North Bay Tour

The North Bay area is a land of contrasts. Gray fog swirls over its high mountain tops and down steep slopes forested with giant redwoods; highways wind through its flatlands past sleepy towns that doze in the sun; quiet creeks drain its valleys and clear streams rush down its dark canyons to Bay and ocean. Paved highways have replaced dusty roads; tiny vineyards of early winemakers have expanded to cover whole slopes and wide flatlands; orchards and gardens and modern chicken hatcheries spread over the valley floors. The Russian River, the sandy beaches and sheltered coves are popular vacation spots, and the mountain slopes are terraced in rows of modern homes inhabited by men and women who work in San Francisco. The rugged Pacific shore and the Bay's indentations are favored by fishermen, and yachtsmen sail their craft around the headlands and between the islands.

San Francisco—Sausalito—San Rafael—Vallejo—Benicia; 52.7 m. US 101, State 37, County roads.

Paved roadbed throughout.

Pacific Greyhound interurban busses serve Marin County.

 

This route follows US 101 across the Golden Gate and cuts north through low hills bordering San Francisco and Richardson Bays. It swings east on State 37, following the contour of San Pablo Bay to the mouth of Suisun Bay, where inland waters of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers pour through Carquinez Strait. Its course is through vacation communities, yachting centers, little towns overlooking the Bay, houseboat colonies, wide dairy acres, and flat marshlands.

North from Van Ness Ave. and Fulton St. in SAN FRANCISCO, 0 m. on Van Ness Ave. to Lombard St.; L. on Lombard; R. on Richardson Ave. to the main approach of Golden Gate Bridge.

The bridge approach rises gradually on concrete piers across the northern edge of the Presidio. At 4.7 m. is the toll plaza (automobiles, 50¢; pedestrians, 10¢) of GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE. For 1.2 miles the route follows the longest and highest single-span suspension bridge in the world, an integral link in the great highway between Canada and Mexico.

 

At 6.6 m. is the junction with a paved road.

 

Right on this road through a part of FORT BAKER UNITED STATES MILITARY RESERVATION, 0.5 m.

SAUSALITO, 2.4 m. (8-600 alt., 3,506 pop.), faces San Francisco from the steep flanks of the Marin hills. Its one business street is built on a narrow shelf beside the Bay, where pleasure craft, fishing boats, and Coast Guard cutters lie at anchor. All have one thing in common—a view of the Bay.

The first white man to come here was Spanish navigator Captain Juan Manuel de Ayala, who named the cove Ensenada del Carmelito (Bay of Little Mount Carmel). The Spaniards who followed named the spot Saucelito (from salcedo—willow) for its many small willow thickets.

The cabin of the young Irishman, John Read, who settled here in 1826, was the first permanent home of a white man in Marin County. When Read died from the excessive bleeding practised by the physicians of the day, his widow married the bandit, “Three-fingered Jack” Garcia, friend of Joaquin Murrieta.

In 1838 an Englishman, Captain William Antonio Richardson, was granted the 19,000-acre Rancho Saucelito. He was a harbor pilot, operated a trans-bay ferry, raised cattle, traded with Yankee ships, and sold water from Sausalito's springs to Yerba Buena.

Sausalito once was known as a town where gambling dens and saloons rid the unwary of his money quickly and efficiently; and its elections were stormy battles. But since 1907 it has been a haven of graceful living. Fishing and the building of small craft are its only important industries.

The DANIEL O'CONNELL MONUMENT, Bulkley and Harrison Aves., a granite bench shaded by pepper trees, is a memorial to the Irish poet and political refugee.

On the slope below the monument the thick, bastion-like WALLS OF SEA POINT, a former home of William Randolph Hearst, face the Bay above Bridgeway Blvd. Hearst razed the palatial home after a quarrel with local residents.

Beside Bridgeway Blvd. at Napa St. the hulks of once-majestic square-riggers, brigantines, and schooners forced out of business by steam slowly decay on the mud bottom. The brigantine Galilee, demasted and nosing the shore, is the home of an artist. It was built at the Turner Shipyard at Benicia (see below), whose museum cherishes pictures of the trim craft with rakish masts and a smooth white hull. Beside it the stark hull of the S. S. Phoenix rests on pilings.

At 4.6 m. is the junction with US 101 (see below).

 

On US 101 at 7.1 m. is the junction with a private road.

Left on this road 6 m. to FORT BARRY UNITED STATES MILITARY RESERVATION, whose fortresses overlook San Francisco Bay. Once part of Fort Baker Reserve, the 893-acre area was set aside in 1904 and named in honor of Civil War veteran General William F. Barry.

Marking the northern entrance to the Golden Gate is POINT BONITA, 7 m. Atop the white tower of POINT BONITA LIGHTHOUSE (built in 1855 and reconstructed in 1877), 124 feet above the water, is a 40,000-candlepower light visible for 17 miles. A cannon brought here in 1850 thundered the first fog warnings in the vicinity.

 

US 101 continues northward into the hills above Sausalito, passes through deep cuts and a long tunnel, and drops down to RICHARDSON BAY, named for William A. Richardson.

At 10.2 m. is the junction with State 1.

Right on State I, across the Marin Peninsula hills and down Green Gulch to the junction with a gravel road, 6 m.; L. here 0.7 m. across an arm of Big Lagoon to MUIR BEACH (swimming, fishing).

State I skirts the ocean shore northward to STINSON BEACH, 12.5 m. {boats, tackle and bait for surf fishing), a small resort town at the southern end of Bolinas Lagoon.

At 16.8 m. is the junction with a paved road, on which the route turns L. along the western edge of BOLINAS LAGOON, named for Francisco Bolanos, pilot of the Sebastian Vizcaino expedition of 1603.

A few rotting piles at 17.2 m. mark the site of the BOLINAS LIGHTER WHARF (L), where oxen in the 1850’s hauled lumber from inland mills in crude wagons whose wheels were solid sections of redwood logs.

At 18.9 m. is the junction with a paved road; R. here 2.6 m. to the RCA STATION (private), twin to one on Point Reyes, whose 46 directional antennas transmit short-waves across the Pacific.

At 19.3 m. on the main side road is BOLINAS (10 alt., 125 pop.), a summer resort, with good swimming and fishing.

 

US 101 continues north over a half-mile-long redwood bridge across the upper reaches of Richardson Bay and on through rolling foothill country bright with wild flowers in spring.

At 12.1 m. is the junction with a paved road.

1. Right on this road 0.7 m. to the JOHN READ RANCH (private), where the orchard planted a century ago by Read on his Rancho Corte Madera del Presidio (cut timber for the presidio) still thrives. This was headquarters of the rancho granted Read in 1834, and here he lived with his young Spanish wife, daughter of Yerba Buena's Presidio comandante, Jose Antonio Sanchez.

At 3.2 m. is the junction with a paved road; R. here across a causeway to BELVEDERE, 4.3 m. (350 alt., 446 pop.), at the southern end of Belvedere Island in Richardson Bay. A quiet suburban town with fine homes and terraced gardens, it looks out from its steep slopes toward Sausalito and Angel Island.

Belvedere's SAN FRANCISCO YACHT CLUB, on Beach Rd., was organized in 1869, the first yacht club in California.

L. from Belvedere across another causeway to TIBURON, 4.7 m. (10 alt., 327 pop.), on Point Tiburon, southwestern tip of Tiburon Peninsula. Along the shore cluster houseboat colonies. Many homes at the water's edge boast small private piers for swimming and boating. To the southeast, across Racoon Strait, lies the green bulk of Angel Island.

East from Tiburon, then northwest around Tiburon Peninsula to CALIFORNIA CITY, 7.4 m. training base for the CALIFORNIA NAUTICAL SCHOOL (visitors Sat. and Sun. 1-5), established in 1929 to train young men for service as officers in the merchant marine. When the training ship California State docks after an extended cruise, the 125 cadets live aboard the modern ship and study ashore. The ship is kept in repair by the Navy, by which it is owned; all other expenses are defrayed by the State.

PARADISE COVE, 8.6 m. a sheltered picnicking and camping place, is frequented by the owners of small sailing craft.

At 13.2 m. is the junction with US 101 (see below).

2. Left on this road is MILL VALLEY, 2.1 m. (57 alt., 4,799 pop.), a residential town built in the narrow canyons and on the steep wooded slopes along two small streams. Originally part of Rancho Corte Madera del Presidio (see below), the town slumbered for two generations, but after the building of an electric railroad from Sausalito it became the home of business men and of artists, musicians, and writers.

OLD MILL PARK, on Throckmorton Ave., is the site of the region's first sawmill, built by John Read about 1834. Read, an Irish sailor, who had acquired Rancho Corte Madera del Presidio, whipsawed timber here for his house in Sausalito and afterwards supplied lumber for San Francisco. Down the small stream draining Mount Tamalpais’ southern slopes he floated the logs to the twin wheels of his water mill, whose frame still stands. Read's adobe, one-half mile northeast, was occupied after his death by the desperado, Bernardino “Three-fingered Jack” Garcia, who married Read's widow.

In Mill Valley the side route turns L. from Throckmorton Avenue on Old Mill Dr.; L. on Cascade Dr.; R. on Molino Ave.; sharply R. on Birch St.; R. on Edgewood Ave.; L. on Sequoia Valley Rd. up a ridge to a junction at the summit with Panoramic Highway, 4.6 m.

Left on Sequoia Valley Road 1.6 m. to MUIR WOODS NATIONAL MONUMENT (picnicking, hiking, riding; no fires permitted), a 424-acre park of virgin redwoods in a mountain ravine. The taller trees are from 200 to 250 feet in height, and from 12 to 17 feet in diameter. The woods, deeply scarred by fire 175 years ago, are noted for their abnormal growths of burls, albino shoots, natural grafts and strange formations. REDWOOD CREEK, where salmon and steelhead spawn, flows through the park at the base of such redwood giants as the Gifford Pinchot Redwood Cathedral Grove, Bridge Tree, William Kent Fir, and Albino Redwood. With the redwoods are dense growths of Douglas fir, oak, and laurel, with azaleas, wild huckleberry, and other plants.

Senator William Kent bought this grove for $45,000 and deeded it to the Nation in 1908 as a monument to John Muir, the naturalist who so loved the California mountains. In the condemnation proceedings necessary to acquire the land, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot gave valuable aid.

