Petaluma’s Social Justice Farmer

Freeman Parker, 1822-1914 (photo by George Ross, courtesy of the Bancroft Library)

Freeman Parker set out in late 1877 to gather signatures around town for a constitutional amendment granting women the vote. It was perhaps an unusual undertaking for a farmer, but Parker was not the sort content with merely sowing grain and milking cows; he also enjoyed cultivating social justice reforms, including women’s rights, Black rights, monopoly busting, labor organizing, and agricultural co-operatives. His iconoclastic nature was most noticeably displayed in his adoption of phonetic spelling, where words are spelled by the way they sound.

“I yuz a variety ov speling,” Parker wrote, “to draw atenshun tou speling reform.”

Such idiosyncrasies aside, many of the reforms Parker championed—along with scurrilous charges of communism and socialism waged against him and his allies—remain relevant today, pointing to some of the perennial fault lines in American society, and the persistent role played by progressive activists like Parker.

Tall, handsome, and adventuresome, Freeman Parker sailed to California in 1849 to join his brother Wilder, who had gone west the year before for the gold rush. Twenty-eight years old, he left behind in his native Vermont his wife Cynthia and infant son Pitman. Arriving in San Francisco, he spent four months recovering from the yellow fever he contracted on the trip, before setting out for the Yuba River, where he found modest success in the mines. After a short time working at his brother’s hotel in San Francisco, and then farming in Marin County, he settled in 1853 on a 160-acre farm near Haystack Landing south of Petaluma, returning to Vermont to retrieve his wife and son.

Parker farm, 4555 Redwood Highway (Thos. H. Thompson, Atlas of Sonoma County, 1877)

During their first six years in Petaluma, the Parkers welcomed four more children to the family, and eventually expanded their farm to 430 acres of rolling hills and river marsh. Cultivating wheat and barley, they also maintained a herd of dairy cows for making butter and soft cheese to export down river to San Francisco. A lover of literature and philosophy, Parker schooled his children in as broad an education as possible. That included procuring a printing press and establishing a family newspaper, which the children took part in writing, as well as providing music lessons. An accomplished musician, he enjoyed playing fiddle at county dances and entertaining fellow passengers aboard ferry trips he took to San Francisco.

In addition to his farm duties, Parker devoted ample time to civic affairs. With his chinstrap beard—a popular fashion during the first half of the 19th century—he conveyed both the rugged manliness of the pioneer and the fresh-faced mien of the businessman, a perfect combination for Petaluma’s transition from river trading post to bustling city.

An abolitionist, Parker participated in the formation of the Sonoma County Republican Party in 1856, during a time of growing political polarization in the county. Although California was admitted as a free, non-slave state to the Union, white slave owners emigrating into the state were permitted to keep the slaves they brought with them as long as they eventually transported them back to the South.

Of the slaves that remained in California, some were able to earn their way to freedom working for their masters in the mines, and others were granted their freedom but remained servants to their former masters. A number of southern slave owners settled on the Santa Rosa Plain, and during the Civil War sided with the Confederacy. Petaluma, largely settled by New Englanders and Irish immigrants, sided with the Union, making the town a relatively safe community for Black residents.

South Barracks, Norwich Military Academy, Norwich, Vermont (photo The Norwich Times)

The other civic arena Parker engaged in was education. While growing up in Vermont, he attended college at the Norwich Military Institute. Considered today the birthplace of the ROTC, Norwich at the time was a controversial private academy. Founded by Alden Partridge, a former superintendent of West Point, it was intended to be an egalitarian alternative to West Point, which Partridge feared was creating an elite aristocracy within the military. He focused on educating citizen soldiers for state militias, instructing them not only in military science and engineering, but also in a traditional liberal arts curriculum.

Parker paid his way through Norwich by offering music lessons and teaching cadets phonetic spelling, a new form of shorthand developed by an Englishman named Isaac Pitman, of whom Parker became an early evangelist (even naming his first son Pitman).

Parker’s experience at Norwich made him a strong advocate of public education, which was viewed as critical for extending school access to the working class. In 1862, he was elected a trustee of Petaluma’s first publicly funded elementary school, the Brick School, at Sixth and B streets. Working closely with school principal Abigail Goodwin Haskell, Parker became a regular attendee of county and state teachers’ conventions, where he lectured extensively on the benefits of phonetic spelling. He was later elected trustee of the rural San Antonio School District south of town, where his farm was located.

Brick School, B and 5th streets, opened 1860 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

As Petaluma’s school district rapidly expanded to four schoolhouses, Parker and his two fellow trustees hired Rev. Edward S. Lippitt, a teacher, minister, and lawyer originally from Connecticut, to serve as the new school superintendent. Lippitt was also appointed minister of the local Methodist Episcopal Church and, for a short time, the interim minister of the Congregational Church, which Parker attended. Parker later converted to Universalism, a Christian theology whose main doctrine, that all human beings will universally be reconciled with God, was better suited to his disposition as a free thinker.

As both the Methodist Episcopal and Congregational churches were centers of the local abolitionist movement, Parker and Lippitt became allies in many of the reforms of the Radical Republican Party, including the three Reconstruction Amendments intended to ensure equality for recently emancipated slaves, with Lippitt serving as president of the county Republican Party, and Parker as one of the vice presidents. After the California Supreme Court ruled in 1864 that public school districts were required to provide “separate but equal” education for Black students, Parker’s board of trustees made Petaluma one of the first school districts to fund a so-called “colored school” for the town’s Black community.

Like many abolitionists, Parker was also an early supporter of the woman suffrage movement. In 1869, after it became clear that the 15th Amendment drafted by Congress was not going to grant the vote to women as well as Black men, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton created the National Woman Suffrage Association to advocate for women’s suffrage. At the encouragement of California suffragists like Laura de Force Gordon, Haskell called a meeting in December, 1869, to form the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association, of which Parker became a vice president.

Abigail Goodwin Haskell, Brick School principal (photo courtesy of Ann Nisson)

The local association’s first task was to gather signatures for a petition calling for a state amendment to grant women the vote. In late January, 1870, 3,000 signatures—424 of them from Petaluma—were amassed at the inaugural convention of the California Woman Suffrage Association held in San Francisco. At the gathering, Haskell was elected the state association’s first president, and in March, she presented the suffrage petition to the state assembly in Sacramento which, then dominated by the conservative, southern-affiliated Democratic Party, voted overwhelmingly against acting on it.

After the defeat, the California Woman Suffrage Association split into two factions due to the demands of more radical members in San Francisco, who sought a variety of social, economic, and political reforms for women in addition to the vote. Haskell and the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association split off with the moderate wing to form the Pacific Coast Woman Suffrage Association, of which Parker served as a delegate.

As the suffrage movement became stymied during the 1870s by internal schisms and adverse rulings of the courts, Parker turned his attention to agricultural reforms. Like a majority of California farmers, he had benefitted from the state’s wheat boom, which began when the Crimean War disrupted Russian grain exports, creating a wheat shortage in Australia and New Zealand. International demand for California wheat further skyrocketed when the Civil War impeded Midwest grain production and export. By the late 1860s, 80 percent of California’s wheat crop was being shipped to the European grain exchange in Liverpool, England.

Wheat schooner on the Petaluma River (photo Petaluma Historic Museum & Library)

In 1867, as soil exhaustion began to manifest from monocrop farming of wheat, a group of Petaluma’s wealthy farm elite who owned thousands of acres—among them William Hill, Harrison Mecham, Ezekiel Denman, J.R. Rose, and Albion Whitney—joined with leading Petaluma merchants to form a chapter of the State Agricultural Society. California’s oldest and most prestigious farm organization, the society had originally been created in 1854 to promote farming at a time when people were still preoccupied with mining. Following the Civil War, the society began to champion progressive, scientific-based farming techniques, including diversifying grains, rotating crops, deep-plowing fields, fertilizing, intermixing breeds of stock, and systemizing operations.

The new Sonoma and Marin Agricultural Society purchased ten acres along Fair Street to install a half-mile horseracing track and a pavilion for an annual agricultural fair. At the fair they awarded prizes for the best fruits, vegetables, livestock, and farm machinery, and sought to educate farmers on new farming techniques and the science of agriculture. Most of those initiatives were met with indifference, as small-scale farmers relied largely upon experience as a teacher and were deficient in technical education. Instead, they maintained a blind adherence to “King Wheat,” the most easily and cheaply produced frontier crop. Lippett, now a lawyer and secretary of county agricultural society, was blunt in addressing them in his keynote speech at the 1870 fair.

“With our old mining habits,” he said, “we sought to farm, and where a few won, many toiled. There was no thought about the future, no care indeed. ‘Let us make our pile and go home,’ said they.”

Sonoma and Marin District Agricultural Society Fairgrounds, Fair Street, 1877 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

For all farmers, the two most common concerns were the price of wheat on the Liverpool exchange, and the cost of shipping it there. As wheat prices in Liverpool began to uncontrollably fluctuate in the early 1870s, California farmers turned their displeasure on the middlemen in the market, including the wheat brokers, railroad monopolies, shipping companies, and bankers charging exorbitant fees and interest.

In Petaluma, the primary middlemen were the McNear brothers, John and George. John operated the largest grain brokerage in town, as well as a fleet of scow schooners that shipped grain down river to San Francisco, where George brokered it for shipment to Liverpool. John McNear also ran one of the four banks in town—the other three operated by fellow wealthy capitalists Isaac Wickersham, William Hill, and Hiram Fairbanks—which provided credit to local farmers at anywhere from 12 to 20 percent interest.

The McNears’ grain monopoly faced new competition with the opening of the San Francisco & North Pacific Railroad in 1870. Operated by Peter Donahue, a ruthless San Francisco businessman, the new rail line extended from the Petaluma River to Santa Rosa, but bypassed Petaluma as its southern terminus, creating instead a new river port near Lakeville called Donahue Landing, where he docked his own fleet of steamships. Once the train started running, the agricultural hub of Sonoma County abruptly shifted from Petaluma to Santa Rosa, which experienced a growth boom in the next few decades, while Petaluma’s growth stagnated.

Paddle steamer “Antelope” moored at Donahue’s Landing, 1878 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

As instability in the wheat market increased, members of California’s farm elite created the Farmers’ Union in 1872, both to push for more scientific innovations to farming and to try to maximize their profits by collectively negotiating reductions in freight and supply costs. In Petaluma, the local gentry, led by Hill, Mecham, and Rose, formed the affiliated Petaluma Farmers’ Club. Their first order of business was an attempt to cooperatively purchase grain sacks.

In April, 1873, the state Farmers’ Union held its first convention. As a speaker they invited Napa farmer W.H. Baxter, who represented a national group called the Grange. A secret fraternal organization modeled on the Masons, the Grange, or Order of Patrons of Husbandry, was launched in Washington, D.C. in 1867. Its original intention was to provide social and intellectual benefits to isolated farm communities. When they realized financial incentives were better inducements for attracting members, the Grange began offering members collective buying of supplies, insurance, and farming implements, as well as the collective selling of their farm products.

At the convention, Baxter made such a compelling case for joining the Grange that soon after the Farmers’ Union was formally dissolved. That June, L.W. Walker and Theodore Skillman established an order of the Grange in Petaluma that grew to 147 members. By the following October, when the California Grange held its first convention, the number of Grange orders in the state had grown to 104. Within two years, that number climbed to 252, most in the northern wheat-growing counties, boasting a total of nearly 20,000 members.

The Grange’s rapid growth was spurred in part by a national financial panic that fall. Triggered by overspeculation in railroads and a drop in European demand for U.S. farm goods, the panic led to a major, five-year recession. During that time, grain prices took a precipitous drop, forcing farmers to dispose of their crops at little or no profit.

A number of small farms were swallowed up by wealthy neighbors or so-called “bonanza farms.” Owned by capitalists, bonanza farms employed gangs of hired laborers and new farming machinery like steam-powered threshers and eventually grain combines. The new technology allowed one man to do the work formerly done by many in cultivating crops like wheat, minimizing the cost of production. Along with negotiating lower bulk rates with the railroads for transportation, the bonanza farmers were able to drive down the price of grain while still turning a profit. A bushel of wheat, which averaged $1.52 in 1866, was worth only $.86 by 1874.

Harvesting wheat harvest, c. 1880s (photo Charles Wieder, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

In 1874, Freeman Parker was elected secretary of the Petaluma Grange, a role that was essentially manager and communications director for the order. His daughter Alma was elected to the position of Flora, one of three offices, along with Ceres and Pomona, that were reserved for women. Named for the ancient mythical goddesses of flowers, grain, and fruit, the offices demonstrated the Grange’s inclusion of women, which had been a distinguishing feature since its founding. Unlike other secret fraternal orders where women were relegated to being members of a female auxiliary, the Grange provided women with central roles and full equality, recognizing the “refinement, gentle influence, and good taste and propriety” they brought to farm life.

Farmwomen in turn found in the Grange an outlet for community and self-improvement, as well as development of writing and leadership skills. While Grange sisters worked on projects of mutual interest with their Grange brothers, they also cooperated with each other in promoting “women’s issues” such as suffrage and home economics.

The Grange itself was largely silent on the issue of woman suffrage however, until 1877, when the California State Grange, looking to increase its numbers at the ballot box, formally called upon Grangers to support a petition drive for an amendment granting women the vote. Freeman Parker answered the call by leading the Petaluma Grange in gathering 212 local signatures. Speaking on behalf of the Grange, he wrote in the local newspaper, “We don’t claim perfection either in our work or play, but I think we come as near it as any similar society ever has; one reason is because we recognize woman’s influence and complete equality.”

Grange meeting in a rural schoolhouse, 1874 (Joseph E. Beale, artist, Pixel.com)

Copies of the signatures, along with signatures gathered from 15 other California cities, were forwarded in January 1878, to state Senator Albion Whitney, a grain wholesaler and dry goods merchant in Petaluma, who presented them to the California legislature. A copy was also sent to U.S. Senator A.A. Sargent of California, a longtime champion of woman suffrage, who presented them to the Senate along with 30,000 other signatures collected nationwide. Both proposals disappeared into the legislative morass, after which leaders of the national suffrage movement formulated a state-by-state strategy to win the ballot for women. That effort came to fruition in California in 1911, when the state’s rural voters, many of them Grange members, determined the narrow passage of an amendment to the state constitution granting women the vote.

