Imagine if the Golden Gate Bridge was never built - engineering issues couldn't be solved, perhaps, or maybe there were insurmountable economic hurdles, or just not enough political will. What would Sonoma County be like today?
The only way to get here from San Francisco is by ferry, for starters, so Santa Rosa is a much smaller place. There was no population boom after World War Two; it's a rural county seat somewhat like Ukiah, and the courthouse is still in Courthouse Square because they patched up the mostly cosmetic damage from the 1957 earthquake instead of tearing it down. Stony Point Road is the Highway 101 bypass, its two lanes swelling to three at the stoplights where there is cross traffic and turn lanes. Tourists clog the Redwood Highway on weekends because the winery events, resorts, spas and casinos in the countryside make this a popular getaway destination for the rest of the Bay Area, while the weekly Press Democrat is always pushing for year-round motocross and horse racing at the fairgrounds in order to draw visitors downtown. "Sonoma County? Sure, it's a nice place to visit, but no, I..."
Building the Bridge was never a sure thing, but it wasn't because there was formidable opposition. Yes, there were efforts to slow or stop the project but it wasn't ongoing, popping up only when the project neared a funding or construction milestone. None or those challenges posed serious threats, but were more like pesky nuisances.
Yet when the project launched in 1923 it seemed delusional to believe it would ever pass beyond the blueprint stage. Not only were there some engineers who thought it was folly to attempt constructing the longest bridge of its kind at that particular place, but its promoters had to run an incredibly complex political gauntlet, convincing Washington and Sacramento to back it enthusiastically - all before doing the basic studies which would prove the concept was viable. And even after construction began in January 1933, a retired geologist made a splash by predicting the south end could never be made stable, requiring months of further testing to prove him wrong.
All in all, it took almost 20 years to get to ribbon-cutting day. This is not the place to tell that whole story; the Golden Gate Bridge District has history pages for further details on the critical years of 1928 and 1930 (although some of the information on bridge opponents is wrong). A version of the original 1916 article proposing the idea is transcribed below.
Local folks probably know that the key part of the origin story concerns doings in Sonoma County by two men: Frank Doyle, president of the Exchange Bank as well as the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce, and Press Democrat editor/publisher Ernest Finley. Although Doyle modestly said he was "just one of the hundreds who helped to put the bridge over," he always will be remembered for kicking the project off by organizing the January 13, 1923 conference in Santa Rosa which brought together over 250 bankers, business leaders and politicians, which earned him his spot standing next to the governor and the mayor of San Francisco when the bridge was officially opened. Finley was the indefatigable champion for the cause, turning the Press Democrat into a soapbox for promoting funding and construction, cheering every nugget of good news and booing every bit of bad.
After Finley's death in 1942, however, the story shifted; it was said the newspaper suffered by losing subscribers because of its bridge advocacy and Finley was a warrior editor battling powerful railroad, logging and farm special interests opposed to the bridge. This version has taken root over the years in the PD and elsewhere; here's the version from the Media Museum of Northern California: "...In this particular crusade, which spanned at least two decades, Finley stood almost alone...he was opposed by nearly everyone. His business suffered as he lost advertising accounts and subscriptions. But he continued the campaign, insisting, 'Damn the circulation! The bridge must be built!'” That's now his legacy quote although it's probably apocryphal.1
The problem with that narrative is it's not really true.
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 little item in a 1912 Press Democrat was a puzzler. A man in upstate New York had written about seeing a poster that read:
| Coming to Plattsburg--An Official Exhibit from Napa, Lake, Marin, Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, just north of San Francisco Bay, in California, with a monster elephant Shark 36 feet long, weight 10,383 pounds, 460 years old. Also an octopus or devil fish; a California ostrich, and one thousand curiosities from Land and Sea. |
It was no hoax; that was part of an ad for an official exhibit traveling the Midwest and East Coast between 1909 and 1915, supposedly introducing hundreds of thousands to the agricultural wonders of Sonoma and other North Bay counties. It never toured in the West and was rarely mentioned in any of the local newspapers; probably only a small number of people here knew about it at all, unless Aunt Myrtle from Altoona visited her Santa Rosa relatives and begged to see an ostrich ranch. And although it was a pricey operation to maintain, probably none of the groups writing checks to support the promotion thousands of miles away realized how damned strange it really was.
