Cypress Hill Cemetery Archives - Petaluma Historian

In the Shadow of Gold Mountain

PETALUMA’S EARLY CHINATOWN

Chinese butcher and grocery, San Francisco, ca. 1885 (photo Universal Archives/Getty Images)

On January 17, 1866, John McNear’s wife Clara died from complications related to the birth of the couple’s fifth child.^[1]Rather than bury her at Petaluma’s public graveyard in Oak Park, McNear developed his own cemetery on forty acres at the edge of town. He called it Cypress Hill. Reverend William C. Pond, the new Congregational minister in town, officiated over Clara’s burial. In gratitude, McNear gifted him Cypress Hill’s first commercial burial plot.^[2]

But death wasn’t all the two men bonded over. There was also “the Chinese question.”

For capitalists like McNear, the Chinese were quiet, diligent laborers, willing to work at wages below those of whites. For Protestant evangelists like Pond, they were prospective converts to send back to China as missionaries in spreading Christianity.

Two years after Clara’s death, lobbyists of commerce and conversion persuaded the U.S. to sign the Burlingame Treaty with China. In addition to opening up new trade opportunities, the treaty lifted restrictions on Chinese immigration, ensuring a steady flow of cheap labor to the U.S, and allowed Christian missionaries to practice in China.[3]

*Chinese Bottling Wine at Buena Vista Winery, Sonoma (photo Eadweard Muybridge, California State Library)*

By 1870, there were nearly 500 Chinese immigrants living in Sonoma County. Their numbers would double over the next decade.^[4]They worked in vineyards, on creek rechanneling and levee crews along the Petaluma River, at wineries, as railroad workers, lumberjacks, quarry miners, farm laborers, and builders of stone fences before the arrival of barbed wire.^[5] A quarter of them lived in Petaluma, primarily in Chinatown, an ethnic enclave extending along today’s Petaluma Boulevard from Western Avenue to D Street.^[6]

Relegated to shanties as living quarters, they operated laundries, groceries, tobacco shops, boarding houses, and restaurants—including one specializing in abalone porterhouse steaks. Dr. Shing Kee operated an herbal medical practice at B and Main streets, that doubled as a laborer hiring company. A handful of Chinese also worked as servants and cooks for wealthy white households.^[7]

*Chung, house servant of T. B and Caroline Hood, Santa Rosa, 1900 (photo Sonoma County Library)*

Excluded from local fraternities, they formed their own Freemasons Lodge. For worship and meditation, they established a Joss House, or Taoist-Buddhist temple, which also served as a community center, especially during Chinese New Year.^[8]

*Joss House temple in San Francisco, 1887 (photo Bancroft Library)*

The Chinese were almost exclusively men, women largely precluded by custom and immigration law. Of the 3,536 Chinese women living in California in 1870, 60% were victims of sex traffickers, smuggled into the country by a crime network known as the Tong, whose reach extended to Petaluma, where they operated brothels, gambling houses, and opium dens for Chinese and whites.^[9]

Most Chinese emigrated to “Gold Mountain”—as they called California—from South China’s Guangtong Province, a region wracked by war, civil unrest, floods, famines, and drought. Petaluma’s other early immigrant groups—the Irish, Swiss Italians, and Germans—who made up a third of the city’s population, fled their own homelands under similar conditions.^[10]

Like them, the Chinese had their own benevolent association, the Six Companies, which fronted their passage to California, aided them in sickness, and shipped their bones back to China for burial.^[11]

*Headquarters of the Chinese Six Companies in San Francisco (photo Bancroft Library)*

As Sonoma County burst from encampments into a bustling economy, the Chinese proved indispensable in building railroads, reclaiming wetland areas, and developing agriculture. Most carved out meager livings, sending a share of their earnings back home to struggling family members.^[12] But unlike European immigrants, who were able to gradually assimilate into Anglo-American culture, the Chinese found themselves perennially marked as foreign, set apart by their features, skin color, exotic dress, and customs.

Prohibited from owning property, denied naturalization and legal protections, they were mislabeled “coolies”—a Hindi term from the British empire for indentured or slave labor—and consigned to the shadow of Gold Mountain as second-class citizens.^[13]

Rev. William C. Pond (photo public domain)

*John A. McNear (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)*

McNear was one of the largest employers of Chinese in the area. Along with his banking and real estate concerns, his primary business was selling grain. He made a fortune during the state’s wheat boom, exporting grain overseas. He also employed hundreds of Chinese at San Pedro Point in Marin County, where he operated a 2,500-acre cattle ranch, brickyard, quarry, and shrimping business.^[14]

*Chinese shrimpers at San Pedro Point (photo Friends of China Camp*)

McNear found a ready ally in Reverend Pond, a fellow New Englander, over the “Chinese question.” Pond left the Petaluma parish after three years to serve as pastor of San Francisco’s Third Congregational Church. Employing a Protestant strategy known as “baiting the Gospel hook with the English alphabet,” he started a night school for the “heathen” Chinese.

