Good and evil, smart but ignorant, compassionate yet unsympathetic, honorable as well as ignoble, a man of many professions and passions.
As farmers, merchants, stock breeders, and ministers descended upon the newly established city of Petaluma in the 1860s, the one thing missing from the growing metropolis was a Renaissance Man—a knowledgeable, educated polymath proficient in a range of different fields, who could help bring Petaluma’s various economic, civic, and religious threads together into a cohesive whole.
In 1863, such a man arrived: Edward Spaulding Lippitt. A theologian, lawyer, educator, newspaper editor, gardener, and politician, he would have a major influence on the town’s moral, educational, and political development, for better or worse, over the next half century.
Born in 1824 on a farm in Woodstock, Connecticut, Lippitt descended from English Puritans who settled Rhode Island in 1630. He exhibited at an early age both the ambition and restlessness that marked the many twists and turns of his adult life. At sixteen he left school to apprentice for two years with a Yale-educated carpenter before entering Yale himself. After one semester, he transferred to Wesleyan University, an all-male Methodist college in Connecticut, lured by a scholarship he received from a family friend.
Lippitt graduated with a Master of Arts degree in 1847. He initially took a job as a school principal in New Hampshire for a year before entering Harvard Law School. He remained at Harvard only one semester before heading to Ohio, where he took a summer job as a surveyor on a new rail line from Cincinnati to Columbus. At the end of the summer, he settled in Cincinnati, accepting a job teaching mathematics and science at Wesleyan Female College.
Lippitt also married in 1848, but lost his wife to cholera less than a year after the wedding. In 1851, he married a second time to Sarah Lewis, daughter of a prominent physician in Monroe, Louisiana, and stepdaughter of H.H. Kavanaugh, a prominent bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, which had spilt from the main church over objections to church’s support of abolition. The couple would go on to have nine children, four of whom died in childhood.
In 1853, Lippitt left Wesleyan Female College to open his own school in Cincinnati, which he called Professor Lippitt’s Scientific and Classical Institute. It closed within a year. In 1854, after being ordained a deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church, he was appointed principal of the Boys Classical School in Cincinnati, as well as board secretary of the newly established Methodist Spring Mountain Seminary.
After immersing himself in an independent study of law books, he was admitted to the bar in Ohio, a common practice for many lawyers at the time. He followed up with an apprenticeship as a junior partner at the Cincinnati law firm of Probasco, Lippitt & Ward. In 1859, after the law firm’s senior partner died, he was hired by Cincinnati’s city solicitor, Rutherford B. Hayes, as assistant city solicitor. A strident reformer, Lippitt also became politically active in the abolitionist wing of Ohio’s newly established Republican Party.
Hayes, who would later be elected Ohio governor in 1868 and U.S. president in 1876, was voted out of office as city solicitor in the spring of 1861 just as the Civil War was starting, and soon after joined the Union Army. Lippitt chose to stay in Cincinnati, securing a new position with the post office.
In 1862, he was indicted for embezzlement after allegedly opening letters in the post and stealing money from them. Lippitt posted a $1,500 bail, but forfeited it, fleeing Cincinnati with his wife and children before the trial. He was reportedly seen making his way to Oregon, but instead, after a wagon train ride across the country, ended up in Sacramento, California, where, at the local Methodist Episcopal church, he ran into a minister he knew from college who offered him a job teaching mathematics at the University of the Pacific, a Methodist college in Santa Clara.
After a year in Santa Clara, Lippitt was hired in July 1863 as the second superintendent of the newly established public school system in Petaluma. Tax-funded since 1859, the school district consisted of four primary and grammar schools. The main campus was the recently constructed Brick School at the northeast corner of B and Fifth streets. Tasked in part with creating a high school curriculum for students in the growing city, one of the initial controversial issues Lippitt faced was educating Black students.
In 1864, a new California state law required that public school districts provide funding for “separate but equal” schools for children of color. Working with the school trustees and leaders of the local Black community, Reverend Peter Killingsworth of the local African Methodist Episcopal Church and George W. Miller, a barbershop owner, Lippitt hired a young Black teacher from San Francisco named Rachel Coursey, and rented out a house on Washington Street as a school for Black students.
