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 The
first to reach Sonoma Valley came through Mexico, which was newly
independent of Spain when the initial expedition of soldiers and
missionaries
arrived here July 4, 1823. They had ridden up from San Francisco,
then known as Yerba Buena, 50 miles to the south.
The priests were Franciscans led by Father Jose Altamira and they
were to found Mission San Francisco de Solano, the 21st and last link of the
California mission chain, and the only one established under
 Mexican
rule. Altamira felt that the existing missions in Yerba Buena and San Rafael were in
poor locations for health and agriculture; he wanted to find a
warmer and more pleasant spot in which to settle.
The soldiers were there as a deterrent against Russian intruders
from the north, who were fishing, trapping, logging and
cultivating the coast from Alaska to Coronado Bay, and who
had established an outpost at Fort Ross in 1812. The Mission
prospered in terms of lands, crops, cattle, horses, and converts,
and was a thriving center when Mexico secularized all of the
missions in 1834. The property was to be divided, and the church would remain as a small
parish church, not the center of activity.
To the town of Sonoma, to carry out this directive as the
administrator of the new Mission, came Lt. Mariano Guadalupe
Vallejo, the then 27-year-old commandant of the Presidio of San
Francisco. Vallejo turned Sonoma from a mission town into a
Mexican pueblo, built around the beautiful eight-acre central
 plaza
(still the largest in California) that survives today as the
center of city life and has been named a national monument. He
laid out the plaza and the street grid and is responsible for the
110-foot wide avenue leading south from the plaza,
today's Broadway (Highway 12). He built a barracks for troops at
the northeast
corner of the plaza, and made Sonoma, briefly, the center of
traffic and trade north of San Francisco.
Vallejo was to gain enormous property holdings, wealth and power.
When his
nephew, Juan Bautista Alvarado, was named governor of the Mexican
state of Alta California in 1838, Vallejo was named military
governor of the state, and the
two of them controlled much of northern California.
But American settlers pouring into California over the Sierras challenged
Mexican power in the 1840's. Mexican rule ended with the Bear Flag
revolt in 1846, which took place in Sonoma itself, and Mexico ceded all of
California and the rest of the Southwest to the United States in 1848.
CONTINUE
Top photo courtesy The Sonoma Index Tribune
Other photos courtesy Sonoma Valley Historical Society
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