The main route follows Panoramic Highway from its junction with Sequoia Valley Road along the northern edge of 960-acre MOUNT TAMALPAIS STATE PARK (camp sites, hiking trails). A wooden trestle, 6.4 m., spans the roadbed of the abandoned Mill Valley and Mount Tamalpais Scenic Railway, laid out with a hand level by the promoters. Built at a cost of $147,000 in 1896, the eight-mile track, known as the “Crookedest Railroad in the World,” had 281 curves. At one difficult place a “double bow-knot” paralleled itself five times within 2,000 feet, thereby achieving a rise of 100 feet. Oil-burning logging engines drew trains to the summit.

At 9.4 m. is the junction with a paved road; R. here through Panorama Toll Gate (fee 50¢), which is aptly named, for as the road climbs higher, it affords even wider views of Bay, ocean and mountains.

At Rock Springs, 11.1 m., is the junction with Ridgecrest Boulevard on which the side route turns R. to the MOUNTAIN THEATER (R), 11.3 m. (admission to performances, 50¢), a natural amphitheater on the flank of Mount Tamalpais from which the audience can look beyond the stage across 70 miles of Bay, plain, and mountain. On stone seats rising in circular tiers, from three to seven thousand people gather annually on the third Sunday in May to watch a dramatic production.

Ridgecrest Boulevard curves uphill to MOUNT TAMALPAIS TAVERN, 14.0 m. (parking lot, hotel, restaurant, free camping and picnicking grounds), within a few hundred yards of the summit of MOUNT TAMALPAIS. There are three crests in the Tamalpais Range, West Peak (2,601 alt.), Middle Peak (2,570 alt.), and East Peak (2,586 alt.). From the summit a third of northern California is visible on clear days. The whole of San Francisco Bay spreads out below, spanned by its two bridges, bordered by cities and orchard lands. A white cluster of buildings is San Jose at the southern end. Beyond the Mount Hamilton and Mount Diablo ranges, the flat San Joaquin Valley stretches east to the blue Sierras. Westward, out to sea, the Farallon Islands seem near and ships appear on the horizon. To the north are the multiple Coast Ranges dividing inland valleys.

The first man to climb the peak was Jacob Leese, Marin County pioneer, who made the ascent to refute the Lacatuit Indian legend that evil spirits haunted the mountain. On the summit, Leese set up a cross of tree limbs. Marin, the Indian chief, to prove his valor, climbed up and hung his blanket from the cross, thereby gaining much prestige with his tribe.

On US 101 at 13.8 m. is the junction with a paved road.

Left on this road is CORTE MADERA (Sp., wood-cutting place), 0.5 m. (56 alt., 1,094 pop.), a snug community of homes with outlying model dairy farms. Its name came from logging operations in surrounding hills where Luis Antonio Arguello cut timbers to repair and enlarge San Francisco's Presidio buildings. Corte Madera's BALTIMORE PARK GROVE, on Madrone Avenue, is a small grove of redwoods extending up a narrow canyon.

The hilly suburban town of LARKSPUR, 1.6 m. (18 alt., 1,549 pop.), looks out over green marshes and meadows from the base of the hills. Beside the highway (R) is the LARKSPUR BOWL (open Sat., Apr.-Sept.; adm. 50¢), a huge, open-air dance floor accommodating 2,000. Through the platform redwoods thrust their trunks upward, twined with lanterns and electric lights. The pavilion is managed by the Larkspur volunteer fire department, which thus pays for itself without drawing on the town's treasury.

One of the chain of quiet residential towns in Ross Valley is KENTFIELD, 3.1 m. (100 alt., 100 pop.), settled early by men of wealth. In Mexican days the spot where the highway now crosses Corte Madera Creek was known as the Embarcadero and later as Ross Landing for James Ross, who owned the surrounding Rancho Punta de Quentin (Point Quentin). The settlement was next called Tamalpais and finally Kentfield, for Senator William Kent's father, Albert Emmet Kent, who had come here in search of health.

ROSS, 3.6 m. (26 alt., 1,701 pop.), once known as Sunnyside, is a community of homes, many with extensive grounds set in back of tall trees and hedges. It was once part of the vast and much-sought Rancho Punta de Quentin, purchased from Benjamin R. Buckelew by James Ross in 1859. The latter, a Scot, who brought a wife from Tasmania, had become a successful wine merchant in San Francisco. When Ross moved into Buckelew's home, leg-irons used on the convicts who built the house were found in the basement.

Founded in 1875, SAN ANSELMO, 4.6 m. (52 alt., 5,766 pop.), is a town of hillside houses and gardens along winding shaded streets. According to a local tale, it was started by a quarrel between two Irish families who lived at Ross Landing (see above). One day, while their husbands were at work on the North Pacific Coast Railroad, the two wives quarreled more seriously than usual; one threw the other into a well and sat on the lid. When rescued by her raging husband, the wife in the well was found clinging to the bucket rope, uninjured and eager for the free-for-all that followed. The railroad company grew alarmed at the ensuing feud for fear it would lose a prized foreman. Hence, one day a section crew heaved one family's shack onto a handcar and pushed it two miles up the tracks. It was unloaded, and there was San Anselmo.

The route goes L. from San Anselmo around the base of RED HILL, where sunrise services are held on Easter.

From the edges of FAIRFAX, 6.6 m. (108 alt., 2,175 pop.), rise brush-covered mountains that have the look of velvet from a distance. The 6,000-acre Rancho Canada de Herrera (valley of the blacksmith's wife), once embracing its site, was granted in 1839 to Pedro V. Sais, a soldier and civil officer in San Francisco. When in 1849 a visitor from Virginia, Dr. A. W. Taliaferro, expressed a wish to buy 40 acres, Sais, with characteristic early California generosity, gave him the land, saying that it was worth that to have a good neighbor. To the large house which Dr. Taliaferro built, came as a visitor in 1856 a direct descendant of the English baron famous in Virginia history, Charles “Lord” Fairfax. Remaining as a permanent guest, he inherited the estate when the doctor died without heirs. After Fairfax's death, the home was for years the restaurant of Madame Adele Pastori, Italian opera singer, who served meals in the garden under the trees. The property is now occupied by the Marin School for Boys.

Northwest from Fairfax, the route curves over Whites Hill and descends through rolling oak-covered foothill country into San Geronimo Valley.

SAN GERONIMO, 12.1 m. (286 alt., 30 pop.), was the home of Lieutenant Warren Revere, grandson of Paul Revere. While hunting elk, Revere, who had been sent by the Government to conduct a survey of timber, found this attractive valley. Buying the two-league Rancho San Geronimo, he settled down to lead the life of a Spanish ranchero. The once powerful Nicasio Indians caused him some trouble by running off his horses for food. When he captured an Indian, he forced him to make adobe bricks in payment for the lost horses.

Right from San Geronimo on a paved road over low hills 3.8 m. to a junction with a county road; (1) R. here 2 m. up Lucas Valley to the LUCAS VALLEY REDWOODS (picnicking, camping), named for John Lucas, a nephew of Timoteo Murphy (see below), from whom he inherited Rancho Santa Margarita. At 10.6 m. is the junction with US 101 (see below). (2) Left here is NICASIO, 4.5 m. (177 alt., 200 pop.), a tree-shaded hamlet with an old wooden church and school house and a few dwellings in need of paint, dating from the 1850’s and 1860’s. After disease and drink had decreased the local tribe of Nicasio Indians, Chief Jose Calistro bought 30 acres two miles east of Nicasio and settled his people upon it. The large stand of prime redwood in the region began to fall in 1862 when James Ross built the first mill one and one-half miles east of town. At 13.3 m. is the junction with State 1 (see below).

The main side route continues west from San Geronimo to the summer resort center of LAGUNITAS, 14.1 m. (219 alt., 512 pop.), and plunges into cool Lagunitas Creek canyon between high redwoods and firs, past mountain cabins perched on hillsides and flats along the stream. Fishing is forbidden to protect the salmon that spawn in the shallow, gravelly reaches.

Once known as Taylorville, CAMP TAYLOR (camping), 17 m. (138 alt.), in a grove of virgin redwoods on a flat next to the stream, is the site where in 1856 Samuel Penfield Taylor built the first paper mill on the Pacific Coast and employed Chinese to collect rags for raw material. Among old-timers, Lagunitas Creek, whose pure water was particularly adapted to paper making, is still known as Paper Mill Creek.

TOCALOMA, 20.8 m. (66 alt., 25 pop.), is a hamlet in a secluded glen on the creek banks.

OLEMA, 22.7 m. (68 alt., 150 pop.), with its white-steepled church and tree-shaded houses, has the look of a New England village. Alemaloke was the name of a former Indian village near here. The place was headquarters in 1837 of the great Rancho Tomales y Bolinas. In the 1860’s a 12-passenger stage rumbled between here and San Rafael, an old wagon cradled on thick leather straps and covered with tarpaulin. The earthquake of 1906 stirred the old town considerably. According to report, a cow on the nearby Shafter ranch fell head first into a yawning chasm which closed together, trapping the unfortunate animal with rump and tail still visible above ground. When the milkers at Skinner's dairy rushed out of the barn (according to Oscar Lewis and Carroll Hall in Bonanza Inn), they saw that “the cypress trees and the rose garden had moved away from the front of the house and now stood in front of the barn. The clump of raspberry bushes had slid down from the north and occupied the space vacated by the roses. The eucalyptus trees had marched to a position opposite the barn and in the process one had shifted from the foot of the line to the head. The piles of manure before the barn had each moved some sixteen feet south of the window to which it belonged.”