A skilled and forceful orator, Lippitt also played a prominent role in Petaluma’s early religious community. Shortly after his arrival, he was appointed superintendent of the Sunday School program at the Methodist Episcopal Church, the city’s largest Protestant congregation, then located at the northwest corner of A and Fourth streets. He also served as the interim minister at the Congregational Church for ten months.
In 1864, in addition to his job as school superintendent, Lippitt was appointed to a two-year term as pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church. During his tenure, Rev. Lippitt oversaw the construction of a new church at the northwest corner of Keller Street and Western Avenue. After his term as pastor ended, he continued to serve as one of the congregation’s elders for decades, teaching Sunday school, giving occasional Sunday sermons, and officiating over weddings and funerals.
Lippitt also became politically active in the Radical Republican Party, including serving as chairman of the Sonoma County Republican Party. Nationally, the Radical Republicans, led by Christian reformers like Lippitt, had focused largely on abolishing slavery and establishing civil rights for former slaves. Following the Civil War they dominated Congress, setting the terms for Reconstruction of the South, as well as securing the presidential election of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868.
In March 1867, Lippitt announced plans to run for State Superintendent of Public Schools, challenging the Republican incumbent, John Swett. He lined up as backers two powerful state Republicans, George Gorham, who was running for governor that year, and U.S. Congressman Cornelius Cole, a former classmate from Wesleyan University who was running for the U.S. Senate.
At the annual conference of the Sonoma County teachers that summer, Lippitt, in his sometimes haughty manner, announced that, if elected state school superintendent, he would use his influence to adopt the Protestant Bible as a textbook in public schools. His announcement was met with an outcry from attendees. Some opposed using such a holy text in a secular setting. Others objected to the use of a Protestant Bible in schools attended by Catholic and Jewish students.
In response, Lippitt lashed out at Catholics at the conference, specifically Irish Catholics, then California’s largest immigrant body, alleging that statistics showed crime to be more rife in Catholic countries due, in his opinion, to their lack of access to “a free and open bible.” After being publicly rebuked by Sonoma County’s School Superintendent Rev. C.G. Ames, Lippitt lost the backing of Gorham and Cole in his campaign for the state race, and withdrew his bid.
A month later, Lippitt resigned from his position as Petaluma Public School Superintendent and announced plans to build a new private high school in town. Professor Lippitt’s Scientific and Classical Institute he stated, would be Christian in nature, but not sectarian, and designed to prepare students for universities, the ministry, and other professions. Lippitt opened the school in the fall of 1867 in the temporary quarters of Brier’s Church on Third Street (now Petaluma Boulevard South) near C Street.
A year later, he trumpeted the grand opening of a handsome new Gothic Revival Style schoolhouse on D Street between Sixth and Seventh streets, then at the edge of town. Debt-financed, the school cost $7,000 ($126,000 in early 21st century currency). It extended from D to E streets, and sat only half a block from the Gothic Revival Style house Lippitt had recently built for his own family at the southwest corner of D and Sixth streets.
In February of 1870, Lippitt was invited to deliver the keynote address at a gathering celebrating the ratification of the 15th Amendment that provided Black men with the right to vote. The event was hosted by Petaluma’s Black militia, the Colfax Guard, named for the abolitionist and U.S. vice-president Schuyler Colfax, and led by local Black leader Captain George W. Miller. A few months after the celebration, Miller led a delegation of Black residents to Lippitt’s home, where after serenading him in gratitude for his advocacy of civil rights, they presented him with two silver tablespoons featuring a medallion of Lady Liberty with his inscribed initials.
A month later, in June of 1870, Lippitt was forced to closed down his private high school due to under enrollment. That fall, the school was taken over by Petaluma’s former school principal Abigail Haskell and her teaching colleague Tracy Mott, who renamed it the Petaluma Home Institute. Their institute only lasted a year before it too closed its doors. In 1873, the Petaluma School District purchased the building in a foreclosure sale for $3,800 to use as its first public high school campus. As they set about remodeling it, they incurred bitter criticism from Lippitt for “turning a tolerably fine building into a mongrel” at an unnecessary cost to taxpayers.
