In 1857, Abigail and Barnabus Haskell arrived in Petaluma pursuing a California dream of free love. It wasn’t quite the promiscuous Summer of Love that would inflame the Golden State a century later, but it did share with the era one irresistible attraction: a rebellion against authority. For the Haskells, the rebellion was over marriage.[1]
Under the yoke of traditional values and institutions back east, marriage was predominately a transactional affair. Traditionally arranged between families, there was little room for love or individual consent. Once married, a bride and her fortune became the property of her husband. Divorce was largely unheard of.[2]
Free lovers denounced it as “legitimized adultery.” They believed everyone should have the ability to choose a monogamous partner based solely on love, and to end the relationship once the love did.[3]
“Woman was not created to be the slave of man,” Abigail Haskell wrote. “She was to be his equal, to walk upright by his side in her native dignity and purity.”[4]
Barnabus and Abigail Haskell with son William, 1850 (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)
Petaluma was still in early formation when the Haskells arrived. Founded during a potato boom in 1852 that quickly went bust, the local economy was rebounding thanks to California’s new wheat boom.[5] Abigail taught at private schools before being appointed principal of the town’s first public school. Barnabus, a hatter by trade, purchased a dry goods store on Main Street.[6]
The Brick School at 5th & B streets, build 1869 (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)
Of Petaluma’s 1,300 residents at the time, 38% were women.[7]While women were largely relegated to the home back east—leaving men to engage in the public world of business and politics—California’s boom-and-bust cycles made such separate spheres challenging. Women burdened with dissolute or absent husbands found themselves having to work to support themselves and their children.
Recognizing their financial insecurity, state legislators passed legislation allowing women to independently own property, operate businesses, enter into contracts and lawsuits, and more easily file for divorce.[8]
Those new rights coincided with advances in safer sex. Thanks to Charles Goodyear’s recent invention of vulcanized rubber, sales of condoms, douching syringes, and “womb veil” diaphragms were soaring. An array of “female medicines” for birth control, varying in effectiveness and safety, were also available from pharmacies, dry-goods stores, and mail-order catalogs.[9]
Female medicines in the mid-1800s (public domain)
As fertility rates began to plummet in the 1850s, divorce cases began to rise, with 70% of the plaintiffs being women.[10] Meanwhile, the women’s suffragist movement was gaining traction, having recently kicked off at the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York.
The movement evolved from an earlier 19th century evangelical crusade known as the Second Great Awakening.[11] Aimed at purifying society in preparation for Christ’s return, it was predominately composed of white, middle-class women. To exert their influence outside the home, they organized into socially acceptable prayer groups, and began calling for a range of social reforms, including temperance, abolition, children’s rights, and female emancipation.[12]
The Haskells converted to the crusade soon after their marriage in 1837, setting off from New York City with a small band of missionaries to establish a Baptist church in Galveston, Texas.[13] Returning to New York City a few years later, the couple joined the Swedenborgian Church, a Christian denomination inspired by the 18th century Swedish scientist, philosopher, and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.
Emanuel Swedenborg (public domain)
Swedenborgians believed in marriage equality. They also believed in a divine love that pervaded and moved the material world, leaving one to follow either the path of self-love, which led ultimately to the realms of hell, or the path of love for others, which led to the heavens.[14] The path to the heavens attracted reformists like the Haskells.
But it was Swedenborg’s revelatory claims—particularly, the immortality of the soul after death—that had the greatest impact on American culture. His belief in the existence of an immaterial reality beyond reach of the human senses was buttressed with visions, trances, and dreams. He claimed to have conversed with spirits and angels on a daily basis.[15]
Those claims gave rise in the 1850s to a countercultural movement known as Spiritualism.[16]
It began when Maggie and Kate Fox, two teenage sisters in upstate New York, claimed to have heard “rappings” from the dead. Joined by their older sister Leah, they began staging public performances as trance mediums communicating with souls of the deceased, setting off a new national sensation.[17]
The Fox sisters, Leah, Kate, and Maggie (courtesy of Association of Religious Data Archives)
Despite its questionable legitimacy, Spiritualism filled a void left by traditional religion, which placed death at the periphery. At a time when one child in every three died before age ten, and many women did not survive childbirth, Spiritualism provided a sense of solace and closure to many struggling with grief.[18]That included the Haskells, whose oldest child died when she was eight years old.[19]
(illustration from Frank Leslies Illustrated Weekly, April 2, 1887)
In Petaluma, the Haskells devoted themselves to the Swedenborgian doctrine of service to others, leading local groups calling for children’s rights, abolition, and temperance (shorthand for husbands who beat their wives and children, and spent their wages on drink).[20]Every summer, Barnabus returned to the east coast to attend the national Swedenborg convention.[21]
The couple also sought fellowship with a local group of Spiritualists who met at the Liberty Street home of Chester Hatch, operator of the town’s first foundry, and his wife Lucretia, a hospice nurse. Chester represented Sonoma County in the Spiritualists’ state conventions. The couple’s home gatherings often featured seances with visiting mediums.[22]
Petaluma spiritualist Lucretia Hatch (San Francisco Call, March 6, 1901)
During the bloodshed of the Civil War, Spiritualism’s popularity grew by an estimated two million followers.[23]The only religious sect to recognize the equality of women, it produced the first large group of female spiritual leaders—typically young, white, single, and Protestant—to address large public gatherings, free from the patriarchal environment of churches. Following the war, female mediums began migrating to California, where they became founding members of the state’s women’s suffragist movement.[24]
In December of 1869, Abigail called a meeting at her home to launch the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association. A few weeks later, she traveled to San Francisco with Lucretia Hatch and another local Swedenborgian, Sarah Myers Latimer, to attend the inaugural convention of the California Woman Suffrage Association. A big part of Abigail’s quest was securing equal access to higher education for women.[25]
National Woman’s Suffrage Convention, 1870 (public domain)
At the convention, Abigail was elected the association’s first president, and Latimer one of her vice presidents.[26] The group’s first order of business was organizing a petition drive for a state referendum granting women the vote. A forceful and persuasive writer, Abigail, took to the newspapers to make her case.