At Olema is the junction with State 1, which the route follows R. up Olema Creek to the junction with a paved road, 24.4 m. where it turns L.; R. here on State 1 is POINT REYES STATION, 0.3 m. (31 alt., 143 pop.), center of a dairy region, surrounded by rolling pastures, which ships butter to San Francisco. State 1 continues north along the eastern shore of TOMALES BAY, a narrow, finger-like inlet first sighted in 1775 by Lieutenant Juan Francisco de Bodega y Cuadra, who believed he had found a passage connecting with San Pablo Bay. Looping inland, State 1 passes through the sleepy farming communities of TOMALES, 18.2 m. (75 alt., 450 pop.), VALLEY FORD, 25 m. (45 alt., 200 pop.), and BODEGA, 31.1 m. (40 alt., 100 pop.). Right from Bodega 1 m. to the SITE OF KUSKOF SETTLEMENT, marked by a flagpole, where Russian colonists raised cattle and grain and converted the Indians to Christianity 130 years ago and (adjoining) the ruins of CAPTAIN STEPHEN SMITH'S ADOBE MANSION, built in 1843, headquarters of the owner of 30,000-acre Rancho Bodega. West of Bodega, State 1 returns to the coast at shallow, marsh-edged BODEGA BAY, named for its discoverer (1775). It skirts the coast northward through thinly settled country, treeless except for occasional clumps of Douglas fir and Bishop pine. At 47.2 m., on the north side of a bridge across the Russian River, is the junction with State 12 (see below).

West from its northern junction with State 1 the main side route goes L. to INVERNESS, 28.2 m. (10 alt., 200 pop.), a summer resort and boating center on Tomales Bay at the foot of wooded hills. The town took its name from the birth place of James Black, a Scottish sailor who arrived in California in 1832 and later took up cattle ranching on a part of Rancho Nicasio facing the east side of Tomales Bay.

The road curves west and south from Inverness over Inverness Ridge.

At 34.2 m. is the RCA RADIO STATION (R), where short-wave antennas, spread over 1,500 acres, catch transpacific signals.

The road continues south along a rocky, windy promontory where many ships have been wrecked.

At 39.9 m. is the junction with a dirt road; R. here 0.7 m. to the UNITED STATES RADIO COMPASS STATION, from which ships at sea take bearings to fix their positions.

At 42.9 m. on the main side road is the junction with a dirt road; L. here 1.3 m. to the UNITED STATES COAST GUARD LIFE-SAVING STATION above the white cliffs facing DRAKE'S BAY. In this sheltered cove Sir Francis Drake beached the Golden Hinde on June 17, 1579 (Julian Calendar) and claimed the region for Queen Elizabeth. He remained for several weeks, revictualing and repairing his ship. In the garden of the life-saving station is a marker commemorating his landing. On the cliffs overlooking the cove stands a white wooden cross, erected by Bishop William Ford Nichols, commemorating the first use of the English language and of the Book of Common Prayer on the California coast. An annual pilgrimage and service on or about St. John Baptist's Day, June 24, is held here.

This coast is the locale of Bret Harte's “The Legend of Devil's Point,” according to which Drake chose “this spot to conceal quantities of ill-gotten booty taken from neutral bottoms, and had protected his hiding place by the orthodox means of hellish incantation and diabolical agencies. On moonlight nights a shadowy ship was sometimes seen when fogs encompassed sea and shore…the creaking of a windlass, or the monotonous chant of sailors, came faint and far, and full of magic suggestions.” Whatever factual basis supports the legend, “a more weird and desolate-looking spot could not have been selected for [its] theatre. High hills…enfiladed with dark caadas, cast their gaunt shadows on the tide…sea fog [comes] with soft step in noiseless marches down the hillside, tenderly soothing the wind-buffetted face of the cliff until sea and sky [are] hid together.”

At Laguna Ranch, on the east side of Drake's Bay, a chauffeur in 1933 discovered a plate of solid brass which he subsequently discarded near Point San Quentin. Another motorist, halted by a flat tire, rediscovered the plate and offered it to the University of California for inspection. Revealed beneath the blackened surface was this inscription:

“BEE IT KNOWNE VNTO ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS IVNE 17 1579

BY THE GRACE OF GOD AND IN THE NAME OF HERR MAIESTY QVEEN ELIZABETH OF ENGLAND AND HERR SVCCESSORS FOREVER I TAKE POSESSON OF THIS KINGDOME WHOSE KING AND PEOPLE FREELY RESIGNE THEIR RIGHT AND TITLE IN THE WHOLE LAND VNTO HERR MAIESTIES KEEPEING NOW NAMED BY ME AN TO BEE KNOWNE VNTO ALL MEN AS NOVA ALBION

FRANCIS DRAKE” 

The main side road continues to the remote tip of the headland, where the white 16-sided pyramidal tower of POINT REYES LIGHTHOUSE, 44.3 m., shines its light 294 feet above the sea. Its 120,000-candlepower light, whose three-ton lens was ground in France and installed at Point Reyes in 1870, is visible in clear weather for 24 miles. But even this beam and the blast of the fog signal have failed to prevent many ships and even one air liner from piling up on the saw-toothed shore.

Across rolling foothill country runs US 101, rising to hilltops and dipping through valleys, with the Bay seldom out of view.

At the tidal mouth of Corte Madera Creek is GREENBRAE, 15.1 m. (32 alt., 100 pop.), a colony of house boats, whose occupants live the year around in their compact arks.

Right from Greenbrae on a paved road which winds along the hills that rise above the West Gate (for official use only) of San Quentin Prison (see below), 1 m., where armed guards are stationed in yellow octagonal towers. The route goes around and above the prison grounds with their neat guard cottages and high wire fences to the junction with a paved road, 2 m., where it turns R. to the SAN QUENTIN WHARF, 2.9 m., now western terminus of the Richmond-San Rafael Ferry (automobiles and driver, 70¢; automobile and four passengers, 80¢; pedestrians, 10¢).

At the head of San Quentin Wharf stands the FERRY INN, erected on the piling of the old Buckelew Sawmill by Benjamin R. Buckelew, who sold the site of San Quentin Prison to the State and who was once publisher and editor of The Californian. Visible from San Quentin Wharf is RED ROCK, three miles offshore, a two-acre uninhabited island whose color is due to the presence of iron oxides, and where legend has placed buried gold and jewels. Boundary corners of three counties meet on the little island.

In the small village of SAN QUENTIN, 3 m. (12 alt., 328 pop.), prison guards and employees live with their families.

The side route ends at 3.1 m., at the main gate of SAN QUENTIN STATE PRISON (relatives and persons on legitimate business admitted daily 8 and 2; guided tours, 9 and 2 Thurs.). The snouts of machine guns protrude from nearby towers. Visible beyond the gates are the grey walls and the stocky unornamented cell blocks of the prison, pierced by barred windows. Behind these walls 5,200 men are “doing time.” Women, once kept here, now are sent to Tehachapi; recidivists—”two time losers”—are sent to Folsom Prison.

New prisoners usually are put to work in the jute mill making burlap and other rough fabrics; later they are placed in work more suited to their individual abilities. Prison farms and dairies offer some of the men outdoor work. Others are employed in furniture shops, printing plants, machine and plumbing shops, bakeries, and kitchens.

The most famous prisoner here for two decades, labor martyr Thomas J. Mooney, accused of planting a bomb and killing several persons during a parade in San Francisco in 1916, was pardoned in 1939 by Governor Culbert L. Olson. Also confined here were Matthew Schmidt and J. B. McNamara, defendants in the Los Angeles Times explosion case of October, 1910.

Convicts built the first prison cells here in the early 1850’s to house other convicts then chained in the black holds of prison boats. The first ten years of the prison's existence were stormy with escapes and uprisings. The most desperate break occurred July 22, 1862, when 400 convicts rushed the front gate, and, using Lieutenant-Governor John F. Chellis as a shield, stormed and carried the gun post near the steamer landing. The convicts released Chellis three miles from the prison and headed for the hills, where they were blocked by a citizens’ posse. Thirty-three escaped, three were killed, and the others captured.

North of Greenbrae, US 101 cuts across tidal lands reclaimed from the marshes. In 1866 this road, built three feet above the marsh lands, was a toll road whose surfacing material had been taken from Indian shell mounds. Tolls ranged from two and one-half cents each for sheep and hogs to one dollar, which admitted three yoke of oxen and a loaded wagon. Today's highway is lined by gas stations, “hot dog” stands, and stores. The old ferry boat Encinal, moored in the marsh near the road at 16.8 m., is a seafood restaurant.

Seat of Marin County and suburban trading center is SAN RAFAEL, 17.5 m. (10 alt., 8,516 pop.). Bisected by San Rafael Creek, the city extends north to steep, round-headed San Rafael Hill. Its business streets are lined with old-fashioned brick buildings; many of its homes are set back of green lawns and tall shade trees.

Father Vicente Sarria founded here, on December 14, 1817, the twentieth of California's missions as an assisténcia (auxiliary) to Mission Dolores, whose Indian converts were rapidly dying off from the effects of measles and other diseases contracted from white men. By 1834 the new mission boasted 1,250 converts, but in that year it was secularized and its converts scattered. In 1844 Governor Manuel Micheltorena granted a considerable part of the present town site to Don Timoteo Murphy, administrator of the secularized mission.

In the 1850’s the little town became a busy but dirty center for the surrounding ranches. Streets bottomless with dust in summer, with mud in winter, were crowded with dogs, children, and Mexicans, and the few plank sidewalks tripped the unwary. Here the daily Petaluma stage and the thrice-a-week “mud wagon” from Olema and Bolinas connected with the San Quentin stages that met the San Francisco ferries, stopping, “with popping of whips and panting of horses…in front of the hotel. Now all is bustle, the men in long dusters, the women swathed in Veils.’ A crowd follows the mail-bag, the women retire to apartments upstairs, and the men line up at the bar…”

Celebration of the founding of San Rafael each October 24 is no longer the gala day it was prior to 1900, when (according to the Marin Journal) decent and respectable people took the day off, remained at home behind locked doors, and waited patiently until the last of the celebration had worn off. Three-card monte men, shell game operators, and crooked card-sharpers thronged the town; stabbings, shootings, and fist fights provided work for local doctors; and entertainment centered around horse races, dog and coyote fights, cock fights, and bull fights.

Among the 80 houses of 1866 were “some costly residences with tastefully laid out ground…” Some of these still stand in the district north of Fifth Avenue, among them the WILLIAM TELL COLEMAN RESIDENCE, 1130 Mission Ave., a large, rambling, white building incorporating San Rafael's first frame house, put up in 1849. Coleman, a San Francisco merchant and vigilance committee member, established in the valley just north of town a nursery; here among the hills he raised thousands of trees.

The apartment building at 720 Fourth St., a three-story structure with tall, narrow windows, decorated with Georgian pediments, was built by convict labor in 1859 as the CENTRAL HOTEL.