With his bank account drained, Lippitt took a part time job as associate editor of the Petaluma Argus, a weekly Republican newspaper run by Henry L. Weston. He also opened up a legal practice on the side at the Argus building at Washington and Main streets. Soon after hiring Lippitt, Weston departed on a six-month sojourn to the East Coast with his family, leaving Lippitt in charge of the newspaper. He wasted no time employing the pages of the Argus to settle old scores with his Republican friends, including Cornelius Cole, who had been elected to the Senate in 1867, and George Gorham, who, after losing the governor’s race that year, took a job in Washington as secretary of the U.S. Senate.
Lippitt’s quarrel with the men extended back to the fall of 1869. Then chairman of the Sonoma County Republican Party, Lippitt lobbied Senator Cole to nominate a local candidate to what was then a federal appointment as attorney general of California. When word came that Cole was instead planning to nominate Santa Rosa attorney L.D. Latimer, Lippitt wrote to Cole, accusing Latimer of being someone who spent his earnings at the bar and the gambling table. After an initial public flurry, during which Lippitt’s charge was widely disputed, Latimer was appointed state attorney general and Lippitt’s “dirty trick” became the subject of an expose by the Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, a Republican newspaper.
Livid, Lippitt went after Cole and Gorham in his Argus editorials, accusing them of being “pot house politicians” who were misrepresenting the Republican Party in Washington. He also accused the Chronicle’s correspondent of slander. The correspondent in turn sued Lippitt and the Argus, asking for $5,000 ($100,000 in early 21st century currency) in damages to his reputation. When Weston returned from his East Coast journey, he promptly published an apology to the Chronicle’s correspondent and asked for Lippitt’s resignation from the newspaper, after which the lawsuit was dropped.
After being fired from the Argus, Lippitt focused his attention on building a law practice specialized in deeds, mortgages, and leases. In 1873, he was appointed both the city’s notary public and its legal solicitor, two positions he held concurrently with his private practice until 1881.
To help restore his finances and expand his business network, he joined the boards of a number of local business enterprises, including the Mutual Relief Association, Petaluma’s largest insurance company; the Sonoma and Marin Railroad Company, a venture originally formed by a group of wealthy Petaluma capitalists that was sold to Peter Donahue, owner of the San Francisco and North Pacific Railway, who finished laying the tracks to San Rafael and Tiburon; and the Sonoma Marin District Agricultural Society, established in 1867 to promote advances in farming and sponsor the annual county fair, where Lippitt’s roses, fuchsias, and fruits were regular contest winners.
In a demonstration of his broad talents, Lippitt was also commissioned by the city in 1876 to create a landscape design of trees and flowers for the newly established D Street Plaza, later renamed Walnut Park, which they never implemented, leaving the site a grazing lot for livestock for another two decades. A bibliophile with reportedly the largest private book collection in the area, he was a strong advocate of public libraries. In 1867, he helped create a library in the Odd Fellows Lodge that was open to the public for a membership fee.
After San Francisco passed an act in 1867 allowing the city to levy taxes for a public library, Lippitt submitted a proposed amendment to the state legislature that would extend the act to all incorporated California cities. After the amendment known as the Roger’s Act passed, a public library was established in Petaluma’s city hall, using books donated from the Odd Fellows library. Appointed a lifetime director and trustee of the library, Lippitt became a regular speaker in their annual lecture series, and in 1904 was given the honor of laying of the cornerstone of the new Carnegie Free Public Library at B and Fourth streets.
But it was in the political realm that he sought to make his biggest impact. Following the onset of a financial recession in 1873 and a number of financial scandals in the Grant administration, the Republican Party began to splinter, and in 1874 lost control of Congress to the Democrats. Despite his fallout with Senator Cole and Senate Secretary Gorham, Lippitt remained actively engaged in the Republican Party as a member of the State Central Committee, and ran in the 1875 Republican primary for country district attorney, but lost.