After conservative parishioners balked at admitting Chinese converts, Pond established his own parish, the Bethany Congregational Church. He also created the California Chinese Mission, which opened dozens of Chinese Mission Schools across California, including one in Petaluma’s Chinatown in 1876.^[15]

*Students at Congregational Chinese Mission School, Los Angeles, 1880s (photo Chinese Historical Society of Southern California)*

That same year, California was hit with the full brunt of a national recession. Triggered in 1873 by overspeculation in railroads and a drop in European demand for U.S. farm goods, it brought with it farm foreclosures and high unemployment.^[16]

In the fall of 1877, labor protestors in San Francisco formed the Workingmen’s Party. Led by a charismatic young Irish immigrant named Denis Kearney, they called for better pay, an eight-hour work day, regulation of banks and railroads, high taxation of the rich, and help for the poor. Denouncing the employment of low-paid Chinese immigrants by rich capitalists, they launched a Chinese labor boycott, adopting as their rallying cry “the Chinese must go.”^[17]

*Cover of the San Francisco Wasp magazine, December 8, 1877* *(Bancroft Library)*

Within weeks, Anti-Chinese Clubs sprang up throughout California, including in Petaluma, where membership quickly exceeded 300. In the spring of 1878, Kearney and his lieutenants staged a mass rally at Petaluma’s Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park) to address local party members and discontented members of the Petaluma Grange.^[18]

*Illustration of 1874 Grange meeting in a schoolhouse (Joseph E. Beale, Pixels.com)*

Formed in 1873 to provide social and intellectual benefits to the local farming community, the Grange aligned with the Workingmen to protest “the wheat-bag trust” of exploitative middlemen—wheat brokers, shipping companies, and bankers—who forced them to dispose of their crops at little or no profit, while charging them interest rates of between 12% and 20%. They called out McNear to be “subjected to the inquisitorial thumbscrews.”^[19]

In the fall of 1878, California voters approved a proposal to hold a convention to update California’s state constitution. After capturing a majority of the convention delegates, the Workingmen’s Party pushed for more stringent federal and state laws against the Chinese, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which placed a ten-year prohibition on the immigration of Chinese laborers.^[20]

*Illustration in the San Francisco Wasp magazine, May 11, 1878, lampooning whites who claim to be anti-Chinese but use their services* *(Bancroft Library)*

Far from appeasing the fanatics, the new restrictions prompted them to expel the remaining Chinese from the U.S., unleashing more hostilities against Chinese communities.^[21] In 1883, an arsonist in Petaluma torched Wah Lee’s laundry at the corner of Western Avenue and Kentucky Street. Before it could be rebuilt, the city banned laundries—new and existing—from its “fire limits” downtown, a zone extending from the river to Kentucky and Fourth streets, and from B Street to Washington Street.^[22]

*1883 Sanborn map of Chinese businesses (in green) at Western Avenue and Petaluma Boulevard (then Main Street)*

Tensions reached a fevered pitch in 1886, following the murder of a former Petaluma couple, Jesse and Sarah Wickersham, at their remote farm house west of Cloverdale. Married cousins, they were the nephew and niece of Petaluma banker Isaac Wickersham, who owned numerous properties in Chinatown. Unfounded accusations pinned the murder on the couple’s Chinese cook, who disappeared after the crime.^[23]

With newspapers fanning the flames, “anti-coolie” meetings were held across Sonoma County, resulting in Chinese being attacked, beaten, and driven out. Some had their homes and shops burned to the ground, including in Petaluma.^[24] Taking advantage of the exodus, McNear replaced a shanty-filled lot he owned in Chinatown with the 1886 McNear Building, launching a commercial gentrification of the block.^[25]

*John McNear before his the new 1886 McNear Building (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)*

Within a year, labor shortages—largely in jobs whites refused to fill—led to the gradual return of the Chinese to Sonoma County. Exhibiting resilience in the face of hostilities, their numbers rebounded by 1890 to 1,145, of which 104 lived in Petaluma.^[26] Looking to reduce tensions, McNear offered to build a segregated Chinese colony east of town, on the condition the Chinese be compelled to abandon Chinatown.^[27]That never materialized.