The former HOUSE OF PETER DONOHUE, 1411 Lincoln Ave., now a restaurant, occupies the big, old-fashioned two-story house built by Peter Donohue, Irish blacksmith who founded the Union Iron Works of San Francisco. About 1906 the estate became the property of Leon Douglass of the Victor Phonograph Company, who lived here with his family until 1926.

Of MISSION SAN RAFAEL ARCANGEL little remains but a few fragments of tile. The building was demolished for its timber in 1860; nine years later a new church was built on the site, but this in turn was destroyed by fire in 1917. The present ST. RAPHAEL'S CHURCH, Fifth Ave. and A St., occupies the site of the old mission, which is depicted in a bas-relief above the central door. A statue of Saint Raphael stands in the main tower.

A bank at 1304 Fourth St. marks the SITE OF THE MURPHY ADOBE built in 1844 by Don Timoteo Murphy, who as alcalde held here many a baile and reception. In 1853, after Timothy Murphy's death, the county court was moved from a leaky room in the old mission to this adobe, which a progressive citizen had bought for $1,000 and sold to the county for $5,000. The old road leading from Murphy's to the freight landing of the 1850’s is now C Street.

The first local building of the DOMINICAN COLLEGE, Grand Ave. between Locust and Acacia Sts., was dedicated in 1889 on land given by Don Timoteo Murphy and William Tell Coleman. The dormitories occupy three handsome old residences, but the educational buildings are modern. In addition to grammar and high school departments, the institution offers a full college course. Since its founding in Monterey in 1850 the college has given much attention to music; many distinguished musicians have taught and lectured here. The music library has some valuable illuminated missals and a number of rare books on music. The campus covers 35 acres planted to pine and eucalyptus by Coleman, who tried to reforest the region. Forest Meadows, a part of the campus, is the setting for the Woodland Theater, an outdoor auditorium built in 1934 and used for the annual concerts.

SAN RAFAEL HILL (717 alt.), rising steeply from the north end of B St., is a municipal recreation area, the gift of Captain Robert Dollar. On the summit, which offers an unusual view, Easter sunrise services are held.

Right from San Rafael on Third St., which becomes a county road running along San Rafael Creek between the hills and marshes. Many fine country homes dot the wooded slopes. The MARIN YACHT CLUB, 1.3 m., participates in all San Francisco Bay regattas. The green marshes end in the Bay waters. Offshore about one mile are the two small MARIN ISLANDS, on one of which the Lacatuit Indian chief Marin sought refuge from the Spanish. Captured, he was baptized at San Rafael. Later his name was given to the county.

At 3.9 m. stand the three tall kiln stacks of the McNEAR BRICK WORKS, where haydite, a light concrete aggregate, is manufactured. The road continues east through hilly land owned by the McNear family, pioneer grain and cattle ranchers. The eucalypti that crown the hilltops and the Bay slopes were among 20,000 trees set out in the 1890’s.

At 5 m. is the junction with an improved road; R. here 0.5 m. to McNEAR'S BEACH (parking fee 50¢; picnic grounds; boats for hire), once McNear's Landing, which offers good bass and rock cod fishing. The beach is sheltered by the tip of San Pedro Point, westermost of two promontories marking the entrance to San Pablo Bay. An old frame hotel (L), embowered in groves of palms and eucalypti, dates from horse and buggy days.

The main side route continues north across low hills to bluffs above San Pablo Bay. In a small cove is CHINA CAMP, 6 m., where a rickety pier extends over the water (boats for hire). Chinese settled here in the 1880’s to fish for shrimp. By 1910, twelve hundred Chinese lived here, catching and drying shrimp.

From BUCKEYE POINT (boats for hire), 6.7 m., the road continues across the hills that rise abruptly from the Bay. Oak, madrone, bay, buckeye, elderberry, wild lilac, and toyon are abundant.

At 11.4 m. is the junction with US 101 (see below).

Stretches of US 101 north of San Rafael are lined with rows of eucalyptus trees, planted in the 1880’s and 189o's as windbreaks.

ST. VINCENT'S SCHOOL FOR BOYS (visitors welcome), 22.4 m. (R), occupies a group of Spanish Renaissance buildings. A Catholic orphanage, it was opened in 1855 on land deeded by Don Timoteo Murphy. The 1,800 acres of ground produce all the dairy and farm products used by the school.

The highway winds smoothly up a range of hills and down into a broad valley to the gates (R) of $7,000,000 HAMILTON FIELD (open only to citizens on official business), 23.7 m., an Army base for pursuit squadrons named for Lieutenant Lloyd Andrews Hamilton of the Seventeenth Aero Squadron, shot down in France, August, 1918. The airport, begun in 1932, covers 928 acres of drained marshland sloping imperceptibly to the Bay. It was used as a bombing base until 1940.

IGNACIO, 24.7 m. (10 alt., 135 pop.), consisting of a few gas stations and lunch counters, was named for Don Ignacio Pacheco, much-married alcalde of San Rafael, who owned a large ranch here. His horses were so admired by John C. Frémont that the American explorer is said to have kidnapped him and demanded a ransom in horses.

At 25.3 m. is the junction of State 37 with US 101. The route goes R. on State 37.

Left on US 101, in little Novato Valley, where dikes thrown up against the incursion of tides have formed green meadows planted to alfalfa and grain, is NOVATO, 2.5 m. (17 alt., 700 pop.), below the hills bordering San Pablo Bay. The town stands on the former Rancho Novato, granted to Don Fernando Feliz in 1839.

In one of the farm buildings (L) of RANCHO BURDELL (private), 5.7 m., is an adobe wall once part of the home of Camillo Ynitia, last chief of the Olompali Indians. Soon after he sold the Olompali Rancho for $5,200, Ynitia was murdered by his brother, who believed he had hidden the gold in the nearby hills. Jacob Leese, Marin County's first English-speaking settler, once owned the rancho, as did Bezaar Simmons, who built a wooden house here in 1850, and James Black, who gave his daughter the property when she married Dr. Galen Burdell.

The rich earth of PETALUMA VALLEY, 9.6 m., supports cattle ranches, fruit groves, dairies, and chicken farms.

Claiming the title of the “World's Egg Basket,” PETALUMA, 13.5 m. (15 alt., 7,983 pop.), which lies at the head of navigation on Petaluma Creek, is the center of a region whose millions of hens lay the utmost modern methods can produce. Poultry-raising here has become an industry in which laboratory experiments blaze the way to more eggs and better hens. From mechanical incubators that turn automatically their trays of eggs, thousands of chicks emerge daily from their shells, immediately to be placed on scientific diets. Along the main street of Petaluma, dominated by the white towers of a grain elevator, cluster grain and poultry equipment stores. Warehouses, factories, and wholesale houses line the creek east of the business section.

In 1834 Petaluma was a sleepy Mexican village within the boundaries of the Rancho Petaluma (see below), which took its name from an early Miwok Indian village. After 1840 the fertile valley experienced a general invasion of settlers. By 1852, Yankees dominated the village. They continued to raise grain, built a flour mill, and shipped their produce down the creek to San Francisco. For nearly a half-century wheat, lumber, wool, bricks, and basalt blocks were carried by a fleet of thirty odd schooners.

The poultry industry, long Petaluma's foremost, began in 1878 when a young Canadian, Lyman C. Byce, coming here in search of health, saw that this region with its even climate, sandy soil, and marketing facilities was admirably suited for chicken-raising. An inventive genius, Byce began manufacturing incubators and brooders, which are today widely used. Connected with poultry-raising are most of the town's industries: feed mills, commercial hatcheries, egg- and poultry-packing plants, box factories, incubator and brooder factories. Since subdivision of the large wheat ranches, dairying has also become an important occupation.

Largest electrically operated hatchery in the world, the SALES AND BOURKE HATCHERY (visitors welcome), 701 Seventh St., occupies a group of red brick buildings. Equipped with thermostatic controls, the incubators rotate their eggs every four hours during the twenty-one day incubation period. In a year approximately two million white Leghorns, a half-million heavy breeds, and a quarter-million turkeys are hatched.

Probably the only drugstore in the world devoted solely to medicines for ailing chickens is the CHICKEN PHARMACY, 176 Main St. The POULTRY PATHOLOGICAL LABORATORY, 627 F St., is maintained by the University of California under the Division of Animal Husbandry.

Only silk mill west of the Mississippi River is the BELDING THREAD SILK MILL, Wilson and Jefferson Sts., occupying ivy-covered red brick buildings.

Right from Petaluma on Washington Street 2.8 m. to a junction with a paved road; R. here to what was General Mariano Vallejo's Casa GRANDE (caretaker) 4.4 m., built in 1833-34. When Vallejo stood on the broad second-story balcony, his eyes could see no land that was not his own, for the great house was headquarters for his 75,000-acre Rancho Petaluma. The white plaster on the adobe walls is cracked and crumbling in spots, and a shingled roof has replaced the original tiles; but the massive walls are the same that Vallejo's Kanaka workmen put together, and the original beams of hand-hewn redwood support ceilings and balconies. The rear wing has been destroyed. In the inner courtyard formed by the four great walls, Vallejo's two thousand Indians gathered to hear his orders.

On US 101 at 21.5 m. is COTATI (113 alt., 1,000 pop.), founded on land Once part of 17,000-acre Rancho Cotati, whose owner, Captain Juan Castaneda, gave up his claim in 1849 to the district's American sheriff, Dr. Thomas S. Page. The sheriff's son, Wilfred Page, laid out the town around a hexagonal plaza, from which the streets radiate in a spider-web pattern. When asked why he had not used simple squares and straight lines in the great expanse of land, Page replied, “Any fool can plant that and come out right, but it takes brains to start on angles and have your plans click.”

SANTA ROSA, 29.9 m. (160 alt., 12,547 pop.), seat of Sonoma County, is an attractive, prosperous city at the base of the Sonoma Mountain on the eastern edge of a rich alluvial valley. In 1829 Father Juan Amores, on a missionary expedition from San Rafael, named the valley and creek for Saint Rose of Lima but the Indians prevented him from establishing a mission. In 1833, Mariano Vallejo tried to begin a settlement here, but abandoned it in favor of Sonoma. The town was not founded until several years after the discovery of gold, when the Argonauts turned to farming. Almost immediately the enterprising community asked to be made county seat (then Sonoma); they received the honor in 1854.