Sarah Myers Latimer, founding vice-president, California Woman Suffrage Association (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)
“Woman is declared inferior to man,” she wrote. “She has no voice in politics, government or law, and we see the sad, lamentable consequences. Brute force is acknowledged as the only power in the universe. Love, that love which the Lord enjoined upon his disciples, is trampled underfoot under the ruthless, iron heel of man-made civilization.”[27]
In March 1870, Abigail led a female delegation to Sacramento to address a select committee of the state legislature—the first women in California history to do so. She presented the committee with the suffrage petition signed by more than three thousand supporters, calling for a referendum to amend the state constitution granting women the vote.[28]
“We claim to be recognized as citizens of this free Republic!” she told legislators.[29] She also asked legislators to open up the new state university in Berkeley to women (the campus began enrolling women six months later).[30]
The referendum proposal was overwhelmingly defeated in the state assembly. California women would not be granted the vote until 1911.[31]
There were further setbacks. In 1873, Congress sought to curb the free love movement by passing the Comstock Law, which banned sending contraceptives through the mail, along with sex education, including information about sexually transmitted diseases. By 1880, most states had outlawed abortion.[32]
Free love advocate Victoria Woodhull depicted as “Mrs. Satan in parody of conservative pushback (Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, February 17, 1872, Library of Congress)
“Woman suffrage in America is on the decline,” reported the Petaluma Courier in 1877, “and justly so. It has been agitated by a bad lot of harum-scarum women, who have mixed free-love, spiritualism, and all sorts of woman’s rights into a sort of political and social hotchpotch that has disgusted right-thinking people.”[33]
Abigail viewed such attacks as teaching moments, although she expressed disappointment that her opponents only had “trash and scurrility” to offer in their opposition. In 1879, she launched the Sonoma-Marin Women’s Christian Temperance Union as its founding president. It was to be her last reform effort. After a lingering illness, she died in 1884 at the age of 64. [34]
Placed in a white casket, Abigail was drawn by a team of white horses to the Cypress Hill Cemetery in a white hearse of white plumes and drapings. The pallbearers were all former students of hers.[35]
“Following the doctrines of the illustrious Swedenborg,” wrote Philip Cowen, a close friend and local bookstore owner, “death had no terror for a mind like hers, who, no doubt, never wronged any living being, hence she had no fear of an angry God, for with her, “God was love.”[36]
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier July 19, 2024.
******
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Ann Nisson, “Abby and Barney,” an unpublished biography of Abigail Haskell, Petaluma Historical Library & Museum.
[2] Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 1-3; Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Second Edition (Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 195.
[5] Gaye LeBaron, “How Sonoma County Prized Potato Got its Start,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 17, 2013; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pgs.69, 156; Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pp. 24-25; James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-22532010000200002;.
[6] Ad announcing the Excelsior dry goods store now owned by Barnabus Haskell, Sonoma County Journal, December 25, 1857; Per Ann Nisson, from May 1856 or 1857 to April 1859, Abigail was employed at Miss Atkins Young Ladies Seminary in Benicia, teaching English, before beginning to teach in Petaluma; List of teachers, Sonoma County Journal, July 22, 1859; “The Closing of Our Public School,” Sonoma County Journal, December 28, 1860.
[8] Bonnie L. Ford, “Women, Marriage, and Divorce in California, 1849–1872,” California Legal History, Vol. 16, 2021, pgs. 6-7, 10, 34.
[9] Halle Lieberman, “A Short History of the Condom,” JSTOR Daily, https://daily.jstor.org/short-history-of-the-condom/; “19th Century Artifacts: History of Birth Control,” Dittrick Medical History Center, Case Western Reserve University, https://artsci.case.edu/dittrick/online-exhibits/history-of-birth-control/contraception-in-america-1800-1900/19th-century-artifacts/
[10] Ford, p.11; Janet Farrell Brody, Contraception and Fertility Rates in Nineteenth CenturyAmerica (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pgs. ix-x, 2-3.
[11] Faye E. Duden, “Women’s Rights, Abolitionism, and Reform in Antebellum and Gilded Age America,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, oxforedre.com. https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/americanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-20
[12] George M. Fredrickson, “The Coming of the Lord: The Northern Protestant Clergy and the Civil War Crisis,” in Miller, Randall M.; Stout, Harry S.; Wilson, Charles Reagan, eds. (1998). Religion and the American Civil War. Oxford University Press. pp. 110–30; Nancy Cott, “Young Women in the Second Great Awakening in New England,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 3 (1), 1975, pp. 15-16;Mary Ryan, “A Woman’s Awakening: Evangelical Religion and the Families of Utica, New York, 1800 to 1840,”American Quarterly, Vol. 30 (5), 1978, p. 619.
[13] Nisson; Benjamin Franklin Fuller, History of Texas Baptists (Louisville, KY: Baptist Book Company, 1900), p. 109.
[14] Emanuel Swedenborg, The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Marriage Love, 1768 (Rotch Edition. New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1907), in The Divine Revelation of the New Jerusalem (2012), n. 308; Olle Hjern, “The Influence of Emanuel Swedenborg in Scandinavia,” in Scribe of Heaven, edited by Jonathan S. Rose, Stuart Shotwell, and Mary Lou Bertucci (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 2005), 157; “Swedenborg’s Cultural Influence,” Swedenborg Foundation, Swedenborg.com. https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/influence/
[15] Richard Lines, “Swedenborg and Spiritualism,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 69, 2005, 113–119; Richard Lines, Things Heard and Seen, the Newsletter of the Swedenborg Society, London, No. 1, (Spring 2000); “Swedenborg’s Cultural Influence,” Swedenborg Foundation, Swedenborg.com. https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/influence/
[16] “Swedenborg’s Cultural Influence,” Swedenborg Foundation, Swedenborg.com. https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/influence/
[17] Karen Abbott, “The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism,” Smithsonian magazine, October 30, 2012; Braude, p. 2; Daniel Bowlin, “The American Phantasmagoria: The Rise of Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century America,” Masters Thesis, Eastern Michigan University, 2019.