After his defeat, he underwent a political conversion to the Democratic Party, denouncing the Republicans as having “degenerated into a vast machine for the manufacture of all that is evil.” Joining the Democratic State Central Committee chaired by railroad baron Peter Donahue, he barnstormed the state for the Democrats during the 1876 presidential election, speaking in his usual fiery style as a former Republican insider who now regarded Reconstruction “the greatest crime of the nineteenth century.”
Renouncing his abolition beliefs, Lippitt called former slaves in the South the “lowest in scale of civilization and intelligence of any race on this continent . . . cruel and barbarous, whose respect for life is about that of the Chinese.” He accused northern carpetbaggers of subjecting the South to “the rule of the most ignorant races of servile men” by giving Blacks the vote while denying the same right to former Confederate officers, arguing that Blacks should not be given the vote until they were educated to execute it properly, a process he expected might take generations.
As the November presidential election of 1876 drew nearer, Lippitt signed on as the founding editor of the Petaluma Courier, a weekly Democratic newspaper launched by printer William F. Shattuck, whose father, Judge Frank W. Shattuck, was a prominent leader of the Sonoma County Democratic Party. Lippitt wasted no time discrediting Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, claiming to have inside knowledge as Hayes’ former “law partner” in Cincinnati, a claim that Republicans quickly exposed as a lie, noting that he had merely been an assistant solicitor.
One of the most contentious and controversial presidential elections in American history, the 1876 election was marred by massive fraud, voter suppression, and illegalities on both sides, in the end leaving the deciding electoral votes of four states—Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon—unresolved. With Democrats controlling the House and Republicans the Senate, a congressional commission ended the impasse by crafting an informal deal known as the Compromise of 1877, which awarded the disputed four electoral votes to Hayes, making him president. In return, Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction, which allowed Democrats to impose a series of “Jim Crow” laws, legalizing discrimination and disenfranchising Black voters for the better part of a century.
While Lippitt praised the new Southern policy that President Hayes was forced to implement, he denounced the means by which Hayes came to power as “rotten, low, mean, and sneaking.” It was somewhat surprising then, that when President Hayes and his delegation came to Petaluma in 1880 to visit the agricultural fair, he attended a luncheon reception at Lippitt’s house.
With the end of Reconstruction, Lippitt used the Courier to launch a newspaper war with Henry Weston’s Argus over Petaluma’s “colored school.” The Argus had joined in a Republican campaign of questioning the cost efficiency of maintaining California’s segregated school policy for a relatively small number of Black students, as opposed to integrating those students into the white schools.
The campaign, spearheaded by a group of state Black leaders, including Petaluman George Miller, who convened annually as the Colored Convention, succeeded in convincing the school boards of other cities, including San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland, and Vallejo, to abolish their “colored schools.” Petaluma, in what the San Francisco Chronicle described as “spirit of caste still alive and dominant,” remained a prominent holdout.
The local newspaper war intensified when it was revealed that a Black barbershop owner named Henry Jones had asked the principal of the white Brick School, Martin E. Cooke Munday, to admit his son, complaining that the boy was receiving a substandard level of instruction at the “colored school.” Lippitt’s Courier reported that Munday, a young leader of the local Democratic Party, had found Jones’ son unqualified for entry to the all-white Brick School. Alternatively, the Argus reported that Munday had privately told Jones that “no colored child” would be admitted as long as he was principal of the school.
Lippitt and the Courier continued to support Petaluma’s “separate but equal” policy until the California legislature finally outlawed such policies in 1880. By that time, most of Petaluma’s Black population had left the city for safer Black communities in Vallejo and Oakland.
Lippitt remained editor of the Courier into the 1880s, employing it as a mouthpiece of the Sonoma Country Democratic Party. He also barnstormed the state on behalf of Democratic candidates, sometimes alongside former school principal Munday, who, after replacing Lippitt as city attorney in 1882, was elected to the state assembly in 1885 before making an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor.