The earthquake of 1906 wrecked Santa Rosa's entire business district with a loss of forty lives, but the town was rebuilt and has continued to keep pace with the subdivision of the surrounding agricultural lands. Local industries include fruit processing, large-scale manufacturing of ice for refrigerator cars, egg-packing, and the manufacture of shoes.

On the tract which for fifty years was an experimental farm of Luther Burbank (1849-1926), who arrived in Santa Rosa in 1875, are the one-and-one-half-acre BURBANK MEMORIAL GARDENS, Santa Rosa Ave. and Tupper St. Property of the Santa Rosa Junior College botany department, the gardens contain a great variety of plants, including many Burbank discoveries. Under an enormous cedar of Lebanon grown from a seed sent from the Holy Land, Burbank is buried.

While a young man, Burbank accidentally discovered the potato named for him on his Massachusetts truck-farm. With the $150 he received for his discovery and ten of the new Burbank potatoes, he followed his brothers to California. Soon he began the experiments with plants destined to add hundreds of new varieties of vegetables, flowers, and fruits to nursery and seed catalogues. He believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and that these acquired characteristics could be fixed, or be made permanent. Among his best-known hybrids are the spineless cactus; Burbank potato; Gold, Wick-son, American, and Climax plums; Splendor and Sugar prunes; and many improved varieties of quinces, berries, and vegetables. His Shasta and Alaska daisies; “crimson flame” and softly colored single and double California poppies; roses; callas; gladioli; dahlias; and many improved flowering shrubs have added color and fragrance to gardens all over the world.

The slim-spired white FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH, B St. between Fifth and Sixth Sts., was built in 1873 of lumber cut from a single redwood tree. Sufficient lumber remained of the same tree to build a five-room residence.

The side route continues L. from Santa Rosa on Sebastopol Avenue (State 12).

In the heart of a countryside which flowers with acres of fruit blossoms in spring is SEBASTOPOL, 37.8 m. (68 alt., 1,853 pop.), center of Gravenstein apple and cherry orchards. J. H. P. Morris named the town Pine Grove when he founded it in 1853 on the site of the adobe house of Joaquin Carillo's Rancho Llano de Santa Rosa (Plain of St. Rose). Two years later a local feud ended in a street battle in which one participant barricaded himself in a store. Enthusiastic spectators, recalling the Crimean city of Sebastopol, then in a state of seige, immediately adopted its name, first for the store, then for the town.

Left from Sebastopol on Gravenstein Highway 0.6 m. to the SONOMA BUDDHIST TEMPLE, ENMAN-JI, which was shipped from Japan for exhibit in the South Manchurian Railway display at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 and afterwards dismantled and erected here. In authentic Kamakura style, the building has a green pagoda roof, bell-shaped windows, and stucco walls.

North of Sebastopol State 12 runs through orchard lands and vineyards, skirting the western edge of a rich hop-growing region, to the shores of the RUSSIAN RIVER, 51.8 m. a vacation area for as many as one hundred and fifty thousand persons annually. Rising in Mendocino County, the stream cuts directly across the Coast Range. In this part of its course the river's meanderings have created a string of beaches covered with yellow sand. The Russians named the river Slavianka (Slavic) when they penetrated the fertile region in 1812 and began trapping for furs along the stream. The Americans, who followed, logged the area, built lumber mills, and farmed the cleared land.

The population of GUERNEVILLE, 52 m. (52 alt., 800 pop.), swells in the summer to seven thousand, filling resort cottages, cabins, and camp-grounds. The town occupies a wide river meadow encircled by mountains, edged by firs and redwoods. The business street is lined with one-story, false-front buildings and old wooden sidewalks. The town took its name from George C. Guerne, who with Harmon G. Heald erected the region's first sawmill in 1865.

Right from Guerneville on a paved road 2.8 m. to 400-acre ARMSTRONG WOODS STATE PARK (camping and picnicking). Here, deep among a fine stand of redwoods, is the ARMSTRONG FOREST THEATRE, whose redwood log benches seat 1,800.

State 12 continues to the junction with a paved road 57 m.; L. here across the river is MONTE RIO, 0.2 m. (41 alt., 500 pop.), at the foot of steep hills whose slopes are covered with summer homes and resort hotels. The side route goes L. from Monte Rio to BOHEMIAN GROVE (visits by special permission), 1.1 m. the 2,437-acre redwood grove of San Francisco's Bohemian Club. Here, in an outdoor theater whose log seats accommodate 1,200, the club since 1878 has held its annual stag Hi Jinks, staging its Grove Play against a natural background of great trees. During a two-week encampment, some six hundred men “rough it” in tents or cabins, eat in the open air, tell tall tales around a campfire, and attend a music-drama written and played by fellow members.

The main side route follows State 12 west from Guerneville along the north bank of the Russian River to a junction with State I, 65.6 m.

BLACK POINT, 28.4 m. (8 alt., 125 pop.), a railroad shipping point for dairy products, lies in a corner where the hills come down to the marshes. The dark appearance of the wooded point projecting into San Pablo Bay suggested the name.

A bascule drawbridge operated by electricity crosses PETALUM, A CREEK, 28.6 m. Barges and river boats use this waterway to Petaluma (see above), and pleasure craft sail here on week-end excursions.

Hills and meadows are left behind as State 37 enters a region of strong winds and wide horizons. Tules are the chief growth in these sloughs, creeks, and tidal lagoons where wild ducks are abundant in the late autumn.

At 32.9 m. is the junction with Sears Point Road, on which the route goes R.

Left on State 37, which leaves green sloughs where red-winged blackbirds wheel and follows the base of low foothills on which sheep and cattle graze.

The embarcadero (landing place) on Sonoma Creek at the site of SHELL-VILLE, 7.4 m. (10 alt., 84 pop.), once piled high with merchandise bound to and from Sonoma, was first named Saint Louis by early Missouri settlers. It was renamed for Theodor Schell, one of the promoters of the Sonoma Valley Prismoidal Railway in 1875, who bought 1,400 acres here in 1860.

The route goes L. from Shellville on State 12 toward the Sonoma Mountains, past the wide orchards and old ranch houses of Sonoma Valley.

At 9.2 m. is a junction with oil-surfaced Petaluma Road; L. here 1.3 m. to a junction with a dirt road; R. here to the entrance of the Coblentz Ranch (private), 2.2 m. About a half-mile from the road, almost hidden by masses of venerable trees (L), are the stone walls and blue-green roof of TEMELEC HALL, built by Bear Flag revolutionist Captain Granville Perry Swift, once the finest private house north of San Francisco. The south wing is said to have been built as early as 1849 by General Persifor Frazer Smith, military governor of California, who sold the 12,000-acre ranch to Swift, a newly rich miner. First and second floors of the 20-room house are surrounded on three sides by colonnaded balconies and the roof is topped by a small gazebo. The massive stone wall in the rear, which once continued around the house and joined the reservoir on the north, was an excellent defense against marauding Indians or bandits. Just south of it were adobe quarters for 40 Indian servants,. At each side of the formal gardens of the front terrace—where cypress, acacia, and lemon verbena, planted by Swift, still flourish—is a tiny ornate stone summer house with high, pointed roof. The two-story stone stable, topped by a tall pigeon cote, once had an inclined driveway for carriages.

Northward from the junction with Petaluma Road through orchards and vineyards State 12 follows the wide road laid out by Mariano Vallejo.

On the east side of the valley at the base of low hills is SONOMA, 11 m. (97 alt., 1,153 pop.), which has never quite lost its leisurely Mexican air. It owes its existence to Franciscan priest Jose Altimira and soldier Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. When Governor Arguello urged Altimira in 1823 to consolidate Missions San Francisco de Asis and San Rafael and move them farther north, ostensibly for the health of the Indian neophytes, but also to check Russian colonization, the young priest came into the Sonoma Valley. Here he dedicated the “New San Francisco” before a willow altar.

The Franciscan authorities, annoyed at the young priest's temerity and impulsiveness, insisted that Missions San Rafael and San Francisco de Asis should remain where they were founded. Altimira fought back in long letters until finally he was permitted to have a mission here—the last founded and most northerly of the California missions—which was named San Francisco de Solano. Neophytes from San Jose, San Rafael, and San Francisco built a few mud-plastered wooden buildings below the billowing hills. In a few years permanent buildings of adobe were finished. Stockaded gardens and vineyards surrounded the mission and small herds of cattle, sheep, and horses roamed the valley. When a chief of the local Chocuy-on Indians was baptised “Sonoma,” the pleasant name was adopted for the valley and the town that grew up around the mission.

In 1835, the missions having been secularized, Governor Jose Figueroa appointed young Lieutenant Mariano Vallejo as comisionado of the Sonoma mission lands and stock and sent him to found a fortified pueblo at Sonoma. Without equipment other than his pocket compass, Vallejo laid out the town in large squares about a plaza. He fortified the hills behind the mission with a few small cannons. With the aid of Indians he built barracks surrounded with a loop-holed wall and adjoining them a palacio with a two-story castlelike tower which was regarded as one of the most pretentious residences in California. Around the dusty plaza where Vallejo put his perspiring Indian soldiers through their paces were built the homes of relatives and friends to whom were granted the broad reaches of the present valleys of Sonoma, Petaluma, Santa Rosa, and Napa.

After a few sharp skirmishes with neighboring Indians, Vallejo was able to make an alliance with Sem Yeto (the mighty arm), over-lord of many tribes, who persuaded his people to submit to the Spanish. Sem Yeto was baptized at the mission and christened Francisco Solano. (The first constitutional convention in Monterey, at Vallejo's suggestion, gave Solano's name to the county east of Napa; a statue has been erected to him in Fairfield.) Under Vallejo's paternal rule the Indians lived in a mild form of peonage.

By the middle 1840’s Sonoma already had some American residents. The Spanish eyed uneasily the newer American immigrants—and with good reason, as it appeared in 1846. The pueblo's fortifications were no handicap to 33 Yankees led by Ezekiel Merritt, who on the morning of June 14 surprised the garrison's 18 men and “captured” the defenseless commander. Under the crude banner painted with a bear and a star which they hoisted in the plaza, the rebels proclaimed the California Republic. It lasted less than a month, for on July 9, 1846, when Lieutenant Joseph Warren Revere of the U. S. Army took command, the Bear Flag was replaced by the Stars and Stripes. “At last the rag of that dirty rabble had been supplanted by the glorious flag of the United States,” wrote Senora Vallejo to the general in the calaboza at Sutter's Fort.