[20] Barnabus led the local Sons of Temperance, and Abigail their ladies auxiliary (Ad, Petaluma Argus, January 14, 1862; “Card of Thanks,” Sonoma County Journal, July 8, 1859); Abigail also served as Worthy Chief Templar of the local Independent Organization of the Good Templars (IOGT), and as a board member of the local California Youth Association 1861 (Ad for IOGT, “Youth’s Association,” Petaluma Argus, November 12, 1861).
[21] Barnabus’ attendance at the annual conventions is documented from 1851 to 1871 in the Journal of the 35th-36th General Conventions of the New Church in the U.S, Journal of the 37th-46th General Conventions of the New Church in the U.S.
[22] “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, November 14, 1883; “State Convention of Spiritualists,” Petaluma Argus, June 7, 1866; “Death of Col. C.P. Hatch, Petaluma Courier, March 19, 1893; “Mrs. Lucretia Hatch,” Petaluma Courier, March 14, 1901; “Noted Spiritualist Dies,” San Francisco Call, March 5, 1901.
[26] “Woman Suffrage,” Petaluma Argus, January 8, 1870; “Woman, State Convention of Female Suffragists,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 28, 1870; “Woman Suffrage, Third Day of the State Convention,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 1870;
[28] The Suffrage Question,” Sacramento Bee, March 19, 1870; Theodore Henry Hittell, History of California, Volume 4 (San Francisco: N.J. Stone & Co., 1898), p. 435.
[29] Hittell, p. 435; “The Suffrage Question,” Sacramento Bee, March 19, 1870.
[30] Nisson; “They Have Done It,” Sacramento Bee, October 4, 1870.
[31] “Sacramento Correspondence,” San Francisco Examiner, March 23, 1870; “Woman Suffrage Carries by About 4,000,” San Francisco Call, October 12, 1911.
[32] “What to Know About the Comstock Act,” New York Times, May 16, 2023; “The History of Abortion Access in the U.S.,” Penn Today, University of Pennsylvania. https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-profs-weigh-history-abortion-access-us
Freeman Parker, 1822-1914 (photo by George Ross, courtesy of the Bancroft Library)
Freeman Parker set out in late 1877 to gather signatures around town for a constitutional amendment granting women the vote. It was perhaps an unusual undertaking for a farmer, but Parker was not the sort content with merely sowing grain and milking cows; he also enjoyed cultivating social justice reforms, including women’s rights, Black rights, monopoly busting, labor organizing, and agricultural co-operatives. His iconoclastic nature was most noticeably displayed in his adoption of phonetic spelling, where words are spelled by the way they sound.
“I yuz a variety ov speling,” Parker wrote, “to draw atenshun tou speling reform.”
Such idiosyncrasies aside, many of the reforms Parker championed—along with scurrilous charges of communism and socialism waged against him and his allies—remain relevant today, pointing to some of the perennial fault lines in American society, and the persistent role played by progressive activists like Parker.
Tall, handsome, and adventuresome, Freeman Parker sailed to California in 1849 to join his brother Wilder, who had gone west the year before for the gold rush. Twenty-eight years old, he left behind in his native Vermont his wife Cynthia and infant son Pitman. Arriving in San Francisco, he spent four months recovering from the yellow fever he contracted on the trip, before setting out for the Yuba River, where he found modest success in the mines. After a short time working at his brother’s hotel in San Francisco, and then farming in Marin County, he settled in 1853 on a 160-acre farm near Haystack Landing south of Petaluma, returning to Vermont to retrieve his wife and son.
Parker farm, 4555 Redwood Highway (Thos. H. Thompson, Atlas of Sonoma County, 1877)
During their first six years in Petaluma, the Parkers welcomed four more children to the family, and eventually expanded their farm to 430 acres of rolling hills and river marsh. Cultivating wheat and barley, they also maintained a herd of dairy cows for making butter and soft cheese to export down river to San Francisco. A lover of literature and philosophy, Parker schooled his children in as broad an education as possible. That included procuring a printing press and establishing a family newspaper, which the children took part in writing, as well as providing music lessons. An accomplished musician, he enjoyed playing fiddle at county dances and entertaining fellow passengers aboard ferry trips he took to San Francisco.
In addition to his farm duties, Parker devoted ample time to civic affairs. With his chinstrap beard—a popular fashion during the first half of the 19th century—he conveyed both the rugged manliness of the pioneer and the fresh-faced mien of the businessman, a perfect combination for Petaluma’s transition from river trading post to bustling city.
An abolitionist, Parker participated in the formation of the Sonoma County Republican Party in 1856, during a time of growing political polarization in the county. Although California was admitted as a free, non-slave state to the Union, white slave owners emigrating into the state were permitted to keep the slaves they brought with them as long as they eventually transported them back to the South.
Of the slaves that remained in California, some were able to earn their way to freedom working for their masters in the mines, and others were granted their freedom but remained servants to their former masters. A number of southern slave owners settled on the Santa Rosa Plain, and during the Civil War sided with the Confederacy. Petaluma, largely settled by New Englanders and Irish immigrants, sided with the Union, making the town a relatively safe community for Black residents.
South Barracks, Norwich Military Academy, Norwich, Vermont (photo The Norwich Times)
The other civic arena Parker engaged in was education. While growing up in Vermont, he attended college at the Norwich Military Institute. Considered today the birthplace of the ROTC, Norwich at the time was a controversial private academy. Founded by Alden Partridge, a former superintendent of West Point, it was intended to be an egalitarian alternative to West Point, which Partridge feared was creating an elite aristocracy within the military. He focused on educating citizen soldiers for state militias, instructing them not only in military science and engineering, but also in a traditional liberal arts curriculum.
Parker paid his way through Norwich by offering music lessons and teaching cadets phonetic spelling, a new form of shorthand developed by an Englishman named Isaac Pitman, of whom Parker became an early evangelist (even naming his first son Pitman).
Parker’s experience at Norwich made him a strong advocate of public education, which was viewed as critical for extending school access to the working class. In 1862, he was elected a trustee of Petaluma’s first publicly funded elementary school, the Brick School, at Sixth and B streets. Working closely with school principal Abigail Goodwin Haskell, Parker became a regular attendee of county and state teachers’ conventions, where he lectured extensively on the benefits of phonetic spelling. He was later elected trustee of the rural San Antonio School District south of town, where his farm was located.