Temperance was another cause Lippitt promoted in the Courier. A member of the Petaluma Temperance Reform Club, he ran a weekly column in the paper called “The WCTU Corner.” Along with his son Edward L. Lippitt, a music teacher, he also formed the Lippitt Temperance Club to teach moral and social values to young men and women in town. Lippitt however drew the line at the WCTU’s early campaign for woman suffrage, writing in the Courier that women petitioning for the right to vote should be “lynched.”
Likewise, when local wheat farmers, many of them former Republican colleagues, formed cooperatives in the mid-1870s as a means of collectively negotiating with grain brokers and railroad monopolies, Lippitt denounced them in the Courier for embracing “communism and socialism.”
After relinquishing editorship of the Courier, Lippitt moved his law office in 1886 into the new Mutual Relief Building at the southwest corner of Kentucky Street and Western Avenue, and welcomed his second son Frank to join him in his practice, now called Lippitt and Lippitt. For the first five years, Frank operated a branch office for the firm in San Francisco. He was subsequently appointed to his father’s old position as Petaluma city attorney in 1896, while still continuing to work with his father in their private practice.
By the turn of the century, Lippitt was a fixture around town, bestowed with the title of Petaluma’s “Grand Old Man.” He reported regularly to his office until 1911, when a series of apoplexy attacks left him housebound. Just months before he died at the age of eighty-seven in 1912, he wrote that the most valuable advice he had received in life was from the father of a classmate at Harvard, who as a physician treated Lippitt for a cold in his freshman year.
“Young man,” the physician told him, “God made man with a beard, and placed him in a garden. I will give you a prescription, which if you follow, will ensure you a long life: Let your beard grow, and work in a garden.”
“I have shaved but once since,” Lippitt wrote, “and have always had a garden to work in and to take great delight in its flowers and fruits.”
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SOURCES SUMMARY
Newspapers
Cadiz Sentinel: “Young and Pure—More of it,” April 2, 1862.
Cincinnati Daily Press: June 2, 1859; June 18, 1859.
Cincinnati Enquirer: Advertisement, September 3, 1853; “Professor Lippitt,” April 21, 1862.
Cloverdale Reveille: “In the Superior Court,” September 28, 1889.
Daily Ohio Statesman: “The Grand Jury,” April 26, 1862.
The Elevator: “Petaluma,” November 1, 1867; “Correspondence of the Elevator,” February 19, 1869.
The Highland Weekly News: “Political Meetings,” September 15, 1859.
Los Angeles Herald: “Prof. Lippitt Speaks,” October 25, 1888.
McArthur Democrat: “You have Tears to Shed,” August 3, 1855.
Petaluma Argus: “The School Festival (J.M. Littlefield superintendent), April 24, 1863; “District School,” July 1, 1863; “M.E. Sabbath School,” October 9, 1863; “Public School,” January 13, 1864; “Resigned,” July 18, 1867; Ad for “High School,” September 26, 1867; “Prof. Lippitt’s Scientific and Classical Institute,” February 6, 1868; “Commencement,” August 20, 1868; “Grand Union Meeting,” September 10, 1868; “Republican County Convention” July 8, 1869; “Appointed,” December 18, 1869; “An Unprovoked Slander,” January 1, 1870; “Flag Presentation,” January 1, 1870; “Celebration,” February 28, 1870; “We Bow,” April 16, 1870; “Going East,” May 23, 1870; “Personal,” October 8, 1870; “We Bow,” April 16, 1870; “Two Dead Ducks,” April 23, 1870; “Going East,” May 23, 1870; “The Levee,” June 4, 1870; “A Splendid Testimony,” June 25, 1870; “Personal,” October 8, 1870; Ad for “E.S. Lippitt, Attorney and Counselor at Law,” October 8, 1870; “Petaluma Home Institute,” December 17, 1870; Advertisement for E.S. Lippitt, Notary Public, February 10, 1873; “Farmers Club,” April 1, 1873; “City Attorney,” May 13, 1873; “The