general instructed county clerks to defer Black registration until “appropriate legislation”—a clause in the amendment— could be adopted by Congress.10

Santa Rosa’s Sonoma Democrat was even more blunt. “Let it be understood, far and near,” the newspaper wrote, “that negroes are not permitted to register as voters in Sonoma County.”11

In California, such opposition was largely theatrical, as only 1,731 of the state’s 4,272 Blacks were men 21 years of age or over, posing little threat to the political balance of power. Sonoma County had only 80 Blacks, more than half of whom lived in Petaluma.12

In mid-April, Lippitt—then in the process of leaving education to open a law practice—was appointed interim editor of the Republican Petaluma Journal & Argus, when the editor, Henry L. Weston, left for an extended trip to Europe.

Edward S. Lippitt in his law office, 1910 (photo Sonoma County Library)

Waging a war of words against the Democrats, he argued that efforts to suppress Black voters would forever align Blacks with the Republicans, keeping the party in control of the national government indefinitely.13

On April 18th, the city of Petaluma defied the county clerk, allowing George Miller and 13 other Black men to vote in a city election.14 Their defiance came on the heels of a similar election in San Jose, making the two cities the first in California to put the 15th Amendment to work.15

It was only after Congress instituted “appropriate legislation” on May 31st, passing the first of three Enforcement Acts imposing fines and penalties on those who obstructed or hindered any person from voting, that Sonoma County’s clerk allowed Blacks to register.16

Their first opportunity to officially vote came in June during a special election seeking voter approval of construction subsidies for new railroad lines.17 A week later, Miller and a delegation of Black citizens turned up with a band at Lippitt’s home, presenting him with a set of silver tablespoons, with the Goddess of Liberty engraved on one side and his initials on the other, as a token of their appreciation for his able advocacy on their behalf.18

It wasn’t long however before the Colored Convention grew frustrated with the reluctance of Republicans to embrace their full civil rights, especially in education. In November 1871, the convention’s Educational Committee, of which Miller was a member, decided to lobby for all school children, regardless of color, being admitted to common public schools.19

Engraving of the 1869 Colored Citizens Convention in Washington, published in Harper’s Weekly (credit Jim Casey Collection)

After championing two bills that died in the state legislature, the committee took their case to the state Supreme Court.20 In the test case of Ward v. Flood, the court upheld the “separate but equal” principle in California school law, but also mandated that Black children be publicly educated, including, if necessary, in white schools.21

With the court’s ruling in hand, the committee began lobbying school districts to abolish “colored schools.” They were helped by the Recession of 1873, during which school districts strapped for funding, opted to enroll Black students rather than fund two separate school systems. By 1875, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, and Vallejo public schools had all been integrated, leaving Petaluma, its school board dominated by Democrats, the lone holdout.22 Thanks to Lippitt, it became a polarizing local issue.

1870 Brooklyn Colored School in Oakland, Mary Sanderson, teacher (photo Oakland History Room)

That same year, Lippitt resigned as county chairman of the Republican Party, and in 1876 launched the Petaluma Courier, a pro-Democratic newspaper. Although he attributed his political conversion to the Republican’s egregious treatment of the South during Reconstruction, it also came on the heels of his defeat in the Republican primary for county district attorney.23 (Republican party officials may have also discovered that Lippitt fled to California from Cincinnati in 1862 while under indictment for embezzlement).24

As editor of the Courier, Lippitt initiated a newspaper war with Weston’s Petaluma Argus, labeling it a “negro-worshipping sheet” for its support of integrating Black students into white schools.25

The skirmish went viral, drawing ridicule in Republican newspapers from San Francisco (“an ante-rebellion spirit of caste is still alive and dominate in Petaluma”) to Pennsylvania (“a great blotch on the face of human progress”).26

Lippitt also renounced his support of the 15th Amendment, accusing northern carpetbaggers of subjecting the South to “the rule of the most ignorant races of servile men” in giving Blacks the vote while denying the same right to former Confederate officers. He maintained that it would take generations for Blacks to be sufficiently educated to vote.27

During the 1876 U.S. presidential election, Lippitt threw his support behind the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, even though his Republican opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, was someone Lippitt had worked with before the Civil War as a young lawyer in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Hayes served as city solicitor.28

After a contested election, Hayes assumed the presidency in return for agreeing to withdraw federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction. That same year, the United States Supreme Court struck down the Enforcement Acts protecting the 15th Amendment, ruling that voting rights were best-regulated by state authorities without federal intervention. The two actions led to a series of “Jim Crow” restriction laws that disenfranchised the Black voters for decades.29

President Rutherford B. Hayes (photo courtesy of WhiteHouse.gov)

In 1880, President Hayes paid a visit Petaluma, lunching at Lippitt’s home, even though Lippitt had publicly denounced him as “rotten, low, mean, and sneaking.”30 That same year, the California legislature outlawed the state’s “separate but equal” educational policy. By that time, most of Petaluma’s Black population had departed for more supportive communities in Vallejo and Oakland, leaving just one student enrolled in the town’s “colored school.”31

George Miller did not live to see this legislative triumph he had long fought for. In the fall of 1873, at the age of 48, he died unexpectedly while preparing for a Colored Convention in Sacramento on education.32

*****

A version of this article appeared in the Sonoma Historian.

FOOTNOTES:

1“Celebration of Our Colored Citizens,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, April 9, 1870.
2Gary Dauphin, “On February 26, 1869, Congress Sent the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to the States for Ratification,” California African American Museum, caamuseum.com, February 26, 2020. https://caamuseum.org/learn/600state/black-history/february-26-1869-congress-sends-15th-amendment-to-constitution-states; Melissa De Witte, “What Did ‘All Men Are Created Equal’ Mean in 1776?” Futurity.com, July 2, 2020. https://www.futurity.org/all-men-are-created-equal-2397112-2/
3Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25.
4“Segregation and John Swett,” Southern California Quarterly, 1964, Vol. 46 (1), pp. 69-82; Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864.
5“Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; “An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt,” edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p.42.
6Herbert G. Ruffin II, “The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865),” February 9, 2009. BlackPast.com; The Elevator: “Masonic Notice,” December 21, 1872; “Died,” October 25, 1873; Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 42.
7Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 146.
8Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p.133. Ovando James Hollister, Life of Schuyler Colfax (Funk & Wagnalls, 1886) p. 257; Schuyler Colfax, 17th Vice President (1869-1873), https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/vice-president/VP_Schuyler_Colfax.htm.; Schuyler Colfax Journals, “Across the continent by overland stage in 1865,” BYU Library Digital Collections, p. 21; “Personal,” Petaluma Argus, July 6, 1865.
9Petaluma Journal & Argus: “Woe is Me, Alhama,” April 16, 1870; “The ‘Democrat’ on Negro Registration,” April 23, 1870.
10“Attorney General,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, April 23, 1870; Ralph E. Shaffer, “California Reluctantly Implements the Fifteenth Amendment: White Californians Respond to Black Suffrage, March – June 1870,” Cal Poly Pomona, p.42, https://www.cpp.edu/class/history/faculty/documents/shaffer15thamend.pdf.
11Shafer, p. 94.
12Shafer, p.69; “1870 Sonoma County Census,” Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopedia, 1876, p. 721; 1870 Census, Ninth Census of the United States, Vol. 4 (Ohio State University, 1872), p. 129.
13Petaluma Journal & Argus: “We Bow,” April 16, 1870; “They Voted,” April 23, 1870; “The Colored Vote,” April 30, 1870; “Professor E. S. Lippitt,” Sonoma Democrat, April 23, 1870.
14“A House Divided Against Itself,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, April 23, 1870; “Enjoying Their ‘Rights,’” Sonoma Democrat, April 23, 1870; Shafer, p. 94.
15“The Fifteenth Amendments,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, April 23, 1870.
16Shafer, pp. 65-67; Kianna Wright, “The Enforcement Act of 1870 (1870-1871),” December 11, 2019. Blackpast.com. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/the-enforcement-act-of-1870-1870-1871/
17Petaluma Journal & Argus: “The Railroad Subsidy,” June 11, 1870; “The Railroad,” June 18, 1870; “Railroad Election Returns,” June 18, 1870; “Great Register, Sonoma County, 1870,” California, U.S., Voter Registers, 1866-1898. Ancestry.com.
18“A Splendid Testimonial,” Petaluma Journal & Argus, June 25, 1870.
19Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) pgs. 178-179.
20The Elevator: “Educational Public Meeting at Bethel Church,” April 27, 1872; Address of the Educational Committee, May 11, 1872.
21Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/
22Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; Jo Ann Williamson, Lori Rhodes, Michael Dunson, “Chapter 7 A Selected History of Social Justice in Education,” Review of Research in Education, November 15, 2016, Vol. 31 (1), pp. 195–224; “1874 Ward V. Flood,” Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/
23“Temperance Convention,” Petaluma Argus, July 9, 1875.
24“The Grand Jury,” Daily Ohio Statesman, April 26, 1862; “Young and Pure—More of it,” The Cadiz Sentinel, April 2, 1862.
25“The Negro School,” Petaluma Courier, April 5, 1877.
26Petaluma Argus: “Our ‘Colored Schools,’” December 22, 1876; “Educational Items,” August 13, 1875; “Our Colored School,” August 11, 1876; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” May 18, 1877; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” May 18, 1876.
27“An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt,” edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p. 43; “Reminiscences of a Long Life,” Petaluma Argus,” October 29, 1910.
28Alumni Record of Wesleyan University, Middleton, Conn, 1883, p. 83-84; “Reminiscences of a Long Life,” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1910.
29Michael Les Benedict, “Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876-1877: A Reconsideration of Reunion and Reaction.” Journal of Southern History (1980): 489-524.
30“Democratic Meeting,” Sonoma Democrat, August 18, 1877; “President Hayes in Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, September 15, 1880.
31“Local Dots,” Petaluma Courier, July 21, 1880.
32“Deaths: George Miller,” Pacific Appeal, October 25, 1873.

Petaluma’s Pioneer Black Leader

19th century Black barbershop (photo public domain)

In September of 1855, George Webster Miller took out in advertisement in the Sonoma County Journal, Petaluma’s newspaper at the time, announcing the opening of his new Humboldt Shaving & Hair Dressing Saloon on Main Street, two doors north of today’s Putnam Plaza. Miller had just moved to Petaluma from San Francisco, where he had resided for four years, with his twenty-three year old wife Catherine and their two infant children, Elizabeth and George Frank. Although Miller proclaimed in his ad that he was determined to please his customers “in the tonsorial art,” his intentions extended beyond merely providing a close shave and a good haircut.[1]

Ad for George Miller’s barbershop (Sonoma County Journal, November 17, 1855)

Like a number of free-born, educated Blacks from the Northeast and Midwest, Miller had come to California looking for economic and social opportunities at the height of the Gold Rush. A native of New Jersey, the twenty-five-year old Miller had arrived in California in 1850 via the Steamer Pacific, which meant that he would have sailed from New York to Nicaragua, traveled cross that country by boat on the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua, then taken a stagecoach to the west coast port of San Juan del Sal, where he would have boarded the sidewheel steamer Pacific bound for San Francisco.