Our story began in San Francisco during the 1880s, where "Mon" Leak was president of the very successful Leak Glove Manufacturing Co. Before joking that "Leak Glove" seems like a really poor choice for a company name, understand he came from a family with a history of really poor names choices; not only was Mon's full monicker "Mondula" but his father was Crapo Leak, having changed his surname as a young man from "Lake." Perhaps he was unclear which part brought such mirth to sniggering children.
Mon exploited the odd family name in his other business, the Leak Advertising Company. Curious why horse water troughs all over Los Angeles had "Leaks" painted on the side, a reporter tracked down Mon for an 1890 interview and learned he had crews running about painting every available fence, wall or water trough with his name or an ad for one of his six clients. He was something of a advertising genius, insofar as recognizing he could blanket a city with a platoon of low-paid sign painters cranking out the same few ads in a kind of mass production.
(RIGHT: The Leak railcars as seen in newspaper ads from 1909-1915)It's likely Mon got the idea for both businesses from his father. The 1860 census lists Crapo as a painter in Johnstown, NY which is next door to Gloversville, where almost everyone in town had some job in the glove-making trade during the 19th century. Crapo was also awarded an 1890 patent for an improved sewing machine part that would make it easier to stitch things like gloves and a couple of years later Mon followed his poppa's lead again, this time getting his own patent on a railway car outfitted to haul around a crew of painters, with hinged bedding platforms that folded up during the day allowing it to be used to demonstrate advertiser's products and hand out samples. Best of all it had its own generator, allowing the train car to be brightly lit both inside and out by dozens of light bulbs. It must have caused quite a sensation in the 1890s when the shebang pulled into a rural community where electricity was still something of a novelty. Again, he was kind of a genius.
Here I must interrupt Mondula's tale to fill in some of the research backstory. When I first read that Press Democrat item I presumed it was a gag - either someone was spoofing the PD or editor Ernest Finley was presenting a "quaint" to give readers a laugh (for more, read "That Can't be True"). But when I Googled on that odd detail of precisely "10,383 pounds," I was gobsmacked to find ads that almost exactly matched the item, and through Ben Truwe's rich archive "Southern Oregon History, Revised" I was introduced to the crafty Mr. Leak. His essay, "Mondula Leak and the Sign on the Wall" provides details which are just sketched here, particularly concerning the years before and after Mon was promoting the North Bay. There are photos of Mon, diagrams of the railcars, the legend of the lucky beans and much more. It's a good read.
Sources found by Ben Truwe state the luxe railcar cost $30,000 (about $750 thousand today) but it wouldn't be built until 1891, when Mon landed a sustaining backer: The county of Placer. For five hundred bucks a month, Mon painted "Placer County on Wheels" on the side. Locals visiting the train were shown a gold-flecked rock, Placer County fruit and told what a swell place it was. That, however, was in addition to his regular promotions. An Oregon paper described what awaited those lured in by free hot popcorn and peanuts: "People were admitted to the car and served hot chocolate as an advertisement for the house that manufactures the cocoa, and then after examining the display they were ushered out the other end of the car carrying armloads of samples of baking powder, newspapers, cocoa, germea, axle grease, etc."
Mon and his wife, Hannah, had a private room at one end but the rest of the train car must have been crowded at nights, with about two dozen men sleeping on their retractable bunks. Besides all the painters there was a bookkeeper, stenographer, electrician and cook. (Did I mention the car also had a coal oil stove which was used in cooking demos? And after a few years of living on the rails he was granted a couple of more patents dealing with food storage on a train.)
There were no further mentions of the painters after 1892, so presumably Mon shut down that side of his operations. No one could blame him; it must have been quite a headache. Besides being in close quarters with so many men for so long there was the logistical problems of running that kind of business from a train in an era when telephones were rare. Mon had no locomotive, so there were ongoing scheduling needs to arrange for the Leak patented car and their baggage car to be hooked up to trains on different railroads. Seeking permissions to paint a fence or side of a barn probably required a savvy advance man, and there had to be a local manager to arrange transit for the painters and handle other services. And while playing California Ambassador would be fun, playing nursemaid to twenty guys with the flu in a rail car without a toilet, would not.
The three-year deal with Placer County ended in 1894 and the train became "Santa Clara County on Wheels" in short order, which it would remain for more than a decade. The major change was that besides county ag products, Mon was only pushing "Schilling's Pure California Wines" (a San Francisco dealer who relabeled a wide variety of wines produced all over California). Gone were the days when visitors lumbered away with armloads of baking powder, axle grease, etc.
