I See by the Papers...

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

Despite its ambitions to become the grand metropolis of the North Bay, Santa Rosa didn’t have a public park until the Juilliards donated their nine acres in 1931. But ten years before that, the city and Chamber of Commerce had bought land just north of our current high school with the intent to create the “Luther Burbank Creation Garden.” Efforts to raise money and bootstrap those plans dragged on through the 1920s. Newspaper articles about the latest (non) developments were so common it was referred to as just “the Burbank Park” without further explanation.

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 summer of 1925 was approaching the midpoint of the Prohibition era and by then Sonoma County pretty much knew what to expect. Every week or two the Press Democrat would report some poor guy arrested by deputies for hiding or transporting a few jugs of “jackass” brandy or other hooch. The fines for these small-time bootleggers was $400-500, which was the equivalent to about six weeks of an average income at the time. That pace would pick up considerably the following year when “Jock” Pemberton became County Detective (see “THE ELIOT NESS OF SONOMA COUNTY“).

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