The route, operated by shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, transported many people to California during the Gold Rush, including both free and enslaved African Americans, most of whom headed straight for the mining towns.[2] Slaves brought to California by their Southern owners to work the mines, where often able to purchase their freedom by working nights in the mines to earn money.[3]

Black miner working a sluice box in Auburn Ravine, 1852 (photo courtesy Getty Images)

As news of Blacks finding success and freedom in California spread among newspapers back east like Frederick Douglass’ North Star, the state’s black population climbed from 962 in 1850 to 4,800 by 1855. Half of the newcomers settled in the mining counties of El Dorado, Yuba, Nevada, and Sacramento; a third in the fast-growing city of San Francisco; and the remainder in towns like Petaluma, then a small but bustling river town supplying San Francisco with agricultural goods.[4]

1855 Map of Petaluma (illustration courtesy of Sonoma County Library)

In California, most free Black men and women were relegated to low skilled and poorly paid jobs. One of the more lucrative occupations for Black men however was barbering. In the South, slave owners had turned a profit by leasing out black barbers to neighboring plantations and local establishments to groom both slaves and affluent white men alike. As a result, many Black men literally “cut” their way to freedom.[5]

Access to an exclusive white clientele provided Black barbers with economic and social advantages that placed them in positions of prestige among Black communities. As customers demanded a high level of gentility from their surroundings, barbers were also expected to excel as interior decorators. The best of these shops were what historian Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr., author of Knights of the Razor, a history of Black barbers, called “first-class.”

Barbers cultivated the personae to match these surroundings. Refined in dress and graceful in movement, they were also expert conversationalists, engaging and entertaining their customers while they worked. They were disseminators of every bit of news, politics, gossip, and anecdote customers shared with each other in the shop. But they also had to watch their step.

A Barber’s Shop at Richmond, Virginia, 1861 (illustration courtesy of The Atlantic)

If their knowledge of politics or business was too extensive, or their jokes too pointed, customers might accuse them of overstepping racial boundaries—with potentially disastrous consequences. Their biggest challenge was the simple intimacy of the shop between the barber and patron. Listening in on the schemes and foibles of the white elite, they were expected to keep their secrets in confidence.[6]

Navigating these situations, a number of 19th-century barbers parlayed their work into economic independence, and in a few cases, investments that brought them extraordinary wealth. In a number of U.S. cities, Black barbers ranked among the richest and most powerful members of the free Black community.[7] 

In turn, they often used their prestige to advance the welfare of those communities, occupied positions of authority in Black organizations and working side-by-side ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in California, which persistently advocated for the social improvement, religious autonomy, and political engagement of Blacks.[8]  

Two months after arriving in Petaluma, George Miller traveled to St. Andrew’s A.M.E. Church in Sacramento to attend the first Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California. The convention drew forty-nine attendees, representing all of California’s ten counties, with Miller serving as Sonoma County’s sole representative. Its primary focus was to mobilize Blacks to lobby for rescinding the state’s restriction laws on African Americans.

A.M.E. Church in Sacramento, 1920s (photo courtesy of California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento)

Although California had entered the Union in 1850 as a free, non-slave state, the early state legislature enacted a number proscriptions against people of color—specifically, Blacks, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants—including the right to testify against a white person in court, homestead on public land, attend publicly-funded common schools, and vote.[9]

After its inaugural meeting in 1855, the Colored Citizens Convention held annual meetings again in 1856 and 1857, with George Miller once again representing Sonoma County (along in 1857 with Elisha Banks, also of Petaluma).

An engraving featured in harper’s Weekly of the National Colored Convention in Washington, D.C., 1869 (courtesy of the James Casey Collection/New York Times)

At the 1857 gathering Miller reported that Sonoma County’s Black population—which in 1850 had consisted of just Joseph and Louisa Silver, two free blacks working as servants to Santa Rosa physician Elisha Ely—had grown to seventy-two, thirty-one of whom resided in Petaluma and were living independently.

Of the remanding forty-one, twenty-seven were listed as farmers, with all but one claimed as slaves by their employers from the South, who, like many other southerners in Sonoma County, had settled primarily on the Santa Rosa plain.[10] Petaluma, by contrast, had drawn as much as fifty percent of its early white population from the Northeastern states, and another twenty percent from Europe, Britain, and Ireland.[11]

The differences in the background composition of the two towns became more pronounced and acrimonious during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era, as expressed in the adversarial relationship between their respective newspapers, the Petaluma Argus and the Sonoma Democrat, with Santa Rosa’s paper backing the Confederacy, and Petaluma’s paper supporting the Union. As a result, Petaluma’s small Black community enjoyed a relatively more supportive social, political, and economic environment than was found in Santa Rosa.[12]

Freedom for former slaves in California became tenuous in 1852 after the state passed its own version of the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, allowing whites to keep slaves they had brought into California as long as they eventually transported them back to the South. This placed freed slaves, who often lacked clear legal documentation of their freedom, at risk of being kidnapped and sold back into slavery in the South.[13]

The state of affairs for all Blacks in California became more precarious in the mid-1850s, when many whites, concerned that their economic livelihoods were being threatened by the relatively cheap labor provided by Blacks and Chinese workers, mounted an anti-immigration campaign to drive them from the state.

In 1858, after the state assembly approved a bill banning further Black immigration, some blacks fled the state, a number of them to British Columbia, where a new gold strike was underway. The bill subsequently died in the state senate, overshadowed by passage of the first anti-Chinese immigration law.[14]

Despite the general adversarial climate in California, some of the legal restrictions Blacks faced began to lift in the early 1860s, as Republicans gained control of the governorship and state legislature. In 1863, the Franchise League, a lobbying group formed by members of the Colored Conventions, succeeded in securing Blacks the right to testify in court, placing a check on the immunity violent white racists had benefitted from. In 1862, the Federal Homesteading Act overrode the prohibitions California had placed on Black homesteaders with its Homesteading Acts of 1851 and 1860.[15]

One area however where  Blacks were dealt a setback was access to education. Along with Chinese and Indian students, they had been excluded from California’s common public schools since the state’s admission to the Union in 1850. The California School Law of 1855 strengthened that exclusionary policy by providing school funding based strictly on the number of white students attending a school. The policy was further fortified by an 1860 law that prohibited public schools from admitting “Negroes and Mongolians” under the threat of losing all funding.[16]

Segregated 19th century school (photo courtesy of Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com)

For George Miller and the other members of the Colored Conventions—most of whom had been educated as free men in the North—access to education was vital to Black success in California, not only in terms of becoming financially autonomous, but also in being viewed as educated and respected members of the community, and hopefully extinguishing some of the racist attitudes that whites held toward them. By embargoing Blacks from entering public schools, California was choosing to perpetuate the Southern fallacy that Blacks didn’t have the ability to survive off the plantation because of their illiteracy.

At the 1855 Colored Convention, members made it one of their top priorities to lobby the state legislature to educate all of California’s children. But they also took matters into their own hands, pooling their resources to buy land and create private schools for black children, often in alliance with the A.M.E. Church, which opened its basements for use as school rooms, deployed its ministers and their wives to serve as teachers, and raised money from its congregations to keep the schools operating.[17]

Report of the first California Colored Convention held in 1855

Petaluma at the time lacked both an A.M.E. Church and a school for black children. George Miller set out to change that. By the early 1860s, his Humboldt Shaving & Hairdressing Saloon was thriving. In 1861, he added a bath house, and in 1863 moved into the newly constructed Towne Building on Main Street across from the American Hotel (today a small parking lot extending between Petaluma Boulevard North and Water Street).[18]

That same year, Miller was joined by another Black barber in town, Frank Vandry Miller, who had immigrated to American from Jamaica in 1843. He opened up his barbershop a couple doors down from George Miller’s shop, also in the Towne Building.[19]

While the Chinese residents in Petaluma at the time lived close together in a designated “Chinese colony” on Main Street between Western Avenue and B Street, there was no clearly distinguished pattern of neighborhood groupings among Black residents. They lived in buildings scattered throughout the city. As a result, a challenge George Miller and other local Black leaders faced was bringing the Black community together. The appearance in 1862 of the Pacific Appeal, the west coast’s first major black newspaper, provided them with one means of doing that.

The Pacific Appeal, “A Weekly Journal devoted to the interests of the People of Color,” launched in 1862

Sporting the motto “He who would be free, himself must strike the blow,” the Pacific Appeal was co-founded by Peter Anderson, an early leader of the Colored Conventions, and Philip Alexander Bell, a pioneering Black journalist from New York. Launched in San Francisco shortly after the demise of California’s first black newspaper, Mirror of the Times, the Pacific Appeal provided a voice for California’s Black communities.[20] George Miller immediately signed on as the newspaper’s distribution agent in Petaluma and Santa Rosa, and Frank Miller as their agent in Sonoma.[21]

In an early edition of the Pacific Appeal, George Miller offered a colorful account of his weekly delivery route aboard the horse-drawn mail wagon from Petaluma to Santa Rosa (a five hour ride), describing some of the newspaper’s subscribers he conversed with along the way, including Santa Rosa barber John Richards.[22]

Born into slavery in Kentucky in 1824, Richards had made his way in 1856, after having acquired his freedom, to Santa Rosa, California, where he opened a shaving saloon and bathhouse at the southwest corner of Main (Santa Rosa Avenue) and Second streets.[23] By the early 1860s, Richards had established branches of his barbershop in Ukiah and Lakeport, and had also began to acquire large land holdings, eventually amassing an estate more than $12,000 ($300,000 in early 21st century currency), making him one of the most prosperous men in Sonoma County.[24] He and Miller would become close allies in educational initiatives for Blacks in Sonoma County.

In addition to networking among Sonoma County’s Black community, George Miller kept strong ties to the Black community in San Francisco, making frequent visits to the city, where he stayed in Black boarding houses.[25] In July of 1862, he represented Sonoma County at the Grand Festival of the Colored Citizens of San Francisco commemorating the emancipation of slavery in the British West Isles and the District of Columbia.[26] Six months later, upon President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, he joined in a large celebration held at Platt’s Hall on Montgomery Street in the city.[27]

By 1863, Miller’s wife Catherine had given birth to two more children, bringing the total number of school-age children in their house to four. Miller felt that it was time to establish a school for African American children in town. On December 4th, he organized a gathering of Petaluma’s Black community, presided over by John Richards of Santa Rosa. (Richards would personally fund the opening of Santa Rosa’s “colored school” a year later in January, 1865).[28] After the meeting, the group pooled their resources to rent a small house on Washington Street and furnish it with seats and desks.