George W. McNear (photo public domain)

With the grain market in continued turmoil, in 1874 the McNear brothers ended their partnership. While John continued to run the Petaluma grain brokerage, George set out to corner the state’s export business by shifting operations away from San Francisco’s costly ports to the less expensive Port Costa on the Carquinez Strait. After building warehouses capable of storing 60,000 tons of grain, opening branch offices in Liverpool and London, and acquiring a fleet of ocean steamers for transport, McNear made Port Costa the west coast’s leading grain port, earning himself the crown of California’s “Wheat King” in the process. But instead of passing the cost savings onto farmers, he pocketed them, further deepening the plight of small farmers.

While the wealthy farm gentry publicly denounced the “wheat-bag trust” of usurious interest rates, railroad abuses, and exploitive middlemen like the McNears, they disapproved of the Grangers’ schemes to aggressively reform monopoly capitalism, arguing that such reforms would undermine the American tenets of self-help and free enterprise. Thanks to the ineptitude of the Grange, they had little to fear.

A Grange co-op brokerage established in San Francisco drove up the price of members’ wheat to levels unwarranted on the world market, resulting in ruin for many Grangers and bankruptcy for the brokerage. In its place the Grange created a co-op to purchase discounted supplies for members. It was so underfunded and poorly managed that farmers withdrew from the Grange by the thousands. By 1876, membership in the California Grange had dropped to under 8,000. Compounding this, the following year a crop failure hit California.

In response, the Grange turned to political action, looking for allies from the working class, which by the summer of 1877 was getting hit by the full brunt of the recession. San Francisco in particular found itself filled with jobhunters of every kind, including unemployed miners, farmhands, and laborers.

On July 23, 1877, a mass meeting of workingmen was called in San Francisco in support of a group of railroad strikers in Pittsburgh. Speakers spoke out against rich capitalists, accusing them of taking jobs away from white workingmen to give to Chinese immigrants, who were willing to work for lower pay. The gathering soon turned into a violent riot for two days. In the weeks that followed, Anti-Chinese Clubs sprang up across the state, calling for a boycott of cheap Chinese labor.

Cartoon by Edward Keller in San Francisco Illustrated Wasp, December 8, 1877 (Bancroft Library)

Roughly 500 Chinese lived in the Petaluma area at the time, working as railroad laborers, quarry miners, stone fence builders, laundry proprietors, household servants, and on river dredging crews. Petaluma’s Anti-Chinese Club, led by Barnabus Haskell, a dry goods merchant and the husband of suffrage leader Abigail Haskell, quickly grew to more than 300 members.

Anti-Chinese Club Leader and Petaluma merchant, Barnabus Haskell (photo courtesy Ann Nisson)

Local capitalists like John McNear, who employed a large number of Chinese at his brickyard and shrimp fishery on San Pedro Bay, opposed the boycott. He was later singled out by the Anti-Chinese Club “to be subjected to the inquisitorial thumbscrews.” Many upper and middle class women also were concerned about the boycott, at least as it applied to domestics, since white working-class women tended to avoid household employment, especially laundry work. For these women, the prospect of losing Chinese workers raised a “servant problem.”

In the fall of 1877, labor protestors in San Francisco formed a group called the Workingmen’s Party (also known as the “sand-lotters,” as they initially met in a vacant sand lot opposite city hall). Led by charismatic young Irish immigrant and drayman Denis Kearney, their slogan was “The Chinese must go.” Their broader objective was to unite workingmen into one political party for the purpose of removing government from the hands of a rich oligarchy of corporate and banking interests.

By chance, California voters that fall approved a proposal to hold a convention to update California’s state constitution, originally drawn up in 1850. The Workingmen’s Party turned their attention to capturing a majority of the 152 convention delegates that would be publicly elected in June, 1878. The floundering Grange, seeing an opportunity to secure both constitutional and legislative relief for farmers, rallied members to form an alliance with the Workingmen’s Party.

Denis Kearney, leader of the Workingmen’s Party (photo San Francisco Chronicle)

In the spring of 1878, Kearney held a mass rally in Petaluma’s Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park), after which Haskell and other members of the local Anti-Chinese Club joined Kearney’s movement, forming the Sonoma County Workingmen’s Club. Local Grange members, including Parker, also joined the new club.

Worried Sonoma County Republicans and Democrats, as in many counties around the state, combined forces to form a Non-Partisan Party for nominating slates of county delegates for the constitutional convention, hoping to thwart the election of Workingmen’s Party candidates. Parker, in a testament to the respect he commanded as both a Republican and a Granger, was selected to attend the county nominating conventions of both the Non-Partisan Party and the Workingmen’s Party. He was also selected as a polling judge in the June election.

Not everyone in Petaluma was as open-minded toward Parker and the Grange however. Lippitt, his one-time political colleague, had switched his party affiliation in the mid-1870s, joining the Democratic State Central Committee chaired by Peter Donahue. In 1876, along with printer William Shattuck, he launched the Petaluma Courier newspaper to serve as a mouthpiece for Democrats in the upcoming election. The presidential election that year was a contested race, with no clear winner, until the Democrats agreed to allow the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, to assume the presidency in exchange for ending Reconstruction and withdrawing Union troops from the South, allowing them to impose the racial apartheid known as Jim Crow.

Lippitt had worked as a young lawyer with Hayes in Cincinnati, where Hayes served as city solicitor. After Hayes joined the Union army at the start of the Civil War, Lippitt secured a position at the local post office. A year later, he was indicted for embezzlement after discovered stealing money from letters in the post. Rather than stand trial, Lippitt fled with his wife and children to California, where Parker and his fellow trustees, unaware of his crime, hired him as school superintendent. In his political attacks as editor of the Courier, Lippitt showed neither Hayes—who lunched at his house during a presidential visit to Petaluma—nor Parker any favors. The Courier denounced the populist movements of the Grange and the Workingmen’s Party as communism and socialism.

Edward S. Lippitt, at his office in the Mutual Relief Building, 1880s (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

As the June election approached, the Workingmen’s Party held a statewide convention to finalize their platform. For both Workingmen and Grangers, the three primary issues were taxes, which they believed to be especially oppressive to workingmen and farmers; the Chinese labor issue, which they claimed threatened the livelihoods of the working class; and the state legislature, which they viewed as being in the pocket of corporate monopolies like the railroads.

At the convention however, the party split into two factions. The Kearney wing from San Francisco advocated for reforms like restricting land holdings to one square mile, or 640 acres, and taxing millionaires out of existence. A smaller, more moderate wing, based in rural counties like Sonoma, denounced these schemes as too radical. After Haskell and other members of the Sonoma County delegation criticized “Kearneyism and communism” as dangerous elements of the party, Kearney had them expelled from the convention as party traitors.

In the election, Sonoma County was allotted four slots for the constitutional convention. Voters chose three Non-Partisan Party candidates and a candidate endorsed by both \ Non-Partisan and Workingmen’s parties, Petaluma city trustee (councilman) James Charles. Across the state, the Non-Partisan Party prevailed with 81 of the total 152 delegates. However, in San Francisco the Workingmen’s Party captured 42 delegates, making them a viable force. The remaining 19 slots were a mix of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.

Although the Grange had sided with the Workingmen, more important to their cause was that 37 of the delegates represented rural farming communities, which proved in many cases more important than party affiliation. During the constitutional convention, which convened from September 1878 through March of 1879, the farming group held the balance of power between the radical Workingmen’s Party and the conservative block of Non-Partisans. This played out in a series of compromises.

For example, one of the convention’s wedge issues was woman suffrage. Although the Workingmen’s Party did not support it, prominent suffrage lobbyists like Laura de Force Gordon embraced the party’s anti-Chinese rhetoric in hopes of gaining their support. While proposals at the convention for woman suffrage were voted down, Gordon succeeded in getting two important clauses added to the new constitution—one that protected women from being denied entry to state universities, and the other that protected women from being barred from any vocation or profession. (Gordon, who was previously rejected from attending Hastings Law School on the grounds that women, “particularly their rustling skirts, were bothering to the other scholars,” subsequently went on to become a lawyer.)

Laura de Force Gordon, along with Susan B. Anthony, take the stage at 1872 Republican Convention held in Cincinnati (drawing by Matt Morgan, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, May 18, 1872)

The final proposed constitution embodied many of the relatively moderate objectives of the Workingmen’s Party and the Grange. The Chinese were forbidden to hold property or engage in certain occupations; taxation was shifted to the wealthy; growing crops was made tax exempt; a railroad commission was set up to regulate the railroads; an eight-hour working day was adopted; a state school fund was established exclusively for primary elementary schools; and home rule was extend to cities, emancipating them from the control of the corrupt state legislature. The new constitution passed 77,959 to 67,134, with the victory margin attributed to the large turnout of farmers.

The victory for the Grange and Workingmen’s Party was short-lived however. Many of the new constitutional clauses, including the anti-Chinese provision, were held by the courts to be null and void. The railroads quickly captured the commission set up to regulate them. Amendment after amendment was submitted and adopted in the state legislature until the difference between the revolutionary 1879 California constitution and other state constitutions was comparatively insignificant.

Grange celebration at Turn Verein Hall, 4th and C streets in Petaluma, c. 1890s (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

After the Recession ended and prosperity returned to California, the Workingmen’s Party dissipated, and membership in the California Grange declined to less than 3,000. (During the years that followed, the state Grange became nearly extinct until 1913, when membership began to rebound after the Grange reorganized itself as a cooperative fire insurance association). The hatred of the Chinese on the West Coast however did not fade. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was adopted by Congress, prohibiting further immigration of Chinese laborers.

Freeman Parker continued to attend Grange meetings, as well as meetings of a new workingmen’s group, the Knights of Labor, but in the early 1880s, he pulled back from the political arena. Some of that may have been due to personal tragedy. In the summer of 1877, at the height of his involvement in local politics, his wife Cynthia died. In 1879, he remarried a widow originally from Vermont, Mrs. Eliza Jones, but the couple separated after a year.

As the wheat market continued to decline, and Petaluma farmers began to shift to dairy farming and growing fruit and grapes, Parker leased 160 acres of his grain fields in 1880 to Danish immigrant Nelson Mastrup, who eventually purchased them. With his youngest son George, Parker maintained the dairy operation on his remaining 270 acres. His daughter Alma lived on the farm adjacent to his, having married its widowed owner, Captain James Hynes. After Hynes’ death in 1887, she had married another widower, David Walls, who operated Haystack Landing for a steamboat company.

Parker farmhouse (photo courtesy Janet Talamantes)

During the 1880s, Parker took numerous trips to the seaport town of Astoria, Oregon, where his brother Wilder settled after leaving San Francisco in the early 1850s. Wilder, who became the town’s mayor and customs officer, had been joined in Astoria by their three other brothers from Vermont, as well as Parker’s two oldest sons, Pitman, who ran the local newspaper, and Gelo, a surveyor. In 1889, Parker moved to Astoria, leaving his farm in George’s hands. Over the next 25 years, he made regular extended visits to Petaluma, usually during Oregon’s rainy winter season. In 1905, he leased 200 acres of marshlands on his farm to a group of San Francisco duck hunters who called themselves The Parker Home Club.

While on an extended stay at the farm in the spring of 1914, Parker passed away at the age of 94. The farmhouse he built in 1854, reportedly from prefabricated panels he had shipped around Cape Horn, stood until 2008, when, after being denied placement on the National Register of Historic Places because Freeman and Cynthia Parker were “not such important figures in local history,” it was torn down to clear the land.

Freeman Parker with violin; note his phonetic spelling of his first name (photo Petaluma Historic Museum & Library)

SOURCES:

Special thanks to Paula Freund and Katherine Rinehart for research assistance and, as always, Katie Watts for copyediting.

Books & Journals

Solon Justus Buck, The Granger Movement, 1870-1880 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913).

California Law Review , Jan., 1918, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Jan., 1918), pp. 114-133.

Clarke Chambers, California Farm Organizations (University of California, 1952), pp. 10-11.

Sue Doherty, “Sonoma Stories and The Song Wong Bourbeau Collection, Masters Thesis, Sonoma State University, 2005. http://sonoma-dspace.calstate.edu/handle/10211.1/1531

William Arba Ellis, Norwich University, 1819-1911; Her History, Her Graduates, Her Roll of Honor, Volume 2 (Capital City Press, 1911), pp. 415-416.

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

Tom Gregory, “Biography of Edward S. Lippitt,” “Biography of Freeman Parker,” History of Sonoma County, California (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1911).

Jean F. Hankins, “Women in the Grange,” The Courier, Vol. 34, No. 1, Bethel Historical Society.

John D. Hicks, The American Nation: History of the United States from 1865 to the Present,
(Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937).

Theodore Henry Hittell, History of California, Volume 4 (San Francisco: N.J. Stone & Co., 1898), p. 436.

“Petaluma Township, Part 3 1880.” History of Sonoma County (Sonoma County CA Archives History).

Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995), p. 114.

Ralph Kauer, “The Workingmen’s Party of California,” Pacific Historical Review (1944) 13 (3): 278–291.

Kris Kobach, “Rethinking Article V: Term Limits and the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Amendments,” 103 Yale Law Journal (1994).

Adair Lara, History of Petaluma (Petaluma: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pp. 65-67.

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

Donald B. Marti, Women of the Grange: Mutuality and Sisterhood in Rural America, 1866-1920 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991) .

Donald B. Marti, “Sisters of the Grange: Rural Feminism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Agricultural History, Vol. 58, No. 3, Symposium on the History of Rural Life in America (Published by: Agricultural History Society, 1984), pp. 247-261.

Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), pp. 36-42.

Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “A History of California Agriculture,” University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (Giannini Foundation Publications, December, 2017). http://giannini.ucop.edu/publications.htm.

Captain Alden Partridge, “West Point—Military Academy,” Citizen Soldier, Windsor, Vermont, March 12, 1841.

Rodman Wilson Paul, “The Great California Grange War: The Grangers Challenge the Wheat King,” Pacific Historical Review, Vo. 27, No. 4, (Nov., 1958) pp. 331-349.

Gerald L. Prescott, “Farm Gentry vs. the Grangers: Conflict in Rural America,” California Historical Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter, 1977/1978), pp. 328-345.

Gerald L. Prescott, “Review of Thomas A. Woods, Knights of the Plow: Oliver H. Kelley and the Origins of the Grange in Republican Ideology,” Agricultural History Vol. 66, No. 2, (Spring, 1992), pp. 376-377.