Brick School, B and 5th streets, opened 1860 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
As Petaluma’s school district rapidly expanded to four schoolhouses, Parker and his two fellow trustees hired Rev. Edward S. Lippitt, a teacher, minister, and lawyer originally from Connecticut, to serve as the new school superintendent. Lippitt was also appointed minister of the local Methodist Episcopal Church and, for a short time, the interim minister of the Congregational Church, which Parker attended. Parker later converted to Universalism, a Christian theology whose main doctrine, that all human beings will universally be reconciled with God, was better suited to his disposition as a free thinker.
As both the Methodist Episcopal and Congregational churches were centers of the local abolitionist movement, Parker and Lippitt became allies in many of the reforms of the Radical Republican Party, including the three Reconstruction Amendments intended to ensure equality for recently emancipated slaves, with Lippitt serving as president of the county Republican Party, and Parker as one of the vice presidents. After the California Supreme Court ruled in 1864 that public school districts were required to provide “separate but equal” education for Black students, Parker’s board of trustees made Petaluma one of the first school districts to fund a so-called “colored school” for the town’s Black community.
Like many abolitionists, Parker was also an early supporter of the woman suffrage movement. In 1869, after it became clear that the 15th Amendment drafted by Congress was not going to grant the vote to women as well as Black men, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton created the National Woman Suffrage Association to advocate for women’s suffrage. At the encouragement of California suffragists like Laura de Force Gordon, Haskell called a meeting in December, 1869, to form the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association, of which Parker became a vice president.
Abigail Goodwin Haskell, Brick School principal (photo courtesy of Ann Nisson)
The local association’s first task was to gather signatures for a petition calling for a state amendment to grant women the vote. In late January, 1870, 3,000 signatures—424 of them from Petaluma—were amassed at the inaugural convention of the California Woman Suffrage Association held in San Francisco. At the gathering, Haskell was elected the state association’s first president, and in March, she presented the suffrage petition to the state assembly in Sacramento which, then dominated by the conservative, southern-affiliated Democratic Party, voted overwhelmingly against acting on it.
After the defeat, the California Woman Suffrage Association split into two factions due to the demands of more radical members in San Francisco, who sought a variety of social, economic, and political reforms for women in addition to the vote. Haskell and the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association split off with the moderate wing to form the Pacific Coast Woman Suffrage Association, of which Parker served as a delegate.
As the suffrage movement became stymied during the 1870s by internal schisms and adverse rulings of the courts, Parker turned his attention to agricultural reforms. Like a majority of California farmers, he had benefitted from the state’s wheat boom, which began when the Crimean War disrupted Russian grain exports, creating a wheat shortage in Australia and New Zealand. International demand for California wheat further skyrocketed when the Civil War impeded Midwest grain production and export. By the late 1860s, 80 percent of California’s wheat crop was being shipped to the European grain exchange in Liverpool, England.
Wheat schooner on the Petaluma River (photo Petaluma Historic Museum & Library)
In 1867, as soil exhaustion began to manifest from monocrop farming of wheat, a group of Petaluma’s wealthy farm elite who owned thousands of acres—among them William Hill, Harrison Mecham, Ezekiel Denman, J.R. Rose, and Albion Whitney—joined with leading Petaluma merchants to form a chapter of the State Agricultural Society. California’s oldest and most prestigious farm organization, the society had originally been created in 1854 to promote farming at a time when people were still preoccupied with mining. Following the Civil War, the society began to champion progressive, scientific-based farming techniques, including diversifying grains, rotating crops, deep-plowing fields, fertilizing, intermixing breeds of stock, and systemizing operations.
The new Sonoma and Marin Agricultural Society purchased ten acres along Fair Street to install a half-mile horseracing track and a pavilion for an annual agricultural fair. At the fair they awarded prizes for the best fruits, vegetables, livestock, and farm machinery, and sought to educate farmers on new farming techniques and the science of agriculture. Most of those initiatives were met with indifference, as small-scale farmers relied largely upon experience as a teacher and were deficient in technical education. Instead, they maintained a blind adherence to “King Wheat,” the most easily and cheaply produced frontier crop. Lippett, now a lawyer and secretary of county agricultural society, was blunt in addressing them in his keynote speech at the 1870 fair.
“With our old mining habits,” he said, “we sought to farm, and where a few won, many toiled. There was no thought about the future, no care indeed. ‘Let us make our pile and go home,’ said they.”
Sonoma and Marin District Agricultural Society Fairgrounds, Fair Street, 1877 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
For all farmers, the two most common concerns were the price of wheat on the Liverpool exchange, and the cost of shipping it there. As wheat prices in Liverpool began to uncontrollably fluctuate in the early 1870s, California farmers turned their displeasure on the middlemen in the market, including the wheat brokers, railroad monopolies, shipping companies, and bankers charging exorbitant fees and interest.
In Petaluma, the primary middlemen were the McNear brothers, John and George. John operated the largest grain brokerage in town, as well as a fleet of scow schooners that shipped grain down river to San Francisco, where George brokered it for shipment to Liverpool. John McNear also ran one of the four banks in town—the other three operated by fellow wealthy capitalists Isaac Wickersham, William Hill, and Hiram Fairbanks—which provided credit to local farmers at anywhere from 12 to 20 percent interest.
The McNears’ grain monopoly faced new competition with the opening of the San Francisco & North Pacific Railroad in 1870. Operated by Peter Donahue, a ruthless San Francisco businessman, the new rail line extended from the Petaluma River to Santa Rosa, but bypassed Petaluma as its southern terminus, creating instead a new river port near Lakeville called Donahue Landing, where he docked his own fleet of steamships. Once the train started running, the agricultural hub of Sonoma County abruptly shifted from Petaluma to Santa Rosa, which experienced a growth boom in the next few decades, while Petaluma’s growth stagnated.