They also began recruiting for a teacher in the pages of the Pacific Appeal. A young Black woman from San Francisco named Mrs. Rachel Coursey, responded to the query. Despite having been married just six months before to John G. Coursey, a music teacher at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in San Francisco, Rachel Coursey came to Petaluma and began teaching at the so-called “colored school” on opening day, January 11, 1864.[29]

Two months after the school opened, the California Supreme Court ruled that public school districts were required to provide “separate but equal” schools for Blacks, except in cases where there were fewer than ten such students in the district, in which case they would be integrated into white schools. At the time, there were 831 Black children of school age living in California. After some pushback, two years later, the Revised School Law of 1866 specified that in the event a town had fewer than ten Black children, the school district could integrate those students into its white schools, assuming that a majority of the white parents didn’t object—a clause that would later become a bone of contention in Petaluma.[30]

Although Petaluma’s “colored school” had only eight students, George Miller’s group succeeded in obtaining public funding for their “colored school” after the passage of the new school law, thanks in part to Petaluma’s new Superintendent of Public Schools, Rev. Edward S. Lippitt, a Republican abolitionist minister originally from Connecticut.[31] By the end of 1864, Petaluma was identified as one of six California cities with a public-funded “colored school,” the others being San Francisco, Sacramento, Marysville, San Jose, and Stockton.[32]

Miller’s group also launched plans in 1864 to establish an Black church in Petaluma.[33] For help, they turned to the A.M.E.’s Presiding Elder, Rev. Thomas M.D. Ward of San Francisco’s Bethel A.M.E. Church. Miller knew Ward from the Colored Conventions, where Ward had played a major role. Ward traveled by steamer to Petaluma where, in a makeshift church, he delivered a Sunday sermon entitled “The Importance of Mental and Moral Culture Among the Colored People of America.”[34]

By 1965, Miller’s group had secured the use of a house near the northwest corner of Western Avenue and Howard Street, believed to be the Greek Revival house at 109 Howard Street, to serve as Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church.[35]

A.M.E. Church, 109 Howard Street, in 1871 map (map courtesy of Sonoma County Library and Isabel Fischer)

Rev. Ward assigned seventy-five year-old Peter Killingsworth to serve as pastor.[36] Born into slavery in South Carolina, Killingsworth had immigrated to California in 1857 after purchasing his and his wife’s freedom in Atlanta, Georgia, for $3,000 ($93,000 in early 21st century currency).

Soon after they reached California foothills, Killingsworth’s wife died in El Dorado County. The reverend consoled himself knowing that “her bones lie in the free soil of El Dorado.”[37] Prior to being assigned to Petaluma, Killingsworth had served as a clergy member of the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Sacramento, and as one of their traveling preachers with assignments in Grass Valley, Nevada County, and San Jose.[38]

Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church opened sometime in the summer of 1865, and was formally dedicated in a ceremony presided over by the Rev. Ward on December 10, 1865, an event that also served as a fundraiser to address the $150 debt still looming over the church ($2,400 in early 21st century currency).[39]

109 Howard Street today, site of original African Methodist Episcopal Church (photo courtesy of Scott Hess)

Rev. Killingworth would sometimes feature A.M.E. pastors from other parts of California to deliver Sunday services, as well as invite white men and women from the local Methodist Episcopal Church, where School Superintendent Rev. Edward S. Lippitt served as pastor, to teach at Sunday school classes.[40] In addition to serving as a place of worship and religious education, the church also provided a meeting place for George Miller and other members of the Black community interested in securing their civil rights.[41]

Methodist Episcopal Church at the corner of Keller Street and Western Avenue, 1885 (photo Sonoma County Library)

To that end, in November of 1865, Rev. Killingsworth attended the fourth Colored Convention in Sacramento, where he served as Sonoma County’s sole representative and also the convention’s chaplain. In his report on Sonoma County, Killingsworth noted that the county had seventy Black residents, comprised of fifty-five adults and twenty children.

Twelve of the adults were general laborers, ten farmers, seven barbers, two blacksmiths, and two carpenters. Together, their combined property holdings were estimated to have a total valuation of $25,000 ($400,000 in early 21st century currency). Killingsworth also noted that the county had one Black church and one Black schoolhouse (Santa Rosa’s “colored school” was clearly operating at that time, but it’s not certain that Petaluma’s was still active).[42]

The members of the Colored Convention were generally hopeful that year, seeking to capitalize on California’s changing social and political climate in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, the end of the Civil War, and California’s Republican-dominated legislature led by Governor Leland Stanford, which, in 1863, had repealed California’s ban on blacks testifying in court against whites. The convention’s Committee on Education revised their proposal from their earlier conventions, once again calling on the legislature to end segregated public education in California.[43]

Their call went unanswered thanks to the Democrats in the state legislature, who also succeeded in blocking California’s ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing civil rights to Blacks, and the Fifteenth Amendment granting Black men the right to vote (California, in fact, would not ratify these two amendments until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s). Ultimately, it was national ratification of the two amendments in 1868 and 1870 respectively that extended these rights to California Blacks.[44]

Miller had a near death experience in August 1866, when the steam engine of the Petaluma & Haystack Railroad he had just boarded at the depot in town, killing four people and injuring many others, including Miller, whose arm was broken.[45]

As the school year began in July 1867, Petaluma had 627 school-age children between the ages of five and fifteen, eight of whom were black.[46] Petaluma’s “colored school” however was clearly shut down by the fall of 1867 when Philip A. Bell, editor of The Elevator, a Black newspaper in San Francisco that Bell spun off from the Pacific Appeal in 1865, came to Petaluma to lecture on the topic of education at the bequest of Rev. Killingsworth.

Drawing of Philip A. Bell, editor of The Elevator (courtesy of blackpast.org)

The day before Bell’s scheduled lecture, the trustees of Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church overruled Rev. Killingsworth, cancelling the talk. Bell, an articulate and outspoken advocate of education for Black children, instead spent the weekend attending Rev. Killingsworth’s Sunday sermon at the church and being introduced around the community by Petaluma’s two Black barbers, George Miller and Frank Miller. [47]

By the time of Bell’s visit, George Miller and Frank Miller were both prospering in their tonsorial businesses, one of the few areas, along with boot black, livery, restaurant, and drayage businesses, that a Black man could reasonably expect sufficient white patronage to be able to work for himself (Black women also worked for themselves, operating hair salons, dressmaking businesses, restaurants, and hiring out as nursemaids and midwives).[48]

Still, Black businesses faced unique risks, as Frank Miller experienced soon after expanding his barbershop to include a bathing salon “for exclusive use of the Ladies” called the Crystal Baths. Late one night his shop windows were smashed out, assumedly by members of the local Ku Klux Klan.[49] Undeterred, Miller repaired the damage and added a new ladies hair salon to his business, featuring “the latest Paris styles” from a Miss Aralena Purnell, “recently arrived from Philadelphia.”[50]

The twenty-six year old Purnell was the daughter of Zedekiah J. Purnell, a barber, literary scholar, and popular orator in Philadelphia, who had recently relocated his family to Petaluma.[51] His daughter Aralena was an educated and trained operatic singer who, prior to coming to California, had undertaken singing tours of Pennsylvania, New York, and New England. In addition to working for Frank Miller as a hairdresser, she and her sister Louisa began performing concerts to rave reviews at Petaluma’s Hinshaw Hall on Main Street just north of Washington Street.[52]

After discovering the Purnell sisters in Petaluma, Philip Bell of The Elevator recruited them to perform at a musical benefit in San Francisco to a white and Black audience of fifteen hundred people. For the Purnell sisters, it became the first of many subsequent performances in the city.[53] In 1870, Zedekiah Purnell and his family left Petaluma for Oakland, where in 1877, Purnell mounted the first Black candidacy for the Oakland city council. He withdrew from the campaign upon the unexpected death of his daughter Aralena at the age of thirty-six.[54]

Philip Bell would make subsequent trips to Petaluma, but he summed up his first visit to town by noting that its Black community was relatively cautious and conservative. “Many of them cannot disengage themselves from their old ideas engendered while in slavery in Virginia and Missouri,” he wrote. “They have no ideas of progress.”

The Elevator newspaper, launched in 1865 by Philip A. Bell

Bell also reported that while George Miller had exerted himself to obtain educational privileges from the local school district with a “colored school,” the effort had not been sustained by a majority of other Black residents, which was why, he contended, the trustees had cancelled his talk on education.[55]

By 1869, things began to change for Petaluma’s A.M.E. Church. In April of that year, Rev. T.M.D. Ward, now a bishop, came to Petaluma to visit Rev. Killingsworth. A few weeks later, Killingsworth, then eighty years old, gave one last sermon before leaving Petaluma for a new A.M.E. parish in Oregon, before returning to preach at the Bethel A.M.E. in Sacramento, where he died in 1872.[56]

Killingsworth was not replaced by a new pastor in Petaluma. Instead, the church appears to have operated under the supervision of the A.M.E. elder for Sonoma and Napa counties, with visiting ministers coming through from time to time. As he departed Petaluma, Killingworth appointed a group trustees —Lewis Barnes, Cooper Smith, Thomas Johnson, and Alex McFarland— to oversee all operations of the church.[57]

Three of the trustees—Barnes, Smith, and McFarland—owned homes on Fifth Street between E and F streets in town. The oldest among them, Alexander McFarland, was born into slavery in Tennessee in 1794 and brought to California by his owner in 1850, where he eventually purchased his freedom. McFarland and his wife Melvina, who was from Florida, married in Sonoma County in 1865 when McFarland was seventy, and adopted a daughter named Eliza.[58]

The next oldest, Lewis Barnes, was born into slavery at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, in 1801, sold twice on the auction block, and brought to California in the 1849 as a slave of a Mr. Cassidy, eventually working his way to freedom and settling in Petaluma in 1855 with his wife Peggy, who had originally been brought to Santa Rosa by her owners, the Overton family. “Uncle” or “Father” Barnes, as he was known around town, worked as a general laborer.[59] The two younger trustees were also general laborers.

Irwin Cooper Smith lived next door to McFarland on Fifth Street with his wife Elizabeth. Both were born slaves—he in North Carolina in 1831, and she in Georgia in 1830. Smith came to California during the Gold Rush to work for his owner in the mines. After two years, he was able to purchase his freedom. Thomas Johnson lived on Petaluma Boulevard South (then Third Street) with his wife Julianna and their three small children. Thomas had been born into slavery in Virginia in 1825, and Elizabeth in South Carolina in 1837. They settled in Petaluma in 1863.[60]

Although George Miller was no longer a trustee of the A.M.E. Church, he continued his efforts to advance Petaluma Blacks by serving as a conduit to larger Black organizations in the state. One of the most vital of these was the fraternal order of the Black Masons, whose membership rolls read like a who’s who of California Black leadership.[61] Miller was a member of the Olive Branch Lodge, which like other Black lodges, had descended from the Black Freemasons established for freed slaves in Boston during the War of Independence by a Black man named Prince Hall.

