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