Charting the course of Santa Rosa's first 150 years

One hundred and fifty years after the State of California granted Santa Rosa a charter as an official municipality would seem to be a proper moment to take stock of what has come of that legislative decision.

Until that decisive moment in March 1868, the valley that became a city had “progressed” (today's word for the proud pioneer's “grown”) in less than 40 years from a wilderness home for native people to the northernmost reach of the new Mexican Empire to an American frontier.

All this in a lifetime.

For three decades before the state charter, the settlement that became Santa Rosa followed a familiar California path as it went from Native American to Spanish to Mexican to a frontier American town named for the Arroyo de Santa Rosa, the Mexican name for the creek that passes through the valley.

There is story about the name that tells of a young Native American woman being baptized in the creek by a priest from the Spanish mission in San Rafael, several years before 1823, when the Sonoma Mission was established.

It was, as the story goes, the feast day of St. Rose of Lima and the priest named not only his convert but the stream as well for the Peruvian saint who was the first to be canonized in Spain's New World.

Church officials, finding no record of the baptism, cautiously consider it legend only.

In the 1830s, with Mexico in control of California and a young officer named Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo governing “La Frontera del Norte” from the pueblo built around the Sonoma Mission, he arranged a land grant of Rosa's valley, to be known as the Rancho Cabeza de Santa Rosa, referring to a boundary at the headwaters of the creek. It was one of two dozen official grants in what would become Sonoma County and the grantee was Vallejo's mother-in-law, Dona Maria Carrillo, a widow and mother of 12 (10 still unmarried), who came from her San Diego home, traveling by oxcart from mission to mission, to start a new life and, unintended, a new town.

History piled on itself on the rancho. In the next 17 years, renegade Americans would “seize” Sonoma and declare an independent “Bear Republic” which lasted just 23 days. But the United States, at war with Mexico, took all of California in an 1848 peace treaty. Dona Maria died; her adobe home was leased by her heirs for a trading post and Santa Rosa's first post office.

The traders were would-be gold miners who found that the gold was in commerce. Berthold Hoen and Theodor Hahman negotiated with a Carrillo son, Julio, for part of the land he had inherited downstream - and, most important, they backed a squatter named James Bennett who was running for the state legislature on a platform to allow county seats to be chosen by a vote in counties where they had not been centrally located.

Bennett was elected by a narrow margin. This was probably the most important vote in Santa Rosa history. The editor of the Sonoma Bulletin, the county's earliest newspaper, described this embryo town as “nothing there but dogs, dust and whisky drinkers.” But Santa Rosa won the election. Growth came quickly. A shanty town predecessor called Franklintown, built on the creek's northern bank (just about where the Flamingo Hotel is today) canceled all plans, put the more substantial buildings on logs and rolled them along the creek to gather around the new town plaza.

Julio Carrillo filed a map of a town that was named Santa Rosa and Barney Hoen and Ted Hahman sat back to watch it grow.

In a dozen years its one-square-mile was filling fast and it was ready for the next step. The county approved incorporation in 1867. And in 1868, the state of California made it all permanent and legal by granting an official city charter (and one to Healdsburg as well).

And the future stretched out before Santa Rosa like, well, let's say a carpet of California poppies. Because growth is no bed of roses.

Looking backward, it always seems that change can and does, quite literally “happen overnight.” We learned this grim lesson last year when wildfires came from the east on the downslope winds, destroying more than 5,300 homes in Sonoma County, the majority of them in Santa Rosa.

There is no “what if” in history, but what if there were? What if the fires had not occurred? What if the development in an old fire path had not taken place to burn again last year?

Mayor Chris Coursey has had multiple opportunities to address that question in the past year. He told me about attending a national mayors' conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2017, two days before the fire came to his town.

He made a presentation, he said, to a group that included not only mayors but city planners and financial staffers exchanging ideas for improving their cities.

Coursey recalls that he spoke about plans for parking and housing “and efforts to create the town we've been talking about for the last 25 years.

“I gave a presentation and a slide show and talked about the potential of the downtown, of the progress we had made, about reunifying the square, about SMART.

“And when I finished one of the people in the group came up to me and said, ‘I don't know what you're asking for. You've got an embarrassment of riches there.' ”

Coursey flew home from Santa Fe just in time to watch a substantial part of his town burn down.

“Those words,” he said last month, “have been ringing in my ears ever since.”

No one, most assuredly not Coursey, is suggesting that Santa Rosa is not still well positioned to grow and prosper. It's just a little harder to see a rosy future when it has been obscured by smoke and ash.

Not that it won't happen - just not in time for the city's 150th birthday.

Poets and scholars like to talk about “a sense of place,” which is hard to define, but all around us nonetheless. The late, great California writer Wallace Stegner suggests that it is a matter of evolution, the places evolve in “a slow accrual, like a coral reef.”

There is truth in his comparison as cities pile layer on layer of change with the passage of time.

So it all comes down to that change thing - everyday change and dramatic change, predictions of what will happen, what did happen, what has happened before.

These are invitations to think about the road taken from past to present. What better occasion than a significant anniversary, a time when we bury our past in a time capsule and gaze into the future? To tell the story of a city in a few pages, a few thousand words is a task that ranges from difficult to impossible. Anything said is an oversimplification.

With that in mind, we offer you some glances at the 150 years, for reflection and, hopefully, optimism about the future.