Then in 1897, a single sentence was added to the end of his usual newspaper blurb: "Another car, to which a small admission fee is charged, contains a whale."
Um, a whale from land-locked Santa Clara County? Well, sure, why not; the premise for the exhibit was that visitors wouldn't know squat about California. Later ads mentioned it was caught in Monterey Bay, but who is Oshkosh knew Monterey Bay wasn't in Santa Clara (or Placer, for that matter). And besides, Mon wasn't claiming it was from the sponsoring county, so it wasn't his fault if people jumped to the wrong assumption. Right?Truwe's history web site offers transcriptions of many ads and articles over the following years showing how things devolved. The whale was rechristened a "monster elephant shark" (it was actually a basking shark) and it began eating up more of the attention; San Jose peaches and prunes were no match to gazing down the yawning maw of a shark that seemingly could swallow you up in a gulp.
Soon ads referred to the second car as the "California Marine Museum" and besides the shark weighing precisely 10,383 pounds ("large enough to feed a multitude of people") papers said there were "many other rare specimens of marine monsters, such as a man-eating shark, weighing 460 pounds, sea angel or flying shark, sea sturgeon, baboon fish." Another write-up promised "a monkey-faced owl, an alligator and several monkeys, alive." For a while there was an X-ray machine, where "one can see the bones in his hands and arms." It must have been quite the letdown to move to the next train car and find yourself facing a pile of big sugar beets that are supposed to be impressive because.
It was free to see the fruit, but if you wanted to enter the other car with the zoo/freak show "a small admission fee of 10 cents is charged to keep out objectionable characters." Later it would bump up to 25¢ which was worth about six bucks today, but that's not a fair comparison; a quarter was the price of premium entertainment - a ticket to the circus or a decent seat at a very good vaudeville theater.
Starting in 1905 the sponsor changed to Stanislaus County, but by then mention of the county was cursory in newspaper ads. The shark was always the headliner, with side attractions including a live alligator (!) a California ostrich (presumably stuffed) and "Peruvian Cavies" (guinea pigs) which he called, "the cutest little animals known of." Every visitor was given a souvenir, such as a sea shell or lucky bean. And about that: Before the train arrived the local papers often ran a paid story placement about the time his "old sailor friend Seth" was spared by savage South Sea cannibals once they saw he had a rare and sacred sea bean. With that tall tale, it can be said Mondula Leak had fully embraced his inner P. T. Barnum.
From the 1909 Ukiah papers we find word that Mon had signed a contract with the North Bay Counties Association, a kind of super Chamber of Commerce across five counties (in 1925 it morphed into the Redwood Empire Association, growing to nine counties including Josephine in Oregon). To the exhibit was now added "the creations of Luther Burbank" - apparently just spineless cactus - and redwood bark. The souvenir was usually a "novelty made of the California Big Trees", a pampas plume (then grown commercially around Santa Barbara) or a lucky bean, "People of North of Bay Counties Hope to Please You," chirped a frequent tagline in the ads.
The contributions from all our local Chambers and trade groups added up to $400-600 per month, but that money was just cake icing; with an admission of 25¢ (15¢ for kids) and several hundred visitors a day, their take must have been around $5,000/mo. Presume the Leaks lived well.
What they needed from the counties, however, was the cloak of legitimacy. With miscellaneous ag products displayed under county and state banners, it could be claimed the exhibit was "educational;" otherwise, it was just oddities better belonging in a carnival sideshow. Some communities even might have banned them.
But here's the interesting question: Did anyone in the North Bay - or before then, anyone in Stanislaus or Santa Clara counties - know the main attraction was not their lovely produce, but instead a stuffed shark?
(RIGHT: A 1915 ad from near the end of the North Bay promotion)
Three articles in San Rafael and Ukiah papers from 1909 and 1910 offered lengthy reviews of the exhibit culled from midwestern newspapers, undoubtedly provided by Mon Leak. Not one of them mentioned the shark or any other of the curiosities, although every other review found in online historical papers prominently mentions the animal displays, often describing them in detail. One can only assume Mon edited the reviews or wrote them himself to keep his patrons in the dark.
The North Bay promotion ended in 1915, and next up was "Georgia on Wheels." (Yes, there was still "a monstrous shark," but its California origin was apparently dropped.) This tour was short lived. The national railway system was near standstill with its heaviest traffic in history because of the run-up to WWI. Also, Mon was now 65.