Prince Hall Lodge gathering, circa 1900 (photo courtesy of the Journal of African American History)

While the Prince Hall Lodges had been officially chartered by the Grand Lodge of England, they were still not recognized by the white Mason lodges in America a century later when Miller joined the Olive Branch Lodge, where he served as Deputy District Master for Petaluma.[62]

Miller was also a member of the Brannan Guard, a Black militia organized in San Francisco in 1866 by John Jones, James Riker, and Alexander G. Dennison. Volunteer militias had become popular in the country following the Civil War, serving as something of a national guard. The Brannan Guards were named after California pioneer Sam Brannan, who had helped to pay for their uniforms.[63] Comprised of forty-five members, they maintained an armory on Pacific Street in the city, and marched with white militias in parades on special occasions like Independence Day. They also staged their own an annual celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of each year.

In the summer of 1869, a white militia called the Hewston Guard had been commissioned in Petaluma by California’s governor, Henry Haight. Led by Captain James Armstrong, they were provided with an armory in the Hopper Building on Main Street opposite Penry Park.[64] That fall, George Miller decided to form a black militia he called the Colfax Guard, named for the newly elected U.S. vice-president, Schuyler Colfax.

Before becoming U.S. Grant’s running mate in the election of 1868, Colfax had served as Speaker of the House, where he helped guide through the congress both the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment protecting the civil rights of former slaves. (Speaker Colfax made a visit to Petaluma in 1865 to visit his stepfather’s brother from Indiana, Elias Matthews).[65]

U.S. Vice-president Schuyler Colfax (photo courtesy Getty Images)

Although not commissioned by Democratic Governor Haight, an openly white supremacist, Miller’s militia become the third Black unit of the Colfax Guard formed in the country that year, joining units already established in New Orleans and Annapolis, Maryland.[66]

On December 30, 1869, the Colfax Guard, joined by Petaluma’s Hewston Guard, inaugurated their  new armory on Washington Street with a “Flag Presentation” that featured a large brass band and presentations by both Captain Miller and his wife Margaret. The festivities were followed by a dinner and a dance that lasted until dawn, with music provided by Miller’s own quadrille, or square dancing, band.[67]

On April 1, 1870, the day after the Fifteenth Amendment had been ratified and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, Miller served as Marshal of the Day for the first formal celebration of the amendment held in the state of California. The festivities began with the Colfax Guard staging at noon in Hill Plaza a 30-gun salute—one gun for each state that had ratified the amendment—followed in the evening by what the Petaluma Argus called a “general jollification” by “the colored people of this city,” across the street from the plaza in Hinshaw Hall.

After the Petaluma Brass Band played to a packed hall, Rev. R.W. Johnson of the First Baptist Church offered a prayer that Blacks would use their newly acquired political power “to the glory and advancement of the whole country.” Miller then read aloud the amendment and a declaration of principles, before introducing Rev. Edward S. Lippitt, the former superintendent of schools who had since become the principal of his own private high school on D Street.[68]

In his oration, Lippitt was keen to distinguish between political and social rights, noting that “the mere exercise of the ballot was not a key to society, and no matter how far the freedom of the polls might be extended, yet individuality and social relations were not in the least compromised thereby.”

That had been a Republican theme throughout the battle for the 15th Amendment, with many Republicans denying that extension of the franchise conferred nor advanced social equality. Lippitt furthered the point, made by Rev. Johnson, that “the colored people” should educate their race up to the requirements of their new responsibilities, a theme that was expressed in editorials and speeches elsewhere during the next few weeks.

Postcard map of Petaluma, 1870 (Illustration Sonoma County Library)

Weeks later the Colfax Guard also joined in San Francisco’s Fifteenth Amendment celebration, which featured the singing talents of Petaluma’s Purnell sisters, Aralena and Louisa. When election time rolled around in the fall of 1870, George Miller and thirteen other Black men in Petaluma cast their votes for the first time.[69]

A year later, on May 10, 1871, Miller learned the limitations of his new voting status when Petaluma constable Frank Adel happened upon his barbershop one day during a lull in customers. Adel, who was having trouble finding jurors for a criminal case, decided to give the Fifteenth Amendment a test and summon Miller to jury duty. Miller marched into the courtroom and took his seat to the gasps of other jurors. Someone yelled out, “Nigger in the pit, put him out!” After a few preliminary questions by the deputy district attorney, Miller was issued a peremptory challenge and sent on his way.[70]

Call in The Elevator to 1870 Color Convention of the Pacific Coast, featuring George W. Miller as President of the Executive Committee

Soon after that event, George Miller and other Black parents in Petaluma began to lobby the school district to reopen the “colored school.” The town’s Black population had grown to forty-four, twenty-two of whom were school-age children.[71] George Miller, whose wife Catherine died in the mid-1860s, had remarried in 1868 to a twenty-year old woman from San Francisco named Margaret Nugent.[72] In addition to the four school-age children living in the house from his first wife, Miller and his second wife Margaret had added two infants, Richard Hoddie Miller, born in 1869, and James Harris Miller born on January 1, 1871 (James would die in 1872, one day after his first birthday).[73]

Brooklyn Colored School in Oakland, Mary J. Sanderson teacher, 1870 (photo in the public domain)

There was also a sixth child living in the house, a white boy named Richard Page Jessup, that the Millers had taken in as something of a foster child. Jessup was born in 1866 out of wedlock as the result of an affair in Marysville between a white couple, Gershom Page Jessup, the local manager of the California Stage Company, and Josie Landis, a local nineteen year old woman attending the Mills Seminary boarding school in Santa Cruz. Without the knowledge of Landis’ parents, Jessup took her out of school in her last moth of pregnancy to live at the home of a black woman in San Francisco named Mrs. Abigail Nugent. Nugent, who had arrived in San Francisco from Philadelphia in 1856, was a midwife and nurse to women in the “400 Club,” the city’s social elite.

A few weeks after giving birth to a son, Landis returned to Marysville, where within months she wedded a local dentist. Gershom Jessup, who the year before had inherited a small fortune from his deceased brother Richard, vice-president of the California Steam Navigation company, paid Abigail Nugent to continue raising his son, visiting him frequently at Nugent’s home. Nugent, a prominent member and donor of San Francisco’s Bethel A.M.E. church, had the child baptized in the church by Rev. T. M. D. Ward, and brought him up assisted by her eighteen-year old daughter Margaret, an only child.[74]

Two years later, Margaret Nugent wed the widower George Miller, and joined him living with his children in Petaluma. In 1869, she gave birth to the couple’s first son, Richard “Hoddie” Miller.[75]

Richard “Hoddie” Miller, 1887 (photo courtesy of Sharon mcGriff Payne)

That same year, Margaret’s mother, brought Richard Jessup, a sickly child, to live with the Millers in Petaluma, hoping to improve his health. Mrs. Nugent lived with the Millers as well, working on fundraising for the local A.M.E. Church, before returning to San Francisco in 1871.[76] She left behind Richard Jessup, who had his own separate room in the Miller home, to be raised among the Millers’ children, with Gershom Jessup continuing to provide monthly financial support. [77]

In 1871, George Miller and other African American parents in Petaluma succeeded in convincing J.W. Anderson, who had replaced Rev. Edward S. Lippitt as the town’s school superintendent, to their cause. “The colored citizens,” Anderson said, “are clamoring for a school, and should have one.” The school district rented a dilapidated house on Fifth Street between D and E streets to house the “colored school,” and in January of 1872 hired A.G.W. Davis, a young man just beginning his teaching career, to teach the twelve African American students who had enrolled. That year Petaluma joined nineteen other “colored schools” in California teaching a total of 510 students.[78]

The Millers enrolled their three younger children in the “colored school,” as well their white foster child, Richard Jessup, who attended under the name Richard Miller. The next year Jessup transferred to the white school, but after a week of being taunted by the other students, he withdrew, after which he was homeschooled by his foster mother Margaret Miller.

Margaret Miller, 1886 (photo courtesy of Sharon McGriff Payne)

At the start of the school year in July, 1873, eighteen-year old Miss Rose Haskins was appointed teacher of the “colored school.”[79] Haskin lived just half a block away from the “colored school,” in the house her father, English contractor and stonemason Robert Haskins, had built on the southeast corner of 5th and E streets. Enrollment that year totaled seventeen students, two of whom were Chinese.[80] In July, 1874, the school district, after complaints about the school’s ramshackle condition, moved the “colored school” into a former private school at the northeast corner of Fifth and D streets.[81]

During Rose Haskins’ first semester in the fall of 1873, the Petaluma Argus, a weekly newspaper edited by Henry L. Weston under the motto “equal rights and equal justice to all men,” began a campaign employed by other Republican newspapers in the state of questioning the cost efficiency of maintaining a separate school for such a small number of Black students (the Radical Republican Party, of which Weston was a member, were abolitionists supportive of expanding civil rights, including school integration, while the southern-dominated Democratic Party, for which Santa Rosa’s Sonoma Democrat newspaper served as the county organ, was strongly opposed to granting such rights).

Petluma Argus editor, Henry L. Weston (Photo Sonoma County Library)

Weston pointed out that, given Haskins’ salary and rent for a separate school building, the average annual cost of educating a student in the “colored school” was $35, as opposed to $12 in Petaluma’s white schools ($1,100 and $370, respectively, in early 21st century currency). Denouncing school segregation as an abomination, Weston declared that the “colored school” must soon “fade away before the ceaseless march of progress and civilization.”[82]

George Miller, meanwhile, remained actively engaged in that ceaseless march on a statewide level. In November of 1871, he and other members of the Colored Convention’s Educational Committee met in Stockton to draw up a petition calling for all school children, regardless of color, to be admitted to common public schools.[83]

Although they succeeded in getting two bills passed by Republicans—then the progressive party—in the state assembly, both were defeated by Democrats—then the conservative, proslavery party—in the state senate. In the spring of 1872, Miller again gathered with the Educational Committee in San Francisco, and under the leadership of Elevator newspaper editor Philip Bell, decided to put a test case before the California Supreme Court.[84]

The case was initiated by Mrs. Harriet A. Ward on behalf of her daughter Mary Frances. After the closing of a “colored school” on Broadway Street in San Francisco, Mary Frances was faced with having to walk a long distance to the nearest available “colored school” across town. Instead, Harriet A. Ward applied for admission of her daughter to the nearby white Broadway School. Her application was denied by Principal Noah F. Flood.