Paddle steamer “Antelope” moored at Donahue’s Landing, 1878 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
As instability in the wheat market increased, members of California’s farm elite created the Farmers’ Union in 1872, both to push for more scientific innovations to farming and to try to maximize their profits by collectively negotiating reductions in freight and supply costs. In Petaluma, the local gentry, led by Hill, Mecham, and Rose, formed the affiliated Petaluma Farmers’ Club. Their first order of business was an attempt to cooperatively purchase grain sacks.
In April, 1873, the state Farmers’ Union held its first convention. As a speaker they invited Napa farmer W.H. Baxter, who represented a national group called the Grange. A secret fraternal organization modeled on the Masons, the Grange, or Order of Patrons of Husbandry, was launched in Washington, D.C. in 1867. Its original intention was to provide social and intellectual benefits to isolated farm communities. When they realized financial incentives were better inducements for attracting members, the Grange began offering members collective buying of supplies, insurance, and farming implements, as well as the collective selling of their farm products.
At the convention, Baxter made such a compelling case for joining the Grange that soon after the Farmers’ Union was formally dissolved. That June, L.W. Walker and Theodore Skillman established an order of the Grange in Petaluma that grew to 147 members. By the following October, when the California Grange held its first convention, the number of Grange orders in the state had grown to 104. Within two years, that number climbed to 252, most in the northern wheat-growing counties, boasting a total of nearly 20,000 members.
The Grange’s rapid growth was spurred in part by a national financial panic that fall. Triggered by overspeculation in railroads and a drop in European demand for U.S. farm goods, the panic led to a major, five-year recession. During that time, grain prices took a precipitous drop, forcing farmers to dispose of their crops at little or no profit.
A number of small farms were swallowed up by wealthy neighbors or so-called “bonanza farms.” Owned by capitalists, bonanza farms employed gangs of hired laborers and new farming machinery like steam-powered threshers and eventually grain combines. The new technology allowed one man to do the work formerly done by many in cultivating crops like wheat, minimizing the cost of production. Along with negotiating lower bulk rates with the railroads for transportation, the bonanza farmers were able to drive down the price of grain while still turning a profit. A bushel of wheat, which averaged $1.52 in 1866, was worth only $.86 by 1874.
Harvesting wheat harvest, c. 1880s (photo Charles Wieder, Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
In 1874, Freeman Parker was elected secretary of the Petaluma Grange, a role that was essentially manager and communications director for the order. His daughter Alma was elected to the position of Flora, one of three offices, along with Ceres and Pomona, that were reserved for women. Named for the ancient mythical goddesses of flowers, grain, and fruit, the offices demonstrated the Grange’s inclusion of women, which had been a distinguishing feature since its founding. Unlike other secret fraternal orders where women were relegated to being members of a female auxiliary, the Grange provided women with central roles and full equality, recognizing the “refinement, gentle influence, and good taste and propriety” they brought to farm life.
Farmwomen in turn found in the Grange an outlet for community and self-improvement, as well as development of writing and leadership skills. While Grange sisters worked on projects of mutual interest with their Grange brothers, they also cooperated with each other in promoting “women’s issues” such as suffrage and home economics.
The Grange itself was largely silent on the issue of woman suffrage however, until 1877, when the California State Grange, looking to increase its numbers at the ballot box, formally called upon Grangers to support a petition drive for an amendment granting women the vote. Freeman Parker answered the call by leading the Petaluma Grange in gathering 212 local signatures. Speaking on behalf of the Grange, he wrote in the local newspaper, “We don’t claim perfection either in our work or play, but I think we come as near it as any similar society ever has; one reason is because we recognize woman’s influence and complete equality.”
Grange meeting in a rural schoolhouse, 1874 (Joseph E. Beale, artist, Pixel.com)
Copies of the signatures, along with signatures gathered from 15 other California cities, were forwarded in January 1878, to state Senator Albion Whitney, a grain wholesaler and dry goods merchant in Petaluma, who presented them to the California legislature. A copy was also sent to U.S. Senator A.A. Sargent of California, a longtime champion of woman suffrage, who presented them to the Senate along with 30,000 other signatures collected nationwide. Both proposals disappeared into the legislative morass, after which leaders of the national suffrage movement formulated a state-by-state strategy to win the ballot for women. That effort came to fruition in California in 1911, when the state’s rural voters, many of them Grange members, determined the narrow passage of an amendment to the state constitution granting women the vote.
George W. McNear (photo public domain)
With the grain market in continued turmoil, in 1874 the McNear brothers ended their partnership. While John continued to run the Petaluma grain brokerage, George set out to corner the state’s export business by shifting operations away from San Francisco’s costly ports to the less expensive Port Costa on the Carquinez Strait. After building warehouses capable of storing 60,000 tons of grain, opening branch offices in Liverpool and London, and acquiring a fleet of ocean steamers for transport, McNear made Port Costa the west coast’s leading grain port, earning himself the crown of California’s “Wheat King” in the process. But instead of passing the cost savings onto farmers, he pocketed them, further deepening the plight of small farmers.
While the wealthy farm gentry publicly denounced the “wheat-bag trust” of usurious interest rates, railroad abuses, and exploitive middlemen like the McNears, they disapproved of the Grangers’ schemes to aggressively reform monopoly capitalism, arguing that such reforms would undermine the American tenets of self-help and free enterprise. Thanks to the ineptitude of the Grange, they had little to fear.
A Grange co-op brokerage established in San Francisco drove up the price of members’ wheat to levels unwarranted on the world market, resulting in ruin for many Grangers and bankruptcy for the brokerage. In its place the Grange created a co-op to purchase discounted supplies for members. It was so underfunded and poorly managed that farmers withdrew from the Grange by the thousands. By 1876, membership in the California Grange had dropped to under 8,000. Compounding this, the following year a crop failure hit California.
In response, the Grange turned to political action, looking for allies from the working class, which by the summer of 1877 was getting hit by the full brunt of the recession. San Francisco in particular found itself filled with jobhunters of every kind, including unemployed miners, farmhands, and laborers.
