In this video presentation sponsored by the Petaluma Historical Museum and the Sonoma County Library, historian John Sheehy explores how a diverse community of Jewish, Chinese, and Swiss Italian immigrant merchants made Petaluma’s Main Street such a bustling melting pot in the 19th century.
Real Main Street Video Presentation, Part II
Part II of the series explores the early Irish, Black, and German communities.
Born in 1839, in Danby, Vermont, to Silas Hulett (1807-1895), a farmer, and his wife Elizabeth Campbell (1808-1896), at the age of eighteen, Ellen Hulett married Isaac V. Button (1835-1929), also of Danby. In 1861, the couple, along with members of their extended family, moved to Petaluma, California, where they built a house at 641 D Street near 7th Street, then the outskirts of town. Between 1863 and 1878 Ellen gave birth to eight children, only two of which, Isaac Monte Button (1878-1945) and Mabel Ella Button Brown (1869-1963), survived beyond infancy.
While Isaac occupied himself with cattle and horse breeding, Ellen served as founding treasurer of the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, launched at the B Street home of her Petaluma neighbor Abigail Haskell, and signed the 1870 Petition for Woman’s Suffrage presented to the California State Legislature. In 1873, the Button family moved to the new mining town of Spring City, Nevada, where Isaac acquired the 64,000 acre Double-Square Ranch, turning it into the West Coast’s most extensive horse breeding ranch.
In 1892, the couple separated and then divorced, with Ellen returning to Petaluma while Isaac remained at his ranch in Nevada. The family house on D Street was moved to the back of the lot fronting E Street, and the front part of the lot sold odd to Frank Denman, who built a new home.
Back in Petaluma, Ellen became actively involved in the suffrage movement through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, writing regularly for the Petaluma Courier newspaper as the union’s local press superintendent under the initials “E.H.B.,” and later serving as the local chapter’s president. Like scores of other evangelical Protestant women, she embraced the WCTU’s intersectional motto of “do everything,” making the case that as the morally superior sex women needed the vote to act as “citizen-mothers” in protecting their homes and curing a host of society’s ills, many of them rooted in alcohol consumption.
Following the 1893 veto by California governor of a suffrage bill passed by the state legislature, Ellen confronted the local opposition. “It is hard perhaps for one not in the work to realize,” she wrote, “what women have done in the busy walks of life towards creating a public sentiment that gradually places women foremost in all great reforms, as she ever has been in the church and in the home.”
In 1896, as California male voters were offered a referendum on approving a Sixth Amendment to the state constitution granting women the vote, Ellen helped to form the Petaluma Political Equality Club to advocate for its passage, and served as it founding president. At the request of the California Woman Suffrage Central Committee, she organized similar suffrage clubs in Napa County during the campaign for the suffrage referendum, which was ultimately defeated. In her writings and public talks she communicated to women a message of courage.
In 1902, Ellen helped to form a new Petaluma Equality Club to continued agitating for women suffrage, hosting regular meetings at her home as the club’s president.
An active member and clerk of Petaluma’s First Congregational Church, during the 1890s Ellen ran the church’s Petaluma Chinese Mission School, one of sixteen such California schools co-founded by the former Petaluma pastor William C. Pond. Although the Chinese Exclusion Acts had greatly decreased enrollment, the night school offered instruction in English and Christianity to Chinese servants for the sole purpose, as Ellen wrote in a Courier article, of sending them back to China as Christian evangelists.
In 1909, at the age of 70, Ellen reconciled with her husband Isaac, joining him in San Francisco, where he had started a draying business after selling his Nevada ranch. The couple later moved to Berkeley, where Ellen died in 1922 at age 83. She was buried at Cypress Hill Cemetery in Petaluma.
SOURCES:
Petaluma Morning Courier: January 25, 1893, March 18, 1893, March 19, 1893, September 11, 1896, September 28, 1896, October 2, 1896, October 3, 1896, November 6, 1896, May 12, 1897, October 25, 1897, June 15, 1897, July 8, 1897, October 25, 1899, July 7, 1900, October 17, 1900, May 8, 1901, November 1, 1901, September 29, 1902, January 6, 1904, September 25, 1906, August 17, 1909.
Petaluma Argus: September 30, 1902, August 3, 1909, March 17, 1922.
Reno Gazette-Journal: October 1, 1929.
San Francisco Call: September 29, 1896.
San Francisco Chronicle: December 22, 1907.
