Introducion

My Sonoma - The Valley of the Moon

By Bill Lynch

Sonoma.  The name is magic to many.  It evokes our best senses, including the taste of fine wines enjoyed amidst vineyards in their fall plumage of brilliant reds and golds as a giant harvest moon rises above the Mayacamas Mountains that defines our 17-mile-long, crescent-shaped valley made famous by Jack London in his book Valley of the Moon.

Those of us who think of ourselves as Sonomans live here.  

I was born here. 

During my childhood, open fields, fruit orchards and vineyards surrounded the one-mile square town of Sonoma. At its center was the eight-acre Plaza originally laid out by Gen. Marianno G. Vallejo. This plaza is also where the Bear Flag of California was first raised when the state declared its independence from Mexico. 

North of the city limits, are Boyes Hot Springs, Fetters Springs and Aqua Caliente – all named after the natural hot mineral springs, supported swimming resorts and health spas and provided summer recreation for locals.

Farther north is the small village of Glen Ellen, above which is the Beauty Ranch of world-famous author Jack London, which was then privately owned and maintained by his descendants. 

Kenwood and the headwaters of Sonoma Creek running out of Adobe Canyon  mark the Valley’s northern border. Up a few miles in Adobe Canyon was Golden Bear Lodge where I learned to swim in an ice-cold pool created by a rock dam across the creek. Farther upstream is where I went trout fishing for the first time.

The nearest big town is Santa Rosa. San Francisco is about an hour’s drive south.

While the Valley of the Moon had been a tourist destination for decades, the industry of the community then was based on farming, and not just wine grapes.  Many of the people who lived here lived on farms just outside the small city limits that spread to the south, southeast and southwest of town. They included the Kisers, who grew various hay crops; dairy farmers like the Stornetta, Mulas, Leveroni and Wilson families; and fruit growers like the Sangiacomos and Battos.

While the older kids had jobs bucking hay, picking prunes and other fruit during the summer, those of us under 10 were free to play, ride our bikes and explore the countryside around us, including the old stone quarries on Schocken Hill that rise north of the town.

Except for a few ranches, there were no homes in the hills.  But there were trout streams there. 

I was a fishing nut. I loved Nathanson Creek, which runs through town. I’d start fishing at the cattle ranch near Gerhicke Road (where Ravenswood Winery is today), then work my way upstream.  I fished up through narrow canyons where a few tall redwoods had survived the axes that felled much of our local forests during the gold-rush building boom in San Francisco.

The Valley floor was laced with little creeks and springs. Just south of the city limits, vast vernal pools would form in the spring. They attracted flocks of wild ducks and geese.  Salmon and steelhead came up the creeks to spawn.  Baby steelhead hatched in winter and became the rainbow trout we fished for when trout season opened in later spring.

Blackberries, planted by early settlers here, had taken over some of the open fields, making perfect nesting places for large coveys of valley quail and hiding places for pheasant.

In the summer, our whole family would go on blackberry-picking excursions, the result of which were delicious berry pies later in the evening.  To this day, a fresh-baked berry pie is my favorite dessert.

Some of the wild places of my boyhood probably looked like the Valley of the Moon that Franciscan Padre Jose Altimira saw when he first made his way north from Yerba Buena (San Francisco) to Sonoma Valley in 1823.

Yerba Buena, a remote outpost of Spanish California, was still a couple of decades away from the gold-rush boomtown we know today as San Francisco.

The Franciscan monk and his party had to cross the bay by boat, find their way up the Marin headlands, ford the Petaluma River, slog through the salt marshes, before they could finally gaze upon a wild and verdant valley in which grizzly bears and mountain lions roamed and through which creeks, teeming with fish, wound their way down to the bay.

It is said that the native American residents of the Valley were the ones who told Altimira that this beautiful place was called “Sonoma.” They said Sonoma was the word for “many moons,” explaining that because of the mountain range formation on the valley’s eastern rim, the moon would seem to rise again and again over their home.