Instead, an ongoing series of discriminatory legislative acts led to the steady reduction of California’s Chinese population. Among them was the Geary Act introduced in 1892 by Sonoma County congressman Thomas Geary, a former Petaluma lawyer. It extended the Chinese Exclusion Act another ten years. Once it expired, Congress extended the exclusion period indefinitely. It would not be lifted until 1943.^[28]

*Congressman Thomas J. Geary (photo public domain)*

Reverend Pond continued his regular visits to town to preach at the Congregational Church, but closed down the Chinese Mission School in 1900, soon after celebrating its 25^th anniversary.^[29] In the years that followed, Petaluma’s Chinatown was reduced to the block of Petaluma Boulevard between C and D streets, as the Chinese population fell to below two dozen.^[30]

*View of Chinatown on Petaluma Blvd (then Third Street) between C and D Streets, early 1900s* *(photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)*

McNear designated a section at Cypress Hill for the Chinese, to be buried in their traditional Buddhist ceremonies.^[31] In 1913, the Six Companies exhumed their remains and shipped them back to China.^[32] McNear himself was laid to rest in Cypress Hill in 1918, beside his first wife Clara. He was joined there by Reverend Pond in 1925, in the plot McNear gifted him in 1866.^[33]

A few weeks after Pond’s death, the last remaining vestige of Chinatown—a Chinese laundry and boarding house between C and D streets owned by the McNear family—was torn down.^[34]

*McNear family gravesite, Cypress Hill Cemetery (photo public domain)*

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 3, 2023.

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Died,” Daily Alta California, January 18, 1866; the child, Herbert Lincoln McNear, died two months later: “Died,” Daily Alta California, March 16, 1866.

[2] “Dr. Pond Rests at Cypress Hill,” Petaluma Argus, November 18, 1925; “Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, November 16, 1877.

[3] “The Burlingame-Seward Treaty, 1868,” Office of the Historian, Department of State, United States website: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/burlingame-seward-treaty

[4] The 1870 U.S. census lists 473 Chinese in Sonoma County, 121 of them living in Petaluma; the 1880 U.S. census lists 904 Chinese living in the county, with no breakout for Petaluma as it was under a population of 4,000. The census groups them under the category “Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and all other,” but “Our Population,” Petaluma Argus, December 17, 1880, states there are 904 Chinese, two Japanese, and 339 Indians and half-breeds.

[5] Nancy Olmsted, “A History of Paving Blocks Along San Francisco’s South Beach Waterfront,” San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, July 1991, p. 17; Sue Doherty, “Sonoma Stories and the Song Wong Bourbeau Collection,” Masters Thesis, Sonoma State University, 2005, p. 34; “Notes from the White Family Collection,” Katherine Rinehart private archives: in 1880 ,Chinese crews worked on levees in Lakeville to reclaim marshland; “More Johns,” Petaluma Argus, May 6, 1869.

[6] Chinese stores and shanties are listed in the 1883 Sanborn map of Petaluma extending along Western Avenue from Kentucky to Main Street, and from there down Main and Third streets to D Street, as well as along B Street from Main Street to Fourth Street.

[7] “Chinese New Year,” Petaluma Argus, January 30, 1868: abalone porterhouse steak & tobacco factory; Ad for physician Dr. Shing Kee, Petaluma Argus, November 14, 1873; Ad for Chung Kee Chinese Grocery, Petaluma Argus, July 25, 1875; Ad for See Hop Chinese Grocery, Petaluma Argus, October 5, 1875; “Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, January 14, 1876: 6 Chinese wash houses, 3 Chinese drug stores; Ad for Wa Sing Wash House, Petaluma Courier, July 19, 1877; “After the Riot,” Petaluma Argus, August 2, 1877: Petaluma had 10 Chinese wash houses, 5 Chinese stores, and boarding houses; “Not Very Pretty,” Petaluma Argus, August 20, 1887: new Chinese wash house on North Main; “Our Fires,” Petaluma Courier, April 6, 1881: 5 Chinese wash houses listed; Ad for Wah Yene Employment Office and Chinese Goods store, Petaluma Argus, November 24, 1882; Ad for Wah Lee Wash House, Petaluma Argus, April 28, 1883; Ad for Jim Kee Laundry Petaluma Courier, January 14, 1891.

