Christopher Nisson Archives - Petaluma Historian

Oyster Shells: Petaluma’s “Secret Sauce”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video of Proposed Oyster Cove Development:

FOOTNOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[10] Lowry, p. 156.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ladies Silk Culture Society

How Chinese Imports Doomed a Women’s Home Industry

Petaluma’s Carlson-Currier Silk Mill, built 1892, supported cheap silk imports over a domestic industry (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

On the evening of July 16, 1892, Ida Belle McNear called the women in her social coterie together for a meeting at Petaluma’s city hall. The topic was silk. Numerous attempts to create a raw silk industry in California over the previous 25 years had come to naught. Now, McNear believed she’d discovered a breakthrough.

Her father-in-law, grain merchant and capitalist John McNear, had recently convinced a San Francisco silk manufacturer to build a new mill in Petaluma. After some arm twisting, the mill’s executives, Edward Carlson and J.P. Currier, agreed to purchase California-grown raw silk from Ida Belle McNear at a 25% premium over the price they paid for imported raw silk from China. The men also warned her that her scheme would never work.

Ida Belle McNear, center pointing, with family members on the Petaluma wharf (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Dauntless, the headstrong 32-year old McNear forged ahead, launching that evening at city hall the Petaluma Women’s Silk Association.

America’s dalliance with sericulture, or silk farming, began in 1825, after Congress approved the import of silk goods from Europe and China, setting off a new fashion fad. A year later, the white mulberry tree, moris multicaulis, was introduced to America from southeast Asia. When eaten by silkworms, the tree’s tender leaves produced silk of the highest quality.

A subsequent “Mulberry Craze” soon overtook the country, giving rise to horticulture’s largest speculation bubble since the infamous “tulipmania” in 17th century Holland. Stock companies were formed to finance the plantings and import millions of silkworm eggs from Europe. Silk mills were rapidly constructed in New England and Michigan.

At the height of the market, the price of a young tree start rose from 5¢ to $5, before the bubble burst in 1839. Five years later, a mysterious blight destroyed what was left of America’s mulberry groves, forcing domestic factories to begin importing raw silk from Europe and Asia.

Poster for auction of mulberry trees in Connecticut, 1840 (photo crickethillgarden.com)

Twenty years later, a second American sericulture craze began after disease devastated mulberry groves in France and Italy. This time, the craze’s epicenter was California, whose Mediterranean climate made it ideal for growing mulberry trees.

Led by a French botanist named Louis Prevost, the craze was incentivized for the first two year by bounties from the state legislature of $250 for cultivating at least 5,000 mulberry trees and $300 for each 100,000 silk cocoons produced.

Orchards and vineyards were advised to border their roads and property lines with mulberry trees in preparation for the coming sericulture boom. California’s largest vineyard at that time, Buena Vista Winery in Sonoma, planted 3,000 mulberry trees around its 500 acres of grapes.

Diagram of the various stages of a silkworm (photo Barre Montpelier Times Argus)

Before the new craze could gain significant traction, Prevost died, leaving California sericulture to flounder as Europe recovered from its blight.

In 1880, imported raw silk sales surged to $13 million from a mere $3 million ten years earlier, as American women again became entranced with silk fashion. The sudden rise inspired a circle of influential Philadelphia women interested in promoting a domestic sericulture industry to form the Women’s Silk Culture Association of the United States.

Twelve auxiliary groups sprang up around the country, including in California, where a group of prominent suffragists with political clout formed the California Silk Culture Association.

Led by Elise Wiehe Hittell, wife of state senator and eminent California historian Theodore H. Hittell, the association’s members included Laura de Force Gordon, co-founder of the California Woman Suffrage Association, journalist, and the second female lawyer admitted to the state bar; Ellen Clark Sargent, treasurer of the National Woman Suffrage Association and wife of U.S. Senator Aaron Sargent; and Windsor’s Sarah Myers Latimer, a co-founder of the Sonoma Country Woman Suffrage Association and wife of California Superior Court Judge Lorenzo Latimer.

Portrait of Sarah Myers Latimer of Windsor by her son L.P. Latimer (photo *Windsor Museum and Historical Society*)

The women promoted sericulture as a home industry, pointing to Italy and France, where raising silk worms and reeling silk from cocoons was managed as a side business by women on family farms. In the five or six weeks it took each year to feed the worms and unreel the raw silk from the cocoons from 100 mulberry trees, a mother and her daughters were able make $300, or $8,500 in today’s currency, providing them with some economic independence.

Women reeling silk from cocoons, 1895 (photo History Museum, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints)

The silk culturists compared the work to that of raising chickens and eggs, which in the early 1880s appeared to defy industrialization, as chickens were still pastoral creatures who ranged about the barnyard and farm, leaving their eggs in mangers or under porches until the farm wife sent the children out to scare up any available eggs to sell for “pin-money” in town.

But industrialization was coming even for the chickens, thanks to innovations in the early 1880s of a Danish immigrant named Christopher Nisson at his Pioneer Hatchery in Two Rock.