The case of Ward v. Flood became the first school segregation case to go before the state Supreme Court. In May, 1874, the court ruled on the case, upholding California’s School Law of “separate but equal” facilities for Blacks and Native American children, but also affirming that, based upon the civil rights extended by the Fourteenth Amendment ratified in 1868, the education of Black and Native American children must be provided for in separate schools upon the written application of parents of at least ten such children. If the trustees of the schools failed to do so, the children had to be admitted into the white schools.[85]

For the members of the Educational Committee, the ruling overall was disappointing, but it also represented an incremental victory in that it clearly mandated the public education of Black children, including admitting them into white schools if need be. With the ruling in hand, committee members turned their efforts to lobbying school districts to abolish “colored schools.” They were helped by the Recession of 1873, during which school districts, strapped for funding, opted to enroll black students rather than fund two separate school systems. By 1875, San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland, and Vallejo had done so.[86] But not Petaluma.

As the school year began in July, 1875, Rose Haskins was promoted to a teaching position at the Brick School, Petaluma’s main grammar school for white students, at Fifth and B streets. She was replaced at the “colored school” by her cousin, Miss Annie Camm, the daughter of local English contractor William Camm.[87] A few months into Camm’s tenure, Henry Jones, a native of Massachusetts who had recently opened a new barbershop on Washington Street, complained about Camm’s competency in teaching his son at the ungraded “colored school.” He requested that Principal Martin E. Cooke Munday of the Brick School admit his son to the white school.[88]

Petaluma Brick School at the corner of Fifth and B streets, 1900 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

Munday, a young leader of the local Democratic Party, claimed to have examined Jones’ son—a claim Jones subsequently denied—and found him to be unqualified for entry into the Brick school. Privately, he told Jones that “no colored child should be admitted as long as he was principal of the school.” Jones, who pointed out that he paid school taxes just like everyone else in town, told the Petaluma Argus that he was “just looking for some justice.”

Instead of returning his son to the “colored school,” Jones placed him in a private school.[89] (Although this incident occurred in 1875, it was not made public until 1877 when the Argus reported it in an effort to embarrass Principal Munday, who at the time was running for county school superintendent. Munday ended up losing to the race to the Republican candidate, but subsequently went on to be elected to the state assembly and then to mount an unsuccessful campaign for Lieutenant Governor.)[90]

In the fall of 1876, a new weekly newspaper, the Petaluma Courier, was launched by two leading Democrats in town, publisher William F. Shattuck, and editor Edward S. Lippitt, the former school supervisor. Lippitt, who had formerly served as chairman of the Sonoma County Republican Party, was a longtime progressive abolitionist and supporter of the local Black community.

Following ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, George Miller and other African Americans had paraded with a band to Lippitt’s house, where they presented him with two silver spoons adorned with Lady Liberty in recognition of his “fearless and able advocacy of their rights, and of universal suffrage.”[91]

Lippitt house at Sixth & D streets, 1959 (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1876 however, Lippitt, distressed and angered by what he considered the Republican Party’s retribution against the South during the Reconstruction Era, switched his allegiances to the pro-South Democratic Party. He and Shattuck launched the Courier as an advocacy organ for Democratic candidates running in the 1876 election, including presidential candidate Samuel Tilden. They wasted no time attacking the Republican positions held by Henry Weston’s Argus, labeling the paper a “negro-worshipping sheet” for its stand on integrating Black students into the white schools.[92]

(Later in life, Lippitt wrote that although he believed in freeing the slaves, he did not expect Blacks to be granted the vote until they had been properly educated to execute it, which he suspected may take generations; he deplored passage of the Fifteenth Amendment as merely a Republican political maneuver to humiliate the South.)[93]

Edward S. Lippitt, 1910 (photo Sonoma County Library)

One result of the newspaper war waged between the Argus and the Courier in 1876 is that the “colored school” became a polarizing topic. Ezekiel Denman, one of the town’s most prominent and wealthiest men, was defeated in his 1876 re-election bid to the Board of Education after voicing support for eliminating the “colored school.”[94] The Board’s stubborn refusal to abolish the “colored school” went viral in 1877, drawing ridicule from newspapers from as far away as San Francisco (“an ante-rebellion spirit of caste is still alive and dominate in Petaluma”) and Pennsylvania (“a great blotch on the face of human progress”).[95]

The presidential election of 1876 was undermined by voter fraud, resulting in an deal between Republicans and Democrats to allow Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to ascend to the presidency, on the condition that he formally end Reconstruction in the South. The end of Reconstruction reversed whatever gains Blacks had made since the Civil War, ushering in an era of Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, and lynchings.

During this period, many Blacks living in Petaluma were drawn away to more vibrant Black communities in Oakland and in Vallejo, the latter of which offered jobs in the nearby Mare Island shipyards.[96]

Vallejo wharf, 1860s (photo in the public domain)

By the spring of 1877, enrollment in the “colored school” had dropped to four students, which Henry Weston was quick to point out in the Argus raised the annual cost per student to $125, as opposed to $12 for students in the white schools.[97] Still, Petaluma’s Board of Education held its ground.

The following spring, Miss Annie Camm resigned from teaching at the “colored school” in order to get married.[98] She was replaced by Miss Mary C. Waterbury.[99] By 1880, Petaluma’s “colored school” was down to merely one student who was being taught by a Black teacher named Miss Louisa Dickson.[100] The population census year listed only seventeen Blacks living in Petaluma.[101]

In April, 1880, the California state legislature voted to abolish “colored schools,” citing the expense of providing a separate education system for a relatively small number of children. They passed a new law requiring that schools be open “for the admission of all children.”[102] At the beginning of the new school year in July 1880, E.S. Lippitt’s Petaluma Courier, unwilling to acknowledge the new law, spuriously reported that the “colored school” had been discontinued after enrollment had dwindled down to but one student.”[103]

In 1882, there were four Black students enrolled in the newly integrated Petaluma public schools. By 1885, there were none.[104]

As the size of Petaluma’s Black community declined at the end of the Reconstruction Era, the local A.M.E. Church lost what remained of its vibrancy. After the A.M.E.’s final appointment of Rev. Fielding Smithea to the church in 1878, it appears the church stopping offering Sunday services altogether.[105] In 1879, William Zartman, a prominent business leader in town who owned a carriage factory across the street from the church as well as property adjacent to it, filed a city nuisance petition against the “colored folks church,” signed by a dozen neighbors.[106]

William Zartman’s Blacksmith, Wagon, and Carriage Shop, corner of Howard Street and Western Avenue, 1877 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1885, the church’s two surviving trustees, Alexander McFarlane and Irwin Cooper Smith, sold the church building and property to Zartman for $300 ($8,000 in early 21st century currency), distributing the proceeds from the sale to other A.M.E churches in the state.[107]

White men’s fondness for their Black barbers didn’t last. The reasons were varied: The temperance movement and the evangelical religious revivals of the “Second Great Awakening” caused many customers to frown upon the barbershop’s liquor-fueled conviviality. The most important explanation for whites’ anxiety about the shop, however, involved Black barbers’ growing wealth.

For many, the success of leading Black barbers seemed to threaten the social order. As white customers were shaved by men with fortunes worth many thousands of dollars, some must have wondered who was serving whom. Meanwhile, at the other end of the social spectrum, immigrant barbers—many of them Germans—catered to a growing population of working-class customers: men too poor, and in many cases too resentful of Black barbers’ success, to patronize the best Black-owned barbershops. A handful of elite Black barbers continued to prosper, but the days when Blacks dominated the trade were coming to an end.[108]

Frank Miller, who by the 1870s had become Petaluma’s most prosperous Black citizens with property holdings of fifteen hundred dollars and a personal estate worth four hundred dollars ($38,000 and $10,000, respectively, in early 21st century currency), was working in 1878 as a barber in the Union Hotel, located at the southwest corner of Western Avenue and Main Street. By the time the hotel was moved in 1881 to B and Main streets to make way for construction of the new Masonic Lodge building, it appears Miller and his wife Charlotte, who he had married in 1871, relocated to San Francisco where they managed a boarding house together.[110]

George W. Miller did not live to see any of this—the decline of Black barbershops in town, California’s integration of public schools, the end of Reconstruction, nor the closing of the A.M.E. church he had helped to start. In the fall of 1873, after returning from one of his regular trips to San Francisco with his wife Margaret, and preparing for the upcoming Colored Citizens Convention to be held in Sacramento, Miller unexpectedly died on October 20 at the age of forty-eight.

Illustration of a Colored Convention held in 1876 (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper)

His funeral, held at St. John’s Episcopal Church in town, was overseen by his fellow barber Frank Miller. The pallbearers included Santa Rosa barber John Richards, Napa Barber Joseph Hatton, and fellow Brannan Guard, Major Alexander Dennison, who had recently moved to Petaluma.[111]

A few weeks after the funeral, Frank Miller and Alexander Dennison traveled to Sacramento to represent Sonoma County at the Colored Citizens of California Convention in place of George Miller.[112]

******


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Advertisement, Sonoma County Journal: August 25, 1855; September 5, 1856. “Deaths: George Miller,” Pacific Appeal, October 25, 1873.

[2] Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[3] Rudolph Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 15-19; Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 71.

[4] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 42;“Proceedings of the First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California, Held at Sacramento Nov. 21st and 22nd in the Colored Methodist Church, 1855.” http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/265

[5] Douglas W. Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

[6] Sean Trainor, “The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard,” The Atlantic, January 20, 2014.

[7] Sean Trainor, “The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard,” The Atlantic, January 20, 2014.

[8] Douglas Walter Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers on Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009). J. Gordon Melton, J. Gordon, A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism (MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) pp. 8–11.

[9] Herbert G. Ruffin II, “The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865),” February 9, 2009. BlackPast.com; Proceedings of the First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California, p.16, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/files/original/e2ddec1776e38c21ee7782d6b4d96eba.pdf

[10] Gaye LeBaron, et. Al., Santa Rosa: A Nineteen Century Town (Santa Rosa, CA: Historia, LTD, 1985), p. 87.“State Convention of the Colored People of California, San Francisco, October, 1857.” Coloredconventions.org. http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/267. ; “State Convention of the Colored People of California, San Francisco, October, 1856,” p.133, Coloredconventions.org.https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/266.

[11] Adair Heig, History of Petaluma,: A California River Town, (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 47.

[12] Sean Carroll, Sonoma County Early African Americans, paper for California State University, Hayward, 2008. Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library.

[13] Mike McPhate, “California’s Black Slaves and the Myth of Free Soil,” California Sun, January 23, 2019. Californiasun.com.

[14] Journal of the Eighth Session of the Legislature of the State of California, Volume 9, Part 1858, p. 623; Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009). Pgs. 17-18.

[15] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) pgs. 59-61.

[16] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25.

[17] J. Gordon Melton, J. Gordon, A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism (MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) pp. 8–11; Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, editors, The Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840-1865, Volume 2 (Temple University Press, 1979).

[18] Petaluma Argus: Humboldt Shaving Saloon Advertisement, December 15, 1863; “Passing Away,” July 30, 1862.

[19] Advertisement for “Frank Miller’s Hairdressing Saloon,” Petaluma Argus, January 23, 1863.

