Stuart’s office of Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, Main Street, 1855 (Sonoma County Library) A legal challenge to the commission’s decision was dismissed in court. 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. The Thompsons purchased the Oak Hill property from Keller. Their daughter Josephine was the first settler’s child born in town on August 25, 1852. The eight acres for Oak Hill Cemetery were donated to the town by James and Mary Thompson, owners of Thompson Bakery on Main Street. Oak Hill (photo Victoria Webb, Petaluma Argus-Courier) Those who lived to the age of 20, had a life expectancy of 60. Īlthough the average life expectancy at the time was only 38, much of that was due to childhood mortality. That included showing proper respect for the dead. 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. Within three years, that figure would more than triple to 1,338 residents, 38% of whom were women. Īt the time, Petaluma had grown to a population of 400 residents. In doing so, they expressed their shared desire to put down roots of generational continuity in the town. Her death prompted townspeople to create a cemetery where Oak Hill Park resides today. In the spring of 1854, a young woman known only as Miss Smith-daughter of a popular Petaluma settler named John Smith-died unexpectedly. The final nailing came, as with most things, in death and the courts. 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.” Its true value resides in the enthusiasm it ignites among people who believe in it. The pursuit of gold, which drew most early settlers to California, was no different. 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. 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. His founding of Petaluma wasn’t as much a land scam as a collective agreement among frustrated settlers. 1855 map of Petaluma (Sonoma County Library) After selling his bogus landholdings, Keller returned to his farm in Missouri. 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. Opening a real estate office at his store, he began selling lots in California’s new gold rush: land speculation. Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry park), 1900 (Sonoma County Library) 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.Īt the center of town, on the hillside where Shirley was buried, Keller set aside land for Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park). 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. A few months later, on January 3, 1852, Keller decided to turn the hamlet into an actual town. Keller read the service while the other men laid Shirley to rest in a coffin fashioned from redwood. 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, a disappointed gold miner from Missouri. 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. Shirley’s death, a local potato boom, launched by the Irishman John Keyes, made a squatters hamlet of the encampment. 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. In the fall of 1851, a farmer named Shirley was thrown from a wagon of potatoes and crushed beneath its wheels. HOW DEATH DEFINED THE BIRTH OF A COMMUNITY Cypress Hill Cemetery (photo Gail Sickler, Petlauma Argus-Courier)
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