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 Immediately after the annexation of California
to the United States, the U.S. Navy governed Sonoma in a loose
confederation with the Bear Flaggers. Fremont was sent back to
Washington and eventually court-martialed for his unauthorized
raids on Mexicans. In 1847 a regiment of Army volunteers from New
York arrived to garrison the town of Sonoma as a frontier outpost,
a mission similar to Mariano G. Vallejo's from Mexico. One of its
commanders, John B. Frisbie, who married one of General Vallejo's
daughters, later helped ruin the general financially.
California became a state in 1850, and Vallejo was elected a state
senator. He lobbied vigorously to locate the state capital in one
or another of two nearby towns formed largely from his extensive
land holdings -- Benicia, named for his wife, on Carquinez Straits
at the northeast tip of San Pablo Bay was the first California
capital, and an adjacent town then called Eureka, but later named
after him as Vallejo. Failing in that, he tried to keep Sonoma, at
least, as county seat, against a challenge from upstart Santa
Rosa. The latter city won in a county-wide election in 1854, a
result some Sonoma historians still challenge, and the town of
Sonoma further lost its political significance when residents of
Santa Rosa removed all the county records in the middle of the
night.
It retained, of course, its favorable surroundings, and there
ensued a period of slow development as a rural
 agricultural and
social center. The Gold Rush had the effect on the valley of
draining it, temporarily, of many of its males. However, the
Sonoma area did feel the impact of California immigration and its
growing wealth. With U.S. rule came the appropriation of many land
holdings, and Vallejo lost much of his real estate, which once
amounted to seven million acres. Later his son-in-law, Commander Frisbie, involved him in a series of disastrous financial
speculations that left him nearly penniless. His Sonoma home on
West Spain street was all that remained when he died in 1890.
The valley had always grown grapes, and the Mission fathers had
planted primitive vineyards at which grapes were crushed under the
feet of their indigenous religious trainees. Vallejo continued the
tradition. Then in the late 1850's there appeared in the valley a
Hungarian immigrant, Col. Agoston Haraszthy, who turned a
scientific eye on viticulture. He convinced the state of
California to send him on a long inspection trip to study the
methods of European growers, whose wines were conceded to be the
best in the world. What he saw convinced him that the Sonoma
valley's red, gravelly soil was perfect for grapes whose wines
would rival Europe's. He helped found the Buena Vista winery and
others followed; by 1876 the valley was producing more than 2.3
million gallons a year.
That's when phylloxera vitifoliae, an aphid-like root parasite,
began attacking and killing vines. The problem was worldwide, and
not until resistant strains of vine were found in Sonoma and Napa
and distributed to Europe was the blight alleviated. The wine
industry then flourished until 1919, when Prohibition all
but destroyed it again. Its place in the valley life was
demonstrated in the great fire of 1911, in which winemaker
Agostino Pinelli let firefighters pump a thousand gallons of his
red wine to put it out.
During this time the valley lay more or less isolated. In the
1880s the town of Sonoma languished until the plaza grew over with
weeds and cattle grazed there. The Mission decayed and fell into
ruin. Transportation was infrequent and slow. Boats from San
Francisco took a day, and not until 1890 was there a standard
gauge railroad through the valley. This line ran down Spain
Street, and included a depot on the Plaza, turntable and engine
house.
Life picked up in the Nineties, with many resorts springing up
after a hot water source was found at Boyes Hot Springs, and the
wine industry making a comeback. Trains brought visitors to the
resorts. Electric light arrived in 1895. Author Jack London came
to the valley in 1904 and mythologized it in his novel The Valley
of the Moon. London settled in Glen Ellen, where he undertook the
construction of a huge mansion that burned down before it was ever
lived in. Some 40 acres of the London estate, including the ruined
manse, are now maintained as a California historical park.
The Sonoma city hall was dedicated in 1908 (shown in the picture
at the top of the page), carefully built with four identical
facades so that the merchants on all sides of the square could
claim that it faced toward them. During World War I, the valley
sent 117 of its sons; 98 of them returned. After the war, in 1919,
the coming of Prohibition almost destroyed the economy of the
valley. With taxes on alcohol and restrictions on its use,
winemakers had seen a complete ban on alcohol coming for years.
They did their best to defeat it, but were were overwhelmed by the
national Prohibition movement; and with the passage of the 18th
Amendment, many valley wineries had to close down. Some converted
to canneries; only Sebastiani, which was licensed to make
sacramental and medicinal wines, was able to remain a winery.
Despite the "dry" triumph of Prohibition the area remained
vigorously "wet" during the Twenties, with several illegal stills
operating and selling liquor to the resorts. The wineries reopened
in 1933, with the repeal of Prohibition, but the vines had been
neglected and the Depression affected markets. The opening of the
Golden Gate Bridge made the area more accessible, but there was
little reason for visitors to come.
Like much of America, Sonoma mobilized itself on the home front
during World War II, supporting blood drives, scrap metal drives,
and a USO, driving at the wartime speed limit of 35 mph, and
learning to tell a Zero from a P40. Mayor C. C . Bean formed a
Home Guard to protect the local water supply, posting two armed
civilians every night to patrol the cistern behind General
Vallejo's old home.
After the war, the long sleep ended. Outsiders discovered the
valley, just as the Mexicans and Spanish had discovered it before
them. The population increased and Sonoma got its own schools and
hospitals. The valley grew from twenty thousand inhabitants in
1960 to forty thousand in 1980.
But growth was managed and a proposal to put a freeway down its
center in the 1960s was abandoned. Sonoma adopted a general plan
in 1974 calling for preservation of single family dwellings and
the valley's natural treasures, and the town prevented a multiple
housing unit from being built. Acting in the same spirit, citizens
recently voted heavily against the construction of a large resort
hotel on the town's last open public land. Sonoma never became the
political and economic hub that General Vallejo had envisioned and
worked for. In the long run that, turned out to be a blessing,
since unlike many parts of California, Sonoma has managed to
retain its original charm and beauty.
Photos courtesy Sonoma Valley Historical
Society
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