[20] https://blackvoicenews.com/2008/07/31/mirror-of-the-times-founded-1857/

[21] “Agents,” Pacific Appeal, January 17, 1863.

[22] “Communications,” Pacific Appeal, April 26, 1862.

[23] Advertisement for the Santa Rosa Shaving Saloon, Sonoma Democrat, June 20, 1861.

[24] “Our Principal Taxpayers,” Petaluma Courier, January 31, 1878. “Death of John Richards,” Petaluma Argus, May 2, 1879.

[25] “Arrivals,” The Elevator, September 20, 1873.

[26] “Emancipation Grand Festival,” Pacific Appeal, July 26, 1862.

[27] Celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1st, 1863, at Platt’s Hall,”  Pacific Appeal, January 17, 1863.

[28] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 24. “Correspondence,” Pacific Appeal, December 12, 1863. The Elevator: “Santa Rosa,”, July 4, 1865 (The Santa Rosa “colored school’ was entering its second semester in July, indicating the first started in January of 1865). “School Examination in Santa Rosa,” February 16, 1866.

[29] Petaluma Argus: “School for Colored Children,” December 16, 1863; “Opened,” January 13, 1864; Pacific Appeal: “Correspondence,” December 12, 1863, “Married,” June 27, 1863, “Arrivals from the Interior,” February 13, 1864.

[30] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25.

[31] “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864; Lippitt’s role is speculated given the silver spoons presented to him by Miller and other A.M.E. members in 1870 for his advocacy in helping them attain their civil rights.

[32] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 25; “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864. (Eight students is an estimate–it’s unknown exactly how many students were in attendance during the Petaluma’s “colored school’s” first year. George Miller had four school-age children. In 1867 and 1868, Petaluma’s annual school census counted eight black school-age children between the ages of five and fifteen in town, out of a total of 627 children in the city.)

[33] “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864.

[34] “Trip to Petaluma,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1864.

[35] City of Petaluma Deed Records, Lot 276, Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library, Ref. 979.418.732. The church appears on the 1865 Stratton Map of Petaluma, at which time the lot it sat upon was legally owned by a homesteader named Thomas Craine, who owned a number of the subdivided lots in the area known as the Bassett Addition. Craine sold the church lot in 1866 to John Little John, who, in turn, transferred ownership to the A.M.E. Church, as recognized by the city as of January 1, 1867. It’s possible the church rented the building prior to that. (In his book, Petaluma’s Architectural Heritage, Dan Petersen notes that the houses on Howard Street between Western Avenue and Harris Street were typical examples of the western Greek Revival vernacular built for early residents. He dates the house at circa 1870).

[36] California State Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Sacramento on the 25, 26, 27, 28 of October 1865. P. 14., coloredconventions.org.

[37] California State Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Sacramento on the 25, 26, 27, 28 of October 1865. Coloredconventions.org.

[38] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 158. “The Appointments of the A. M. E. Church for the Conference,” Pacific Appeal, November 8, 1862; “The Appointments of the A. M. E. Church for the Conference,” Pacific Appeal, September 12, 1863; 1860 U.S. Census, Sacramento, California; 1861 Sacramento City Directory.

[39] Petaluma Argus: “Notice,” November 30, 1865; “Campbell’s Chapel, November 30, 1865. “Santa Rosa,” The Elevator, July 4, 1865, the first newspaper mention of Rev. Killingsworth at the A.M.E. Church in Petaluma.

[40] An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p.42.

[41] Rudolph Lapp, Afro-Americans in California (San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser Publishing Company, 1987).

[42] “Proceedings of California Convention of Colored Citizens, 1865” http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/268, pgs. 14, 24. (no mention of Santa Rosa’s colored school” in Killingsworth’s report to the convention).

[43] Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, editors, The Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840-1865, Volume 2 (Temple University Press, 1979); Herbert G. Ruffin II, “The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865),” February 9, 2009. BlackPast.com

[44] Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction(The University of North Carolina Press; Reprint edition, 2015)

[45] “Frightful Explosion,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, August 30, 1866.

[46] Petaluma Argus: “School Census,” July 4, 1867, July 2, 1868, July 1, 1869, June 18, 1879.

[47] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 252-253. “Petaluma,” The Elevator, November 1, 1867.

[48] Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 29.

[49] “Cowardly,” Petaluma Argus, April 30, 1868.

[50] Advertisement for Miss Purnell from Philadelphia, Petaluma Argus, December 24, 1868.

[51] “Acknowledgments,” The Elevator, January 29. 1869. “Remittances received from . . . Z. F. Purnell, Petaluma.”

[52] “Remember It,” Petaluma Argus, March 25, 1869; Site of Hinshaw Hall: “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror, Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 7, 1861.

[53] The Elevator: “Personal,” February 26, 1868; “Letter to the Editor, Miss Purnell’s Concert,” December 4, 1868. “Deaths,” Pacific Appeal, November 30, 1877. “A Dramatic Novelty,” San Francisco Examiner, November 22, 1870.

[54] Pacific Appeal: advertisement for concert, August 12, 1871; advertisement for board house, September 2, 1871; “Brilliant Fifteenth Amendment Celebration,” May 2, 1874; “Personal,” December 21, 1872; “Deaths,” November 30, 1877. The Elevator: “Letter to the Editor,” December 4, 1868; “Personal,” February 26, 1869; “Freedom’s Jubilee,” March 18,1870. San Francisco Examiner: “A Dramatic Novelty,” November 22, 1870. The Evening Telegraphy (Philadelphia): “Musicians,” March 30, 1867; “A Political Rumpus,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 18, 1877.

[55] The Elevator: “Petaluma,” November 1, 1867; “Correspondence of the Elevator,” February 19, 1869; California State Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Sacramento on the 25, 26, 27, 28 of October 1865. P. 14. http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/268

[56] “Lecture,” Grass Valley Daily Union, February 15, 1871; “General Dispatches,” Grass Valley Daily Union, December 3, 1871; 1871 California Voter Registration, Nevada County; “Died,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 28, 1872;

[57] Petaluma Argus, “Lecture,” May 20, 1869; “If a Man Die, Shall He Live Again?” October 19, 1872; “Religious Notice,” March 25, 1871; “Bishop Black at A.M.E. Church,” August 14, 1878. Legal Agreement by Killingsworth Assigning Church Trustees, May 18, 1869, Sonoma County Archives; “Zion Conference Appointments, The Elevator, April 7, 1877. (Note: McFarland is not listed in the May 18, 1869 legal agreement, but is listed as a trustee on the city deed records for the church entered January 25, 1869; he also is listed as a church trustee along with Cooper Smith the recorded sale of the church property October 3, 1885—from deed records at the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library).

[58] “Uncle Aleck Dead,” Petaluma Argus, August 4, 1886. “Melvina & Alexander McFarland,” Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library archives.

[59] “Death of a Septuagenarian,” Petaluma Argus, January 21, 1871.

[60] Katherine Rinehart research papers, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library archives. Regarding Cooper Smith: Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 42.

[61] Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 42.

[62] The Elevator: “Masonic Notice,” December 21, 1872; “Died,” October 25, 1873. “Prince Hall Freemasonary,” Freemason Information, freemasoniformation.com

[63] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing, 1919) p. 146.

[64] “Commissions,” San Francisco Examiner, July 19, 1869; Petaluma Argus: “Target Excursion and Ball,” October 23, 1869. “Target Practice,” October 30, 1869.

[65] Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p.133. Ovando James Hollister, Life of Schuyler Colfax (Funk & Wagnalls, 1886) p. 257; Schuyler Colfax, 17th Vice President (1869-1873), https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/vice-president/VP_Schuyler_Colfax.htm.

[66] “Processiana,” New Orleans Cresent, September 13, 1868; “The Grand Demonstration,” New Orleans Republic, September 15, 1868; Miscellaneous,” The Daily Standard (Raleigh, NC), October 18, 1869.

[67] Petaluma Argus: “Flag Presentation,” January 1, 1869; “The Picnic,” July 9 1870.

[68] Petaluma Journal & Argus: “Celebration,”, February 25, 1870; “Jubilant,” April 2, 1870; “Celebration of Our Colored Citizens,” April 9, 1870; Ralph E. Shaffer, “California Reluctantly Implements the Fifteenth Amendment: White Californians Respond to Black Suffrage,” Cal Poly Pomona, 2020. https://www.cpp.edu/class/history/faculty/documents/shaffer15thamend.pdf

[69] Petaluma Argus, “They Voted,” April 23, 1870; Registration of the Domicile Inhabitants, County of Sonoma, 1872: George Miller listed as first registering to vote in 1870.

[70] “Nigger in the Pit! Put Him Out!” Petaluma Argus, May 13, 1871.

[71] 1870 Population Census.

[72] “Married,” The Elevator, June 26, 1868.

[73] 1870 census records; “Died,” Petaluma Argus, January 6, 1972.

[74] “Young Jessup Wins,” Napa Register Weekly, July 5, 1889; “Jessup Contest,” Napa Register Weekly, September 19, 1890; “Estate of Gershom P. Jessup, Deceased,”  Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, by California Superior court (San Francisco Probate dept., James Vincent Coffey, Bancroft-Whitney, 1909). Pp. 476-509.

[75] “Deaths,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 27, 1902.

[76] “Resolutions of Thanks,” Pacific Appeal, September 2, 1871;

[77] The 1870 census doesn’t list Richard Jessup in the Miller house but instead a child born in 1866 named “Richard Robinson,” most likely an alias to hide Jessup’s identity from his birth mother).

[78] Petaluma Argus: “Our Public Schools,” June 3, 1871; “Our Public Schools,” January 6, 1872; “Educational,” March 9, 1872; “The Public Schools,” July 20, 1872.

[79] Petaluma Argus: “Our Public Schools,” July 18, 1873;

[80] Petaluma Argus, “The Colored School,” November 7, 1873.

[81] Petaluma Argus: “Educational Notes,” July 17, 1874; “Colored Schools Elsewhere,” April 27, 1877. (E.S. Lippitt confirms that the “colored school’ was on the northeast corner of Fifth and B streets in An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt, p. 42.)

[82] Petaluma Argus: “Our ‘Colored Schools,’” December 8, 1876.

[83] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) pgs. 178-179.

[84] The Elevator: “Educational Public Meeting at Bethel Church,” April 27, 1872; Address of the Educational Committee, May 11, 1872.

[85] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/

[86] Delilah Leontium Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing,1919) p. 180-182; Jo Ann Williamson, Lori Rhodes, Michael Dunson, “Chapter 7 A Selected History of Social Justice in Education,” Review of Research in Education, November 15, 2016, Vol. 31 (1), pp. 195–224; “1874 Ward V. Flood, Blackpast.org, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ward-v-flood-1874/

[87] Petaluma Argus, “Educational Notes,” June 25, 1875; “Educational Notes,” July 9, 1875.