When Lilburn W. Boggs, former Governor of Missouri, was appointed alcalde of Sonoma by General Stephen W. Kearny, the appointment was contested by John H. Nash, Bear Flag revolutionist who had grabbed for himself the post of alcalde. Nash refused to turn over the city records. Only after Governor Richard B. Mason had dispatched Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman to seize and carry off Nash did Boggs become head of the community. After a few months Vallejo, who promised not to bear arms against the Americans, returned to Sonoma and settled down to master the difficult language of his new country and act as Indian agent for the district. Garrisoned by the Army, Sonoma quieted down.

Sonoma always has centered around its PLAZA, bounded by Napa and Spain Sts., First St. W. and First St. E. In its northeast corner is the BEAR FLAG MONUMENT, a bronze statue of a pioneer (John MacQuarrie, sculptor) holding the new flag, mounted on a 40-ton boulder of volcanic rock. In the center of the Plaza is the buff stone COURTHOUSE AND CITY HALL, which replaced in 1908 an old adobe courthouse that once housed the county seat, although a grand jury had condemned it as “not fit for a cattle shed,” When a special election in 1854 decided in favor of the lusty young town of Santa Rosa as county seat, two jubilant new officials drove a team of mules from Santa Rosa one dark night and rifled the courthouse. The county clerk is said to have prodded the mules home with his wooden leg.

The oldest building in Sonoma, the MISSION SAN FRANCISCO DE SOLANO, built in 1824, is an L-shaped adobe roofed with red tile and surmounted by a plain Latin cross. Hanging from an ivy-covered framework in front is a bell cast in Peru in 1829. After the secularization of the missions in 1835, the mission church became the parish church, but when a new church was built in 1880, it was sold. The old buildings then served as a hay-barn and a wine cellar; the patio, as a butcher's slaughter yard. A small wooden saloon crowded against the front wall of the church. For years small boys threw rocks through the crumbling walls. After long neglect the mission was purchased in 1903 by public-spirited citizens who presented it to the State. It is now a State landmark and museum.

The MISSION MUSEUM (open 10-4.) contains early California papers, portraits of pioneers, part of the Sonoma flagstaff, timbers and millstone from Sonoma's first gristmill, Indian baskets shownig beaded and feathered work of the Pomo, long handwrought iron hinges from Fort Ross, and timbers from the ship Ocean Hero, which was towed to Lakeville and there sunk to serve as an embarcadero.

The BLUE WING HOTEL, 217 E. Spain St., is an adobe building 100 feet long whose second-story balcony extending over the sidewalk, similar to one in the rear, is supported by octagonal redwood posts rising to the roof. The original 12-light windows, open beams and wooden ceiling, and handmade doors with ogee mouldings are well preserved. The museum (open 2-4-y adm. lo¢), formerly the hotel bar, contains a gold scale once used in a store across the street, a music box that tinkles “Linger Longer Lou”, a small red altar from the local Chinese joss house, and a long quartermaster's account with John C. Fremont covering the disbursement of $1,242 in small sums. Sonoma's man-power fire engine is flanked by an automobile bought by Luther Burbank in 1915. The collection also includes General Persifor Smith's medicine cabinet and the walnut desk used by Frank Soule while writing The Annals of San Francisco.

Its wide verandah facing the Plaza, the old MEXICAN BARRACKS, Spain St. and First St. E., which cost Vallejo $9,000 of his private funds, is a two-story structure built in 1836 of adobe and hand-hewn redwood timbers hauled to the site by oxteam. Used as headquarters for Vallejo's Mexican soldiers and as a munition depot, it was later garrisoned by the Bear Flag rebels and finally by United States officers.

The EL DORADO HOTEL, 145 First St. W, erected in 1846 by General Vallejo's brother, Captain Salvador Vallejo, became a famous California hostelry. The original building is hidden by ugly modern additions except on the north side, where appear the old 42-inch-thick adobe walls. The frame second story has a balcony supported by wooden posts.

The SALVADOR VALLEJO ADOBE (private), adjoining the El Dorado Hotel on the south, is a two-story adobe of nice proportions. A row of tall posts rises from the sidewalk to the second-floor roof, which extends over a shallow balcony reached from inside through French doors. Although he had ranchos, vineyards, horses, and cattle, Salvador Vallejo became so financially involved that in 1853 all his personal belongings were attached: even the gold epaulets from his Mexican uniform and such trifles as brandied peaches and feather fans.

Painted in dull red and yellow is the FITCH HOUSE (private), 347 First St. W., a two-story adobe with a cantilevered balcony extending over the sidewalk. Built in 1836 by Jacob Leese for Henry D, Fitch, Vallejo's brother-in-law, it boasted the first fireplace in the county. General Persifer Smith made his headquarters here. In the 1850’s, St. Mary's Hall, an Episcopalian boarding school for young ladies, occupied the building.

The two-story RAY HOUSE (private), E. Spain St. and Second St. E., is a long rectangular adobe and frame structure, the small wooden portion of which was built in 1846 and supplemented four years later with a large adobe addition. The two sides facing the streets are surrounded by rows of redwood posts supporting an open-raftered, low-pitched roof extending eight feet beyond the walls. American Army officers were quartered here in the 1840’s and 1850’s. Later the building housed the first Masonic organization in the county.

In the northwestern part of town, at the end of a tree-shaded lane opening off W. Spain St., is the VALLEJO HISTORICAL STATE MONUMENT, Vallejo's $150,000 estate, Lachryma Montis (Lat., tear of the mountain), established in 1851. The family home, a two-story yellow house in “American Gothic” style, has a high pitched roof with many gables decorated with elaborate jig-saw tracery. Vallejo's 13th child, Seora Luisa Vallejo Emparan, the last of his immediate family, has a life tenancy of her old home. The whip-sawed house timbers were hauled here by oxteam.

The SWISS CHALET (open 10-4), now a museum, is a two-story half-timbered house with the second floor overhanging. The original frame and bracing timbers were shipped around the Horn from Switzerland, numbered for assembly. The enclosing walls are of a soft rose-colored brick. In a recent restoration many of the original oak timbers were replaced with redwood and the whole building set upon a foundation of concrete. The building was used as a store house and as Indian servants’ quarters. On the long dining table used by Vallejo and his family of 16 children stand two globes made in 1823, one of the world and one of the skies. In the cases are the sword and uniform the General wore when Mexican Comandante-General; his elaborately embroidered christening robe; the silk-lined, enameled jewel case which, with a set of jewelry, was a wedding present to Señora Vallejo; and a charming daguerreotype of the side-whiskered general surrounded by six pretty ringletted, hoop-skirted daughters and granddaughters.

In SONOMA CEMETERY, at the northern end of W. First St., is the grave of General Vallejo (1808-90) and his wife, Francisca Benicia Carrillo de Vallejo (1816-91), marked by a black granite monument.

State 12 goes west from Sonoma on West Napa Street to the junction with a paved road, 12 m., where it turns R.

BOYES SPRINGS, 13.7 m. (150 alt, 400 pop.), long a vacation center, was settled in 1883 by Captain Henry Ernest Boyes, who had come to California from England. Boyes and his wife heard stories of the old hot mineral springs used by the Indians and investigated—the captain digging and Mrs. Boyes hoisting the bucket. Located here are BOYES HOT SPRINGS (mineral water plunge; dancing; lunch counter).

The SONOMA MISSION INN (tennis courts, saddle horses, swimming pool) occupies a large white concrete building with the twin towers, rounded arches, and tiled roofs typical of the California missions.

FETTER'S SPRINGS, 14.1 m., were developed about 1907 on the 100-acre ranch of Mr. and Mrs. George Fetter, who built a hotel there. This resort and AGUA CALIENTE, 14.6 m. (75 alt., 415 pop.), are open throughout the year.

HOOKER'S MONUMENT (L), 15.2 m., boulder bearing a bronze tablet dedicated to Colonel “Fighting Joe” Hooker of Civil War fame, stands on the edge of the 550 acres which he acquired in 1851, during a two-year leave from the Army, with the thought of becoming a “Southern planter of California.” In a clump of oaks 350 yards west is the snug little four-room clapboard HOOKER HOUSE, the timbers of which were cut in Norway and shipped ‘round the Horn.

Adjoining is the GEORGE WATRESS HOUSE, a two-story stone and timber building built in 1853 by Hooker's successor on the ranch. Watress, former proprietor of the Astor House in New York, arrived in San Francisco in 1851 and became proprietor of a hotel before moving to Sonoma Valley.

State 12 winds through low, chaparral-covered foothills drained by Calabazas (pumpkin) Creek.

At 18.3 m. is the junction with a paved road, on which the route goes L. to GLEN ELLEN, 19.3 m. (227 alt., 220 pop.), shaded by tall trees that grow along Sonoma Creek, once a railroad terminal and a fashionable summer resort. It has long been famous for its wine grapes. The JACK LONDON MEMORIAL LIBRARY AND COMMUNITY CENTER (L) was built by the Glen Ellen Women's Club and other admirers of the novelist.

The route goes R. from Glen Ellen on a paved road to the entrance to the JACK LONDON RANCH (accommodations; saddle horses), 19.7 m. A private road winds up to the ranch houses—the old Kohler and Frohling winery buildings that London purchased for headquarters and the stone house built by Charmian London after her husband's death. Except for occasional trips, one of which was described in The Cruise of the Snark, Jack London lived here from 1904 until his death in November, 1916.

The ranch, eventually 1,400 acres in extent, did not occupy a great deal of the author's time—cultivation, experimentation and stock breeding being left to employees, many of whom were paroled convicts. London wrote in the mornings, 1,000 words being a day's work. His income, ultimately $40,000 annually, enabled him to be very hospitable.

Some distance from the main buildings, the ruins of WOLF HOUSE stand among charred redwoods. This building, a three-story structure built of rock quarried in the Sonoma hills, had been planned by London as his ideal home, but before he could move in, the place was destroyed by fire of unknown origin. An unmarked boulder not far from the ruins cover London's ashes.

The route goes east on Sears Point Road, a lonely stretch of highway, across marshlands, past sloughs and lagoons to the junction with a paved county road, 42.7 ra., on which it goes R,

At 43.7 m., on the outskirts of Vallejo (see below), is the junction with Tennessee Street.