Using an efficient new incubator developed in Petaluma by Isaac Dias and Lyman Byce, Nisson designed a poultry assembly line that began with hatching eggs in dozens of incubators, then placing the baby chicks in stove-heated brooder houses that served as surrogate mother hens. Once they were old enough to begin laying eggs themselves, they were moved them to a colony house, where their eggs could be easily collected.

Christopher Nisson’s Pioneer Hatchery, Two Rock, 1920 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Nisson’s industrialized model would eventually give rise to a major egg boom in Petaluma that would last until the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, the women of the California Silk Association pressed forward with their craft-scale model for sericulture, using their political clout to persuaded the California legislature to create a State Board of Silk Culture, with five of its nine appointees drawn from the silk association. The state board distributed subsidies for planting mulberry trees and raising silk cocoons around the state, including in Sonoma County, where the sericulture effort was led by Frances Purrington on the farm she shared with her husband Joseph in Green Valley.

Laura De Force Gordon also convinced the legislature to appropriate $7,500 for funding for two years a free filature, or silk-reeling school, in San Francisco for young girls.

Laura de Force Gordon, 1887 (image Library of Congress)

On the promotional front, the women made a push at agricultural expositions, including the 1882 Philadelphia Silk Exposition, where cocoons raised by Mrs. H.C. Downing of San Rafael won first prize for exceptional quality; the 1884 Sonoma-Marin District Agricultural Fair, where a sericulture exhibit by horticulturalist Dr. Galen Burdell of Novato became the talk of the exposition; and the 1884 California state fair, where Lyman Byce’s new Petaluma Incubator Company displayed a baby incubator to improve the efficiency of hatching silkworm eggs.

The association also worked with the State Board of Silk Culture to promote silk culture in the public schools, distributing mulberry trees, silkworm eggs, and instructions to provide young girls with an elementary knowledge.

For most young women, the only employment available at the time was teaching, which only employed one in ten of them, or factory work. Many reported to having to marry unwisely in order to be supported. Silk culture was intended to teach them to earn money at home, and so provide them with an option to having to marry unwisely in order to be supported.

In 1885, the association helped to secure in the East Bay town of Piedmont one of five silk Experimental Stations established by the U.S. Department of Agricultural across the country to foster sericulture.

Piedmont Experimental Silk Culture Station, 1890s (photo History Room, Oakland Public Library)

Shortly after, Hittell spun off a new organization from the California Silk Association called the Ladies Silk Culture Society to foster sericulture for women in the state. The society’s membership such luminaries as Charles Crocker, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, U.S. Senator Leland Stanford, former state governor George C. Perkins, and a number of professors of agriculture and the sciences at the University of California.

The society assumed operation of the Experimental Silk Station in Piedmont, which consisted of a building for silk reeling and a eucalyptus-covered tract of 15 acres. With $10,000 appropriated from the state legislature, they replaced the eucalyptus with 6,000 mulberry trees and acquired half a million silkworm eggs for annual distribution. Hiring 100 women and girls, they used the station to teach people how to cultivate and handle silkworms, with the expectation they would be sent out as teachers of others in far reaches of the state.

Their efforts however faced an uphill battle with the industrialization overtaking the country. The Carlson-Currier Silk Mill in San Francisco publicly claimed to “have proven itself the fast friend of native-grown silk” by spinning some raw silk from the society’s Piedmont Experimental Station.

Trade card for Carlson & Currier, a subsidiary of Belding Bros. & Co. Silk Manufacturers, 1883 (California Historical Society)

However, as the west coast subsidiary of one of the country’s largest silk manufacturers, Michigan-based Belding Brothers & Company, their business relied upon cheap raw silk imports from Asia, where laborers made between 6 and 15 cents a day, versus $1 a day in California, for the tedious task of reeling raw silk from cocoons by hand. Half a pound represented a good day’s work.

Industrialists argued the solution was in labor-saving filature machinery that would take the silk directly from the cocoon and twist it for the weaver. American inventors set out to develop a reliable automatic reeling machine, but by the late 1880s, all attempts had proved disappointing.

In 1890, as import sales of raw silk rose to $24 million, or roughly $700 million in today’s currency, silk culturists called for tariffs on imported raw silk so as to make domestic sericulture competitive.

Silk dinner or reception dress in the 1880s (photo Frick Pittsburg)

Other industries were also lobbying congress for what came to be called the McKinley Act of 1890, a bill spearheaded by congressman and future president William McKinley, that raised duties of nearly 50% across a range of imported foreign goods to protect American manufacturing. Silk manufacturers, fearing silk tariffs would drive up consumer prices and thus reduce demand for silk goods, fought against the proposal, leading to its exclusion form the bill.

After the tariff battle, the political tide turned against silk culturalists, as government funding dried up at both the state and federal levels on the grounds that past appropriations had yielded poor results. In March of 1892, the Ladies Silk Culture Society purchased the Piedmont Experimental Silk Station from the U.S. government for a only $50, with plans to maintain it privately.

