In Part II of this video presentation sponsored by the Petaluma Historical Museum and the Sonoma County Library, historian John Sheehy explores how a diverse community of Irish, Black, and German merchants in the 19th century made Petaluma’s Main Street such a bustling melting pot.
Real Main Street Video Presentation, Part I
Part I of this video presentation series explores Petaluma’s early Jewish, Chinese, and Swiss Italian communities.
In preparation for St. Patrick’s Day, historian John Sheehy was interviewed on KSRO about the early Irish history in Sonoma County. For those who missed it, below is an excerpt from the transcript:
How the Irish Settled Sonoma County
The Irish were the first large immigrant group to settle in Sonoma County from the time the county was established in 1850 until the 1890s. They came from Ireland on three different paths:
Many following the Potato Famine of 1845-1849 back home, when a million Irish immigrated to America. Others came to California earlier in 1846 as Union soldiers in the Mexican-American War, and then stayed behind after the war ended to mine for gold before settling on farms in Sonoma County. And finally, a number of Irish men been exiled to the penal colonies in Australia by their British rulers after the Irish Rebellions of 1848 and the early 1860s, and then made their way to California, including one of my great-grandfathers, the Fenian Charles Sheehy from County Limerick.
The fact that California had been governed by Mexican Catholics was certainly appealing to those suffering religious persecution under British Protestant rule back home.
The Earliest Irish Settlers: Read & O’Farrell
Sonoma County’s first Irish settler, John Read, arrived in 1827 while the area was under Mexican rule. He built a ramshackle house along Crane Creek near Cotati and planted corn. But the Coast Miwok natives burned his crops, and so he retreated to Mill Valley, where he married a Californio widow—a native of Spanish and Mexican heritage—and so was able to become a landowner of large Mexican land grant, the Rancho Corte Madera. John Reed Elementary School in Rohnert Park is (mis)named in his honor.
In 1843, the man who is perhaps the county’s most famous Irishman, Jasper O’Farrell, a civil engineer from Dublin, came to work in the area as a surveyor for the Mexican government. The Mexicans paid him in land grants, including part of Rancho Nicasio in Marin. He also purchased the Rancho Estero Americano, which included land between Freestone and Valley Ford. There, he established his family estate named Analy after ancestral lands in Ireland (which carried over to the naming of Analy High School in Sebastopol).
After the Mexican-American War ended, O’Farrell was hired to map out the grid for the new city of San Francisco, including its grand promenade known as Market Street, and a street that still bears his name. He made good money surveying, and in the 1850 U.S. Census he was reported to be Sonoma County’s wealthiest citizen.
The Potato Boom
A number of the Irish immigrants in the early 1850s followed a fellow Irishman named John Keyes to the west Sonoma County—Bloomfield, Bodega, Valley Ford—where he began growing potatoes, or “Irish diamonds” as they were known, the county’s first big boom crop. Potatoes were able to keep without refrigeration, which made them transportable on schooners down the Petaluma River to a growing San Francisco. By the mid-1850s, Sonoma County’s potato boom was largely over, a victim of overplanting, soil erosion, and increased competition.
The Wheat Boom
The potato boom in Sonoma County was followed by the California wheat boom. With it came a second influx of Irish immigrants in the 1860s, including my Irish ancestors from County Kerry, the Caseys, many of them attracted by wheat’s reputation as the “poor man’s crop.” It required little expertise or capital, and unlike fruit trees or grape vines that took years to mature, it returned a good profit the first year. Best of all, wheat harvesting was mechanized through the use threshers, and so not particularly labor intense.
Many of the Irish wheat farmers, including my ancestors, settled in Lakeville south of Petaluma and on the western slope of Sonoma Mountain, an area that became known as “Little Ireland,” somewhat segregated from Protestant-dominated river town of Petaluma. My great-grandfather John Casey farmed 160 acres across the northern end of Tolay Lake, previously a sacred Coast Miwok site, that was drained by a wealthy German settler William Bihler in 1870 for planting potatoes. The old Casey farm is now part of the new Tolay Lake Regional Park.
The wheat boom crashed in the 1880s, after which my ancestors and many other farmers switched to dairy ranching.
Donahue Landing
By that time, a new Irish community had been established south of Lakeville called Donahue Landing. It was actually a company pop-up town of 200 people erected by an Irishman named Peter Donahue, who in 1870 built the San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad that extended from Donahue Landing north to Healdsburg.
His instant town of Donahue Landing featured a two-story hotel, a firehouse, a one-room county school, two laundries, a saloon, and a stable that doubled as a dance hall. Donahue employed only Irish on his crews. Meanwhile, another Irishman, John Frisbee, a son-in-law of Mariano Vallejo, who built a separate rail line through the Sonoma Valley to Healdsburg at the time, employed only Chinese workers. Many of Donahue’s Irish workers stayed on in Sonoma County after the railroad was finished.
Catholic Church Communities
The other impact of the Irish immigrants in Sonoma County was the establishment of English-speaking Catholic Church communities in a county that was largely Protestant in its early days. That included St. Vincent’s parish in Petaluma in 1857, St. Rose parish in Santa Rosa in 1860, and St. Teresa parish in Bodega in 1861. These parishes usually started out in someone’s stable, as in Petaluma, or a hotel, as in Santa Rosa, with visiting priests who rode a circuit from the San Rafael mission until such time as enough money was raised by the parish to build a church and support a permanent priest.
By 1870, the U.S. Census counted the Irish as the largest single immigrant group in Sonoma County, about a third of the 20,000 people in the county. They also comprised a third of San Francisco’s population of 100,000.