In 1917 he reinvented himself again, this time turning his advertising model upside down. If he could no longer bounce from town to town, he would stay in one place and expect the towns to come to him via the "Southeastern Exhibit Association," with its year-round display of Georgia products (no mention of any sharks, though). Announcing their four-story exhibit hall in downtown Atlanta, Mon boasted to a reporter his field organization built a network of enthusiastic supporters eager to promote the state. Unfortunately, when he retired two years later, leadership passed to Edward Young Clarke, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Clarke is credited with reshaping the Klan via a greatly expanded, dues-paying membership - in other words, he followed Mon Leak's Association model, using a field organization to build a network of enthusiastic supporters eager to promote hate.
Mon and Hannah retired to West Palm Beach, Florida, where he died in 1924. That's the end of the story, except for several Believe-it-or-Not angles.
His mother, Caroline, was actually the most famous member of the family, being the key witness in the sensational murder trial of Theodore Durrant, an 1895 San Francisco serial killer dubbed "The Demon of the Belfry." His poppa, Crapo, returned to his old stomping grounds around Gloversville, New York, where he was arrested in 1896 for "enticing young girls into his place for immoral purposes." Crapo was running a "disorderly house," according to the local papers, which was usually a polite way of saying it was a brothel. When he was sentenced to five years in prison for abduction all the newspapers in the area called him a "notorious divekeeper."
And then there was our famous shark; to my astonishment, I was able to discover its origins. Before Mon whipped up that stupid lucky bean story, he used to pay newspapers to print his item about how the shark was caught:
| Yesterday as Captain Emanuel Feress of the fishing smack Garibaldi was about to tack and sail for port he had an adventure with a monster shark that the crew will long remember. They had turned toward shore when a commotion commenced in the water, and instantly the ropes holding the net tightened and the smack started off at a rapid gait, the waves washing over the deck. The crew were thoroughly frightened and wanted to cut loose, but Captain Feress kept cool and ordered them to stand ready for whatever it was that had hold of them, and for half an hour no one knew what was going to happen. They could see nothing, but they were going away, and some invisible power had hold of the boat. Then a big black object came suddenly to the top, jumping clear out of the water, trying to loosen himself, then started for the shore, and soon had run into the bar and the tide left him high and dry, and they could then see what it was that had nearly scared the life out of them, a monster shark measuring 36 feet, the largest anyone on this coast had ever seen. |
That story supposedly first appeared in the Monterey Herald on April 20, but the year kept slipping forward; in his earliest account it happened in 1887, then 1895, then 1905. But while every single detail was a lie, he did tell the truth about the date at the beginning: It was caught in April of 1887. That was ten years before Mon Leak began hauling it around the country, and when he stopped showing it off the shark had been dead for thirty years.
I could not find out what happened to the shark - likely it went off to a Georgia carnival, saloon or a collector with lots of space over his mantle - but I'm sure Mondula hated to sell. It had inspired nightmares for countless kids, but once upon a time it had inspired a glove maker to become a kind of showman.
Very Like a Whale.
A very large shark was towed into port yesterday by the San Vicente. It was caught in Monterey Bay by the fishing steamer U. S. Grant. It is about thirty-five feet long, measures twenty feet in circumference and weighs nearly five tons. When the huge carcass was brought alongside the wharf it was with considerable difficulty hoisted on a large dray drawn by six horses and taken to Central Park, where it is now on exhibition.
- Daily Alta California, April 29, 1887
AN ORDOROUS SHARKRenders the Existence of Policeman Fitzhenry Unhappy
Policeman Fitzhenry filed a complaint yesterday with the Board of Health against the proprietors of the shark that was captured near Monterey last week, and whose cadaver is now on exhibition in a tent at Central Park. As the monster weighs more than five tons and is fully thirty feet long, such a mass of putrescent blubber is offensive to the nose of Policeman Fitzhenry. A posse of reporters inspected the remains yesterday afternoon, and instead of being nauseated by the decomposition of cold shark meat were fumigated with carbolic acid as thoroughly as to pass muster even with the new Board of Health.