[8] “Chinese New Year,” Petaluma Argus, January 30, 1900; “Has His Say,” Petaluma Courier, October 11, 1901; “Explore California: Weaverville Joss House Park,” California State Parks Foundation, January 17, 2020. https://www.calparks.org/blog/explore-california-weaverville-joss-house-state-historic-park; Gordon C. Phillips, “The Chinese in Sonoma County, California, 1900-1930: The Aftermath of Exclusion,”Masters Thesis, Sonoma State University, 2015, pgs. 64, 74; http://sonoma-dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.3/153831/PhillipsG_Thesis.pdf;sequence=1

[9]Jean Pfaelzer, California a Slave State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), p. 252: more than 90% of the Chinese population in 1870 was male; Iris Chang, The Chinese in America (NY: Viking Books, 2003), pp. 80-86; Phillips, pp. 80-84; “Is There No Remedy?” Petaluma Argus, August 26, 1871; “Half Told,” Petaluma Argus, September 2, 1871; “Chinese Wedding,” Petaluma Argus, September 12, 1873: bride from local brothel; “Recorder’s Court,” Petaluma Argus, September 12, 1873: gambling house; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, March 14, 1879: Chinese gambling house; “Voice of the People,” Petaluma Argus, December 19, 1885: five alleged opium dens in town; “The Chinese,” Petaluma Argus, February 6, 1886: local brothels; “Police Notes,” Petaluma Argus, August 27, 1880: opium dens; “Caught in the Act,” Petaluma Courier, September 16, 1896: opium den; Phillips, pp. 7, 63-64.

[10] 6,093 of Sonoma County’s 19,833 were foreign born per the 1880 U.S. Census, “Population by Race, Sex, and Nativity,” p. 428.

[11] Chang, pp. 78-80.

[12] Thomas Chinn, A History of the Chinese in California (San Francisco, CA: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969), p. 22; Pfaelzer, p. 262.

[13] Pfaelzer, p. 147, pp. 247-250.

[14] Chinn, p. 21; “China Camp State Park,” Marin History Museum video, November 26, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8tZpz1YAlE.

[15] William C. Pond, Gospel Pioneering: Reminiscences of Early Congregationalism in California 1833-1920 (Oberlin, OH: The News Printing Company, 1921), pgs. 10, 17, 91-95, 130-135; Robert Segar II, “Some Denominational Reactions to Chinese Immigration to California, 1856-1892,” Pacific Historical Review , February, 1959, Vol. 28, No. 1, pgs. 51, 58; Wesley S. Woo, “Presbyterian Mission: Christianizing and Civilizing The Chinese in Nineteenth Century California,” American Presbyterians, Fall 1990, Vol. 68, No. 3, pgs. 68, 71, 167-172.

[16] Segar, pp. 52-53.

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

[18] Kearney first held a meeting in Donahue, but was a no show at the Main Street Plaza rally, leaving his lieutenants Wellock and Knight to preside: “Anti-Coolie Meeting,” Petaluma Courier, December 27, 1877; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, February 15, 1878; “Kearney,” Petaluma Argus, March 15, 1878; “Kearney, Wellock, and Knight,” Petaluma Argus, March 22, 1878; “Workingmen’s Club at Donahue,” Petaluma Argus, March 29, 1878; “Workingmen’s Meeting Saturday,” Petaluma Argus, March 29, 1878; “The Workingmen’s Meeting,” Petaluma Courier, April 11, 1878; “Notice,” Petaluma Argus, May 3, 1878; “Workingmen’s Convention,” Petaluma Argus, May 31, 1878.

[19] “Farmers’ Club,” Petaluma Argus, June 2, 1873; “Organization of a Grange,” Petaluma Argus, June 16, 1873; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, February 4, 1876; “W.W. Chapman,” Petaluma Courier, June 5, 1878; “History,” Sebastopol Grange #306, http://sebastopolgrange.org/history/; W.L. Robinson, First Century of Service and Evolution – The Grange 1867 – 1967 (National Grange, 1967); Clarke Chambers, California Farm Organizations (University of California, 1952), p. 11; “Sonoma County National Bank, Petaluma, 50^th Anniversary,” Coast Banker, Volume 16, Coast Banker Publishing Company, 1916; “The Boycott,” Petaluma Argus, March 13, 1886; 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.

[20] Chang, pp. 124-128.

[21] Chang, p. 132.

[22] “Another Blaze,” Petaluma Courier, February 14, 1883; “Polly Larkin’s Pot-Pourri,” Petaluma Courier, October 1, 1884; “The Fire Limits,” Petaluma Argus, Aril 2, 1875; The laundry ban applied to the city’s fire limits: “Legal Notice: Ordinance No. 11,” Petaluma Courier, November 19, 1884; “Fire Friday Evening,” Petaluma Courier, August 15, 1894.

