No tombstone in the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery attracts more attention than the one for Davis Wright, "colored boy" - or so it seems, as every few months questions or comments pop up on social media when someone discovers it and expresses amazement. What's the story behind it? There has to be a story.
We only know four things about Davis Wright. He was 12 when he died; he was "colored," but born in California so he was never a slave; he was buried in the Wright family plot. It's the latter connection which intrigues.
Davis was part of the household of Sampson Wright - a wealthy farmer and horse breeder - where in the 1860 census the 8 year-old boy was listed as a servant. In itself that's not unusual; also in the census Davis' 5 year-old brother was likewise enumerated as a servant, as was a toddler at another house in Santa Rosa and an Indian baby in Sebastopol. It simply meant a person of color who was living under a white man's roof.
What made the Wright situation so unusual in 1860 was that he had six other black "servants" beside Davis.1 No other home near Santa Rosa had more than a couple - and in those situations, the second servant appeared to be the baby or the mother of the other.
The other curious thing about the Wright black servants was that they all had the last name "Wright:" Esther (age 50), John (25, but actually 29), Mary (18), James (13), Henry (11), David [sic] (8) and Georg [sic] (5). Except for Davis and George, all of them were born in Missouri, where Sampson Wright had lived before coming to California. Missouri was a slave state and Wright was a slaveholder there, with five slaves counted in the 1850 census.
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
The V-E Day celebrations in Sonoma County didn't have much have much bang to them, but that's okay - we were saving our juices for the wild hell-raising that would come three months later when Japan surrendered.
For a week before the official V-E Day on May 8, 1945, two stories dominated the news: The United Nations Conference on International Organization AKA "World Peace Conference," which had just started in San Francisco. (Fun fact: In Nov. 1946, the 1,640 acre Sobre Vista estate near Glen Ellen was among the sites considered as a possible location for building the UN. And you think traffic on Highway 12 is sometimes bad now...)
The other big news at the top of the front pages concerned the fall of the Nazis and when V-E Day would be officially declared. Joe Stalin had proclaimed the war over on May Day. Eisenhower had said on May 4 that Germans were "thoroughly whipped." So why the wait? In newsrooms across the country, there was much squirming in editorial chairs. "Don't blame your newspaper and its press services for not telling you in this edition that 'It's all over in Europe,'" griped the Press Democrat. "Evidently there are good and valid reasons why the responsible military leaders of the Allies, and their governments who depend upon their judgments do not give out that final, fateful symbol 'V-E DAY.'"
Then early on Monday, May 7, the wire services broke the news that the war in Europe would be declared over at 9AM Eastern War Time the next day, as Truman, Churchill and Stalin would make simultaneous radio announcements.
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.
Here's a rare historical nugget: A summary of the reasons why people were behind bars in the Sonoma County jail during 1892, which I think was the only time such a list appeared in a Santa Rosa newspaper.
There were 500 prisoners that year, more than half (315) being held for misdemeanors, vagrancy, drunkenness and unspecified minor offenses - the whole list can be found below. Mostly the rest is predictable: People steal things valuable or not, people hurt other people causing varying degrees of damage, and people do stupid things that may show they are crazy. Two items that might surprise us today were child stealing (yikes!) and using vulgar language.
Both Santa Rosa and the county had laws against saying bad words in front of children or women, which was the topic of a previous article (see "THE HIGH COST OF CUSSING"). It was usually a charge thrown in with other offenses such as drunkenness or fighting, and continued to be used that way into the 1920s. But there were two cases in the 1890s that stand out because the law was seemingly used in a cruel and vindictive manner.
Alfred Jacobs, a Sebastopol 13 year-old was arrested in 1890 on two counts: assaulting his sixth grade school teacher and for using vulgar language. He was given two consecutive 60-day sentences by Judge Dougherty, but one of them was dropped when the assault charge was dismissed.
The boy stayed in jail as lawyers returned to court four times to debate a writ of habeas corpus. It's unclear what that meant in this situation - perhaps they were trying to square the circle of arresting a child by using a law meant to protect children. At any rate, they dithered until two months had passed and he was released anyway.
Jacobs would spend much of the 1890s behind bars, including two years at San Quentin for grand larceny. "After his release from the prison, Jacobs devoted himself most industriously to thievery, and has been in trouble many times," the Santa Rosa paper tsk-tsked in 1897. "District Attorney Seawell regards Jacobs as a dangerous menace to society." During that decade he was also locked up for vagrancy, horse theft and burglary.
Even if you don't take his age into account, there's no question his punishment was harsh; that same year adults were sentenced to only ten days for swearing. Perhaps the judge intended the extended sentence as sort of a "time out" to contemplate and reform his ways - or maybe the judge was an old-school "spare the rod, spoil the child" sadist. Whatever the reason, it's interesting to note just three days after Jacobs was given his long punishment, that judge gave a lecture on "the moral, intellectual and religious formation of character."
The other incident where profanity was treated as a serious crime happened in 1894 - and like the case of Alfred Jacobs, it was also heard in the courtroom of Judge Dougherty.
Until she was arrested Kate Norton lived in poverty with her three children. She and her 22 year-old daughter, Bertha, were taken by the Bodega constable to Santa Rosa on charges of insanity.
There was a history of the women being harassed by local boys, which the Democrat shamefully reported as if it were a big joke. "It seems to have been their part at the town of Bodega to amuse the boys, against their will of course, but the young boys of the town have been in the habit of annoying them into a frenzy to enjoy a little loquacious concert intersperced with pungent profanity." The paper said both were "intensely excitable and emotional and well stored with vulgar phrases and grossest profanity" because they were Irish immigrants.
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