Four months later, Ida Belle McNear and the Petaluma Women’s Silk Association waded into the silk culture morass. Their plan was to set up a filature in Petaluma for reeling silk from cocoons they purchased from women around the state. They would then sell the raw silk to the new Carlson-Currier Silk Mill being constructed in town at an agreed upon 25% premium, making Petaluma the new silk center of California.

Carlson-Currier Silk Mill, Petaluma, 1910 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Carlson-Currier had been lured to Petaluma from San Francisco with incentives provided by John McNear and other capitalists in the local Improvement Club, looking to transition the town into industrial center, the “Oakland of the North Bay.” The incentives included free land for the mill site and a bonus of $12,000, or $300,000 in today’s currency.

The club’s other big selling point was access to cheap labor, specifically girls and young women from town and the surrounding farms. They already filled the factory floors of Nolan-Earl Shoe Factory and Adams Box Factory in McNear’s new Factory District near the railroad depot, as well as the new poultry hatcheries springing up around town.

Of the 200 employees Carlson-Currier ultimately employed after the mill opened in October, 1892, three quarters were female.

Merely three months after the new mill opened, Ida Belle McNear and the Petaluma Women’s Silk Association threw in the towel, realizing Carlson-Currier’s 25% premium for domestic raw silk was woefully insufficient in turning a profit on domestic sericulture. Labor costs alone for the two days it took a person to reel a pound of raw silk from cocoons by hand far outweighed the $1.40 per pound that Carlson-Currier paid for imported raw silk from Asia.

For largely the same reason, two years later the Ladies Silk Culture Society closed down their Piedmont Experimental Station, formally ending the dream of a home silk industry for women.

Inside Petaluma’s Carlson-Currier silk mill, subsidiary of Belding Bros. (photo Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library)

Meanwhile, Petaluma’s silk mill continued to grow and thrive, doubling in size during the fashion-conscious Roaring Twenties. However, the onset of the Great Depression decimated the luxury fabric market, as did the increasing popularity of cheaper synthetics like rayon and nylon, and the embargo Japan placed on silk exports in the years preceding World War II.

After the silk mill was forced to close down in 1939, the mill was purchased by the Sunset Line & Twine Company, which operated there until 2006, after which the building was converted to a boutique hotel.

Sunset Line & Twine, 1940s (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Sonoma Historian Journal, 2021 No. 1.

SOURCES:

Newspapers and Magazines

Los Angeles Times: David Karo, “The Fruit of Broken Dreams,” July 19, 2000.

Mercury News: Nilda Rego, “Days Gone By: Piedmont Clings to Its Caterpillars as Silkworm Mania Dies Out in California,” March 23, 2012.

Alameda Daily Argus: “Something About Silk,” November 24, 1883.

Petaluma Argus: “Our Fair,” September 1, 1882; “A Plea for Silk Culture,” March 28, 1885; “Eighteenth Annual Fair,” August 30, 1884; “Petaluma,” February 7, 1885; “The Multicaulis Mania,” June 27, 1885 (reprint from Harper’s Magazine, July 1885).

Petaluma Courier: “Silk Worms,” February 14, 1883; “The Petaluma Incubator,” October 8, 1884; “That Silkworm Foolishness,” July 30, 1890; “For a Silk Mill,” August 19, 1891; “Silk Factory Philosophy,” December 19, 1891; “The Silk Factory,” December 18, 1891; “Carlson-Currier Company,” October 19, 1892; “Silk Reeling,” January 24, 1893; “Personal Notes,” March 26, 1893.

San Francisco Call: “Enthusiastic Ladies,” July 17, 1892; Sericulture at Home,” October 2, 1892.

San Francisco Chronicle: “New Silk Mills,” S.F. Chronicle, November 29, 1891.

San Francisco Examiner: “Work for Women,” October 8, 1883; “A Young Industry,” June 23, 1884; “A Silk Culture Society,” June 5, 1885; “The Sericulturists,” October 14, 1887; “Signed by the Governor,” March 22, 1889; “The Culture of Silk,” January 25, 1891; “An Eloquent Arraignment,” March 24, 1891; “Silk Culture,” March 25, 1891; “In a Commercial Arcadia,” March 6, 1892; “Petaluma’s Silk Plant,” June 26, 1892; “To Stimulate Silk Culture,” July 21, 1892; “The Congress for Women,” May 2, 1894; “Horticulture and Agriculture,” January 24, 1894; “On the Wrong Track,” May 10, 1895;

Books, Journals, Websites

William C. Wyckoff, “Report on the Silk Manufacturing Industry of the United States,” 1880 Census. ftp.census.gov › vol-02-manufactures › 1880_v2-18

Annual Report of the Women’s Silk Culture Association of the United States, Volume 3 (Philadelphia, April, 1883).

Stanton, Anthony, Gage, History of Woman’s Suffrage, Vol. 3, p. 762.

Nelson Klose, “Sericulture in the United States,” Agricultural History, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 225-234.

E.O. Essig, “Silk Culture in California,” Agricultural Experiment Station, Circular 363, October 1945, College of Agriculture University of California at Berkeley.

Evelyn Craig Pattiani, “Silk in Piedmont,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 4 (December, 1952), pp. 335-342.