- Daily Alta California, May 3, 1887
GEE! BUT THIS IS SOME BOOSTEastern Relative Sends Santa Rosans Copy of Startling Announcement in New York
A card from Jos. Kellogg, brother of F. H. and Chas. Kellogg of Santa Rosa, instructor in agriculture at Cornell University, and who is now putting in his vacation in a walking tour through the New England States, reports that in Plattsburg, New York, he found the inhabitants considerably stirred by posters all over the town bearing the following legend:
"Coming to Plattsburg--An Official Exhibit from Napa, Lake, Marin, Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, just north of San Francisco Bay, in California, with a monster elephant Shark 36 feet long, weight 10,383 pounds, 460 years old. Also an octopus or devil fish; a California ostrich, and one thousand curiosities from Land and Sea."
- Press Democrat, August 11, 1912
They were the movers, the shakers, backslappers and opportunity-seekers, all cheerleaders for progress as long as nothing really changed. They were the members of the 1909 Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce, and Press Democrat editor Ernest L. Finley was their president and the town's Booster in Chief.
(RIGHT: 1909 Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce officers)
To an outsider, it might have seemed as if the Chamber was much ado about not much except for their annual membership dinner. It was civic groups such as the Woman's Improvement Club that organized the Rose Carnival and other projects that made Santa Rosa a nicer place to live, and the Sonoma County Automobile Association - led by James Wyatt Oates - lobbied for first-ever street paving and other needed infrastructure upgrades. On the flip side, we do have the Chamber mostly to thank for the 107-page "Illustrated Portfolio of Santa Rosa and Vicinity," which served to beautifully promote the town and remains the most valuable photographic artifact about Santa Rosa from that era. But what the Chamber also sought was to silence critics of the status quo.
Boosterism has a long history in America, going back at least as far as the early 19th century drive to promote Chicago as the commercial hub of the westward expansion. By the end of the 1800s, towns everywhere were puffing up about their specialness to attract new businesses and residents. But the term "knocker" apparently didn't appear until around 1906*. It quickly devolved from simply meaning someone who didn't sufficiently boost their town into describing someone who was sabotaging the community, and within a few years, to be a knocker was to being labeled a pariah. A 1910 magazine offered a booster/knocker checklist (which was reprinted in other journals) that included venom such as, "The booster is a loving husband. The knocker is a wife beater..."
There are many examples of Chambers of Commerce promoting this us-versus-them antagonism, although they hardly had a monopoly on the idea. In Babbitt and other novels of the 1920s, Sinclair Lewis pointed out that groups like the Rotary Club and Kiwanis were spending more energy whipping up members to hate skeptics than they were in the performance of good works. But it was at the 1909 Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce dinner where District Attorney Clarence Lea warned that knockers were "instinctively" opposed to any form of change and cut from lesser cloth than "The Progressive Man." ("Progressive" had dual meaning at the time; where it usually described Teddy Roosevelt-style reforms, it was also conflated with being a pro-progress booster.)
Lea's speech was rich in willful ignorance or hypocrisy. The very men in his audience were the ones who were actually fighting progress and change; just a year before, they had won the 1908 city elections with a keep-the-status-quo ticket headed by the Chamber's previous president, defeating a coalition of reformers who wanted to weed out Santa Rosa's entrenched corruption.
The attendance list for the Chamber's dinner (CLICK or TAP to enlarge) is also interesting for who did not attend. Missing were James Wyatt Oates and John Comstock; Oates' absence is not surprising because he had no truck with the Good Old Boy clique that made up most of the Chamber, but Comstock might have been expected to attend, as he and his sisters had recently opened an art gallery on Fourth Street. Also MIA was Luther Burbank, who always stood with the reformers - even as he permitted the Chamber to endlessly tout his name and image to boost the town.
The Press Democrat account of the dinner also includes a detailed description of the 1908 nickelodeon film made about Burbank, which is now presumed lost. A later short, "Nature Study," was produced by the Ford Motor Company ca. 1917 and is widely available.
*Google Books shows "knocker" being used between 1901-1904 to criticize trade union members who didn't support their union. |
ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE SANTA ROSA CHAMBER OF COMMERCEMany Men Interested in Advancement of the City Gather at Festal Board in Brilliantly Decorated HallMusic, Fine Menu, Oratory and Moving Pictures on Thursday Evening--Excellent Reports of Work and Officers and Directors are Reelected Unanimously--Praise for Woman's Improvement Club
Two hundred men, representing all the professions and the commercial side of Santa Rosa, met Thursday night around the festal board at the annual banquet of the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce at Native Sons' Hall...