The accuracy of this translation has been questioned by later historians, but the magical description of Sonoma as the “Valley of the Moon” was forever engraved for posterity in the novel of the same name by author Jack London, who came here in 1904 to live and write.  His Beauty Ranch is today a California State Park.

In London’s day, Sonoma Valley was a remote part of the Bay Area. 

There was no Golden Gate Bridge. It took a boat trip followed by stage or horseback ride to get here from San Francisco.

My grand-aunt, Celeste Granice Murphy, who was editor of The Sonoma Index-Tribune from 1915 to 1946, wrote a book The People of the Pueblo – A Story of Sonoma, in 1937 that gives a fascinating description of those early days in the nineteenth century when Sonoma was an important outpost of Mexico on the California frontier. 

Aunt Celie, as we called her, was not the only historian in our family.  My father Robert M. Lynch, who took over the family business from her in 1946 and became the editor and publisher, not only wrote editorials and the news of the community, but also published historical editions and special sections about our Valley’s rich history.

In 1997 he published his own book, The Sonoma Valley Story, that picked up where Aunt Celie’s book left off, and covered much of what happened here in the twentieth century.  In 2015 I added a section to Dad’s book covering the Valley’s history for the first 15 years of the twenty-first century.

My grand-aunt Celie and my father were my connections to old Sonoma. Through them, I met many of Sonoma’s most prominent citizens of the their era.

I worked for the family newspaper almost all my life. I learned our Valley’s early history by working on the paper’s historical editions with my father.

Following college and service as a Navy officer in Vietnam, I returned here permanently in 1969 and rejoined the newspaper staff. My father was still the editor. Two decades later, when he turned that job over to me, I still counted on him to identify old photos or help me with the background of a story that had roots deep in local history. He was the guy I expected to compose the obituaries of Sonoma Valley's oldest and most distinguished citizens as they passed on.

He died in 2003, and I still miss him.  

I often reflect on how truly fortunate I am to have lived and worked in such a beautiful place so rich in history, blessed with a salubrious climate and populated by wonderful people.

 I retired from full-time editing and publishing at the I-T in 2012, when I turned 70.  

After a few months celebrating retirement, fishing and traveling, I started going through the many boxes and old files my Dad had stashed away in the attic, in the garage, and in musty old antique oak filing cabinets in his office.   Even the cabinets had a story behind them.  He bought them and a huge roll-top desk at an auction of stuff from the old Sonoma County Courthouse when it was still in downtown Santa Rosa.

In them I found a treasure of photos, letters, notes and other documents related to life in Sonoma over his lifetime, and in many cases over the lifetime of my grand-aunt Celie. I discovered old letters from my great grandfather, Harry Granice, who established our family newspaper business here in 1884.  They went even further back to my great-great-grandmother, Rowena Granice, who published newspapers in California’s gold country in the 1850s and ‘60s.

Over the course of my nearly 50 years of covering local news and writing stories about Sonoma,  I have compiled a large collection of tales told once (some several decades ago) that many contemporary Valley residents haven’t read or heard. Parts of the accounts in this book have be published before in the Index-Tribune as part of a news story or column. Most of the photographs are from my family’s Index-Tribune archives and were published in the I-T at some point.

Many names, familiar to me, are now on buildings and facilities in the Valley – Arnold Field, Prestwood and Sassarini schools, the Grinstead Amphitheatre, Jerry Casson Senior Center and Andrews Hall, for example. Then there are the institutions we take for granted: our Plaza, our hospital, the Field of Dreams, Boys and Girls Club, and more. 

What does a name on a building mean after a few decades?  A fellow Sonoman was honored, but for what?  The reasons why they were highly regarded are lost as years pass. 

But the names remain and their stories can be told if even one person remembers.  

Close friends and family members have suggested that these stories need to be preserved and carried forward. 

I have done by best to do so.

While the people, places and incidents are real and part of Sonoma Valley history, some are retold stories passed on to me by my grand-aunt, father and fellow Sonomans who have been part of my life here.  

My accounts contain anecdotes, embellished and shaped by my personal experience.  

These are the tales, old and new, of My Sonoma, the Valley of the Moon.