[88] The Colored School,” Petaluma Courier, April, 12, 1877. Petaluma Argus: “Cozy Barber Shop,” April 23, 1875; “Died,” September 3, 1879; “Our Colored School,”

[89] Petaluma Courier: “The Colored School,” April, 12, 1877; “Letter from a Citizen,” April 19, 1877. Petaluma Argus: “The Colored School,” April 6, 1877; “The Colored School,” April 20, 1877; “Personalities,” August 31, 1877;  “How is This?” August 24, 1877.

[90] “The Election,” Petaluma Courier, September 6, 1877. “In the Assembly,” San Francisco Examiner, January 28, 1884.

[91] “A Splendid Testimony,” Petaluma Argus, June 25, 1870.

[92] Petaluma Courier, “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877.

[93] An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p. 43.

[94] Petaluma Argus: “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877.

[95] Petaluma Argus: “Our ‘Colored Schools,’” December 22, 1876; “Educational Items,” August 13, 1875; “Our Colored School,” August 11, 1876; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” May 18, 1877; “A Pennsylvania Opinion,” May 18, 1876.

[96] Sharon McGriff-Payne, John Grider’s Century: African Americans in Solano, Napa, and Sonoma Counties from 1845 to 1925 (iUniverse, 2009), p. 58.

[97] Petaluma Argus: March 30, 1877; “Our Colored School,” March 23, 1877.

[98] “Our Public Schools,” Petaluma Argus, June 14, 1878 (listed her as teaching for two months the spring). “Married,” Petaluma Courier, July 18, 1878.

[99] Petaluma Courier, “Election of Teachers,” June 19, 1878; “Teachers Elected,” January 8, 1879.

[100] Petaluma Courier, “The Public Schools,” June 18, 1879; History Of Sonoma County, Sonoma County, CA (Archives History – Books …..Petaluma Township, Part 3 1880).

[101] 1880 Population Census, Sonoma Country History and Genealogy.

[102] Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 25.

[103] “Local Dots,” Petaluma Courier, July 21, 1880.

[104] Petaluma Argus: “School Census Report,” June 2, 1882;  “School Census,” June 6, 1885.

[105] “Sixteen Volume: A.M.E. Appointments, Pacific Appeal, August 10, 1878. Per the City of Petaluma Deed Records, Lot 276, Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library, Ref. 979.418.732: Sold on October 3, 1885 by two trustees of the AME, a religious society not incorporated; includes a small frame structure; states it has been many years since any religious services were held, and that but four or five members of the society remain; remains of the sale to be extended to other A.M.E. churches throughout the state. Last service listed in the Petaluma Argus was August 14, 1878, when Bishop Black of Baltimore preached at the A.M.E. Church.

[106] “Petition of Wm Zartman et al.,” February 24, 1879, Sonoma County History and Genealogy Library archives.

[107] City of Petaluma Deed Records, Lot 276, Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library, Ref. 979.418.732.

[108] Sean Trainor, “The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard,” The Atlantic, January 20, 2014; Douglas Walter Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers on Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009).

[109]

[110] “Married,” Petaluma Argus, October 28, 1871. “Peggy’s Pecilings,” Petaluma Courier, May 13, 1891. McKenney’s District Directory for 1878-9 of Yolo, Solano, Napa, Lake, Marin, and Sonoma Counties, p. 274, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library: Miller as listed as working in the Union Hotel, which at the time had a barbershop operated by Charles Whitehead, called Whitehead Shaving Saloon); it’s possible that Miller was working for Whitehad. “Miller and wife running board house . . .” Katherine Rinehart, biography of Frank V. Miller, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.

[111] “Deaths: George Miller,” Pacific Appeal, October 25, 1873. “Grand Ball.” The Elevator, March 28, 1874 (one of many listing for Alexander Dennsion representing Petaluma).

[112] “Call for a State Convention,” Pacific Appeal, November 15, 1873. “Pacific Coast Dispatches,” San Francisco Examiner, November 26, 1873.

[113] “Estate of Gershom P. Jessup, Deceased,”  Reports of Decisions in Probate, Volume 2, by California Superior court (San Francisco Probate dept., James Vincent Coffey, Bancroft-Whitney, 1909). Pp. 476-509.

[114] “Dancing Party,” Napa Register Weekly, November 30, 1883; “Real Estate Transfers,” Napa Register Weekly, March 5, 1885; “Local Brevities, Napa Register Weekly, April 1, 1886; Local Brevities, Napa Register Weekly, August 5, 1887.

[115] “Jessup Jr Wins,” Napa Register Weekly, March 9, 1888; “Richard Jessup’s Money,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 11, 1893;“Death Comes to Senator Mahoney,” San Francisco Examiner, December 24, 1897.

[116] “Local Briefs,” Napa Valley Register, January 17, 1890; “Personal,” Napa Valley Register, August 14, 1891; “Letters,” The Sacramento Record Union, October 11, 1897.

[117] “Death of Edward Hatton,” Napa Register Weekly, May 11, 1897; “Deaths,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 9, 1897; “Deaths,” Napa Valley Register, August 27, 1902; “Deaths,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 27, 1902; “Deaths,” San Francisco Examiner, December 28, 1928.

The Secret Life of a Petaluma Shoeshine Man

Henry Chenault’s Unknown Role in 1917 Houston Race Revolt

Henry Chenault at his shoeshine stand outside the Arcade Barbershop, 18 Western Avenue, 1955 (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Rain was falling the night of August 23, 1917, when 150 Black soldiers marched on the city of Houston. They were protesting the inhumane treatment they had received from residents and police, including the brutal beating that day of two soldiers by white policemen. By the end of the evening, 20 people would be dead, 16 of them white, resulting in one of the largest court-martials in American history and, ultimately, the death of 19 Black soldiers by hanging.1

Henry Chenault was among an additional ten soldiers scheduled to be hung. At the last minute, President Woodrow Wilson commuted their sentences to life imprisonment, later reduced to 20 years. Chenault ended up serving 13 years of hard labor at Leavenworth Federal Prison. After his release, he made his way to Petaluma, where he opened a shoeshine stand in the early 1930s.2

Thanks to Chenault’s engaging charm, his sidewalk stand—first on Main Street and then Western Avenue across from Andresen’s Tavern—quickly became a popular local crossroads.

Henry Chenault’s empty shoeshine stand outside the Arcade Barbershop beside Pedroni’s Delicatessen, late 1940s (photo courtesy of Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)

For sports enthusiasts, the stand was a mecca to stop at and check the radio—always tuned to a ball game—for the latest score and Chenault’s play-by-play commentary. Among downtown merchants, it served the city’s “second chamber of commerce.” To newcomers it was an unofficial welcome center, stocked with brochures and Chenault’s recommendations of places to go and things to see. For local politicians, many of whom relied upon Chenault as a trusted advisor, it was a spot to keep their fingers on the pulse of the community.3

Street sign outside Henry Chenault’s shoestand, painted Lew Barber (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

With his uncanny ability to recall names, dates, and scraps of street conversation, Chenault was said to be on a first-name basis with nine out of ten people who passed by. During Petaluma’s suburban housing boom in the 1950s and 60s, as the city’s population more than tripled to 25,000, that became increasingly important. A personalized greeting from Chenault was reassurance that Petaluma remained a place where people knew your name.4

Longtime Argus-Courier columnist Bill Soberanes attributed his popularity to a personal creed that if one looked for the good in others, the bad points would vanish.5

Henry Chenault and Petaluma Argus-Courier columnist Bill Soberanes at Chenault’s shoeshine stand, 1960s (photo courtesy of Petaluma Argus-Courier)

While that may have been self-fulfilling—Chenault never spoke of his incarceration, telling people he worked on the railroads after being discharged from the army—it didn’t erase Petaluma’s bad points when it came to race, no matter how much good Chenault brought out in the town.6 For most of his years in Petaluma, he was the city’s only Black businessman, as well as its sole Black homeowner.7

That wasn’t by accident. Unlike the blatant and violent Jim Crow racism he faced as a young soldier in Houston, the discrimination he found in Petaluma was largely covert, camouflaged behind a smiling face.

That didn’t stop Henry Chenault from trying.

Born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1895, Chenault quit school at 16 to apprentice as a teamster and stableman. Upon turning 18 in 1913, he enlisted for a three-year stint in the U.S. Army. Following his discharge, he settled in Oakland, where he met and married Willie Bernice Butler, originally of Red Bluff, adopting her five-year old son Samuel.

On May 24, 1917, almost two months after the United States entered World War I, Chenault was recalled to active duty, and assigned to the all-Black Third Battalion of the 24th Regiment. A unit of the famed Buffalo Soldiers, the 24th had charged up San Juan Ridge with Teddy Roosevelt and fought in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War.8

Soldiers of the Third Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment at Camp Logan, Texas, August 1917 (photo courtesy of the Houston Chronicle)

In late July, the Third Battalion was dispatched to Fort Logan, three miles outside of Houston, Texas, to guard the construction off a new aviation training facility.

Racial tensions were high across the country that summer. In July, white mobs in East St. Louis, Illinois, staged a labor riot, killing dozens of Blacks who had moved there from the South to work in war factories.

East St. Louis Race Riot headline, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Friday, July 6, 1917 (image public domain)

Houston officials and business leaders, looking to capitalize financially on the new army base, assured the military that Black soldiers would not pose any problem in their city.9

It proved to be an empty promise. A segregated state, Texas had a reputation for lynchings and racial violence. In Houston, the mere presence of Black men in uniform threatened the social hierarchy. A year before, a member of the 24th stationed in Del Rio, Texas, had been killed for no other reason than he was Black. It angered many white Texans to see Black men in uniform. They feared that if they weren’t kept in check, local Black civilians would begin demanding equal treatment for themselves.10

Soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment, Camp Logan, Texas, 1917 (photo public domain)

As a result, soldiers in the 24th endured an onslaught of racial slurs and discrimination from city residents, along with pistol whippings and arrest from police officers for violating such Jim Crow laws as sitting in “white only” sections on the streetcars and drinking from “white only” fountains.

Tensions came to a boil the night of August 23rd, after two white police officers assaulted a Black private for interfering in the arrest of a Black woman. When a Black M.P. patrolling the city asked the officers about the soldier’s whereabouts, he was hit with a pistol, shot at three times, and brutally beaten before being thrown in jail.

News filtered back to the 24th that police had killed the two soldiers and an armed white mob was headed for the camp. Shots rang out, sending the frightened soldiers scrambling for their rifles and shooting into surrounding buildings at suspected snipers. An examination of soldiers inflicted with bullet wounds that evening at the camp, found the bullets came from non-military rifles.

Camp Logan , Texas, 1917 (photo U.S. National Archives)

After forming a skirmish line to secure the camp, 150 soldiers began marching toward the Houston police station to hold the police accountable for their attacks on the two soldiers.