[23] “A Terrible Crime,” Petaluma Courier, January 27, 1886; “Ah Ti, the Murderer,” Petaluma Argus, January 30, 1886; Jeff Elliot examines holes in the accusations against the Wickersham’s cook: “The Wickersham Murders,” “Who Killed the Wickershams,” Santarosahistory.com, http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2017/05/the-wickersham-murders/.

[24] “Anti-Coolie Meeting,” Sonoma Democrat, February 6, 1886; “Going Below,” Petaluma Argus, February 13, 1866; “Sebastopol Anti-Chinese League,” Sonoma Democrat, February 27, 1886; “Blew Them Up,” Petaluma Argus, March 10, 1886; Chinatown fires (no headline) Petaluma Courier, September 21, 1887.

[25] “An Additional Story,” Petaluma Argus, April 3, 1886.

[26] Phillips, pp. 38-39; “Fruit Growers,” Petaluma Courier, march 13, 1886; “Potato Diggers,” Petaluma Argus, November 19, 1887; U.S. Census, 1890.

[27] “Polly Larkin’s Pot-Pourri,” Petaluma Courier, October 1, 1884: McNear first raised the idea of a colony in East Petaluma in 1884; “A Persistent Fire,” Petaluma Argus, September 3, 1887; “Locals,” Petaluma Argus, September 17, 1887; “Recent Burning,” Petaluma Courier, September 21, 1887; “That Citizens’ Meeting,” Petaluma Courier, September 21, 1887.

[28] Chang, pp. 125-141.

[29] Pond visits include: “Chinese Sunday School,” Petaluma Argus, July 23, 1875; “Items of Local Interest,” Petaluma Argus, August 10, 1877; Pond’s visits to Petaluma: “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, July 9, 1875; “Religious,” Petaluma Argus, July 21, 1876; “Items of Local Interest,” Petaluma Argus, August 10, 1877; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, August 8, 1879; “Local Brevities” Petaluma Argus, August 6, 1880; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, September 2, 1881; “Twenty-Fourth Anniversary,” Petaluma Argus, May, 8, 1899; “Congregational Church Dedicated Friday,” Petaluma Argus, June 28, 1901; “Dr. Pond Arrives from San Francisco,” Petaluma Argus, August 17, 1903; “Chinese School,” Petaluma Argus, August 15, 1885; “Chinese Mission Anniversary,” Petaluma Argus, June 11, 1900.

[30] U.S. Census; 1894 Sanborn Map.

[31] “Chinaman Gone,” Petaluma Argus, February 12, 1875.

[32] “Remains Will Be Shipped to Orient,” Petaluma Courier, May 2, 1913; “6,000 Will Sail Home to Final Rest in China,” Los Angeles Herald, April 23, 1913.

[33] “Dr. Pond Rests at Cypress Hill,” Petaluma Argus, November 18, 1925; “People Honor Memory of J.A. McNear,” Petaluma Courier, June 22, 1918.

[34] “Chinatown Building Being Razed,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1926.

Petaluma’s Land of the Dead

HOW DEATH DEFINED THE BIRTH OF A COMMUNITY

*Cypress Hill Cemetery (photo Gail Sickler, Petlauma Argus-Courier)*

Petaluma’s first death was by potatoes. In the fall of 1851, a farmer named Shirley was thrown from a wagon of potatoes and crushed beneath its wheels.^[i]

Petaluma was just coming into being. The year before, a meat hunter named Tom Lockwood set up camp at an abandoned Coast Miwok trading village along the Petaluma Creek to ship wild game to hungry gold seekers in San Francisco.^[ii]

By the time of Mr. Shirley’s death, a local potato boom, launched by the Irishman John Keyes, made a squatters hamlet of the encampment. Along with a couple of trading posts, a potato warehouse and a handful of rustic cabins, the hamlet featured a makeshift general store, hostel, and eating house erected by George H. Keller, a disappointed gold miner from Missouri.^[iii]

Keller, Lockwood and a young man named Columbus Tustin buried Shirley’s body on the hillside across from Keller’s store, where Penry Park sits today. Keller read the service while the other men laid Shirley to rest in a coffin fashioned from redwood. A few months later, on January 3, 1852, Keller decided to turn the hamlet into an actual town.^[iv]

Making an illegal claim to 158 acres of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio—a privately-owned, 13,000-acre Mexican land grant extending east of the Petaluma Creek into Marin County—Keller hired a surveyor named J.A. Brewster. With Lockwood’s help, Brewster platted a town on 40 acres running from the creek west to Liberty Street, and from Oak Street south to A Street.