On July 23, 1877, a mass meeting of workingmen was called in San Francisco in support of a group of railroad strikers in Pittsburgh. Speakers spoke out against rich capitalists, accusing them of taking jobs away from white workingmen to give to Chinese immigrants, who were willing to work for lower pay. The gathering soon turned into a violent riot for two days. In the weeks that followed, Anti-Chinese Clubs sprang up across the state, calling for a boycott of cheap Chinese labor.
Cartoon by Edward Keller in San Francisco Illustrated Wasp, December 8, 1877 (Bancroft Library)
Roughly 500 Chinese lived in the Petaluma area at the time, working as railroad laborers, quarry miners, stone fence builders, laundry proprietors, household servants, and on river dredging crews. Petaluma’s Anti-Chinese Club, led by Barnabus Haskell, a dry goods merchant and the husband of suffrage leader Abigail Haskell, quickly grew to more than 300 members.
Anti-Chinese Club Leader and Petaluma merchant, Barnabus Haskell (photo courtesy Ann Nisson)
Local capitalists like John McNear, who employed a large number of Chinese at his brickyard and shrimp fishery on San Pedro Bay, opposed the boycott. He was later singled out by the Anti-Chinese Club “to be subjected to the inquisitorial thumbscrews.” Many upper and middle class women also were concerned about the boycott, at least as it applied to domestics, since white working-class women tended to avoid household employment, especially laundry work. For these women, the prospect of losing Chinese workers raised a “servant problem.”
In the fall of 1877, labor protestors in San Francisco formed a group called the Workingmen’s Party (also known as the “sand-lotters,” as they initially met in a vacant sand lot opposite city hall). Led by charismatic young Irish immigrant and drayman Denis Kearney, their slogan was “The Chinese must go.” Their broader objective was to unite workingmen into one political party for the purpose of removing government from the hands of a rich oligarchy of corporate and banking interests.
By chance, California voters that fall approved a proposal to hold a convention to update California’s state constitution, originally drawn up in 1850. The Workingmen’s Party turned their attention to capturing a majority of the 152 convention delegates that would be publicly elected in June, 1878. The floundering Grange, seeing an opportunity to secure both constitutional and legislative relief for farmers, rallied members to form an alliance with the Workingmen’s Party.
Denis Kearney, leader of the Workingmen’s Party (photo San Francisco Chronicle)
In the spring of 1878, Kearney held a mass rally in Petaluma’s Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park), after which Haskell and other members of the local Anti-Chinese Club joined Kearney’s movement, forming the Sonoma County Workingmen’s Club. Local Grange members, including Parker, also joined the new club.
Worried Sonoma County Republicans and Democrats, as in many counties around the state, combined forces to form a Non-Partisan Party for nominating slates of county delegates for the constitutional convention, hoping to thwart the election of Workingmen’s Party candidates. Parker, in a testament to the respect he commanded as both a Republican and a Granger, was selected to attend the county nominating conventions of both the Non-Partisan Party and the Workingmen’s Party. He was also selected as a polling judge in the June election.
Not everyone in Petaluma was as open-minded toward Parker and the Grange however. Lippitt, his one-time political colleague, had switched his party affiliation in the mid-1870s, joining the Democratic State Central Committee chaired by Peter Donahue. In 1876, along with printer William Shattuck, he launched the Petaluma Courier newspaper to serve as a mouthpiece for Democrats in the upcoming election. The presidential election that year was a contested race, with no clear winner, until the Democrats agreed to allow the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, to assume the presidency in exchange for ending Reconstruction and withdrawing Union troops from the South, allowing them to impose the racial apartheid known as Jim Crow.
Lippitt had worked as a young lawyer with Hayes in Cincinnati, where Hayes served as city solicitor. After Hayes joined the Union army at the start of the Civil War, Lippitt secured a position at the local post office. A year later, he was indicted for embezzlement after discovered stealing money from letters in the post. Rather than stand trial, Lippitt fled with his wife and children to California, where Parker and his fellow trustees, unaware of his crime, hired him as school superintendent. In his political attacks as editor of the Courier, Lippitt showed neither Hayes—who lunched at his house during a presidential visit to Petaluma—nor Parker any favors. The Courier denounced the populist movements of the Grange and the Workingmen’s Party as communism and socialism.
Edward S. Lippitt, at his office in the Mutual Relief Building, 1880s (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
As the June election approached, the Workingmen’s Party held a statewide convention to finalize their platform. For both Workingmen and Grangers, the three primary issues were taxes, which they believed to be especially oppressive to workingmen and farmers; the Chinese labor issue, which they claimed threatened the livelihoods of the working class; and the state legislature, which they viewed as being in the pocket of corporate monopolies like the railroads.
At the convention however, the party split into two factions. The Kearney wing from San Francisco advocated for reforms like restricting land holdings to one square mile, or 640 acres, and taxing millionaires out of existence. A smaller, more moderate wing, based in rural counties like Sonoma, denounced these schemes as too radical. After Haskell and other members of the Sonoma County delegation criticized “Kearneyism and communism” as dangerous elements of the party, Kearney had them expelled from the convention as party traitors.
In the election, Sonoma County was allotted four slots for the constitutional convention. Voters chose three Non-Partisan Party candidates and a candidate endorsed by both \ Non-Partisan and Workingmen’s parties, Petaluma city trustee (councilman) James Charles. Across the state, the Non-Partisan Party prevailed with 81 of the total 152 delegates. However, in San Francisco the Workingmen’s Party captured 42 delegates, making them a viable force. The remaining 19 slots were a mix of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.
Although the Grange had sided with the Workingmen, more important to their cause was that 37 of the delegates represented rural farming communities, which proved in many cases more important than party affiliation. During the constitutional convention, which convened from September 1878 through March of 1879, the farming group held the balance of power between the radical Workingmen’s Party and the conservative block of Non-Partisans. This played out in a series of compromises.
For example, one of the convention’s wedge issues was woman suffrage. Although the Workingmen’s Party did not support it, prominent suffrage lobbyists like Laura de Force Gordon embraced the party’s anti-Chinese rhetoric in hopes of gaining their support. While proposals at the convention for woman suffrage were voted down, Gordon succeeded in getting two important clauses added to the new constitution—one that protected women from being denied entry to state universities, and the other that protected women from being barred from any vocation or profession. (Gordon, who was previously rejected from attending Hastings Law School on the grounds that women, “particularly their rustling skirts, were bothering to the other scholars,” subsequently went on to become a lawyer.)