...Every detail of the banquet was admirably carried out. It was expected that this would be the case, seeing that the energetic, clever women of the Improvement Club had taken charge of the arrangement of the tables and the serving of the menu. A committee of ladies was in charge of each table. It was the setting of an alluring picture. The tables were beautifully adorned. Magnificent clusters of chrysanthemums, roses and other blooms--each table offering a different hue, and the whole scheme blending in one effective whole. Adding to the effect were the candelabra from which the soft light of candles filtered through silken shades. A dainty boutonniere at each plate was a Chilean flower--"scyphanthus elegans" kindly donated by Mr. Luther Burbank. In addition to this was a pretty souvenir menu card. The menu was as follows...
...During the enjoyment of the feast the large orchestra, under the direction of Mrs. Joe P. Berry, rendered a number of selections from the balcony. The music was a fine feature and the spontaneous applause of the auditors showed their appreciation. It was a bounteous spread of everything and all concerned earned many compliments for the excellence of the arrangements.
After the cigars had been passed around, President Ernest L. Finley as master of ceremonies, called the assemblage to order. He paid the Woman's Improvement Club a deserved compliment for the serving of the banquet and the part they had taken in the success of the evening, his words being greeted with prolonged applause...
...With his characteristic force and spirit, the Hon. Clarence F. Lea, District Attorney of Sonoma County was heard in his address on "The Progressive Man." His plea was for less "knocking" and more "boosting," and his words on this point had the right ring. He characterized the "knocker" as being "dissatisfied with what is, and instinctively being opposed to any change." He spoke of the broad vision and aim of the progressive man, and his keen appreciation of advancement that tended for the uplifting and advancement of the community. He spoke enthusiastically of the benefits to be derived from the building of the proposed railroad into Lake county, and gave some good advice to the builders, urging that the route selected should be so arranged as to be of use and service to the entire county...
...Horatio F. Stoll, secretary of the Grape Growers of California, had a very entertaining address. His topic was "Our Experiences at the Seattle Exposition," dealing with the manner in which the California exhibit and "boosting" was received at the exposition. He said some very good things along the line of future promotion effort. A most interesting part of his remarks was their illustration by a set of excellent views and moving pictures, in which Santa Rosa and Sonoma county were particularly brought to the front. A complete set of these pictures is being shown at the great Irrigation and Land Congress now in session in Chicago. The pictures created a great deal of enthusiasm at last night's assemblage. They showed the Luther Burbank residence on Santa Rosa avenue; Mr. Burbank coming out of the door and starting to work in his experimental grounds; his reception of visitors and other interesting features. One of which Mr. Burbank's aged mother, who comes out and seats herself on the porch. Mr. Burbank's secretaries, Miss Pauline Olsen and Miss Swanson. The other picture reproduced the great Italian-Swiss Colony at Asti, Sonoma county; the vineyards and wine-making; the Sbarboro Pompeiian villa and Mr. Sbarboro receiving visitors with the accustomed genuiness [sic] of California hospitality.
After the proceedings were over men and women lingered to discuss the success of the evening in all its varied forms. One could not help remarking what an eye-opener it would have been for an easterner, coming from his November frosts and snows, if he could have looked in upon that festive scene in Native Sons' hall and viewed those magnificent chrysanthemums, roses and carnations that had been plucked a few hours previously from their blooming in the open air i;n the gardens of the "City of Roses."
[..]
- Press Democrat, November 19, 1909
Here's another of those very odd public service "booster" ads that appeared in the Santa Rosa Republican around 1908 (other examples here and here). CLICK or TAP to enlarge and learn how you can help "the old town perk up and plunge forward."
Nearly every year, one of the Santa Rosa newspapers produced a promotional supplement on the wonders of Sonoma County: A great place to start a farm, build a factory, or just settle down. Santa Rosa itself was overflowing with churches, secure banks, Luther Burbank, and prosperous businesses; they would praise the leather tanning companies, the fruit canneries, the flour mill, the pharmacies and even the hardware stores. Yet they never, ever, boasted of the town's casket factory.
Until 1908, Kobes & Huntington provided almost everything a contractor might need to finish a building - or that a downtown business might need for repairs after Saturday night drunken revelries. The shop, which was in Railroad Square at 115-121 Fifth Street (currently the large, white warehouse across from the Last Day Saloon), sold plate glass and art glass, mirrors, bank and saloon fixtures, stairways, refrigerators and all kind of mouldings and other millwork made on the premises. But from 1908 forward, they turned out one thing only: Redwood caskets and coffins.