W.L. Robinson, First Century of Service and Evolution – The Grange 1867 – 1967 (National Grange, 1967).

Noel Sargent, “The California Constitutional Convention of 1878-1879,” California Law Review, Nov., 1917, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Jan., 1918), pp. 6-7, 17-19, 114-115, 118-120, 123, 128-129, 131.

Sonoma County Dept of Parks & Recreation Primary Record, DPR 523, Office of Historical Preservation, Freeman Parker Farm – 4555 Redwood Highway, Diana Painter, Recorder. September 19, 2009; Dept of Parks & Recreation Primary Record, DPR 523, Office of Historical Preservation, Freeman Parker Farm – 4555 Redwood Highway, Andrew Hope, Caltrans, recorder. Sept. 2004.

J.T. White, “George W. McNear,” National Cyclopedia of American Biography, V.1, Volume 7, 1897.

Thomas A. Woods, Knights of the Plow: Oliver H. Kelley and the Origins of the Grange in Republican Ideology (Iowa State University Press, 1991).

Newspapers, Websites, Archives

The Cadiz Sentinel: “Young and Pure—More of it,” April 2, 1862.

“China Camp State Park” video, Marin History Museum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8tZpz1YAlE

Cincinnati Daily Press: (Lippitt) June 2, 1859; June 18, 1859.

The Cincinnati Enquirer: “Professor Lippitt,” April 21, 1862.

Coast Banker: “Sonoma County National Bank, Petaluma, 50th Anniversary,” Volume 16, Coast Banker Publishing Company, 1916.

Daily Ohio Statesman: “The Grand Jury,” April 26, 1862.

The Elevator: “Petaluma,” November 1, 1867; “Correspondence of the Elevator,” February 19, 1869.

Los Angeles Evening Express: “Last Night’s Dispatches, Legislative Matters,” January 22, 1878.

New York Times: “Overlooked No More: Laura DeForce Gordon,” January 9, 2019.

Pacific Bee: “Congress in Session,” January 12, 1878.

Petaluma Argus: “District School,” July 1, 1863; “Agricultural Circular,” January 31, 1867; “List of Premiums,” June 27, 1867; “Sonoma County Industrial Society,” June 13, 1867; “Located,” July 18, 1867; “Our County Fair,” September 9, 1867; “The County Fair,” September 19, 1867; “County Fair,” May 21, 1868; “Grand Union Meeting,” September 10, 1868; “Agricultural Society—Election of Officers,” May 20, 1869; “Special Notice,” December 25, 1869; “Card to the Public,” July 2, 1870; “Opening Address,” October 8, 1870; “School Election Notice,”May 6, 1871; “Let Us have a Farmer’s Club,” November 29, 1872; “Farmers’ Club,” February 7, 1873; “Farmers’ Club,” June 2, 1873; “Granges,” October 15, 1875; “Organization of a Grange,” June 20, 1873; “Grange Election,” October 30, 1874; “Local Brevities,” February 4, 1876; “Twenty Years Ago,” August 11, 1876; “Petaluma Grange,” August 18, 1876; “News and Other Items,” January 28, 1878;“Local Brevities,” February 15, 1878; “The Workingmen’s Movement,” March 15, 1878; “Kearney, Wellock, and Knight,” March 22, 1878; “Workingmen’s Meeting Saturday,” March 29, 1878; “The Workingmen’s Meeting,” April 11, 1878; “Notice,” May 3, 1878. “The Non-Partisan Convention,” May 7, 1878; “Kearney Ignored,” May 24, 1878; “Convention Notes,” May 27, 1878. “The Candidates,” June 14, 1878; “The Vote in Petaluma,” June 21,1878; “Woman Suffrage,” June 28, 1878; “Official Vote,” July 5, 1878; “The Constitutional Convention,” July 12, 1878; “The Boycott,” March 13, 1886; “Celebration in Petaluma,” July 9, 1887; “Local Notes,” June 3, 1905; “Freeman Parker on Reform Spelling, ”December 20, 1906. “E.S. Lippitt, Reminiscences of a Long Life,” September 2, October 3, October 29, 1910.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Mrs. Alma Walls, One of the City’s Oldest Pioneers, Dies After Short Pneumonia Siege,” February 12, 1938; “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” December 17, 1960; Katherine Rinehart, “Remembering the Parker House,” May 8, 2008.

Petaluma Courier: “The Result Secured,” December 28, 1876; “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877; “Anti-Coolie Meeting,” December 27, 1877; “The Workingmen’s Meeting,” April 11, 1878; “The Election,” April 11, 1878; “Fired Out,” May 22, 1878; “Judge Thomas,” June 5, 1878; The Election,” June 26, 1878; “Freeman Parker Arrives from Astoria,” November 4, 1903; “Death of N. Mastrup,” December 30, 1909; F. Parker Dies In His 92nd Year,” Petaluma Courier, April 10, 1914.

Sacramento Bee: “Woman Suffrage,” October 11, 1878; The Suffrage Question,” March 19, 1870.

San Francisco Call:“McNear is a Miller,” July 28, 1895.

San Francisco Chronicle: “Woman State Convention of Female Suffragists” January 28, 1870;“Woman Suffrage, Third Day of the State Convention,” January 29, 1870; “Woman Suffrage,” January 20, 1871; “Anti-Kearneyites,” May 18, 1878; “The Workingmen,” May 18, 1878.

San Francisco Examiner: “Woman Suffrage Convention,” January 10, 1878;

 “California Legislature, Senate,” January 23, 1878; “Ticks of the Telegraph,” June 14, 1878.

Sonoma County Journal: “Phonntic Type,” (sic) September 24, 1858; “Petaluma Institute,” July 27, 1860; “The Exhibition,” June 14, 1861; “Election of School Trustees,” April 11, 1862;  “School Notice,” July 1, 1863.

History,” Sebastopol Grange #306, http://sebastopolgrange.org/history/

Petaluma’s Days as a Porn Capital

The jury in Petaluma’s Deep Throat obscenity trial, entering the State Theater to view the film, September 17, 1973 (photo courtesy of the Petaluma Argus-Courier)

Filmmakers often use the flashback to render a coming-of-age story, dipping into the whirlpool of memories that mark any rite of passage. For those who grew up with drive-in movies—first as pajama-clad kids plied with snacks and soda pop in the family station wagon, and then as adolescents making out in the back seat—the re-emergence of outdoor theaters during the current pandemic stirs up its own flashback whirlpools of childhood innocence and teenage initiation. If you came of age in Petaluma during the 1970s and early 1980s, those flashbacks inevitably include the X-rated movies displayed on the big screens at either end of town.

I was nine years old when Petaluma’s first drive-in, the Parkway Auto Movies, opened in the summer of 1964. My mother made up a bed in the back of our Ford station wagon, knowing that not long after the cartoon shorts played, my sister and I would be off to dreamland, leaving her and my father to watch the main feature in peace.

That summer was the last for the family station wagon. In a fit of midlife crisis, my father traded it in for a sporty, two-door Pontiac LeMans coupe. Once I was old enough to get my driver’s license, I drove the LeMans to the Parkway on dates. Couples wooing in the “passion pit” rarely saw more than the first 20 minutes of any movie, which at the Parkway was just as well. Built in the lowlands of Denman Flats north of town, the drive-in was plagued in summer with creeping ground fog and flooded in winter during heavy rainstorms.

Night time photo of the Parkway Auto Movies, Denman Flats , 1980 (photo courtesy of Petaluma Argus-Courier)

I started high school in the fall of 1970. My next-door neighbor Kenny, who was a few years older, got a job changing the marquee at the Parkway, and hired me to help. We also changed the marquee at the State Theater downtown (today’s Mystic Theater). Both theaters were owned by Alan Finlay, a small, friendly man, who also owned a theater in Boyes Hot Springs.

Finlay purchased them in 1967 from Dan Tocchini, Jr., a second-generation, small town theater mogul. The next year, Tocchini bought the only other theater in town, the California, changing its name to the Showcase (today’s Phoenix Theater). Over the next two decades, Toccini and Finlay swapped theaters back and forth, dominating the movie business in town.

California Theater (today’s Phoenix) before its conversion to the Showcase in 1968, 201 Washington Street, late 1950s (Sonoma County Library)

A second drive-in, the Midway, also opened alongside the freeway south of town in 1967, offering wired speakers that sat on the car roof instead of hooking onto the driver’s window. That not only saved speakers from being ripped off their poles by customers absent-mindedly driving away, it also provided stereo sound.

Such technological innovations were important, as moviegoers were declining in the ’60s due to the rising popularity of television. Hollywood studios, which had dominated moviemaking for decades, were being replaced by business conglomerates who shifted to financing and distributing independently produced pictures. That opened the door to the “Hollywood Renaissance” of the late 60s and early 70s, allowing young filmmakers to appeal to younger countercultural audiences with movies like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Easy Rider.

Lost in the transition to New Hollywood was the predictability theater owners had come to depend upon from the studios. In their heyday, movie factories pumped out enough new releases to supply a schedule of double features that changed three times a week at theaters. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday usually screened musicals; Wednesday and Thursday, B-movies (low budget films); and Friday and Saturday, westerns.

But while in 1950, 12.3 per cent of American’s recreational budget was spent on movie tickets, by 1965, it was 3.3. per cent. As audiences diminished, theaters cut back, rotating movies only once a week, usually pairing a new release with a B-movie or a second-run hit from prior years. Even then, many big budget films were flopping at the box office.

There was, however, a glimmer of hope on the horizon. The sexual liberation of the swinging ’60s brought an end to the “Hays Code,” a set of strict moral guidelines imposed upon filmmakers. The code was originally adopted during the Depression after studios, struggling with dwindling audiences during cash-strapped times, resorted to making films touching on sex, violence, and other less-than-wholesome topics. Dropping the code in 1968, the movie industry shifted to alerting audiences about film content, adopting the film-ratings system we know today.

The new ratings proved a boon for movie theaters, providing them with a exclusive niche of R- and X-rated films that network television couldn’t broadcast. It took only a year for an X-rated movie—Midnight Cowboy, the story of a friendship between a male prostitute and an ailing con man—to win an Oscar for Best Picture. Two years later, Midnight Cowboy was re-rated from X to R, without a single frame being altered. The change was due in large part to the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow).

Movie poster for I Am Curious Yellow, 1969 (in public domain)

Initially banned in the United States for its explicit nudity and sex, the film depicted a 20-year old female college student experimenting with relationships, political activism, and meditation. After U.S. courts ruled it not obscene in 1969, the film became the highest grossing foreign film of all time, helping to usher in the “Golden Age of Porn.”

I Am Curious (Yellow) came to the State Theater in January, 1970, where it ran for an unprecedented six weeks. Prior to its arrival, blue movies, or stag films, were largely restricted to old, whirling, reel-to-reel projectors set up in the back room of the Moose Lodge or the Elks Club on select evenings. Cheaply produced in grainy black-and-white, the films accorded with the public yet strangely private nature of fraternal orders, a characteristic they shared with drive-ins theaters.

By the time Kenny and I began changing marquees in the fall of 1970, Finlay was screening a double or triple bill of X-rated films one week out of every month at both the Parkway and the State. Our first X-rated marquee was Russ Meyers’ crossover hit, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, at the Parkway. Like most of Finlay’s X-rated films at the time, it was soft porn, meaning that the focus of the films were more on the erotic setup, with only simulated sex.

Parkway Theater Ad (Petlauma Argus Courier, September 25, 1970)

After finishing the marquees every Tuesday night, Kenny and I stopped in the Parkway’s projection booth to get paid. Finlay, who maintained a small living room there, was usually watching television with his mother between changing reels.

The Midway drive-in south of town also added adult films to its rotation at that time. While the drive-ins were popular with customers seeking anonymity, they also drew public attention. The Midway’s screen faced the freeway, which meant drivers got a full view of the movies as they passed by. The Parkway’s screen had its back to the freeway, but looked out upon Stony Point Road, a rural lane that was often lined with parked cars during X-rated showings.

Outraged parents and religious leaders appealed to city hall to shut down adult films at the drive-ins on the grounds that they were creating safety hazards for distracted drivers. They also complained that underaged teenagers were not being carded for X-rated films, or else were sneaking in, hidden in car trunks. In response, police increased their patrols of the drive-ins during the showing of adult films.

The Showcase remained the only theater in town showing family fare. That was important to me, as the theater served as a clubhouse for my clique of high school friends. One of our classmates, Tom Gaffey, was assistant manager, and since the Showcase’s manager was off most evenings playing cards, Tom was in charge, allowing us the run of the place.

In September, 1971, Finlay began screening the country’s first hardcore hit movie, Mona. Unlike the soft porn he had been running, the sex in Mona was not simulated. The film ran at the State for five continuous weeks, packing in audiences. By the fall of 1972, the State, Parkway, and Midway theaters were running adult films almost exclusively, both hard and soft porn, drawing customers from hours away by car, and earning Petaluma a reputation as the Hardcore Capital of the North Bay.

That Christmas, Finlay upped the ante, screening the film Deep Throat at the State. Classified as hardcore due to its graphic enactments of oral, vaginal and anal sex, group sex, and masturbation in a dozen and a half sex scenes, it was among the first pornographic films to feature relatively high production values with both plot and character development. Drawing half of its audience from middle class married couples and single couples on dates, Deep Throat ushered in a new acceptability for X-rated films that The New York Times dubbed “porno chic.”

Poster for Deep Throat at State Theater, December, 1972 (photo in public domain)

In the early spring of 1973, Tocchini leased the Showcase to Finlay, providing him with a monopoly on Petaluma’s three theaters. Finlay brought in his own staff at the theater, putting an end to our teen clubhouse. With the State and Parkway showing adult films, he maintained the Showcase as the only venue in town for family fare. Meanwhile, Deep Throat became the most popular movie ever to play in Petaluma, running 28 consecutive weeks until Petaluma’s city council decided in late May to shut it down.

At the time, the film faced obscenity charges in at least a dozen American cities. However, as Sonoma County’s district attorney warned the city council, getting a conviction would prove difficult, as there was no common legal definition of pornography to cite.

State Theater showing Behind the Green Door in 1973, next door to Christian bookstore (Sonoma County Library)

Kenny was working as a projectionist at the State when the Petaluma police showed up to confiscate Deep Throat. Finlay immediately substituted it with another hardcore hit film, Behind the Green Door. A few days later, the police came back with a warrant for that film. Finlay replaced it with another copy he was running simultaneously at his theater in Boyes Hot Springs. Having just turned 18, I was hired to shuttle the film reels between the two theaters each evening in my father’s LeMans, until police also confiscated that copy of the film.