At the center of town, on the hillside where Shirley was buried, Keller set aside land for Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park).^[v]

*Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry park), 1900 (Sonoma County Library)*

Opening a real estate office at his store, he began selling lots in California’s new gold rush: land speculation. Among those buying was Tustin, who developed the town’s first subdivision, Tustin’s Addition, extending from First to Eighth streets, and A to F streets.^[vi] After selling his bogus landholdings, Keller returned to his farm in Missouri.^[vii]

*1855 map of Petaluma (Sonoma County Library)*

His founding of Petaluma wasn’t as much a land scam as a collective agreement among frustrated settlers. Prevented from homesteading on the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio—whose legal ownership was in dispute—they willingly engaged in Keller’s charade in hopes of benefitting from a mutually profitable enterprise.

That Keller’s property sales were recorded by Sonoma County’s first recorder of deeds, William Boggs—the son of Sonoma County state assemblyman Lilburn Boggs—spoke to the extent of complicity in the charade, as did the federal appointment of Keller’s son Garret as Petaluma’s first postmaster.^[viii]

The pursuit of gold, which drew most early settlers to California, was no different. Gold itself has no intrinsic value. It is a lie agreed upon. Its true value resides in the enthusiasm it ignites among people who believe in it.^[ix]As David Starr Jordan noted, that enthusiasm ignited an ethos of “whatever is not nailed down is mine, and whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”^[x]

The final nailing came, as with most things, in death and the courts.

In the spring of 1854, a young woman known only as Miss Smith—daughter of a popular Petaluma settler named John Smith—died unexpectedly. Her death prompted townspeople to create a cemetery where Oak Hill Park resides today. In doing so, they expressed their shared desire to put down roots of generational continuity in the town.^[xi]

At the time, Petaluma had grown to a population of 400 residents. Within three years, that figure would more than triple to 1,338 residents, 38% of whom were women.^[xii]Their influence, along with the creation of five churches and two fraternal lodges—the Odd Fellows and Masons—helped to domesticate and civilize what had been a rough-and-tumble town. That included showing proper respect for the dead.^[xiii]

Although the average life expectancy at the time was only 38, much of that was due to childhood mortality. Those who lived to the age of 20, had a life expectancy of 60.^[xiv]

*Oak Hill (photo Victoria Webb, Petaluma Argus-Courier)*

The eight acres for Oak Hill Cemetery were donated to the town by James and Mary Thompson, owners of Thompson Bakery on Main Street. Their daughter Josephine was the first settler’s child born in town on August 25, 1852.^[xv]

The Thompsons purchased the Oak Hill property from Keller. A year after Miss Smith was buried, ownership of the cemetery reverted, along with the rest of Petaluma, to James Stuart, a San Francisco land speculator deemed the legal owner of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio by the California Land Commission. A legal challenge to the commission’s decision was dismissed in court.[xvi]

*J.S. Stuart’s office of Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, Main Street, 1855 (Sonoma County Library)*

Stuart promptly opened a real estate office in town—Office of Arroyo de San Antonio—for residents to purchase a legal property deed from him, regardless of whatever bogus deeds they held from Keller, Tustin, or other squatters.^[xvii] More than 200 residents shelled out a total of $70,000 ($2 million in today’s currency) to repurchase their lots from Stuart.^[xviii]

After overproduction put an end to the potato boom, Petaluma’s economy began to grow in the mid-1850s with the new California wheat boom. By 1858, the townspeople decided it was time to incorporate as a city, allowing for taxation of its citizens for things like schools, roads, and cemeteries.^[xix]

Oak Hill Cemetery by that time was something of a mess, neither ornamented nor enclosed, the dead buried without any apparent order. The newly elected city trustees, or city council, set out to change that. They began by asking Stuart to donate the existing eight acres of the cemetery to the city, along with 20 additional acres for future expansion. Stuart agreed to the existing eight acres, but balked at surrendering more of his prime real estate.^[xx]

In 1866, local grain merchant John A. McNear, who had made a fortune on the California wheat boom, lost his wife Clara to an early death. She died during an exceptionally rainy January, and McNear, worried about her grave flooding, set off to find high ground upon which to bury her.^[xxi]

Clara McNear (photo Petaluma
Historical Library & Museum)

Or so the story goes.