Right here over a causeway 0.9 m. to MARE ISLAND NAVY YARD (usually open 9-4:30 daily, subject to special restrictions; cameras checked), at the southern end of a narrow 3,000-acre peninsula flanked by the Bay on the west and the channel of the Napa River on the east. Here are shipyards, drydocks, machine shops, warehouses, barracks, officers’ quarters, a radio station, and a naval hospital. In 1851 President Millard Fillmore set aside Mare Island for a Navy dock; four years later Captain (later Admiral) David G. Farragut became commandant. Before Farragut's arrival a floating drydock built in New York had been shipped around the Horn and reassembled here. First vessel to be repaired was the Pacific, in 1853. The first stone drydock, 507 feet long, constructed in the 1870’s, is still in use; a second, 740 feet long and able to hold any Navy vessel, was built in 1919. The keel of the first ship built, the wooden tug Lively, was laid in 1869. Here during the World War the U. S. S. Ward was constructed completely in 17 days, and the U. S. S. California, then the Nation's deepest draft battleship, was launched.

The work of more than 7,000 civilian employees and about 1,200 Navy men is directed from the MARE ISLAND ADMINISTRATION BUILDINGS, 1.9 m. In the office of the commandant is Farragut's Log, a record of the duties performed here in the 1850’s by Farragut.

Across from the Administration Buildings, in Alden Park, is the FIGUREHEAD OF THE U. S. S. INDEPENDENCE, all that remains of the famous old wooden battleship, which after more than 100 years’ active service was broken up at Mare Island. Among an array of captured guns, is the ANCHOR OF H. M. S. CENTURIAN, from the British ship which was lost in 1742 at Robinson Crusoe's Island. The anchor is ten feet long and its irregular lines and flukes show long years of use.

From the San Carlos, De Ayala sighted the peninsula in 1775 and called it Isla Plana (flat island). In the 1830’s the property was granted by Governor Juan Alvarado to Victor Castro, who sold it about 1850 to Bezar Simmons and John Frisbee (a son-in-law of Mariano Vallejo, who at one time claimed the island). The Government was for many years involved in litigation proceedings with several claimants. It is believed that the island first was called La Isla de la Yegua (the island of the Mare) because General Mariano G. Vallejo found grazing there a prized mare lost when a ferry overturned with a load of livestock in Carquinez Strait.

VALLEJO, 42.5 m. (10 alt., 19,747 pop.), a hilly city of treeless residential streets and old-fashioned business blocks, is located at the confluence of the Napa River and San Pablo Bay. The first mention of the town reveals that in 1817 a group of Spanish soldiers led by Lieutenant Jose Sanchez engaged a band of Suisun Indians headed by Chief Malica near Vallejo's site. Sanchez emerged victorious after a short skirmish but the chief retired to his wickiup. When the invaders aproached he set fire to it, burning himself to death.

In April, 1850, General Mariano Vallejo donated 166 acres of land for a town site and promised $370,000 for the construction of a State Capitol. Two years later the capital was transferred here from San Jose. The State legislature met in a hastily erected building but, dissatisfied with their accommodations, abandoned it within a week.

Three brothers, Levi, John, and Eleazer Frisbie, played important roles in the history of Vallejo. Levi and John laid out the city in 1851. John, builder of the California Pacific Railroad and manager of Vallejo's great estate, had left the Army in 1848. Levi married Doña Adela Vallejo, said to have been the most beautiful of the General's daughters. Eleazer was appointed first postmaster of Vallejo and later Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court.

Captain Frank Marryat described Vallejo in the 1850’s as “a few scrubby-looking hills that bordered on the bay…” A store-ship laden with corrugated iron plates for the construction of houses had sunk at her Vallejo moorings. When Marryat raised her and found the cargo unfit for sale in San Francisco, he used the tide to clean the cargo stacked on the beach and soon was able to erect “a very handsome hotel” out of the salvage. When the legislature returned to Vallejo, only to abandon it a second time, Marryat reported that “the city made to order was then pulled down and sold for old materials…”

Having twice lost the capital, the city played for smaller stakes in 1873 when it attempted to take the county seat from Fairfield. Vallejo won in a special election, but Fairfield brought a special suit enjoining the action. After a bill was introduced into the legislature whose passage would divide Solano County so that Vallejo should be separated from it—making her a county seat with no county outside her own confines—Vallejo immediately capitulated and Fairfield retained the county seat.

The industries of Vallejo, located along the water front and on the outskirts of the city, include a brick and tile factory, oil and sugar refineries, a smelter, a die-casting company, and a flour mill. Much of its patronage and not a few of its residents come from Mare Island (see above).

The SITE OF THE SECOND STATE CAPITOL BUILDING, Santa Clara and York Sts., is marked by a bronze plaque.

On Sacramento St. near York St. is the RICHARDS RESIDENCE, a two-story structure built of redwood in the early 1850’s by C. B. Richards, first harness maker in Vallejo. Its lower and upper verandahs are supported by columns of redwood, and the original green shutters still hang at the windows.

Facing Mare Island at the foot of Carolina St. is the VALLEJO YACHT CLUB, a two-story structure topped by a square lookout tower. Often docked here is the three-masted schooner, California, once representative of the club in the San Francisco-Honolulu race. This clubhouse for more than 35 years has been the goal for yacht races from parts of the Bay region.

Left from Vallejo on State 29, between the Napa River and the Sulphur Springs Mountains, to the entrance (R) to NAPA STATE HOSPITAL for insane persons and alcoholics (visiting hours: relatives daily, 9-11, 2-4; public Mon., Wed., Fri., 9-11), 12.1 m. At the end of a wide driveway, flanked by dormitories (L) and cottages (R) and bordered by large magnolia trees, is the main building, built in 1873, a four-story stone building in Gothic style. Its red roof, tweaked up into dormers over attic windows, breaks into a square central tower and round conical towers on each corner. The Gothic idea is so omnipresent that the tortoise, a Gothic emblem, is carved on beams within the building. The gray granite entrance portico is adorned with niches in which are white marble statutes symbolic of various virtues. Opened in 1875 with a capacity of 500, the asylum was full by the end of the year. A program of enlargement which has not yet ended was undertaken. By June, 1938 the State had expended more than $4,000,000 here.

In the same year, 3,605 patients, 29.3 per cent in excess of normal capacity, were cared for by 448 officers and employees. In addition to medical care and exercises, occupational therapy and entertainment are provided. A 426-acre farm is stocked with cattle, hogs, and poultry. The truck farms and orchard supply many of the institutions needs.

North on State 29, the well-preserved one-story JUAREZ ADOBE, 13.6 m., built in 1845 (now occupied by a bar and dance floor), was the second of the Juarez adobes on Rancho Tulucay. About 90 feet long, it has walls between two and three feet thick, with deep window embrasures, built of adobe bricks covered with plaster. An earlier adobe in the rear built in 1840 is in ruins. Bricks have tumbled from the walls, revealing the chopped straw used as a binder for the mud. Most of the roof has vanished, but some of the hand-split redwood shakes rest on the huge beams.

NAPA, 14.6 m. (24 alt., 7,718 pop.), seat of Napa County, covers the flat lands around the head of navigation on Napa River and the low hills to the east. Napa River, one of the few naturally navigable streams in California, is joined here by Napa Creek, which flows through the town from the west. The business district extends for several blocks west from the river. Old-fashioned stone, brick, and wood structures give the streets the atmosphere of the 1870’s and 1880’s but the store fronts are modern and retail shops are busy serving the needs of farmers and town folk.

The Indians called the place Nappo. That they had long lived here was shown when street graders at Franklin and Laurel Streets cut into a burial ground where almost a hundred skeletons, with mortars, pestles, and other artifacts, were found. When settlers came into the valley, the Indians moved their brush shelters to the hills or to the edges of ranches where they could find work. John Bidwell's diary of 1842 says: “Wheat, Corn, and Potatoes are seldom surrounded by a fence, they grow out on the plains and are guarded from the cattle and horses by the Indians, who are stationed in their huts near the fields. You can employ any number of Indians by giving them a lump of Beef every week and paying them about one dollar for same.” In 1856, when Napa was a sizeable town, one historian said that the Indians “made the night ring with their revelry…and when they could secure the means got dead drunk.”

In 1836 Nicolas Higuera, one-time soldier at the San Francisco Presidio, received Rancho Entre Napa to the southwest of the present town. Near the river, he built a house of wicker plastered with mud and thatched with tule grass. Cayento Juarez, who brought in stock the next year, received in 1840 Rancho Tulucay, a two-square-league section east of the river on which he built an adobe (see above). Salvador Vallejo, brother of the General, received Rancho Napa, some 3,000 acres northwest of the town, in 1838 and stocked it with cattle.

First commerce in this country was conducted by “Boston” launches which visited ranchos around the Bay to trade for hides and tallow. In 1841, young John Rose and John C. Davis launched a schooner about the size of a whale boat near the present First Street. John A. Sutter sailed the little Sacramento up the river in 1844, loaded with settlers bound for the fertile valley lands. One of them, Bartlett Vines, later married a daughter of George C. Yount and became the father of Napa County's first American baby. Sutter's return cargo was lime, which he bought from Higuera.

When Higuera gave Nathan Coombs 80 acres in payment for work on the former's new adobe house in 1848, Coombs had a surveyor stake out a town-site. Harrison Pierce bought a load of lumber from Bale and Kilburn's mill on Napa River and began work on a small building, which he intended for a saloon. When Coombs and Higuera came to look it over, they found it right in the middle of the proposed Third Street. Deciding that Mr. Pierce must have been sampling his own wares too generously, they insisted that he move the building out of the street on to his lot. Pierce barely got the roof on his building when gold was discovered. He spent the summer at the mines, but when snow fell in the mountains he came back and opened the Empire Saloon, where he served square meals of beef, hard bread, and coffee for $1.00. A man named Thompson built a store that year, and General Vallejo and General Frisbie opened a second in 1849. After 1850 steamboats churned the water between Napa and San Francisco. First of these was the little Dolphin, fitted with a locomotive boiler. It was said that she had to be “trimmed” by shifting the passengers and that her tall captain, F. G. Baxter, was always sighted long before the stack. The second steamer was the Jack Hayes, brought around the Horn in pieces and assembled at Benicia. Soon boats were carrying not only passengers but the lumber, cattle, and wheat of the surrounding ranches.

