I See by the Papers...

Yeah, there's a dead body on display at the fairgrounds. What's the big deal?

Visitors to the 1985 Sonoma County Fair found a tent at the far end of the midway announcing a "World of Wonders" exhibit. Admission was a buck.

Inside were cages and stalls with deformed or otherwise unusual looking animals. According to the Press Democrat the menagerie included a hundred lb. water rat (which was probably a capybara), a "five-legged cow, a steer with two noses, a five-legged lamb, a 'punk rock' goat and a 'headless' chicken."

In the center of that barnyard freak show was a coffin. Through the plexiglass top you could see the body of an adult man. His skin was leathery and the color of mahogany with sparse hair and beard. A loincloth covered his hips.

Propped against the side of the coffin was a sign: "He is real. Count Demonicus: preserved and petrified by arsenic solution." The July 31 edition of the PD ran a photo of the coffin with the remains faintly visible.

But wouldn't you know it, some killjoy didn't think it was appropriate to have a dead guy laying on the straw covered dirt just a few steps away from the barn with the 4-H bunnies. The cops were called.

Coroner Investigator Tom Siebe thought it was probably fake and told the PD "Yeah, it looks pretty good. But under plastic, things can be deceptive." To check on it, the county took possession of the body for an x-ray. It was real.

The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott

Don't be scared, but there may be strangers in your house.

Anyone lucky enough to inherit their family's photo album must have wondered about some of the folks in there. Are there unlabeled Victorian-era portraits where people look as stiff as statues? Maybe there are snapshots from a century ago of relatives posing with seemingly close friends - but could they be distant relations you'd like to know about? There may also be missing persons. Why do none of the photos with great-aunt Tilda include her husband Cornelius?

This is a quick trip through a collection of pictures left by a Santa Rosa family from around the turn of the century. Or rather, it's about forty images that were donated to the Sonoma County Library, which scanned them and placed them online. Not all of the set is interesting - about half are nameless, rigid-necked Victorians - but some are quite unusual and deserve attention. The final section of this article concerns the bigger question about what could be done to restore information missing from thousands of historical photos in our library's archive and elsewhere.

The first puzzle is figuring out which family we're looking at. The library's descriptions usually mention "William H. Hudson" or "part of a collection of Hudson family photographs" but that's a weak clue, as there were several unrelated Hudson clans in the North Bay at the time which included a William H. A few years ago the Sonoma County Historical Society wrote a piece on this and concluded a Santa Rosa businessman was the right guy.

But in the library collection three different men are identified as William H. Are their photos mislabeled or were these really the trio who shared the same name? And which one is the businessman we seek? Fortunately, he was vain enough to buy an entry in one of the local history "mug books" so we have an accurate reference of what he looked like, at least in his senior years.

That history book offers a detailed bio or you can read a condensed version at his entry on Find a Grave (although it presently uses photos of wrong Williams). Here I'm skipping most of the details except for those that apply to the photographs.

Overlooked was that William and his wife Percie had very private lives. Rarely were they mentioned in any of the local newspapers. Aside from a nice announcement in the paper where he once worked as a printer, their marriage was elsewhere a two-line notice in the Vital Statistic columns. There were no birth announcements for their children, even though she was part of a large and prominent Healdsburg family.

Their quiet profile extended to the family album. There's no wedding photo, nor baby pictures, nor portraits of their son in Army uniform as he went off to fight in WWI, nor picture of the son with his wife or of their children. (Think about that for a moment: Grandparents without a single photograph of their grandkids?!) I want to assume such images did exist and at some point a family member raided the album, but the Hudson's seeming desire to live behind closed doors does not lend great confidence.

The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott

Once upon a time Santa Rosa had a rival village next door named Frankin Town.

Or not.

The often-told story goes something like this: In the early 1850s, before there was a place called Santa Rosa, Oliver Beaulieu founded a village somewhere near the Carrillo Adobe. He named it Franklin after his brother. A church was built and there were a handful of businesses (tavern/inn, blacksmith, etc.) plus a like number of houses. In 1853 Julio Carrillo, along with three other men, laid out a street plan about a mile to the west for a town they called Santa Rosa.¹ After it was declared the new county seat the following year, the denizens of Franklin began rolling their buildings to Santa Rosa on wheels. By 1855 or so, all of them - including the church - had been moved. There was nary a trace of Franklin left.

Twenty years passed before any of that Franklin history was told, although that's not particularly surprising. When it faded away there was only a single weekly newspaper in the area (the Sonoma County Journal in Petaluma) and even Santa Rosa was scarcely mentioned in its pages - why waste ink on a defunct settlement? But once local area histories began being written in the mid 1870s, there was always a passage about Franklin. As the years went on those mentions kept getting longer as historians cribbed from their predecessors and tossed in more details. If you added up all the varied claims (transcribed below) there were up to three stores, a couple of taverns, a hotel, a blacksmith or two, the church, a wagon shop and a saddle tree factory.

None of the historians cited where they got their information, and only one could have possibly visited the short-lived Franklin (Robert A. Thompson, who began living near Petaluma in 1852). At the same time, that lack of a firm narrative also lends the story an air of mystery - which is why we're still talking about it today.

Questions abound: What appeal did Santa Rosa have that Franklin lacked? Why were the residents quick to abandon it? Did Beaulieu actually intend to establish an incorporated town? And what's the deal with the name "Franklin Town?" That's just the top of the list.

The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott

Read any good old newspapers recently? We live in a golden age for anyone interested in exploring our past. There are many tens of thousands of different newspapers now online with over a billion pages to prowl, much of it either free or accessible at no cost via your library.

The rest of this article and the entire series on July, 1925 can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com. - Jeff Elliott

Our 1925 ancestors had boundless love for all things with a steering wheel and on Sundays the Press Democrat had a dedicated automobile section that was 3-4 pages long. Beyond the expected ads from car makers, there were articles on topics like tire pressure, battery prices, and trouble shooting problems (“A peculiar grating noise from a horn is an indication of a broken diaphragm”). New salesmen at local dealerships were treated like sports stars, often with a photo to accompany their profile. Readers learned which asphalt roads were newly oiled and where to expect detours.

The rest of this article and the entire series on July, 1925 can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com. - Jeff Elliott

The most shocking thing to read in the July 1925 Press Democrat was that the Barlow ranch in Sebastopol was still using children to harvest crops. I had presumed it would have ended after WWI, when the soldiers came back from the war and the state lifted a wartime emergency act that shortened the school year so high school kids could help out on farms, but here was the superintendent of the Boys and Girls Aid Society of San Francisco boasting to the Santa Rosa Rotary Club that the summer program was going as strong as ever.

The rest of this article and the entire series on July, 1925 can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com. - Jeff Elliott

The 4th of July fell on a Saturday in 1925, and tens of thousands of San Franciscans emerged from their foggy summer climes to drive around sunny Sonoma county. (It actually rained here that morning, but hey, it was still a relief from the city’s usual June Gloom.) One slight problem: There was no Golden Gate Bridge yet, so 15,000 cars had to get here by ferry. And that’s not counting a large number that crossed a day or so earlier, parked in Sausalito as their drivers took the ferry back to the city as pedestrians to finish up the workweek.

The rest of this article and the entire series on July, 1925 can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com. - Jeff Elliott