As Oak Hill Cemetery sat atop a hill, it seems more likely McNear recognized an opportunity at hand. For Clara’s final resting place, he purchased 40 hilly acres along Magnolia Avenue. Beyond the city limits at the time, it was not hindered by residential development like Oak Hill. After burying Clara on the hilltop, he laid out the rest of the grounds as Cypress Hill Cemetery and began selling plots. Ownership of the cemetery would remain in the McNear family until 1957.^[xxii]

*McNear Family plot, Cypress Hill (photo public domain)*

Two local religious communities followed his lead, establishing their own cemeteries along Magnolia Avenue. The Salem Cemetery Association, established in 1857 by German Jewish merchants, purchased 8 acres from McNear at the south end of Cypress Hill Cemetery in 1870 (today’s B’nai Israel Cemetery).

*Entrance to B’nai Israel Cemetery (photo public domain)*

The next year, St. Vincent’s Catholic Church purchased 12 adjacent acres for Calvary Cemetery.^[xxiii]

In 1879, city trustees voted to close Oak Hill Cemetery to further burials, citing a problem with rainwater draining into the downtown, creating a health hazard. They directed new burials of non-Jews and non-Catholics to Cypress Hill.^[xxiv] City Hall watchdogs pointed out the rainwater from the cemetery flowed north, away from the downtown, running down Howard Street to West Street, and eventually emptying into the same seasonal creek as rainwater from the cemeteries along Magnolia Avenue.^[xxv]

The trustees stood by their decision, pressing residents to move family members buried in Oak Hill to Cypress Hill, with financial incentives from McNear. Those unwilling or unable to afford doing so, were forced to leave their family members at Oak Hill, alongside the bodies of those buried far from home or whose families had left the area._[xxvi]

In 1900, the city decided to convert Oak Hill Cemetery into a park. By that time, thieves were stealing the marble tombstones and selling them to fish markets for counters. The city gave families six months to remove bodies still buried at Oak Hill before they leveled the grounds.

*Oak Hill Park, 1905 (photo Sonoma County Library)*

The Odd Fellows paid to move former members to their plot at Cypress Hill, including Thomas Baylis, who opened one of the town’s first trading posts in 1851.^[xxvii]

A number of bodies remained behind. That became evident in 1947, when the city designated Oak Hill Park for the site of a new hospital. First, they were required to remove of all human remains from the grounds.^[xxviii] Before excavations could begin, the city killed the project after failing to secure the necessary government funding. A decade later, Hillcrest Hospital was built at the top of B Street instead of Oak Hill Park.^[xxix]

In 1876, a group of workmen leveling part of Main Street Plaza discovered the redwood casket of Mr. Shirley buried there by Keller, Lockwood, and Tustin. Shirley’s decaying bones were transferred to a new coffin, and reverently laid to rest in Cypress Hill Cemetery, where they remain today.^[xxx]

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A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 13, 2023.

SOURCES:

[i] “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876; Our Oldest Pioneer,” Petaluma Argus, November 28, 1901; Note: J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 261 (Note: Munro-Fraser identifies the farmer as a Mr. Fraser, not Mr. Shirley).

[ii] Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), p. 54.

[iii] Robert A. Thompson, pgs. 24, 55; “History Mystery Solved,” Petaluma Argus Courier, February 11, 2021.

[iv] “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Argus, March 31, 1876; “Territorial Legislature of 1857-58,” Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, edited by George W. Martin, p. 211; Robert A. Thompson, p. 55.

[v] David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (October., 1979), p. 439; Thompson, p. 55; Munro-Fraser, p. 186.

[vi] Thos. H. Thompson, Map of Sonoma County, 1877; Sonoma County Deed Records, show two grants in 1853 from Columbus Tustin, one to Edward S. Jones, May 16, 1853, and the other to Fred Starkey, August 12, 1853, indicating that he was selling lots by that time.

[vii] Henry Miles Moore, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the City and County of Leavenworth,” Western Life (Leavenworth, KS), August 3, 1900; “History Mystery Solved,” Petaluma Argus Courier, February 11, 2021.

[viii] A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United States, 1853: Petaluma Postmasters,” p. 510, United States, Department of State; “Deeds of Sonoma County, 1847-1901,” film #008117705, LDS FamilySearch database. familysearch.org. (Note: Garret V. Keller is mistakenly identified by both Munro-Fraser and Robert A. Thompson in their books as Petaluma’s founder; he was only 21 years of age in 1852).

[ix] David Milch, A Life’s Work (New York: Random House, 2022) p. 154.

[x] The quote is attributed to Stanford University’s founding president David Starr Jordan, quoteinvestigator.com.

[xi] “The First,” Petaluma Argus, July 20, 1877; “Our Oldest Pioneer,” Petaluma Argus, November 28, 1901; Munro-Fraser, p. 262. (Note: the deceased is identified as “Miss Smith” in Munro-Fraser’s book and likewise Tom Lockwood’s recollections, but as Mrs. Stuart, the daughter of John Smith in the Argus’ 1877 article. Neither is listed in the 1854 death records of Sonoma County).