The 1850’s were roistering days for Napa, for miners found it a good town to winter in. Coin of the realm included gold dust, foreign coins, and the five- to fifty-dollar gold slugs made in San Francisco. By 1854, 400 people lived here. A subscription was taken up in 1855 and the first public school in the valley opened. A small newspaper, the Napa County Reporter, appeared on the streets on the Fourth of July, 1856; it was known as a tri-weekly, because after it appeared one week, the publisher spent all of the second week trying to get out the next issue, which would then appear the third week. A new City Hall was built in 1856. A silver boom in the mountains around the valley emptied the town in 1859; one man said, “If they can find silver in Washoe, why not in Napa.” Promoters hastily issued and sold stock, but the bubble burst when assays proved the ore to be low in value, and hotel and saloon keepers emptied bulky specimens into the streets “making quite a contribution of paving material to the streets of Napa.” These streets were quagmires of muck where bundles of straw were thrown to make paths, and woe “to the unlucky wight who had too much ‘tangle-foot’ aboard, for a single misstep would send him in mud to his waist.” In summer, when the dirt was ground into deep ruts by wagons, they were “canopied with intolerable clouds of dust through which people floundered over a strange mosaic of rubbish, cast-off clothing, empty bottles and sardine cans.”

But in the 1860’s the first shacks of adobe and split wood were being replaced by more substantial buildings, the citizens trod on wooden plank sidewalks, and bridges spanned the river so that it was not necessary to go to the ford north of town or to take the ferry to get to the other side. In 1865 Napa celebrated the completion of a railroad to Suscol; free rides were given to anyone who “wanted to embrace the opportunity.” “Pony,” the diminutive, wood-burning engine, was succeeded by the magnificent $9,000 “Napa City,” with a four and one-half foot drive wheel. In 1868 the road was continued to Calistoga, where Samuel Brannan feasted the first train load of passengers.

The town's later growth, based on the productiveness of the surrounding country, has been steady though not spectacular. Its products include gloves, athletic equipment, shirts and pants, and basalt paving and building materials.

Surrounded by green lawns and tall elms, the NAPA COUNTY COURTHOUSE, Second, Third, Coombs, and Brown Sts., was built in 1878, replacing a courthouse erected in 1856. The gray, cement-covered brick building has a tower of the most unexpected contours. George Dyer observes that it “might have been brought from the Kremlin, Moorish windows, turnip top and all.”

The NAPA HOTEL, First and Main Sts., oldest building in town, a three-story crenellated structure, has been extensively remodeled since it was built in 1851 by James Harbin.

TULUCAY CEMETERY, on the hills east of Napa on Third St., was opened on land given by Cayetano Juarez in 1858. Many plots are outlined in native stone and names of early families are commemorated in handsome large mausoleums of warm-colored stone. Huge eucalyptus trees shadow the graves and coveys of grey quail mince along the paths.

The route continues east from Vallejo on Georgia Street, which becomes Benicia Road.

SOUTHAMPTON BAY, 50.9 m., on Carquinez Strait, is remembered as the site of the Corbett-Choynski prizefight; here on the grain barge Excell the celebrated bloody ring battle was fought June 6, 1889. The fight began at seven in the morning and lasted an hour and forty minutes—until a swig of brandy failed to revive Choynski in the 27th round. Corbett wore three-ounce gloves; Choynski, driving gloves. A sports writer described the opening of the fifth round: “Choynski came up in a rollicking way and did some good work but the professor quickly scored a flush hit with a left on his nose that brought the blood in a deluge.”

Where the western end of Suisun Bay narrows to form Carquinez Strait lies BENICIA, 52.7 m. (10 alt., 2,913 pop.), a quiet little town whose past is of greater interest than its present. Benicia's founder was Dr. Robert Semple, a lean, hardy Missourian six feet, eight inches tall, who gave the impression of even greater size in his coonskin cap and loosely-fitting buckskin hunting jacket. (According to local legend, he wore his spurs on the calves of his legs when horseback riding and waded Carquinez Strait when the ferry was late.) Semple came to the Bay region from Monterey, where in 1846 he had established California's first newspaper, the Californian (see Social Heritage: Gentlemen of the Press). He had been a member of the group, who, after the Bear Flag rebellion, had taken General Mariano Vallejo as a prisoner to Sutter's Fort. Quick to note the advantages Benicia's site offered for a thriving metropolis, he had persuaded Vallejo to deed him five square miles of the Suscol Rancho.

Thomas O. Larkin, the American Consul in California, became a partner with Vallejo and Semple when the transfer of the land was concluded in the autumn of 1846. The town laid out the following year was called Francisca, in honor of Vallejo's wife; because of its similarity with the name San Francisco, Señora Vallejo's middle name, Benicia, later was adopted.

The fickle legislature, which had been dividing its attention among San Jose, Sacramento, and Vallejo, made Benicia the State capital in February, 1853. Unfortunately for the town's elaborate civic plans, the legislators abandoned it for Sacramento a year later. A visitor of that forlorn time wrote of Benicia: “…instead of raising an imposing front in evidence of man's progress, it hides its diminutive head among the few huts that stand in commemoration of its failure.”

Between 1853 and 1868 a steamer ferry, the lone, owned by Semple, operated between Benicia and Martinez, across the strait. Each of her two engines controlled a paddle-wheel, and since the two frequently became asynchronized, the little boat would reel around in drunken circles. At such moments the swift current would add considerably to the skipper's navigating problems.

The largest wooden dry dock ever constructed on the Pacific Coast was built in the shipyard of Captain Matthew Turner in 1895 for a San Francisco company. Today Benicia's chief industry is the canning of meat, fish, and vegetables. Also located here is a large factory that manufactures gold dredges.

The PACIFIC MAIL DOCKS, east of the Benicia-Martinez Ferry Slip, were built when the Pacific Mail Steamship Company established its California headquarters in Benicia. By 1853 they had constructed great wharves, foundries, and machine shops. The company's great early steamers California, Oregon, and Panama berthed in Benicia between trips for repairs and refueling. After 1881 the company could no longer compete with overland railroad transportation, and the property was sold.

At the lower end of First St. a marker indicates the SITE OF JACK LONDON'S HANGOUT (Jorgenson's Saloon), where the future novelist spent much of his time during the adventurous days of 1892-93 when he was an officer on the fish patrol. London lived on a water-front barge; to his seafaring intimates he was “Curley-headed Jack.” His Benicia experiences are recalled in his novel, John Barleycorn.

The old STATE CAPITOL BUILDING, on the north side of G St., now the City Hall, library, and museum, a two-story brick building with a Doric portico, was built to house the State legislature, which held its second Benicia session here 1853-54. Later the building became the county courthouse and schoolhouse. The first-floor museum (open daily 9-5) houses a collection of pioneer items relating to Benicia: old lithographs of buildings and of the ships that slipped from local ways, ancient guns, a Wells Fargo safe with a secret keyhole; and the inevitable old music box that still plays lively tunes.

In the State's first MASONIC HALL, J St. west of First St., a two-story redwood buiding erected in August, 1851, the legislature met in February, 1853.

ST. PAUL'S EPISCOPAL CHURCH, First and J Sts., a large wooden Gothic structure topped by a slender spire, had cathedral status when Benicia was the see for the Diocese of Northern California. The house of the diocesan, Bishop John H. D. Wingfield, and the entrance gate to the campus are all that remain of the College of St. Augustine, which was the successor to a school founded in 1847.

In 1851 the two-story SOLANO HOUSE, First and E Sts., was built of redwood. Long the leading hotel in the region, it was host to such notable guests as Generals U. S. Grant and William T. Sherman; California Governors Bennett Riley and Frederick F. Low; John Sutter; and Colonel Silas Casey, the famous Indian fighter.

On I St. west of First St. is the marked SITE OF BENICIA SEMINARY. One of the first Protestant girls’ schools in California, the seminary was established in 1852 for several denominations by the Reverend Sylvester Woodbridge and others. Its first teachers were sent here by Governor E. Fairbanks of Vermont. The Reverend Cyrus T. Mills, who purchased the school in 1865, was the founder of the present Mills College (see OAKLAND).

In BENICIA CITY PARK, First between K and L Sts., is the SITE OF THE FIRST PROTESTANT CHURCH IN CALIFORNIA, established April 15, 1849, by the Reverend Sylvester Wood-bridge, a Presbyterian minister. The church declined and was finally closed in 1871 after controversy over adherence to the Union.

A portion of the adobe CALIFORNIA HOUSE still stands on the south side of H St., west of First St. Built by William Tustin in 1847, it became one of California's first hotels. Ex-Governor L. W. Boggs of Missouri performed Benicia's first wedding ceremony here when Frances Cooper became the wife of Dr. Robert Semple. In 1854 the building was sold to John Rueger, who turned it into a brewery.

Doña Maria Concepcion Arguello (Sister Dominica), in the years following her tragic love affair with Count Nikolai Rezanov (later romanticized by Bret Harte and Gertrude Atherton), found religious refuge in ST. CATHERINE'S CONVENT, West L St. between First and Second Sts. The original cream-colored brick building with its old dormer windows still stands. The school has expanded into modern buildings of the mission style.

A private residence on the north side of H St. between Second and Third Sts. was once the PEABODY HOSPITAL, established in 1849. Here returning gold miners were treated by Dr. W. F. Peabody, later Mayor of Benicia.

Brought around the Horn in sections in 1849, the CAPTAIN JOHN WALSH HOUSE, 117 East L St., still stands, well preserved. Walsh settled in Benicia in 1849 and became deputy collector of the then important port.

Still used by the United States Army as an ammunition depot is the BENICIA ARSENAL, north-east edge of town, established in 1851. A large stone building, in its day it was the most pretentious structure in Benicia and a social as well as a military center. The Benicia Barracks was established here in 1849.

1. At Benicia is the Benicia-Martinez Auto Ferry Slip (Car and driver 55¢, each additional passenger 10¢), from which ferries cross the strait to MARTINEZ, 2 m. (12 alt., 6,569 pop.) (see East Bay Tour 1).

2. North from Benicia on First St. 1 m. to the ROMAN CATHOLIC CEMETERY, where a simple cross marks the grave of Dona Maria Conception Arguello.