Almost immediately the company was the second-largest coffin maker in the state, their assembly line building up to 700 caskets a month under exclusive contract to a San Francisco dealer. It was certainly one of the most successful Santa Rosa businesses and was in the process of expanding rapidly, all good reasons for the newspapers to tout the company in their annual supplements and town boosters to point at it with considerable pride. Yet except for one small article about the changeover - which only appeared in the Press Democrat on a slow news day - locals were quiet about the busy factory on Fifth street. Quiet as a tomb, you could even say.
BIG BUSINESS AT THE CASKET FACTORY
Between 400 and 700 Caskets Are Made at Kobes & Huntington's Establishment on Fifth Street Monthly
Few residents of Santa Rosa are aware that the second-largest manufacturing plant for caskets in California is located in the city, and is turning out from 400 to 700 coffins of various sizes monthly. Such is the fact.
Kobes & Huntington, who for a number of years conducted a planing mill and cabinet shop on Fifth street, some months ago secured a contract from the San Francisco Casket Co., of San Francisco, to furnish them caskets and boxes for the next eight years, and the plant was remodeled to make it suitable for the new purpose for which it was to be used. Over $2,000 worth of additional machinery was installed and for some time past now shipments of a car of caskets has been made weekly, and two cars of boxes monthly.
The manufacture of such quantities of caskets requires 40,000 feet of lumber per month, and the firm has now on hand 250,000 feet. The lumber must be bone dry, the steps are being taken to secure a steady supply from one mill during the lifetime of the contract. A steam plant is to be installed this fall for the purpose of having a place to kiln dry lumber, and also furnish a steam room where the boards maybe bench to be used the making of coffins. In trade parlance there is a difference between caskets and coffins.
The firm makes at present four styles of caskets, the square, which is the cheapest grade; the octagon, the elliptical and the chancellor. These all take their names more or less from their shapes. The "coffin" is different from any of them in that it takes the peculiar shape given it while the material is heated by steam before being put together.
The redwood lumber to be used in the manufacture of caskets is cut into various lengths before being taken into the shop and loaded on hand trucks. It is then wheeled to the various parts of the shop where it is to be used and machinery cuts it into the desired shapes, makes the moldings, cuts holes for the various attachments, and then it is taken to the assembling room. Here skilled men put it together rapidly.
There is little or no waste. The smaller pieces are all used in making the small sections and even sticks not larger than good kindling are used in forming the rounded head board confined between two veneer boards and glued in place. In all nine men are employed in the shop and each one does only his part of the work as it passes along from bench to bench.
The caskets when completed are shipped to San Francisco where they are covered and finished into the handsome products seen in many undertaking parlors. The question is often asked what becomes of the caskets made? The State Board of Health reported 2900 deaths for June, and there had to be a casket for each body. The Santa Francisco dealers furnish a large share of the supply for the Islands and Oriental trade, so it will be seen there is a large demand.
- Press Democrat, July 28, 1908
In 1908, they thought mail-order catalogs would kill off downtown; little did they know that doom awaited via parking meters a full century later.
Here's another in a series of public service "booster" ads that appeared in the Santa Rosa Republican between 1907 and 1909. (CLICK to enlarge image.) This gem appeared April 21, 1908, a few days after the second anniversary of the Great Earthquake, when a Press Democrat editorial called on Santa Rosans to shout down critics: "Now as never before the croaker, if he insists upon croaking, and the knocker, if he persists in knocking, must be shoved to the rear..."
Before the Internet got the blame, it was Sears & Roebuck that was accused of destroying our local economy. Even though downtown was still a dangerous construction zone, don't you feel perfectly lousy for ordering those washrags from a mail-order catalog instead of risking your neck to buy them from The White House Department Store?
This is the first in a series of public service "booster" ads that appeared in the Santa Rosa Republican between 1907-1909. (CLICK to enlarge image.)
 |  |
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
Proposes Some Things for Improvement of Santa Rosa
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The matter of the relaying of the streets in places where trenches have been dug for sewer and water pipe work was considered and the council was requested to enforce the ordinance compelling the repair of the same. Also the secretary was requested to call the attention of the city governing body to the habit of displaying of buggies, wagons, and farming implements on the sidewalks in front of sale places, stores, or blacksmith shops.
The hiding of unsightly piles of brick or rubbish was discussed and the building of high board fences was suggested. It was also suggested that parties might be secured to erect the same if allowed to use them for billboards.
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- Press Democrat, December 21, 1907