[xii] Robert A. Thompson, p. 56.

[xiii] Faiths Represented in Petaluma Churches,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1956 (Note: the five churches were the Baptist Church founded 1854, Methodist Church, 1856, Episcopal Church, 1856, St. Vincent’s Catholic Church, 1857, and Congregation Church, 1857); “Organizations-Clubs-Lodges,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1955 (Note: the Odd Fellows Lodge was established 1854, and the Masonic Lodge established in 1855).

[xiv]https://www.infoplease.com/us/health-statistics/life-expectancy-age-1850-2011; https://priceonomics.com/why-life-expectancy-is-misleading/.

[xv] “Our Oldest Pioneer,” Petaluma Argus, November 28, 1901; “Celebrated Birthday,” Petaluma Courier, August 27, 1921; “Death Claims Josephine Polk,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, November 16, 1940. (Note: Munro-Fraser states in his book on p. 251 that Robert Douglas, Jr. and his new bride Hannah Hathaway had the town’s first-born child, who only lived 12 days; however Douglas also states they weren’t wed until December 31, 1852, which was after Josephine Thompson’s birth in Petaluma on August 25, 1852).

[xvi] “The Cemetery,” Sonoma County Journal, December 24, 1858; “After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863.

[xvii] Ad for “Office Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio,” Sonoma County Journal, October 27, 1855.

[xviii] “The First Fight of the Lobby,” Petaluma Argus, February 25, 1863.

[xix] Thos. Thompson, p.20.

[xx] “The Cemetery,” Sonoma County Journal, December 24, 1858.

[xxi] “Died: Clarinda ‘Clara’ Damen Williams McNear,” Sacramento Bee, January 19, 1866; “High Water,” Petaluma Argus, January 25, 1866; Matriarchs of Local History, Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 26, 1997; “Get to Know Some of Petaluma’s Legendary People,” Butter & Eggs Day Special Section, Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 25, 2013, p.27.

[xxii] “Our Real Estate Transactions,” Petaluma Argus, April 27, June 8, July 20, 1872; “Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus, November 16, 1877; “Cypress Hill Sold to Locals By McNears,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 27, 1957

[xxiii] “Salem Cemetery Association,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 26, 1932; “Organizations-Clubs-Lodges,” Petaluma Argus Courier, August 18, 1955; “Catholic Cemetery,” Petaluma Argus, February 18, 1871; “Consecrated,” Petaluma Argus, April 29, 1873.

[xxiv] “Board of Trustees,” Petaluma Courier, May 29, 1878.

[xxv] “Re-Burial of the Dead,” Petaluma Argus, June 14, 1878; “A Protest,” Petaluma Argus, June 28, 1878; “Ordinance No. 122,” Petaluma Courier, June 13, 1879.

[xxvi] “Board of Trustees,” Petaluma Courier, May 29, 1878.

[xxvii] “Desecrating the Graves,” Petaluma Courier, December 27, 1895; “Swiped Tombstones,” Petaluma Courier, November 7, 1899; Petaluma Courier, March 21, 1900; “Depopulating Oak Hill,” Petaluma Courier, May 18, 1900; “Oak Hill Park,” Petaluma Courier, October 3, 1901.

[xxviii] “Council Takes Steps to Make Oak Hill Available for Hospital,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 22, 1947; “A History of Petaluma Medical Facilities,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 30, 2015.

[xxix] “Petaluma Hospital District First to Organize, Dropped to 26^th Place for State, Federal Aid,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 8, 1950; “Hillcrest Dedication End of Long Labors,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 29, 1956; Jim Johnson, who participated in creating a stone labyrinth in Oak Hill Park in 1999, noted that they used a number of granite stones they found on the site, which they believed was from stores stones at the cemetery to be made into tombstones;”Labyrinth Gets Finishing Touches,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 16, 1999.

[xxx] “Centennial resurrection,” Petaluma Argus, March 31, 1876; there is no record of Shirley’s burial in either 1851 or reburial in 1876 in Sonoma County Cemetery Records, 1846-1921 (published by the Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 1999); Lucy Kortum notes Shirley was buried at the northwest corner of the Calvary Hill Cemetery set aside as a potter’s field, an that any markers that might have once existed are gone and the land is overgrown with trees and brush: Lucy Kortum, “Petaluma Cemeteries,” Petaluma Historical Museum, Update, v. 12 no. 1, p. 4.