At his arraignment before Petaluma judge Alexander McMahon, Finlay was charged with exhibiting obscene matter and “assisting persons (actors) to expose themselves.” In the district attorney’s filing of the charges, he cited a related case in New York where a judge had denounced Deep Throat as “a nadir of decadence and a Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild before the fire.”

The second copy of Behind the Green Door was returned to Finlay at the arraignment, as the original warrant only specified one copy. He immediately began re-screening it at the State until he was able to replaced it a few weeks later with another copy of Deep Throat.

On June 4, 1973, a few days before my high school graduation, the city council, passed an ordinance prohibiting films with “explicit sexual materials” from being shown at drive-in theaters. At the recommendation of legal counsel, they avoided use of the word pornography. That put an end to X-rated films at the Parkway, but not the Midway, which was outside city limits. County supervisors later passed a similar ordinance a few months later, targeted specifically at the Midway.

In late June of 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling defining obscenity as based in part on community standards. Intended to give local communities more agency in applying their own moral standards, the ruling actually served to undermine Petaluma’s case. Judge McMahon dismissed the charges against Finlay on the grounds that the prosecution failed to present evidence of a community standard of obscenity.

Elevated to a symbol of free speech and free sex thanks to the trial’s publicity, Deep Throat continued to draw audiences to the State, where it ran continuously until June 1974, and then episodically until the summer of 1976, almost four years after its Petaluma premiere. Finlay also acquired the Midway during that time and, in defiance of the county ordinance, began screening adult-only films there again.

As cable television and video rentals further eroded theater attendance, theater operators shifted to multiplexes, placing many screens under one roof to provide customers with more simultaneous viewing options. Petaluma’s first multi-plex theater, Washington Square Cinemas, opened at the shopping mall of the same name in 1976.

State Theater, mid-1970s (photo source unknown)

In the late 1970s, as home video began to cut into pornography ticket sales, Finlay exited the theater business in Petaluma. The new owners of the State transformed it into a repertory theater they called the Plaza, featuring art-house and foreign films. The Showcase was purchased by a group that renovated it into a performing arts center renamed the Phoenix.

Tocchini took back the Parkway, continuing to screen largely second-run family features. He also purchased the Midway, renaming it the Sonomarin Drive-in and maintaining its roster of hardcore adult films, which by that time movie producers were rating on their own as “XX” or“XXX” to distinguish them from soft porn (the X-rating itself was changed in 1990 to NC-17).

The Sonomarin Drive-in (formerly the Midway) along Highway 101, south of town, early 1980s (photo in the public domain)

“We like the X-rated movies,” Toccini said at the time, “because it eliminates competition for commercial films in our immediate area.”

Rising land prices and the continued transition to home video brought an end to the Parkway in 1986, taking with it what had once been a way of life for families and teenagers in Petaluma. The site was eventually converted into a golf driving range. The Sonomarin (Midway) followed in 1988, the property later purchased by the state of California for use as a flood control reservoir.

Closure of the Parkway Auto Movies, 1986 (Photo Sonoma County Library)

For those like Kenny and me, who came of age during the Golden Age of Porn, Petaluma’s reign as the Hard Core Capital of the North Bay left an indelible mark. As our former boss Finlay proudly noted, “Deep Throat put this city on the map.”

SOURCES:

Newspapers

Los Angeles Times: David J. Fox, “X Film Rating Dropped and Replaced by NC-17,” September 27, 1990.

The New York Times Magazine: Ralph Blumenthal, “Porno chic; ‘Hard-core’ grows fashionable—and very profitable,” January 21, 1973.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Sale is Finalized,” June 8, 1967; “Mad Hatters at Spa,” Bill Soberanes column, November 24, 1967; “New Drive-in to Open Here Friday,” December 14, 1967; “California Theater Sold,” September 25, 1968; “Filmmakers Becoming New Breed,” December 27, 1969; Midway film ad for X-rated Paranoia, November 21, 1969; “In Defense of New Rating System,” December 6, 1969; film ads for the State and Parkway theaters, January, 1969 – March 15, 1970; film ads for the State Theaters, September 1-October 6, 1970; “Group Campaigns for Family Movies,” February 3, 1972; ad for State Theater featuring Deep Throat, December 13, 1972; “Showcase Movie Theater Leased,” February 8, 1973; “Sex Movie Measure O.K.’d,” May 22, 1973; “City Asks Help on X-Rated Movies,” May 19, 1973; “City Police Seize Sex Film,” May 24, 1973; “Second Sex Film Seized at Movie Theater Here,” June 5, 1973; “Duplicated Sex Film Seized by Police,” June 6. 1973; “X-Rated Movies Charges Filed,” June 11, 1973; “Plea Scheduled on Sex Movies Charges,” June 12, 1973; “Should Tackle Real Problems,” September 5, 1973; “Civil Offense for Drive-in X-Rated Films,” September 25, 1973; “Controversial Film Ends Long Run Here,” June 6, 1974; ad for Deep Throat at Midway, September 29, 1976; Final ad for Deep Throat, May 20, 1976 (The record for a continuous run of Deep Throat was ten years at the Pussycat Theater in Hollywood, “Hologram USA Hollywood Theater,” http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/2364); “Opening Set for New Firms,” July 15, 1976; “X-rated Movies Leave the Downtown,” February 1, 1977; “New Owners to Reopen Theater,” May 25, 1977; “Rejuvenated Theater to Return as Performing Arts Center,” May 23, 1979; “Drive-in Theaters A Dying Breed,” January 25, 1980; “Adult Films Are Not Appreciated,” April 14, 1983; “Parkway Closure Ends An Era,” January 24, 1986; “Drive-in a ‘Headache,’” December 17, 1986; “Washington Square Mixes Movies, Videos,” June 12, 1987; “X-rated Drive-in to be Sold,” August 13, 1988; Harlan Osborne, “Tocchini Family Builds Legacy with Sonoma County Theaters,” December 8, 2016.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Showcase Theater Leased,” February 7, 1973; “Hard Core Capital of North Bay,” May 25, 1973; Porno Trial Begins,” September 12, 1973.

Books and Websites

Film History of the 1970s, filmsite.org.

Alison M. Parker, “Mothering the Movies,” Movies Censorship and American Culture, Francis G. Couvares, ed. (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).

Susanna Paasonen and Laura Saarenmaa, “The Golden Age of Porn: Nostalgia and History in Cinema,” Pornification (Oxford: Berg Publishing), pp. 23-32.

Scott Tobias, “Midnight Cowboy at 50: Why the X-rated Best Picture Winner Endures,” The Guardian, May 24, 2019.

Interview with Aaron Sizemore, who worked as a projectionist at the Sonomarin and the Parkway: “The Sonomarin from 1983 until its closure in 1989 was operated by the late Allan ‘Duck Dumont’ Shustak, who also operated a couple of hardtop porn houses in the Bay Area. The screen came down in 1989 and the building was demolished in 1991. The property was sold to the state for use as a flood control lake (it was cheaper than elevating the freeway at that spot.”

Petaluma’s First Woman Voter

By Katherine J. Rinehart & John Sheehy

Three San Francisco women casting their ballots in the first election California women were able to vote in, April, 1912—Elizabeth Gerberding, Mary Sperry, and Nellie Eyester (photo by Hamilton Henry Dobbin, California State Library Collection)

One unexpected victim of the COVID-19 pandemic may be voting rights. Given the opposition in some quarters to voting by mail, efforts to politicize the U.S. Post Office, and a likely shortage of poll workers, especially those over the age of 60 at heightened risk from the virus, many Americans are wondering if they will be able to exercise their vote this fall, including those who have never had to face systemic voter suppression.

It’s an ironic twist to a year commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment which extended nationally to women the right to vote, a right that until this year many may have come to take for granted.

In California, woman suffrage actually occurred nine years before ratification of the 19th Amendment. On October 13, 1911, three days after passage of the state proposition granting women the vote, the first woman to register in Sonoma County was twenty-four year old Agatha Starke of Petaluma. An ardent suffragist, she represented a new, upcoming generation of working women.

A third-generation Petaluman—Agatha’s grandfather Augustus Starke was of one of the town’s earliest settlers in 1850 after finding success in the gold fields—Agatha attended Santa Rosa Business College, graduating in 1910. Her first job out of college was as a cub reporter for the Petaluma Argus, where one of her older sisters, Isabel, ran the business office.

Petaluma Argus office at 146 Main Street, 1934 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

At the turn of the century, journalism increasingly offered career paths to women, as publishers learned that news or features written from a feminine perspective—not merely mimicking male journalists—sold newspapers. After a year as a reporter, Agatha took over her sister’s position as office accountant when Isabel left for another job, finding office work preferable to covering the town news beat.

After California’s Proposition 4 narrowly passed with 50.7% of the vote on October 10th, women across the state scrambled to become the first in their city or county to register to vote. On October 12th, the Argus staff learned that a lawyer named Estelle Kirk had been the first woman to register in San Diego County and perhaps the state.

Spotswood & Lovejoy Cigar store at 145 Main Street, 1913, renamed Lovejoy & Schluneggar following Spotswood’s death (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

The next day, the staff, led by editor James Olmsted, persuaded Agatha, whom the Argus described as “plucky,” to take up the challenge. Across the street from the newspaper’s Main Street office, Spotswood & Lovejoy, a cigar store (site of Della Fattoria today), served as an agent for voter registration. Escorted into the establishment by a reporter—cigar stores at the time were male lairs—Agatha walked up to proprietor Robert Spotswood and “meekly” said, “I would like to register.”

Spotswood pulled out a blank registration form and began asking Agatha for her pertinent details. Unmarried, she was living with her widowed mother and eight of her nine siblings at 610 E Street, which her father had purchased shortly before his death in 1902. When the question of age came up, Agatha answered promptly, although the reporter noted, “the popular accountant at the Argus is not very aged.”

The sort of setting Agatha had to register in—Scuhler’s Cigar Store at 108 Main Street, across from Spotswood & Lovejoy.

Returning to the Argus office, Agatha reported there had been nothing horrible about the experience, and that she was pleased with having been persuaded to make history. The Argus staff then went about documenting the event, asking the linotype operator to work late to get the item into the next day’s edition.

However, it turns out that Agatha jumped the gun on her registration. Although passed on October 10th, Proposition 4 did not go into effect until January 1, 1912. That meant Agatha’s initial registration was invalid, and she would have to re-register once the cigar store opened after New Year’s Day. Unfortunately, she took an extended leave from her job at that time, possibly due to illness, leaving Jennie Colvin, a woman from Santa Rosa who operated the Alpha Rooming House with her husband, Reverend Peter Colvin, to officially lay claim to being Sonoma County’s first registered woman voter.

Four months later, in April, 1912, California women went to the polls for the first time.

In 1916, Agatha Starke hired her younger sister Marguerite to replace her at the Argus because she was quitting to secretly marry William Kaiser of San Francisco.

Marguerite leaked the news to reporters, who adorned the Argus’ official automobile as “Cupid’s chariot,” and intercepted the newlyweds on their way to the train station after a private wedding at St. Vincent de Paul church. The couple were whisked to the newspaper’s office for a brief celebration before being conveyed in Cupid’s chariot to the train station, where they set out for their honeymoon in Santa Cruz.

Starke family home, 610 E Street, Petaluma

Agatha moved back to Petaluma in 1964 to be with her extended family. She died at the age of 84 on October 21, 1971, almost sixty years to the day that she first registered to vote, and just a week after the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Equal Rights Amendment for ratification by the states, an initiative originally launched by suffragists in 1923 that remains ongoing.

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

SOURCES:

Petaluma Argus: “The Death of Augustus Starke at San Bernardino,” May 29, 1900; “Local Notes,” April 27, 1910; “Changes in the Argus Staff,” March 22, 1911; “First Woman to Register,” October 13, 1911; “First Lady to Register in Sonoma County,” October 14, 1911; “Local Notes,” January 9, 1912; “Were Wedded at St. Vincent’s,” September 2, 1916.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Starke is Called to Eternal Rest,” August 27, 1927; “Agatha Starke Kaiser,” October 22, 1971.

Petaluma Courier: “Father of F.J. Starke is Dead,” May 19, 1900; “Answered the Last Call,” October 31, 1902; “First Woman Candidate for Assembly,” July 18, 1914; “Re-elected Secretary of W.C.T.U.,” October 3, 1914.

“Many Were Called, But Few Were Chosen,” Oakland Tribune, August 25, 1914.

“The Santa Rosa Business College,” Santa Rosa Republican, August 7, 1900.

“Gaye LeBaron’s Notebook,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 5, 1995.

Kate Hutton Lovejoy: Early Suffragist

By Katherine J. Rinehart and John Sheehy

Catherine “Kate” Hutton Lovejoy was born in 1833, in Malone, Franklin County, New York, just a stone’s throw away from the Quebec border. Her father, George H. Hutton, was Scottish immigrant who made chairs, her mother, Samantha (Barnes) Hutton, a spinner. Kate grew up in Malone with three siblings: sisters Emma and Belle, and brother Charles.

In 1855, she married Allen P. Lovejoy, a dentist, and moved to Springfield, Vermont, where Allen established a dental practice. In 1863, during the Civil War, the couple came west to Petaluma to join Allen’s father, John Lovejoy, also a dentist, who established a practice there in 1860. They were joined by Allen’s younger brother George, yet another dentist, and George’s wife Elizabeth.

After working briefly for their father, Allen and George established the Lovejoy Brothers Dentistry on Main Street. Beginning in 1864, Allen also became the town’s sole Western Union telegraph operator, having worked in the trade back east before studying dentistry. He set up a telegraph in his dental office. Kate and Allen purchased a home at 22 Sixth Street between A and B streets.

In 1869, Kate participated in forming the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association (SCWSA), and served as one of five delegates from the county to the inaugural California Woman Suffrage Association convention held at Dashaway Hall in San Francisco, on January 27-31, 1870. Kate was joined by Abigail Haskell, Lucretia Hatch, and Sarah R. Latimer of Petaluma, and Fanny M. Wertz of Healdsburg. In the spring of 1870, Kate became the second president of the SCWSA.