Laura de Force Gordon, along with Susan B. Anthony, take the stage at 1872 Republican Convention held in Cincinnati (drawing by Matt Morgan, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, May 18, 1872)
The final proposed constitution embodied many of the relatively moderate objectives of the Workingmen’s Party and the Grange. The Chinese were forbidden to hold property or engage in certain occupations; taxation was shifted to the wealthy; growing crops was made tax exempt; a railroad commission was set up to regulate the railroads; an eight-hour working day was adopted; a state school fund was established exclusively for primary elementary schools; and home rule was extend to cities, emancipating them from the control of the corrupt state legislature. The new constitution passed 77,959 to 67,134, with the victory margin attributed to the large turnout of farmers.
The victory for the Grange and Workingmen’s Party was short-lived however. Many of the new constitutional clauses, including the anti-Chinese provision, were held by the courts to be null and void. The railroads quickly captured the commission set up to regulate them. Amendment after amendment was submitted and adopted in the state legislature until the difference between the revolutionary 1879 California constitution and other state constitutions was comparatively insignificant.
Grange celebration at Turn Verein Hall, 4th and C streets in Petaluma, c. 1890s (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)
After the Recession ended and prosperity returned to California, the Workingmen’s Party dissipated, and membership in the California Grange declined to less than 3,000. (During the years that followed, the state Grange became nearly extinct until 1913, when membership began to rebound after the Grange reorganized itself as a cooperative fire insurance association). The hatred of the Chinese on the West Coast however did not fade. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was adopted by Congress, prohibiting further immigration of Chinese laborers.
Freeman Parker continued to attend Grange meetings, as well as meetings of a new workingmen’s group, the Knights of Labor, but in the early 1880s, he pulled back from the political arena. Some of that may have been due to personal tragedy. In the summer of 1877, at the height of his involvement in local politics, his wife Cynthia died. In 1879, he remarried a widow originally from Vermont, Mrs. Eliza Jones, but the couple separated after a year.
As the wheat market continued to decline, and Petaluma farmers began to shift to dairy farming and growing fruit and grapes, Parker leased 160 acres of his grain fields in 1880 to Danish immigrant Nelson Mastrup, who eventually purchased them. With his youngest son George, Parker maintained the dairy operation on his remaining 270 acres. His daughter Alma lived on the farm adjacent to his, having married its widowed owner, Captain James Hynes. After Hynes’ death in 1887, she had married another widower, David Walls, who operated Haystack Landing for a steamboat company.
During the 1880s, Parker took numerous trips to the seaport town of Astoria, Oregon, where his brother Wilder settled after leaving San Francisco in the early 1850s. Wilder, who became the town’s mayor and customs officer, had been joined in Astoria by their three other brothers from Vermont, as well as Parker’s two oldest sons, Pitman, who ran the local newspaper, and Gelo, a surveyor. In 1889, Parker moved to Astoria, leaving his farm in George’s hands. Over the next 25 years, he made regular extended visits to Petaluma, usually during Oregon’s rainy winter season. In 1905, he leased 200 acres of marshlands on his farm to a group of San Francisco duck hunters who called themselves The Parker Home Club.
While on an extended stay at the farm in the spring of 1914, Parker passed away at the age of 94. The farmhouse he built in 1854, reportedly from prefabricated panels he had shipped around Cape Horn, stood until 2008, when, after being denied placement on the National Register of Historic Places because Freeman and Cynthia Parker were “not such important figures in local history,” it was torn down to clear the land.
Freeman Parker with violin; note his phonetic spelling of his first name (photo Petaluma Historic Museum & Library)
SOURCES:
Special thanks to Paula Freund and Katherine Rinehart for research assistance and, as always, Katie Watts for copyediting.
Books & Journals
Solon Justus Buck, The Granger Movement, 1870-1880 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913).
California Law Review , Jan., 1918, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Jan., 1918), pp. 114-133.
Clarke Chambers, California Farm Organizations (University of California, 1952), pp. 10-11.
William Arba Ellis, Norwich University, 1819-1911; Her History, Her Graduates, Her Roll of Honor, Volume 2 (Capital City Press, 1911), pp. 415-416.
James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-22532010000200002
Tom Gregory, “Biography of Edward S. Lippitt,” “Biography of Freeman Parker,” History of Sonoma County, California (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1911).
Jean F. Hankins, “Women in the Grange,” The Courier, Vol. 34, No. 1, Bethel Historical Society.
John D. Hicks, The American Nation: History of the United States from 1865 to the Present, (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937).
Theodore Henry Hittell, History of California, Volume 4 (San Francisco: N.J. Stone & Co., 1898), p. 436.
“Petaluma Township, Part 3 1880.” History of Sonoma County (Sonoma County CA Archives History).
Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995), p. 114.
Ralph Kauer, “The Workingmen’s Party of California,” Pacific Historical Review (1944) 13 (3): 278–291.
Kris Kobach, “Rethinking Article V: Term Limits and the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Amendments,” 103 Yale Law Journal (1994).
Adair Lara, History of Petaluma (Petaluma: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pp. 65-67.
E.S. Lippitt, An Autobiography of Edward Spaulding Lippitt, edited by Lee Torliatt (Santa Rosa: Sonoma County Historical Society), p. 43.
Donald B. Marti, Women of the Grange: Mutuality and Sisterhood in Rural America, 1866-1920 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991) .
Donald B. Marti, “Sisters of the Grange: Rural Feminism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Agricultural History, Vol. 58, No. 3, Symposium on the History of Rural Life in America (Published by: Agricultural History Society, 1984), pp. 247-261.
Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), pp. 36-42.
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.
Rodman Wilson Paul, “The Great California Grange War: The Grangers Challenge the Wheat King,” Pacific Historical Review, Vo. 27, No. 4, (Nov., 1958) pp. 331-349.
Gerald L. Prescott, “Farm Gentry vs. the Grangers: Conflict in Rural America,” California Historical Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter, 1977/1978), pp. 328-345.