Fair,” October 11, 1873; “To Be or Not to Be,” June 26, 1874; “The Fair,” September 18, 1874; “Board of Directors,” November 20, 1874; “Temperance Convention,” July 9, 1875; “Our Plazas,” January 28, 1876; “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877; “Personalities,” August 31, 1877; “How is This?” August 24, 1877; “The Election,” April 11, 1878; “Sonoma and Marin Railroad,” July 5, 1878; “Temperance Lecture,” June 6, 1879; “Who Has Lied,” October 25, 1884; “The Public Schools,” November 7, 1893; “History of the Local Library,” June 10, 1904; “Eighty Candles Adorn His Birthday Cake,” September 14, 1904; “Petaluma’s Grand Old Man Passes Another Milestone,” September 17, 1909; “Reminiscences of a Long Life”: May 13, 1910, September 2, 1910, October 3, 1910, October 29, 1910, June 10, 1911, June 17, 1911.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Newspaper Completes Century,” August 17, 1955; “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” December 17, 1960; “Argus-Courier Celebrates 160 years of Chronicling Petaluma’s History,” September 24, 2015;
Petaluma Courier: “The Tilden Troopers,” November 9, 1876; “Petition for Woman Suffrage,” December 28, 1876; “The Result Secured,” December 28, 1876; “The Colored School,” April, 12, 1877; “Letter from a Citizen,” April 19, 1877; “The Election,” September 6, 1877; “President Hayes in Petaluma,” September 15, 1880; “Death of Bishop Kavanaugh,” March 19, 1884; Lippitt Attorney at Law advertisement, January 20, 1886; “A Lively Meeting,” October 19, 1896; “The L.T.C. held . . .” January 23, 1897; “Organized a New Chapter,” January 18, 1902; “The L.T.C.” January 29, 1903; “Prof. E.L. Lippitt and his L.T.C. . . .” August 14, 1907; “E.S. Lippitt Again Ill,” November 22, 1911; “E.S. Lippitt Better,” July 24, 1911; “Death of E.S. Lippitt,” May 3, 1912.
San Francisco Chronicle: “How Latimer’s Appointment Came,” December 24, 1869; “Another of His Public Statements Proved False,” November 6, 1873;
San Francisco Examiner: “In the Assembly,” January 28, 1884
Sonoma Democrat: “Teacher’s Institute,” June 1, 1867; “The Bible in the Public Schools,” June 8, 1867; “Schoolmasters Abroad,” June 8, 1867; “Sunday Laws,” August 24, 1867; “A Bigot,” October 2, 1867; April 23, 1870; “Two Dead Ducks,” April 30, 1870; “Law Suit,” August 27, 1870; “Law Suit Dismissed,” October 29, 1870; “Apology,” November 5, 1870; “E.S. Lippitt Resigns,” November 12, 1870; “Democratic Meeting,” August 18, 1877;
Books, Journals, Websites, Archival Records
“Alumni Record of Wesleyan University,” Middleton, Conn, 1883, p. 83-84.
Michael Les Benedict, “Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876-1877: A Reconsideration of Reunion and Reaction.” Journal of Southern History (1980): 489-524.
D. Michael Bottoms, An Aristocracy of Color: Race and Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850-1890 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), pp. 55–59.
Tom Gregory, “Biography of Edward S. Lippitt,” History of Sonoma County, California (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1911.
History of the Bench and Bar: Being Biographies of Many Remarkable Men . . ., edited by Oscar Tully Shuck (Commercial Printing House, 1901), p. 533-534.
Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995), p. 114.
E.S. Lippitt, Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), pp. 1, 41, 43.
J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (Allen, Bowen, & Co., 1880), p. 328. “Petaluma Township, Part 3 1880.”
Catherine Coffin Phillips, Cornelius Cole, California Pioneer (San Francisco, 1929)
Katherine Rinehart, Petaluma: A History in Architecture (Arcadia Publishing, 2005); Petaluma Argus: An
Willoughby Rodman, History of the Bench and Bar of Southern California (California, W.J. Porter, 1909) p. 208.
“Woman Suffrage Petition, 1870,” Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.
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