Dashaway Hall, Post Street, San Francisco, 1867 (photo by Eadweard J. Muybridge, Online Archive of California)

In January, 1871, she was a Sonoma County delegate to the Pacific Coast Woman Suffrage Association Convention held in San Jose. The new association was formed after the SCWSA and other suffrage groups broke away from the California Woman Suffrage Association due to internal conflicts.

In 1878, Kate and Allen Lovejoy signed their names to a woman suffrage petition sent to the California State Legislature demanding they enact a law enabling women to vote in presidential elections and amend the California State Constitution to establish equal political rights for all American citizens, irrespective of sex. Kate had signed a similar petition in 1870. Both petitions were buried in legislative committees, with no action taken.

It appears that Kate and Allen separated after June, 1880. Both left Petaluma, while retaining ownership of their Sixth Street house, which they rented out. Allen relocated briefly to Ferndale, before embarking on an occupation as a traveling dentist in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, with regular visits to Petaluma. Kate returned to her family in Malone to tend to the needs of her aging parents—her mother died in 1881, and her father in 1889—and to her sister Belle, who lived in Petaluma with the Lovejoys in the early 1870s, but by the end of the decade was committed to the Willard Asylum for the insane in Ovid, New York.

In 1885, Allen hung himself in the American Hotel while visiting Petaluma on an extended stay to remodel the Lovejoy house. The cause of death was attributed to his drinking and his being “short of coin,” i.e. deeply in debt. The house was left to Kate, who died in 1890 at the age of 57, after being stricken with erysipelas, a skin infection also known as St. Anthony’s Fire.

The Lovejoys’ house was sold to the owner of the Petaluma Argus, H. L. Weston, the following year. Weston moved it to the back of the lot, facing Post Street, and built a new house in its place. In the early 1970s, the Lovejoys’ house was torn down and replaced by a modern duplex.

SOURCES:

Letter from Ellen Dumas at the Franklin County Historical and Museum Society to Katherine J. Rinehart, July 22, 2020.

J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), “A.P. Lovejoy,” pp. 564-565.

Ferndale Enterprise, “Notice,” January 6, 1882.

Franklin Gazette: “People vs. Lovejoy,” September 21, 1888; Kate Lovejoy obituary, May 16, 1890.

Petaluma Argus: Ad for George E. Lovejoy, dentist, June 24, 1863; “Telegraph,” March 10, 1864; “Dental Rooms,” July 23, 1868; “Good,” December 25, 1868; “Offices and Operators,” February 20, 1874; “Local Brevities,” April 15, 1881; “Personal and Social,” April 7, 1882; “Death of A.P. Lovejoy,” April 18, 1885.

Petaluma Courier: “Courierlets,” March 30, 1881; “Death from Suicide,” April 22, 1885; Kate Lovejoy estate, June 10, 1891; Kate Lovejoy estate, November 18, 1891; “Dr. George E. Lovejoy,” January 15, 1906.

Petaluma Argus-Courier, Bill Soberanes column, July 18, 1991.

San Francisco Chronicle, “Woman,” January 28, 1870.

Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel: “Card to the Public,” July 9, 1870; “Woman Suffrage Convention,” January 7, 1871.

Sonoma County Journal: ad for J. Lovejoy, dentist, July 27, 1860.

Petaluma’s “California Girl”

Anna Morrison Reed dressed in a Greco-Roman tunic for the Circus Maximus event at the State Agricultural Society Fair, 1893 (Petaluma Historical Museum & Library)

A charismatic poet and journalist, Anna Morrison Reed captivated the nation as a young woman with her electrifying lectures on temperance and a woman’s place in the home. By the time she reached middle age however, Reed had become one of California’s leading suffragists as well as a spokesperson for beer and wine industry.

Anna Moreda Morrison was born in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1849. Shortly after her birth, her father departed with a wagon train bound for the California and the gold rush, leaving behind his wife and child. In 1854, four-year-old Anna and her mother boarded a ship in New York for California, where they reunited with her father, who was working the mines in remote Butte County.

Homeschooled by her mother, Anna demonstrated an early talent for poetry, publishing her first poems in local newspapers when she was fifteen. At seventeen, she began teaching in a rural school and writing articles for the local press. At nineteen, she gained entry to Mrs. Perry’s Seminary in Sacramento, but had to withdraw after two months and return home to take care of her parents and three younger siblings, who were all afflicted with malaria.

To support her family, Anna joined the temperance lecture circuit as the opening act for her mother’s cousin, Col. E.Z.C. Judson, a recovering alcoholic and the originator of the western “dime novel,” who later started Buffalo Bill Cody on the path to fame. Anna learned from Judson the formula for an entertaining presentation, combining speaking, poetry recitations, music, and dancing.

Reed performing as a young woman on the temperance speakers circuit, c. 1870 (public domain)

After learning the ropes, Anna went on the road as a solo act, speaking to small-town residents in every Northern California county except Modoc, traveling either on horseback or by stagecoach, accompanied by only her younger brother Eddie. Espousing traditional roles for women in the home, she quickly gained notoriety for her opposition to the women suffragists working the temperance circuit, many of whom were Spiritualists originally from the east coast. She drew large crowds and the attention of prominent politicians as well as the national press, who dubbed her the “California Girl.”

One newspaper described her as “an unusually attractive personality with sparkling brown eyes, finely molded features, and luxuriant dark hair … a striking illustration of what pluck and native talent can do in spite of adverse circumstances in early life.”

Anna’s speaking tour, which continued non-stop for two-and-a-half years, generated enough money for her to purchase a house for her family. Her events usually ended with a community dance that she happily participated in, garnering her several suitors and marriage proposals. In 1872, after a whirlwind romance that began at a dance, she married John Smith Reed, a successful miner twenty years her senior.

The Reeds made their home in Ukiah, where John became involved in ranching as one of the largest landholders in Mendocino County, as well as politics and founding the Bank of Ukiah, where he served as president for many years. Anna, following the message of her lectures, became a stay-at-home mother, giving birth to five children in her first eight years of marriage.

Reed at the family ranch in Laytonville (Mendocino County Historical Society)

She remained active in the local and state temperance movement, using her political connections in Sacramento to draft California’s first local option law in 1874, which proposed allowing communities to determine whether they would be wet or dry when it came to selling alcohol. After passing the legislature, the law was quickly struck down by the state high court.

Anna also continued to write. Deemed the “Poetess of the North” by the San Francisco press, she published her first book of poetry in 1880, followed by two more well-received volumes in the 1890s. She also became a founding member of the Pacific Coast Women’s Press Association, which provided support to women writers and journalists.

After a large fire destroyed their Ukiah home in 1889, the Reeds bought a sheep ranch near Laytonville in Mendocino County. Anna returned to the public eye as a rancher, becoming the first woman to deliver the annual address before the State Agricultural Society of California, as well as at Cloverdale’s Citrus Fair and Petaluma’s Sonoma-Marin Agricultural Fair. In 1892, the California legislature appointed her to the Board of Lady Managers for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. To raise money for the exposition’s California exhibits, Anna returned to the speaking circuit of Northern California, sometimes with a child in tow.

Reed on the circuit in the 1890s (public domain)

In the 1890s, a financial downturn in the sheep business led to repossession of the family’s ranch by John’s former colleagues at the Bank of Ukiah. The action, which Anna complained was part of a property swindle by the bank, broke John, and in 1900 he died of a heart aneurism, leaving his family penniless. To make money, she began selling ads and subscriptions to a Ukiah newspaper, as well as writing a weekly column. She also remained active in the California Women’s Press Association.

By 1904, she had made enough money to purchase a house for her extended family, and to fund a magazine, The Northern Crown, which covered the people, politics, arts, and travel of Northern California. In the first issue she made it clear that life had made her a staunch supporter of suffrage and social justice reform for women. In the years that followed, she became a prominent advocate for the California suffragist movement.

In 1908, Anna moved her family from Ukiah to Petaluma, where she continued to publish The Northern Crown, while launching her own daily newspaper, The Sonoma County Independent, which she declared to be the “paper of the people.” In 1911, she was chosen to serve as one of the official speakers of California’s Equal Suffrage Association’s campaign for passage of the state suffrage amendment, Proposition 4, which passed that year by a narrow margin of 50.7%.

After selling The Sonoma County Independent in 1912, she returned to the California lecture circuit to spearheaded fundraising for the erection of the Pioneer Mother monument, a testament to early women settlers at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (it can be seen today in Golden Gate Park).

Reed advocating for the Grape Growers Association, 1915

Anna also became a paid spokesperson for both the United Brewery Workers and the Grape Growers of Northern California, arguing that while she remained a supporter of temperance in terms of drinking in moderation—she herself enjoyed an evening glass of port—she opposed the “warped and Puritanical minds” intent upon suppressing individual liberty and stealing the livelihoods of the thousands who labored in California vineyards, hopyards, wineries, and breweries through prohibition, noting that “the professional good” have the habit of believing evil of all who differ with them.

In 1916, due to the health of her son Jack, who contracted TB from the carbon-based inks he used operating his mother’s printing presses, Anna and her family left foggy Petaluma to return to Ukiah, where she took a job editing the Ukiah Times Journal while continuing to publish The Northern Crown.

In 1918, she ran on an anti-prohibition platform as a Democratic nominee for a seat in the California State Assembly, losing by only a few hundred votes. Having witnessed passage of the 19th Amendment extending to women the right to vote in 1920, she died at her daughter’s home in San Francisco on May 23, 1921, and was buried in Laytonville.

******

SOURCES:

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

Books
John E. Keller, Anna Morrison Reed 1849-1921 (California Historical Society, 1978)

Richard Mendelson, From Demon to Darling: A Legal History of Wine in America (University of California, 2010), p. 32

Richard B. Rice, William A. Bullough, Richard J. Orsi, Mary Ann Irwin, “The California Girl,” The Elusive Eden: A New History of California, Fourth Edition (Long Grove, IL: Waveland press, 2017). p. 317-318.

Pauline C. Thompson (1993). A ‘California Girl’: The Life and Times of Anna Morrison Reed, 1849-1921 (Unpublished master’s thesis). California State University, Hayward.

Nan Towle Yamane, Women’s Press Organizations, 1881-1999, edited by Elizabeth V. Burt, (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000).

Newspapers & Blogs

“For the Ladies,” syndicated in: Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1870; Vermont Journal, August 13, 1870; Daily Commonwealth (Topeka, KS), August 14, 1870; Brooklyn Eagle, August 11, 1870; Hartford Courant, August 23, 1870.

The Golden Coast,” Akron Daily Democrat, December 29, 1892.

“’Prohibition is Piracy’ says Mrs. Reed,” Cloverdale Reveille, February 19, 1916.

Petaluma Argus: “Jack Reed is Home Again,” June 4, 1914; “Will Soon Move the Plant up to Ukiah,” June 14, 1916.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: Mrs. Anna M. Reed Gave Address,” February 15, 1916; “Rear-View Mirror Column,” August 20, 1960; “Anna Medora Morrison Reed,” March 4, 1987.

Petaluma Courier: “Peggy’s Penciling” column, August 25, 1891; “Installed New Press,” May 14, 1909; “Mrs. Anna Reed Will Speak on Monument,” June 19, 1914.

“Wet Speaker Shows Endorsement of Prohibition Woman,” Sacramento Bee, September 10, 1914.

“Suffragette Appeals to Workers,” San Francisco Examiner, August 31, 1911.

“Mrs. Reed to Take Platform,” Santa Rosa Republican, July 25, 1911.

Joanna Kolosov, “A Northern California ‘Pioneer’ in Her Own Right,” Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library, March 28, 2018. https://sonomalibrary.org/blogs/history/a-northern-california-pioneer-in-her-own-right

Ad for Anna and Col. E.Z.C. Judson, Stockton Independent, December 9, 1868.

Ukiah Daily Journal: “The Petaluma Fair,” September 4, 1891; “World’s Fair Lecture,” March 31, 1893.

“A Wise Appointment,” Ukiah Republican Press, February 12, 1892.

“Inter Poenia,” Weekly Butte Record, June 9, 1866.

Rethinking General Vallejo

Mariano Vallejo, Sonoma home, 1885 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Enthralled with the legend of General Marino Vallejo, at the age of ten I set off with a friend on a pilgrimage to the Petaluma Adobe. I had attended Old Adobe Fiesta Days with my parents and seen the square dancing, Indian dances, and the whiskerino contests, but after reading a short biography of the general, my friend and I became determined to ride our sting-ray bikes up Casa Grande Road, the route Vallejo used for hauling cattle hides and tallow to his dock on the Petaluma slough, our own Yellow Brick Road to the local Land of Oz.

Fifty years later, I struggle to reconcile my early admiration of Vallejo with what I’ve since come to learn about the man. While September 27th each year is intended as a day to honor the historic and cultural contributions of California Native Americans, it’s difficult to do so without also acknowledging the tragic losses they incurred at the hands of colonists like Vallejo.

State parks archaeologist Breck Parkman touches upon some of that legacy in his recent studies of the trade relationship between Vallejo and the Russian mercantile colony at Fort Ross. Citing new English translations of archival Russian documents, Parkman highlights the different approaches Vallejo and the Russians took with the native community, particularly during the smallpox epidemic of 1837-39. Spread by one of Vallejo’s soldiers after he returned from a cargo-run to Fort Ross with the disease, the epidemic decimated most of the natives in the Sonoma-Napa region. Their bones, often left unburied, “bleached the hills.”

Parkman began exploring the epidemic back in 2006, after the New Year’s Eve Storm that flooded parts of Petaluma. Concerned about an earlier excavation of a native camp along Adobe Creek, Parkman went to the site and found that a good part of the creekbank had collapsed during the flood, exposing the “New Year Feature”— a long trench into which burned native homes and their contents had been buried. No body remains were found, but along with his colleague Susan Alvarez, Parkman determined that the trench (since destroyed) was most likely used by Vallejo in trying to contain the smallpox epidemic.

Vallejo with elderly Pomo woman, 1878 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

In the Vallejo biography I read as a boy, the epidemic was depicted as a natural tragedy, one the general was helpless to prevent. Except that he wasn’t. Vaccine for smallpox had been available in California since the early 1800s. According to historian S.F. Cook, after a smallpox (or perhaps measles) outbreak in 1828, the Mexican government had inoculated an estimated 12,000-16,000 clerics, soldiers, and native mission acolytes from San Diego to Sonoma.