Gerald L. Prescott, “Review of Thomas A. Woods, Knights of the Plow: Oliver H. Kelley and the Origins of the Grange in Republican Ideology,” Agricultural History Vol. 66, No. 2, (Spring, 1992), pp. 376-377.
W.L. Robinson, First Century of Service and Evolution – The Grange 1867 – 1967 (National Grange, 1967).
Noel Sargent, “The California Constitutional Convention of 1878-1879,” California Law Review, Nov., 1917, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Jan., 1918), pp. 6-7, 17-19, 114-115, 118-120, 123, 128-129, 131.
Sonoma County Dept of Parks & Recreation Primary Record, DPR 523, Office of Historical Preservation, Freeman Parker Farm – 4555 Redwood Highway, Diana Painter, Recorder. September 19, 2009; Dept of Parks & Recreation Primary Record, DPR 523, Office of Historical Preservation, Freeman Parker Farm – 4555 Redwood Highway, Andrew Hope, Caltrans, recorder. Sept. 2004.
J.T. White, “George W. McNear,” National Cyclopedia of American Biography, V.1, Volume 7, 1897.
Thomas A. Woods, Knights of the Plow: Oliver H. Kelley and the Origins of the Grange in Republican Ideology (Iowa State University Press, 1991).
Newspapers, Websites, Archives
The Cadiz Sentinel: “Young and Pure—More of it,” April 2, 1862.
Cincinnati Daily Press: (Lippitt) June 2, 1859; June 18, 1859.
The Cincinnati Enquirer: “Professor Lippitt,” April 21, 1862.
Coast Banker: “Sonoma County National Bank, Petaluma, 50th Anniversary,” Volume 16, Coast Banker Publishing Company, 1916.
Daily Ohio Statesman: “The Grand Jury,” April 26, 1862.
The Elevator: “Petaluma,” November 1, 1867; “Correspondence of the Elevator,” February 19, 1869.
Los Angeles Evening Express: “Last Night’s Dispatches, Legislative Matters,” January 22, 1878.
New York Times: “Overlooked No More: Laura DeForce Gordon,” January 9, 2019.
Pacific Bee: “Congress in Session,” January 12, 1878.
Petaluma Argus: “District School,” July 1, 1863; “Agricultural Circular,” January 31, 1867; “List of Premiums,” June 27, 1867; “Sonoma County Industrial Society,” June 13, 1867; “Located,” July 18, 1867; “Our County Fair,” September 9, 1867; “The County Fair,” September 19, 1867; “County Fair,” May 21, 1868; “Grand Union Meeting,” September 10, 1868; “Agricultural Society—Election of Officers,” May 20, 1869; “Special Notice,” December 25, 1869; “Card to the Public,” July 2, 1870; “Opening Address,” October 8, 1870; “School Election Notice,”May 6, 1871; “Let Us have a Farmer’s Club,” November 29, 1872; “Farmers’ Club,” February 7, 1873; “Farmers’ Club,” June 2, 1873; “Granges,” October 15, 1875; “Organization of a Grange,” June 20, 1873; “Grange Election,” October 30, 1874; “Local Brevities,” February 4, 1876; “Twenty Years Ago,” August 11, 1876; “Petaluma Grange,” August 18, 1876; “News and Other Items,” January 28, 1878;“Local Brevities,” February 15, 1878; “The Workingmen’s Movement,” March 15, 1878; “Kearney, Wellock, and Knight,” March 22, 1878; “Workingmen’s Meeting Saturday,” March 29, 1878; “The Workingmen’s Meeting,” April 11, 1878; “Notice,” May 3, 1878. “The Non-Partisan Convention,” May 7, 1878; “Kearney Ignored,” May 24, 1878; “Convention Notes,” May 27, 1878. “The Candidates,” June 14, 1878; “The Vote in Petaluma,” June 21,1878; “Woman Suffrage,” June 28, 1878; “Official Vote,” July 5, 1878; “The Constitutional Convention,” July 12, 1878; “The Boycott,” March 13, 1886; “Celebration in Petaluma,” July 9, 1887; “Local Notes,” June 3, 1905; “Freeman Parker on Reform Spelling, ”December 20, 1906. “E.S. Lippitt, Reminiscences of a Long Life,” September 2, October 3, October 29, 1910.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Mrs. Alma Walls, One of the City’s Oldest Pioneers, Dies After Short Pneumonia Siege,” February 12, 1938; “Ed Mannion’s Rear-View Mirror,” December 17, 1960; Katherine Rinehart, “Remembering the Parker House,” May 8, 2008.
Petaluma Courier: “The Result Secured,” December 28, 1876; “The Negro School,” April 5, 1877; “Anti-Coolie Meeting,” December 27, 1877; “The Workingmen’s Meeting,” April 11, 1878; “The Election,” April 11, 1878; “Fired Out,” May 22, 1878; “Judge Thomas,” June 5, 1878; The Election,” June 26, 1878; “Freeman Parker Arrives from Astoria,” November 4, 1903; “Death of N. Mastrup,” December 30, 1909; F. Parker Dies In His 92nd Year,” Petaluma Courier, April 10, 1914.
Sacramento Bee: “Woman Suffrage,” October 11, 1878; The Suffrage Question,” March 19, 1870.
San Francisco Call:“McNear is a Miller,” July 28, 1895.
San Francisco Chronicle: “Woman State Convention of Female Suffragists” January 28, 1870;“Woman Suffrage, Third Day of the State Convention,” January 29, 1870; “Woman Suffrage,” January 20, 1871; “Anti-Kearneyites,” May 18, 1878; “The Workingmen,” May 18, 1878.
San Francisco Examiner: “Woman Suffrage Convention,” January 10, 1878;
“California Legislature, Senate,” January 23, 1878; “Ticks of the Telegraph,” June 14, 1878.
Sonoma County Journal: “Phonntic Type,” (sic) September 24, 1858; “Petaluma Institute,” July 27, 1860; “The Exhibition,” June 14, 1861; “Election of School Trustees,” April 11, 1862; “School Notice,” July 1, 1863.