All in all, 20 people died in the soldiers’ uprising that evening, including 11 white residents, five policemen, and four Black soldiers killed by friendly fire. Afterward, 118 soldiers were court martialled for murder and mutiny. All pleaded not guilty. They included Chenault, who claimed to be sick that night, and so remained behind in camp.11

As the night was dark and rainy, identification of individual participants proved impossible. Instead, military investigators persuaded seven frightened soldiers to testify against their battalion mates in exchange for immunity. The resulting testimonies were conflicting.12 In Chenault’s case, an informant posing as a participant in the uprising, was planted in his cell to trick him into allegedly revealing his participation.13

The court martial of members of the 24th Infantry Regiment, 1917 (photo U.S. National Archives)

The men were tried in three groups. Despite inconclusive evidence, 19 black soldiers in the first group sentenced to hang, their executions expedited under the Articles of War, as the U.S was at war with Germany. Another 10 soldiers in the second group, including Chenault, were sentenced to death. After an outcry from the NAACP and high-ranking military officials, President Wilson, an avowed racist, reluctantly commuted their sentences to life in federal prison.

All told, 110 men of the 24th were convicted, 63 men of them received life sentences. Some soldiers served as many as 20 years before their release.14 Chenault was released after serving 13.15

Upon his release, Chenault reunited with his wife Willie, then working as a hotel manager in San Francisco. By 1933, they were renting a house in Petaluma, where he opened a shoeshine stand outside Damon and Oster’s, the town’s largest barbershop and beauty salon, on Main Street across from the town clock.

Damon & Oster’s Barbershop and Beauty Salon across from the town clock, in 1935 (photo Sonoma County Library )

Chenault soon became a Petaluma fixture with a signature technique of taking a deck of cards and placing individual cards in a customer’s shoe to keep the polish from rubbing off on the man’s socks.17 Behind his happy demeanor however, he struggled.

In 1937, he and his wife divorced, after which he became engaged to Cecily Clapp, a 30-year old Black woman working as a domestic for the Herold family of Herold Drug Store in town. In May 1938, Chenault purchased a house at 32 West Street. Three months later, Clapp died from an illness apparently brought on by sunstroke. Chenault accompanied her body by train to her hometown in Virginia.18

When World War II broke out, disrupting his shoeshine business, he took a job on Mare Island, where thousands of Blacks had immigrated from the South to work in the shipyards. In 1944, he married Bessie Thompson, a Kansas native who had moved to Petaluma from Eureka in 1939 with her young daughter Nancy Lou.19

After the war, Chenault opened a new shoeshine stand outside the Arcade Barbershop at 18 Western Avenue, where he would remain for the next twenty-one years.20

Henry Chenault at 18 Western Avenue stand, 1949 (photo courtesy of Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

He and his wife became actively engaged in politics, serving as officers of the Petaluma Democratic Club, and founding members of the Sonoma County NAACP. Established in Santa Rosa in 1955, the chapter elected Bessie Chenault as its first treasurer.21

While the county chapter supported the national civil rights movement—for example, picketing and boycotting the F.W. Woolworth’s Department Stores in Petaluma and Santa Rosa over the chain store’s refusal to serve Blacks at lunch counters in the South—their primary focus was securing equal treatment in jobs and housing for Sonoma County’s estimated 1,000 Black residents, most of whom lived either in rural areas or Santa Rosa’s South Park neighborhood.22

F.W. Woolworth Co. department store in Phoenix Building on Main Street in the mid-1950s (photo Sonoma County Library)

That included lobbying for the controversial California Fair Employment Practice Act, which barred businesses and labor unions from discriminating against job applicants because of race, color, or creed. After many legislative defeats, it was signed into law in 1959.23

They also pressed for the California Fair Housing Act of 1963, which made it unlawful to discriminate against home buyers and renters.

In 1960, a federal commission on civil rights found Petaluma had only one home owned by a Black family—that of Henry and Bessie Chenault at 32 West Street.24

The Chenault home, 32 West Street, purchased in 1938 (2021 photo by John Sheehy)

The Chenaults’ daughter, Mary Lou, was Petaluma High School’s only Black student when she graduated in 1950. Santa Rosa Junior College, which she went on to attend, was only marginally better in terms of student diversity.25

The commission determined Petaluma’s lack of Black residents was due to exclusionary housing practices. They pointed to a cabal of Sonoma County bankers, real estate agents, developers and neighborhood groups who blackballed and financially threatened anyone attempting to sell or rent property to Blacks.26

Such exclusionary practices were reinforced by formal housing policies. In 1927, the National Association of Real Estate Boards championed racial covenants, creating a model clause that was inserted into countless deeds: “No part of said premises shall be sold, given, conveyed or leased to any negro or negroes.” The Federal Housing Administration, created in the 1930s to insure home mortgages, also required racial covenants to guarantee loans—better known as “redlining.”27

In Petaluma, the suburban tract housing boom on the city’s east side following World War II was accompanied by restrictive covenants that preventing the sale or resale of homes to Blacks.

Covenant in deed for Madison Square Subdivision development by Goheen Construction on Petaluma’s east side in 1946 (courtesy of Connie Williams)

Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that such covenants were not legally enforceable, they did not rule that they couldn’t be used.28 Stifling Black homeownership in suburbs like Petaluma pushed Black Americans, many who had migrated to California during the war to work in shipyards and factories, into zones of concentrated urban poverty in the East Bay and San Francisco.29

Henry Chenault near his shoeshine stand outside the Arcade Barbershop, late 1960s (photo Sonoma County Library)

According to the 1960 civil rights commission report, Black families showing an interest in buying in Sonoma County were often told the property had “just been sold,” even though the house remained on the market. Blacks who did manage to purchase property in Sonoma County had to contend with the possibility of racially motivated violence and vandalism.

In the 1950s, the Santa Rosa weekend home of Jack Beavers, a leader of the San Francisco NAACP chapter, was burned. Black and white neighbors alike agreed that the fire was likely a deliberate act of discrimination.30

The California Fair Housing Act, championed by the Chenaults and other members of the Sonoma County NAACP, was met with opposition after being adopted in 1963. The next year, the California Real Estate Association put forth a ballot measure to nullify the act, and explicitly allow discrimination in the housing market. It passed with 65% of the vote, but was overruled in 1967 by the U.S Supreme Court.31

Chenault was still shining shoes on Western Avenue and fighting the good fight in 1969 when he died unexpectedly at age 74.

Henry Chenault, 1895-1969 (photo courtesy of Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

In 2023, the Army formally overturned the convictions of Chennault and the other 109 soldiers charged with crimes association with the 1917 riot, acknowledging that the military trials had been unjust, tainted by racial discrimination.32

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and in the 2022 Buffalo Soldiers Exhibit at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.

*****

Sidebar: In 2020, a motion picture based upon the 1917 Houston Race Revolt was released. It is currently streaming on Apple TV and Starz.

Footnotes:

[1] C. Calvin Smith, “The Houston Riot of 1917, Revisited,” The Houston Review, Spring 1991, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 85-102.

[2] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault,” South Texas College of Law Digital Collection, https://cdm16035.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15568coll1/id/1707

[3] Petaluma Argus-Courier: Bill Soberanes, “So They Tell Me” column, June 19, 1952; Bob Wells, “Everybody Here Knows Henry L. Chenault,” June 24, 1954; “A Paragraph for Mr. Chenault,” October 29, 1954; Bill Soberanes, “Henry Chenault Was a Petaluma Institution,” January 20, 1993.

[4]“Shoe Shine Operator is C. of C.,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1949.

[5] Bill Soberanes, “Henry Was a Friend to All,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 15, 1969.

[6] “Henry Chenault is Dead,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 14, 1969.

[7] Soberanes, January 20, 1993; “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.

[8] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault”; “Who Are the Buffalo Soldiers,” https://www.buffalosoldiermuseum.com/

[9] Allison Keyes, “The East St. Louis Race Riot Left Dozens Dead, Devastating a Community on the Rise,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 30, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/east-st-louis-race-riot-left-dozens-dead-devastating-community-on-the-rise-180963885/; Smith, pp. 86-89.

[10] Smith, pp. 86-89.

[11] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault”; Christian, Garna L. (2009). “The Houston Mutiny of 1917,” Trotter Review: Volume 18, Issue 1, Article 14. https://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol18/iss1/14

[12] Outline of events from Smith, pp. 85-102.

[13] Robert V. Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), digital edition, p. 286; “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault.”

[14] Smith, p. 97; Haynes, p. 301; “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault”; “5 Surprising Facts About Woodrow Wilson and Racism,” Christian Science Monitor, December 14, 2015,.

[15] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault”; The 1917 Houston Riots/Camp Logan Mutiny. Prairie View A&M University. 

[16] Burroughs Miller is Bride of Julio Coehlo,” Petaluma Argus Courier, August 7, 1933;

[17] Bill Soberanes, So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 3, 1966.

[18] “Final Divorce Decrees Granted,” San Francisco Examiner, November 10, 1937; “H. Chenault’s Fiancee is Called,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1938; “Henry Chenault Home from East,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 9, 1938; Sonoma County Deeds, Sonoma County Clerk: May 19, 1938: Grantee- Henry Chenault; Grantor – Central Bank, etc., Deed, Book 455, page 138; 1940 U.S. Census, Petaluma, lists Henry Chenault, single, white, living at 32 West Street.

[19] “Henry Chenault is Dead,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 14, 1969.

[20] Bob Wells, June 24, 1954.

[21] Bill Soberanes, So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 24, 1960; June 27, 1966; December 19, 1966; “Santa Rosa Unit of NAACP to Receive Charter,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 2, 1955.

[22] “Picketing by NAACP Continues in County,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 20, 1960; “Negro ‘Test’ Stores Open—Part of the Way,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 9, 1960.

[23] Bill Soberanes, So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 20, 1955; Michael C. Tobriner, “California FEPC,” Hastings Law Journal, 1965, Vol. 16, issue 3.

[24] Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, p. 588. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hearings_Before_the_United_States_Commis/fUXVAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

[25] “Petaluma High School Will Hold Graduation Exercises on Durst Field Friday Night,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 8, 1950; “Ex-Petaluman Honors King: As a Girl, She Was the Only Black Student,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 19, 1993.

[26] Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, p. 590. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hearings_Before_the_United_States_Commis/fUXVAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

[27] “Is There Racism in the Deed to Your Home?” New York Times, August 17, 2021.

[28] Moore, Montojo, Mauri, “Roots, Race, and Place,” Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, University of California, Berkeley, October 2019, pgs. 7, 13; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,2017), 6.

[29] Rothstein, p. 6.

[30] Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, p. 590.

[31] Moore, Motojo, Mauri, p. 54.

[32] Jaime Salazar, Mutiny of Rage: The 1917 Camp Logan Riots and Buffalo Soldiers in Houston (Prometheus eBooks, 2021), p. 51; “Army Overturns Convictions of 110 Black Soldiers Charged in 1917 Riot,” New York Times, November 14, 2023.