When smallpox first appeared in 1837, the Russians quickly vaccinated their native workers at Fort Ross, suffering only a few deaths. Vallejo did not. Except for inoculating a few allies like Chief Solano, he reserved the vaccine for fellow Californios. As a result, most of Vallejo’s 2,000 workers at the Adobe died. The Petaluma Adobe, which Vallejo operated more as a factory than a military fort, exporting grain, livestock, and woolen textiles, never fully recovered.

Vallejo’s reasons for not providing natives with the vaccine are unknown. As one of the most powerful men in California, it’s doubtful he lacked the clout to obtain it (the Russians had reportedly supplied Mexicans the vaccine for the 1828 epidemic). But while revered as one of California’s most enlightened men, Vallejo was also at times egotistical, autocratic, and Machiavellian. An admirer of the Romans, he saw echoes of their empire building in the Spanish-Mexican conquest of California’s native “barbarians” by a small group of “civilized men.”

That was evident at times in his treatment of the natives. After Vallejo converted the Petaluma Valley into a vast ranch of 12,000 to 15,000 cattle, eliminating much of its wild game, natives who had resisted indentured servitude at his factory resorted to killing cattle to feed themselves. In one case, after 35 cattle went missing, Vallejo ordered 35 natives indiscriminately rounded up and shot. Other acts of cruelty—murder, rape, and abduction—were carried out by his brother Salvador and main enforcer Chief Solano.

Petaluma Adobe from Casa Grande Road, 1970 (photo Sherman Bolvin, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

On our personal sojourn to the Petaluma Adobe some fifty years ago, my friend and I only made it as far as Casa Grande Road, then a rural lane, before being stopped by falling darkness. A deputy sheriff found us and drove us home. In retrospect, that was probably best, given what Dorothy found when she reached the Land of Oz and pulled back the curtain on the wizard.

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

Blackface, Rodeos, and the Egg City Minstrels

Jesse Stahl and his signature “backward ride” at the rodeo (photo Oakland Black Cowboy Association)

The sight of Jesse Stahl whirling atop a bucking bronc surprised the crowd of 4,000 gathered at the 1912 Salinas rodeo, where Stahl was featured as its first Black contestant. Despite his first place performance, he was awarded second place. After the judge announced his decision, Stahl jumped on an exhibition horse and, either out of protest or merely mockery, set off on a victory lap around the arena, riding backwards to the thrill of the crowd.

Stahl’s backward exhibition became a popular spectacle in subsequent competitions, where he continued to place second or third, but never first, until the day he competed in a rodeo judged by Tommy Caulfield, Jr.

“Regardless of nationality or color,” Caulfield announced in awarding Stahl his first place winnings, “the man who makes the most points deserves the most money.” Glancing at the other contestants, some of whom had refused to compete against Stahl because he was Black, Caulfield added, “If there is anybody looking for an argument, I’ll be glad to meet him right after the show.”

No one took him up on his offer, probably because, in addition to judging rodeos, the redheaded Caulfield also judged boxing matches, having spent time as a prizefighter himself.

After the rodeo, Stahl became a regular visitor to Petaluma, either breaking wild horses shipped in from Nevada to Caulfield’s corral beside the trainyard, or competing in rodeos at Kenilworth Park (now the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds). He made it clear he considered Caulfield not only one of the best rodeo judges, but also the fairest, an opinion shared by many.

But there was another side to Caulfield, one that clouds this image of him as a principled man without prejudice: he liked to perform in blackface at minstrel shows. In one review, a Petaluma newspaper reported that “as a coon, Tommy is in a class all by himself.”

Petaluma’s minstrel troupe and their band and chorus, 1931. Tom Caulfield in blackface, far right. (photo Sonoma County Library)

Like most white performers who donned blackface’s coal-black makeup, woolly wigs, and outlandishly red lips, Caulfield grew up far from the racial prejudice of the South. The sixth child of a fiery Irish immigrant who became Petaluma’s largest cattle dealer, Caulfield did his best after high school to escape the confines of his hometown.

Following a failed attempt at medical school, he knocked around railroading, playing semi-pro baseball, boxing, and touring the country with a vaudeville theater troupe, before finally returning to Petaluma and the family cattle business.

Tommy Caulfield, second row, far right, with the 1903 Petaluma Alerts baseball team (photo Sonoma County Library)

The consummate Irish storyteller, he continued to perform in local vaudeville shows, often in blackface.Following one of his performances, the author Jack London invited Caulfield and his fellow cast members to dinner. Throughout the evening, London made many offers of whiskey and wine, all of which Caulfield, a lifelong teetotaler, politely declined. “Son,” London finally said, “you’re the first man I’ve ever met who stands by his principles.”

Caulfield subsequently became a good friend of London’s and his personal cattle buyer. He also served as the basis of a character in Valley of the Moon, London’s 1913 novel that expresses the happiness he found at his Glen Ellen ranch, as well as his xenophobia and white supremacy.

Jack London’s 1913 novel, Valley of the Moon

By the time Caulfield and his brother Will inherited their father’s cattle business, he had become one of the Petaluma’s best liked and most illustrious citizens, known for making generous loans of livestock, acreage, and cash to new ranchers, and also for providing an annual Christmas dinner to the migrant workers who lived in camps near the train yards. Petaluma’s annual cattle drive, which extended from the Caulfield Stockyards on Lakeville Street to the Caulfield’s slaughterhouse on McDowell Road east of town, was a revered tradition for ranchers. But for the broader public, Caulfield’s popularity stemmed primarily from his role in Petaluma’s minstrel troupe.

Champion riders who competed in Petaluma rodeos, posing at a Northern California roundup rodeo in the early 1920s. Left to right: Don Tate, Hippy Burmister, Bill Errbone, Perry Ivory (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

Minstrelsy—comedic performances in which white men blackened their faces, adopted heavy dialects, and performed what they claimed to be Black songs, dances, and jokes—began in 1830 when a white performer in New York City named Thomas Dartmouth Rice created a blackface character called “Jumping Jim Crow.”

Minstrel shows quickly became a national sensation, influencing white composers of the day like Stephen Foster, who wrote “Camptown Races,” “Oh, Susanna,” and other popular songs for the shows, and eventually leading to the development of vaudeville.

Blacks also performed in minstrel shows, forced ironically to don blackface, as it was often their only way to break into the entertainment business. Some subverted blackface’s primitive representations with political commentary in their comedic minstrel routines, while others blended cultural influences, like William Henry Lane—better known as “Master Juba”—who set an Irish jig and reel dance to syncopated African rhythms, giving birth to tap dancing.

Although intended to be light, meaningless entertainment, minstrel shows also perpetuated negative stereotypes of Blacks as being lazy, ignorant, superstitious, hypersexual, criminal, and cowardly. They depicted the South as a genteel land of benevolent planters and happy servants, the most popular of whom were the caricatures of the mammy and the old uncle. The underlying message was that Blacks belonged on Southern plantations. Even after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, minstrels still sang of pining for the old plantation.

The shows were most popular outside the South. By providing a means of looking down upon and laughing at Blacks, blackface helped ease the discomfort and fear many whites felt toward them, while at the same time allowing them to enjoy and appreciate Black culture.

Many of the early blackface actors were working-class Irish from the Northeast. As Catholic immigrants, they were consigned to a low social, political, and economic status. Blackface became their means of Americanization, authenticating their whiteness by comically dehumanizing those who were not white.

The Egg City Minstrels and their band and chorus, 1931. Tommy Caulfield in blackface, seated far left; George Ott in white tuxedo, seated in center (photo Sonoma County Library)

Petaluma’s first blackface minstrel troupe, the Petaluma Ethiopian Minstrels, was formed by a group of white amateurs for a Christmas benefit in 1875, just as Reconstruction was coming to an end and many of the 44 members of Petaluma’s small Black community were moving on to friendlier enclaves in Oakland and Vallejo.

The troupe followed the traditional three-act format of the minstrel show, opening with a band and chorus followed by the grand entrance of fourteen minstrels strutting, singing, waving their arms, banging tambourines, and prancing around a semicircle of chairs, until the interlocutor, a white man not in blackface dressed in formal attire, finally called out, “Gentlemen, be seated!”

Occupying his place in the middle of the semicircle, the interlocutor moved the first act along by asking questions of the “end” men at either edge of the semicircle—Mr. Tambo, who played the tambourine, and Mr. Bones, who rattled a pair of clappers known as “the bones.”

“Mr. Bones, I understand you went to the ball game yesterday afternoon. You told me you wanted to go to your mother-in-law’s funeral.” “I did want to,” Bones answered back, “but she ain’t dead yet.”

These fast-moving exchanges were interspersed with ballads, comic songs, and instrumental numbers, chiefly on banjo and violin. The second and third acts usually consisted of a series of individual performances—the Petaluma Ethiopians premiered with “Rascal Billy,” “The Stage-Struck Darkey,” “Uncle Tom’s Visit,” and “Woman’s Rights”—concluding with a hoedown or walk-around, in which every member did a specialty number while the others sang and clapped.

The immense popularity of minstrel shows during the late 19th century paralleled the passage of “black codes” meant to restrict Black behavior by southern state legislators, who, in a nod to minstrelsy, referred to them as “Jim Crow laws.” In parts of the country that had small Black populations like Sonoma County, blackface caricatures took on semblances of truth, with older Black men commonly designated with the title “uncle.”

The Petaluma Ethiopian Minstrels reigned as the most popular entertainment troupe in town until the turn of the 20th century, when local minstrel shows were displaced by nickelodeons, which featured silent short films interspaced with vaudeville acts, many of which included blackface routines.

As society modernized, so did the ways in which blackface was portrayed, particularly in the film industry. In 1915, “The Birth of a Nation,” the epic silent film about the Civil War and Reconstruction that glorified white supremacism, featured white actors in blackface portraying Blacks as sexual predators and simpletons. The film became a box office blockbuster, inspiring a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which by the 1920s grew to more than two million members across the country.

Still photo from the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation,” directed by D.W. Griffin (photo Alamy.com)

Petaluma’s chapter, established in 1924, staged a night time cross-burning beside the Petaluma Adobe for the initiation of new members. Given that Petaluma’s Black population in 1920 consisted of just six individuals, the local KKK largely focused their nativist attention on Sonoma Country’s Mexican, Mexican-American, and Japanese-American field laborers.

That same year, George Ott, owner of a Petaluma stationery store and president of the local Chamber of Commerce, decided to revive the Petaluma Minstrels as a means of raising money for charitable organizations. For help, he called upon his best friend and the town’s most popular blackface performer, Tom Caulfield. With Ott serving as the interlocutor and Caulfield as an end man, they recruited 14 local merchants to the group, including businesswomen, and adopted as their motto “to scatter sunshine.”

In 1926, the Petaluma Minstrels made their radio debut on an Oakland broadcasting station, after which they were inundated with booking requests from all over California. Playing on Petaluma’s egg boom at the time, they changed their name to the Egg City Minstrels, and began performing at benefits around the state for hospitals, orphanages, fire departments, military bases, and prisons.

The Egg City Minstrels’ popularity coincided with a minstrelsy craze on radio and film, most notably 1927’s “The Jazz Singer,” which ushered in the talkies. Featuring a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant named Al Jolson performing as an aspiring singer in blackface, it became a huge hit.

Although Jolson positioned himself as an ally of Blacks in helping to popularize Black jazz, his designation as the “king of blackface” echoed for cinematic historian Nic Sammond the Americanization that Irish blackface performers before him had sought with the white Protestant majority.

Poster for 1927’s “The Jazz Singer” (photo Pinterest)

After Petaluma’s egg boom foundered during the Depression, the Egg City Minstrels changed their name to the Redwood Empire Minstrels. They continued to stage benefit performances until the start of World War II, by which time minstrel shows had fallen out of favor. Ott estimated that during their seventeen years together the troupe had raised $44,000 for charity ($750,000 in today’s currency), none of which they pocketed themselves.

In 1948, Petaluma’s minstrel troupe reunited for one final benefit performance at the local Masonic Lodge, giving 60-year old Caulfield his last opportunity to perform in blackface. That same year, Caulfield led local ranchers on the last annual cattle drive across the flat prairie east of town. Beginning in 1950, the prairie began to fill up with new suburban homes as Petaluma transformed into a bedroom community for San Francisco. Caulfield’s roundups became the fodder of local legend, as did Jesse Stahl, the Black cowboy who had once ridden broncs in Caulfield’s corrals.

Stories about Stahl usually underscored the lack of prejudice Petaluma had toward the cowboy. Henry Howe, a cousin of Caulfield’s who competed against Stahl on the rodeo circuit and later worked as a horse wrangler for Hollywood filmmakers, recalled that he and Stahl were drinking at a bar with other cowboys after a particular rodeo in Texas, when a group of local Ku Klux Klan members walked in. “If you don’t want a fight,” they said, “hand us that n—– cowboy.” Instead of handing over Stahl, Howe and the rodeo cowboys beat the daylights out of the Klan members.

Or, so the legend goes. The sad truth is that Stahl, having retired from the rodeo circuit in 1929, died poor and alone in Sacramento in 1935, at the age of 55. He was destined for a pauper’s grave until old rodeo friends chipped in to give him a proper burial. In 1979, he was posthumously inducted into Oklahoma City’s Rodeo Hall of Fame, only the second Black cowboy to receive that honor.

Rodeo Hall of Fame member Jesse Stahl, 1879-1935 (photo Oakland Black Cowboy Association)

Caulfield, the man who had once bravely stood up for Stahl on the rodeo circuit, died in 1960, twelve years after his last blackface performance and his last cattle drive. Not long afterward, the Caulfield Stockyards were converted into a shopping mall.

Tom Caulfield at his stockyard (photo Petaluma Argus-Courier)

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Video features:

“Camptown Races,” sung by Al Jolson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tuu5YtkPIo

California Rodeo at Salinas, 1935:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=197222941224193

SOURCES:

Publications & Websites

Edwin S. Grosvenor, Robert C. Toll, “Blackface: the Sad History of Minstrel Shows,” American Heritage, Winter 2019, Vol. 64, Issue 1.

The Atlantic: Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, “New Racism Museum Reveals the Ugly Truth Behind Aunt Jemima,” April 23, 2012; Tony Horowitz, “The Mammy Washington Almost Had,” May 31, 2013.

Tricia Wagner, “Jesse Stahl (CA. 1879-1935),” Blackpast.org, September 7, 2010. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/jesse-stahl-c-1879-1935/

“Minstrel Show, American Theater,” Encyclopedia Britannica, May 19, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/art/minstrel-show

Johann Hari, “Jack London: Not Just the Voice of the Wild,” The Independent, August 23, 2010.

New York Times: Holland Cotter, “We Don’t Have to Like Them, We Just Need to Understand Them,” June 25, 2020; Riché Richardson, “Can We Please, Finally, Get Rid of ‘Aunt Jemima?” June 24, 2015.

Susan J.P. O’Hara, Alex Service, “Champions of the Rodeo,” North Coast Journal, July 19, 2018.

Petaluma Argus: Petaluma Minstrels Ad, December 17, 1875; “The Vaudeville At the Hi School,” October 18, 1923; “Klan Principles Disclosed to Large Assemblage,” October 24, 1924;

Petaluma Courier: “Will Study Medicine,” July 23, 1902; “Native Sons Vaudeville Show a Great Success,” April 17, 1912; “Petalumans Give Minstrel Show at Kenwood,” February 8, 1924; “Initiation of KKK Before Guests,” June 2, 1925.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Ku Klux Klan Visit Petaluma,” April 21, 1930; “Noonie, Mike Monroy Train Hard for Bout,” May 15, 1930; “Remember Petaluma’s First Theater?” April 15, 1954; “Tom Caulfield is Packed with Stories,” October 27, 1955; “Tom Caulfield—His Story,” So They Tell Me column, May 3, 1960; “Ex-Petaluma Horse Trainer Hangs Up His Spurs,” February 3, 1972; “The Last Round-up,” Bill Soberanes column, April 16, 1980; “Tom Caulfield, Livestock Yard Owner,” December 29, 1990; “Petaluma’s Fabulous and Versatile Tom Caulfield,” December 8, 1998.

Sacramento Bee: “Jesse Stahl Will Be Given a Decent Burial,” April 20, 1935.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: Lou Leal, “Let the Public Speak: Jack London’s Evolution,” June 29, 2020.

“Blackface: The Birth of An American Stereotype,” Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/blackface-birth-american-stereotype

U.S. Census Data, 1870 and 1820, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.

Books

William Courtright, The Complete Minstrel Guide: Containing Gags, Jokes, Parodies, Speeches, Farces, and Full Directions for a Complete Minstrel Show (Dramatic Publishing Company, 1901)

William Loren Katz, The Black West (New York: Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996)

Jack London, Valley of the Moon, 1913 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 17.

Gina M. Rosetti, Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), p. 36.

Nic Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Duke University Press Books, 2015).

Yuval Taylor, Jake Austin, Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).

Christo’s Trojan Horse

How the Running Fence tipped the political balance in Sonoma County

The Running Fence , September 8-22, 1976 (photo Wolfgang Volz)

Given the traditional symbolism of fences with divisiveness, it should have come as no surprise that when an artist showed up in Petaluma in early 1974 with a proposed exhibit called the Running Fence, he would have his work cut out for him.

Bulgarian-born artist Christo asserted that his installation—a 18-foot high nylon fence stretching 24.5 miles across Sonoma and Marin counties from Highway 101 in Cotati to the Pacific Ocean in Bodega Bay—would foster a sense of “togetherness” by creating with a new, shared vision of the area’s rolling pastureland.

Instead, Christo’s proposal quickly became a lightning rod in a turf war between local environmentalists and outside developers that would impact the region for decades to come.

That, of course, is not the common story of how the Running Fence saga unfolds in documentaries and tributes to Christo, who died in 2020 at the age of 84. Those narratives commonly borrow from the storybook narrative of the hero’s journey, with Christo cast in a Sisyphean struggle against incredible opposition as he persistently pursues his artistic vision, the manifestation of which ultimately brings about the transformation of hearts and minds he sought, thanks to the mind-changing epiphany that only beauty can inspire.

One problem with this storyline is it buries the subversive manner with which Christo ultimately undermined the coalition of pro-development supporters who welcomed him to town, effectively tipping the political balance in favor of the environmentalists, who did not, in preserving the pastures he showcased in his exhibit.

The artist Christo (photo Morrie Camhi)

Held aloft by steel poles and cables, the Running Fence exhibit opened for two weeks in September 1976to an estimated two million visitors. This brief exhibit however was preceded by four years of planning and drama, during which the proposal was subjected to 18 public hearings, three sessions in California superior courts, and a 465-page environmental impact report.

For much of that time, Christo and his exhibit partner and spouse Jeanne-Claude operated out of their headquarters at the Petaluma Inn, commuting back and forth from their home in New York City. As the legal battles dragged on, Christo made it clear didn’t consider the physical Running Fence itself to be the art of the exhibit, but rather the process of the fence coming into being.

“You are all part of my work,” Christo explained in his Bulgarian accent to supporters and distractors alike.

Yet, despite his pledge to foster a sense of togetherness with the project, his focus quickly turned to assembling a partisan coalition in helping to get it approved. Whether he went about it as the “arrogant, wheeler-dealer egomaniac” local artist Mary McChesney accused him of being, or merely a pragmatic opportunist, the coalition of developers, anti-tax proponents, and ranchers Christo assembled, was, like most coalitions, a mixed bag. The one thing uniting them was a common desire to eliminate government restrictions on land use, including restrictions on absurd art installations like the Running Fence, which none of them confessed to understanding.

The most enchanting part of project’s storybook narrative is the charm offensive Christo and Jeanne-Claude mounted over coffee and fresh-baked pie around the kitchen tables of local dairy ranchers upon whose land they wished to erect the fence.

Sheepdog trainer and former rancher, Lester Bruhn (photo Gianfranco Gorgoni)

In reality, the couple, with their foreign accents, New York avant-garde airs, and free-spirited hippie looks, were an oddball mismatch to the conservative, no-nonsense personalities of the ranchers and their wives, many of them direct descendants of Swiss-Italian, Danish, and German immigrants. They received a cold shoulder until a former sheep rancher and sheepdog trainer, Lester Bruhn, recognized in the couple’s harebrained scheme a money-making opportunity for cash-strapped ranchers.

With Bruhn opening doors, Christo and Jeanne-Claude made the opening pitch to 59 ranchers around their kitchen tables, followed up by a battery of nine lawyers who negotiated leases for the fence to run across their properties. The opening lease offer for a modest size ranch was $200 ($1,000 in today’s currency). Some ranchers held out for more, including one large ranch that received $5,500 ($28,000 in today’s currency). The ranchers were also promised the fence’s nylon curtains, posts, and cabling once the exhibit came down.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude employed a similar approach in gaining the support of the conservative Sonoma County Taxpayers Association. “They came to us, hat in hand, money in pocket,” said the group’s president Jim Groom. “We like that.”

The one constituency Christo and Jeanne-Claude did not seek to court were local artists. Instead, they snubbed them. In turn, many artists condemned the Running Fence as a silly gimmick and a form of “fascist art,” seeking to dominate the landscape instead of complement it.

“We later realized,” said Jeanne-Claude, “the local artists saw us as an invasion of their turf.”

Jeanne-Claude (photo Morrie Camhi)

The dustup over artistic integrity may have also been part of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s strategy, as it allowed them to shift the media’s focus from the relatively tedious machinations of negotiating land use policy, to a theatrical sideshow over the nature of public art itself.

Yet, while Christo commonly referred to the Running Fence as “public art,” technically there was nothing public about it. Mounted on private land, it’s $3 million price tag ($13.5 million in today’s currency) was money Christo raised through the sale of his art works, not public monies. Despite Christo’s claims of everyone being part of the aesthetic process, no members of the public were formally involved in its physical creation or procurement, nor were any government-appointed public art commissions engaged in its review and approval.

Like a visiting carnival, the only official review of the Running Fence’s installation by the public or public agencies was restricted to its land use.

Christo at Sonoma County public hearing, 1975 (photo Gianfranco Gorgoni)

Concurrent with Christo’s four-year campaign to secure land use approval, the city of Petaluma was enmeshed in a legal battle of its own, fighting outside developers over limiting the city’s growth to 500 new houses per year. The developers maintained that imposing such a restriction was an infringement of the right of people to live where they wanted.

In February 1976, just two months before Christo received the final go-ahead from Sonoma County for his installation, Petaluma was granted a landmark decision when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected reviewing a lower appellate court ruling that upheld the city’s growth limits. The ruling had national consequences, and made Petaluma the darling of the slow growth movement.

By that time, savvy housing developers had already shifted their focus to subdividing the unregulated rural countryside surrounding Petaluma. One of their most contentious proposals was a 994-unit housing development slated for the Watson Ranch, a 1,000-area property north of town on Pepper Road between Stony Point and Mecham roads. The ranch sat just a mile south of Cotati’s Meacham Hill where Christo intended to launch his Running Fence installation from.

Like many local ranchers, John Watson was a second-generation dairyman, his family having leased the one-time Mecham family ranch since 1926, before purchasing it in 1965. Five years later, faced with rising property taxes, Watson sold a majority interest in the property to developers from Palo Alto.

It wasn’t Watson’s only option. Thanks to the Williamson Act, a California land conservation bill passed in 1965, ranchers could reduce their taxes by legally restricting their land to agricultural or open space use. Some, like Watson, were reluctant to do so given the instability of the local dairy industry, which, by the early 1970s, was facing the perfect storm in terms of financial sustainability.

In addition to being financially squeezed by rising feed prices while the state kept a lid on milk prices, national milk consumption was declining due to new dietary concerns about cholesterol. At the same time, dairy competition was increasing due to large factory farms in California’s central valley, where feed was cheaper and property taxes lower. To make matters worse, a historic two-year drought hit the area in the mid-1970s, forcing many ranchers to pay for trucking in water for their cows, each of whom drank an average of 50 gallons a day.

Barbara and Wilbur Volkerts at their Pepper Road ranch that the Running Fence ran across (photo Gianfranco Gorgoni)

The largest existential threat facing dairymen however was California’s new waste treatment regulations.

Most local dairies were situated near streams into which they washed the waste from their milking operations. With the rise of the environmental movement in the late 1960s, new regulations were adopted to stop dairy waste from polluting waterways. Ranchers were given until 1977 to install closed waste disposal systems and open-stall barns. The cost of doing so ranged between $100,000 for a medium-sized dairy to $300,000 for a large dairy ($500,000 to $1,500,00 in today’s currency).

For many ranchers, the waste regulations were the final nail in the coffin. Beginning in the early 1970s, “dairy for sale” became a sign of the times in Sonoma and Marin counties. Larger dairies resorted to swallowing up their smaller neighbors in an effort to remain competitive with the larger farms in the central valley. For some ranchers, the only viable alternative was the choice Watson made to subdivide the ranch with outside developers.

Between World War II and the early 1970s, Petaluma’s population surged from 8,000 to 30,000 residents, as the area became an attractive bedroom community for commuters working in San Francisco, a forty-five minute drive away.

To keep up with developer demand, the city was forced to periodically annex surrounding farmland. With new subdivisions butting up against farmland, ranchers became besieged with complaints from new suburban residents of the smells, flies, and noise coming from the ranches. In addition to the increased scrutiny of county health inspectors, ranchers were adversely impacted by rising property tax assessments as their land value substantially increased when a subdivision moved in next door.

The opposition to the encroaching housing developments in the rural area was led in part by Dr. Bill Kortum, a Petaluma rancher and large animal veterinarian. elected to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors in 1974 on a platform of growth control and agricultural preservation, Kortum fought to prevent wall-to-wall subdivisions stretching across his district in Southern Sonoma County by creating greenbelt zones between the incorporated cities.

Sonoma County Supervisor Dr. Bill Kortum (photo Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

In 1975, his proposal became part of a new interim general plan to manage growth that the board began developing. The planning process would ultimately take three years to complete. In the meantime, Kortum and the board’s other environmentalist, Chuck Hinkle, requested a moratorium on new property lot divisions. Developers immediately went on the offensive, working behind the scenes to launch a recall campaign against Kortum and Hinkle.

As a proxy attack dog, they enlisted Jim Groom, president of the Sonoma County Taxpayers Association. A Rohnert Park developer and former Santa Rosa city councilman, Groom had invested heavily in coastal lands for subdivision following the Sea Ranch housing development in the 1960s, which stretched along ten miles of Sonoma County’s coastline. In 1972, before Groom could begin his own coastal housing development, voters approved a ballot initiative Kortum had helped to launch, establishing a California Coastal Commission to reign in coastal developments. The new initiative left Groom’s investment under water.

In retaliation, Groom crafted the recall against Kortum and Hinkle ostensibly as a protest of the Board of Supervisors’ decision in 1975 to increase property taxes. He enlisted the support of local ranchers, pointing out to them that Kortum’s proposed greenbelt zones would not only diminish their land value, but also eliminate their retirement or rainy-day options of selling their land to developers.

While Groom’s contentious recall campaign was underway, Christo appeared before the Board of Supervisors for approval of the Running Fence exhibit. Kortum was the only board member to vote against it.

As it turned out, most of the 59 ranchers who signed leases for Christo’s installation had also previously agreed to restrict their land to agricultural use or open space in exchange for lower taxes under the Williamson Act. Like other environmentalists, Kortum was concerned that, in approving Christo’s project, the county would be potentially opening the door to more exclusions to the Williamson Act in the farmlands, such as commercial billboards, outdoor concert arenas, carnivals, and motorcycle raceways.

Pro-growth supervisors on the board dismissed Kortum’s concern. One member pointed out that a fence, “running or not,” was technically agricultural by nature.

Running Fence installation (photo from the film Running Fence by by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin)

In April 1976, Christo and Jeanne-Claude broke ground for their installation on Bruhn’s Valley Ford property. A month later, Kortum and Hinkle were recalled in a special election engineered by Groom. In August, developers of the Watson Ranch’s 994-unit subdivision on Pepper Road, apparently hoping for a quick approval given the recent recall of Kortum and Hinkle, presented their plans to the Sonoma County Planning Commission.

On September 8th, Christo and Jeanne-Claude opened their two-week exhibit of the Running Fence by unfurling the nylon panels on the same day with one final, dramatic twist.

A few months before the opening, the Coastal Commission rescinded its approval the fence’s final 1,000 yards that were slated to run across protected coastal land into the Pacific Ocean. That particular patch of land at Bodega Bay belonged to developers who originally purchased it for a subdivision, only to be thwarted by creation of the Coastal Commission. Christo’s lawyers appealed the decision, and a new hearing was negotiated for September 23rd, a day after the Running Fence exhibit was scheduled to come down.

The Running Fence’s “illegal leap” into the Pacific Ocean at Bodega Bay (photo Wolfgang Volz)

Christo didn’t wait for the near hearing, but instead defiantly extended his fence the final 1,000 yards into the sea.

Alfred Frankenstein, a prominent San Francisco art critic, who had watched Christo work patiently and diligently over the years to secure the necessary approvals, called his “illegal leap” into the ocean not only a violation of the law, but a violation of the spirit of the artwork. Christo disagreed.

“Illegality is essential to [the] American system, don’t you see?” he told the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins. “I completely work within [the] American system by being illegal, like everyone else—if there is no illegal part, the project is less reflective of the system. It’s the subversive character of the system that makes it so exciting to live here.”

The day after Christo’s opening, 700 developers, anti-tax proponents, and regional Republican leaders gathered at Santa Rosa’s Veterans Memorial Building to honor Groom as citizen of the year for his leadership in the recall campaign of Kortum and Hinkle. A telegram of appreciation for his good work was read to the assembly from U.S. President Gerald Ford.

For the next two weeks, the Running Fence turned the Sonoma-Marin dairylands into the world’s largest museum, drawing large, appreciative crowds. The installation was far more beautiful than anyone anticipated, even Christo himself, who dubbed it “a ribbon of light” as he watched its billowing nylon panels move with the wind. For many local viewers, it helped them to see the landscape they were so familiar with in an entirely new way.

The Running Fence (photo Wolfgang Volz)

Christo didn’t wait for the near hearing, but instead defiantly extended his fence the final 1,000 yards into the sea.

Alfred Frankenstein, a prominent San Francisco art critic, who had watched Christo work patiently and diligently over the years to secure the necessary approvals, called his “illegal leap” into the ocean not only a violation of the law, but a violation of the spirit of the artwork. Christo disagreed.

“Illegality is essential to [the] American system, don’t you see?” he told the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins. “I completely work within [the] American system by being illegal, like everyone else—if there is no illegal part, the project is less reflective of the system. It’s the subversive character of the system that makes it so exciting to live here.”

The day after Christo’s opening, 700 developers, anti-tax proponents, and regional Republican leaders gathered at Santa Rosa’s Veterans Memorial Building to honor Groom as citizen of the year for his leadership in the recall campaign of Kortum and Hinkle. A telegram of appreciation for his good work was read to the assembly from U.S. President Gerald Ford.

For the next two weeks, the Running Fence turned the Sonoma-Marin dairylands into the world’s largest museum, drawing large, appreciative crowds. The installation was far more beautiful than anyone anticipated, even Christo himself, who dubbed it “a ribbon of light” as he watched its billowing nylon panels move with the wind. For many local viewers, it helped them to see the landscape they were so familiar with in an entirely new way.

Christo and the Running Fence (photo Morrie Camhi)

On May 31, 2020, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran a headline that most likely would have pleased Christo’s subversive character. It read, “Famed environmental artist behind the Running Fence dies at 84.

********************************************************

Thanks to Katie Watts for her editing assistance.

SOURCES:

Artforum: Colby Chamberlain, “The Politics of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence,” April 2017.

Coastwalk California: “Bill Kortum—His Story,” December, 2014, https://coastwalk.org/bill-kortum-his-story/

Los Angeles Times: “Petaluma is Doing ‘Just Fine’ After 17 Years of Controls,” April 11, 1988.

Eric Stanley, “Christo: Legacy Remembered,” Museum of Sonoma County, June 9, 2020. https://museumsc.org/christo-legacy-remembered/

New York Times: “Christo, Artist Known for Massive, Fleeting Displays, Dies,” May 31, 2020.

The New Yorker: Calvin Tompkins, “Onward and Upward with the Arts: Running Fence,” March 28, 1977.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Christo’s Fence Now Under Construction,” May 4, 1976; “Planners: House Report Had Holes,” August 25, 1976; “Late Housing Report Draws Criticism,” August 18, 1976; “Petaluma Farms Draws Criticism at Hearing,” September 3, 1976; “Fence Triggers Debate,” September 11, 1976; “Opposition Defeats Subdivision,” September 17, 1976; “Fence Artist is Gone,” September 30, 1976; “Open Space, Park EDP Changes Studied,” July 13, 1978; “Watson Ranch Remains Open Land Under Trust,” December 10, 1979; “Environmental Icon’s Legacy Remembered,” December 25, 2014.

San Francisco Examiner, “Good for Business, But is it Art?” September 9, 1976.

San Rafael Daily Independent Journal: “Christo’s Fence Granted Sonoma Board’s Approval,” May 19, 1975.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Supervisors Clear Christo’s Fence,” March 19, 1975; “Christo’s Fence Clears Coast Committee,” April 25, 1975; “Groom, SCTA Supported,” September 17, 1975; “Kortum Vows to Defeat Recall,” December 17, 1975; “Second District,” May 26, 1976; “Kortum: An Opportunist’s Copout,” June 2, 1976; “Christo’s $2 Million Fence Almost Reader for Sept. 8 Hanging,” August 30, 1976; “Christo’s Fence Takes Illegal Dip,” September 8, 1976; Gaye LeBaron column, September 12, 1976; “Ford Praises Groom as Citizen of Year,” September 12, 1976; “Delong Bitter Blast at General Plan, Kahn,” January 11, 1978; “Jim Groom Still Packs a Mean Punch,” June 23, 1993; “Christo, Famed Environmental Artist Behind ‘Running Fence’ in Sonoma and Marin counties, Dies at 84,” (pick up from Washington Post), May 31, 2020.

Smithsonian magazine: “Q&A: Christo and Jeanne-Claude,” December, 2008; “Christo’s California Dreamin’,” June 2010.

Sonoma Magazine: Glen Martin, “Christo’s Running Fence: Photos, Stories, and Memories,” June, 2020.

Sonoma West Times and News: “Running Fence Has its Problems,” July 26, 1976; “Artists Speak from Both Sides of the Fence,” July 26, 1976; “Recall Elections, New Faces Were Part of the County’s First General Plan Debates,” August 15, 2007.

Caitlin O’Hara, “The Journey to the Running Fence,” UC Press Blog, https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/9847/the-journey-to-running-fence/

Brian Doherty, et al, Remembering the Running Fence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

Anne Schuhart, “Keeping Dairy Waste Under Control,” Soil Conservation, Volume 43; Volumes 1977-1978 (Information Division, Soil Conservation Service, 1977), pp. 15-17.

Running Fence, film documentary by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, 1977.

Petaluma Historytelling 1920-1970: with Katie Watts & John Sheehy

Onstage with Jim & Tom

Jim Agius and Tom Gaffey welcome historians Katie Watts and John Sheehy for a deep dive into Petaluma’s history from the the 1920s to the 1970s. We explore how Petaluma became known as the world’s egg basket, Prohibition, speakeasies, massive bootlegging rings, famous people-meeter and Petaluma booster Bill Soberanes, the post-war boom, Gilardi’s, Mayor Helen Putnam, the near decimation of Petaluma’s downtown, how the east side developed and much more.

Writer, historian, Petaluma Good Egg Katie Watts

Katie Watts is a writer, editor, and Petaluma historian, who as features editor for the Petaluma Argus-Courier, for years edited the popular “Yesteryears” column highlighting local history.

Writer, historian, Petaluma Good Egg John Sheehy (photo Anthony Tusler)

John Sheehy is the author of On a River Winding Home: Stories and Visions of the Petaluma River Watershed, which features intimate historical stories of the Petaluma River Watershed paired with the stunning photography of Scott Hess.

Tom Gaffey is the general manager and Jim Agius the talent buyer of the Phoenix Theater, where Onstage with Jim & Tom is produced.

Petaluma’s Peter Sellers: Frederick Geers (1955-2020)

“To dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free.” —Bob Dylan

Right-to-left, Frederick Geers, Jon Rankin, Tom Gaffey (seated) and John Sheehy, in a still shot for a student film set at Donahue’s Landing, 1972 (photo by Brigham Denison)

Friendships forged while growing up usually change as time passes, but memories made together in youth often create bonds for life. Frederick Gardiner Geers, who recently passed away, was such a friend. Although we grew up in Petaluma in the 1960s, we didn’t become friends until high school in the early 1970s, when I joined two of the cliques where Fred played a central role, journalism and theater.

Creative and whip-smart, he was wired with an intense energy softened by a satiric wit. Behind his coke-bottle glasses and tight-lip smile—used to hide his bad teeth until he had them all replaced in high school—Fred was our enigmatic Peter Sellers, a private person who presented himself in a series of different guises, sometimes playing Inspector Clouseau; at other times, Dr. Strangelove. During the rare instances he dropped his thespian guard, he revealed a poet’s sensitivity to the world around him.

From time to time, Fred’s natural intensity got the better of him, and he would erupt in head jerking, eye blinking, and uncontrollable cussing. When Fred fell under one of his spells—an event that often occurred while we were riding aimlessly around in someone’s car—it was like being caged with a seething bobcat. “Time to let Fred out,” became our a customary fire drill. In retrospect, it’s possible that he may have been touched in adolescence by Tourette Syndrome.

Frederick Geers, Petaluma, 1978 (photo John Sheehy)

Like many in our high school gang, Fred was something of an “at-risk kid.” We all had troubles at home that we tacitly acknowledged but never discussed, in something of an unspoken bond. In Fred’s case, life centered around his mother Jean, as his father was not in the picture.

Jean Gardiner was the daughter of the president of Heald’s Business College in Fresno, who was also a fig farmer. In 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, she moved to Hawaii to work for the Army Corp of Engineers as a civilian medical secretary. On the morning of December 7, 1941, she was driving to work at the Pearl Harbor Naval Base when a Japanese plane dropped a bomb onto the road in front of her. She survived the blast, but experience stayed with her for life, fueling a lifelong animosity toward the Japanese.

Jean remained in Hawaii until after the war, giving birth to a daughter with her first husband, an army major. After their divorce, she returned to California, where in 1950 she married John Geers, an Army private, and took a job working at Hamilton Air Force Base. Their son Frederick was born in Fresno in 1955, when Jean was forty-six, after which she and her husband purchased a small ranchette in Cotati, and Jean acquired a horse named Thunder.

The Geers divorced in 1958, when Fred was three. Jean took Thunder and her two children back to Hawaii for a couple of years, then returned with them to Petaluma. She rented a farmhouse west of town where they could board Thunder, and took a job as a medical transcriber at Letterman Hospital in the Presidio. Fred attended rural Wilson School were he became a devoted Cub Scout.

Fred as a Cub Scout at Wilson School

I first became aware of Fred during a Washington’s Birthday Cherry Pie Eating Contest in junior high, in which he placed a close second. By that time, Thunder was gone, Jean’s daughter was married, and Fred and his mother were living in an old Victorian on Petaluma Boulevard, a block away from Walnut Park. At the beginning of his sophomore year, Fred moved to Hawaii to try living with his father, who managed a hotel in Hilo. He returned after a semester, scarred by the physically bullying he received from the local Hawaiian kids who tormented him for being a mainlander.

At Petaluma High, Fred and I both worked on the school’s newspaper, the Trojan, where a fellow member of our gang, Tom Gaffey, was the top editor. Tom and Fred helped form an Explorer journalism troop in the Boy Scouts led by Ralph Thompson, managing editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier. Soon after I joined the troop, we launched a newspaper, The Bugle, for the Boy Scouts of the Sonoma-Mendocino Area Council, with Fred serving as editor.

Fred and I also collaborated on an underground newspaper in high school, inspired in part by “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson, which, much to our delight, became a source of controversy for the school administration.

Along with journalism, Fred engaged himself in theater, where his shape-changing theatrics translated well to the stage. He appeared in almost all of our school productions, most notably in the musical Carnival as B.F. Schlegel, the larger-than-life ringmaster who creates a sense of family for a group of quirky performers working his rinky-dink carnival.

Melinda Orchard as Rosalie and Frederick Geers as B.F. Schlegel in the musical Carnival, 1973

While the drama club on campus was populated with colorful personalities, few matched Fred for true eccentricity. At cast parties he distinguished himself on the dance floor, often dancing solo to his own ecstatic rhythms for hours on end. His own taste in music tended toward progressive rock, especially the band Yes, who provided the soundtrack to his teenage years.

After graduating with honors from Petaluma High in 1973, Fred enrolled at San Francisco State. In the years that followed, he remained in the Bay Area, working as a freelance writer and a chef, and for a brief time, running the historic Lorenzo Theater in San Leandro as a repertory venue, featuring both films and live performances. During opening night’s musical concert, Fred took a lit cigarette away from a defiant customer, who responded by stabbing him with a knife, setting off a melee that the police had to break up.

In the early 1980s, Fred worked as a chef at the first farm-to-table gourmet restaurant on the Healdsburg Plaza, just as the town was beginning to draw wine tourists to the area. Over the next decade it wasn’t unusual to find him cooking at some tony restaurant in San Francisco, whirling around the kitchen with his sous chefs like a dancing dervish ringmaster.

Although Fred never married, he had a number of long-term relationships, including with actress Diane Varsi, who was nominated while still a teenager for her role in the film Peyton Place.

Fred left the culinary business in the mid-1990s to become a technical writer at a software company. After the company merged with the open source software developer Red Hat, Fred was suddenly worth millions, at least in stock options. His paper fortune evaporated in the dot com bust of the early 2000s, after which he returned to cooking and freelance writing. During the 2010s, he served as the longtime chef at Ireland’s 32, San Francisco’s legendary Irish pub on Geary Street.

Frederick Geers, San Francisco, 2018

One of the last times I saw Fred was at an open house celebration for Tiburon attorney Jon Rankin, a charter member of our high school gang. Fred and his female partner at the time arrived by Uber, dressed in long, black overcoats as characters from the film the Matrix. True to his Peter Sellers nature, Fred never broke character the entire evening.

At the time of his death, Fred was employed at Episcopal Community Services in San Francisco, running a kitchen for feeding the homeless and the needy. After his 65th birthday on March 18th, he was sent home to the Inner Richmond apartment where he lived alone, to self-quarantine during to the Covid-19 pandemic. He died two weeks later of a heart attack while asleep in bed. In a final gesture so characteristic of Fred, he exited the stage on April Fool’s Day.