Sebastopol

The Stone Bank at Main and Bodega

In the 1950s the Bank of Sonoma County occupied a stone block building, known as the Kingsbery Building, on the corner of Main Street and Bodega Avenue.⁴ A postcard of the same corner shows cars on Main Street and the tracks of the P&SR electric railway in the foreground.⁴ An aerial photograph of Main Street from about 1940 to the 1950s picks out the Sebastopol Times newspaper, Spiller’s Harness Shop, Spooner’s Grocery, and the Starland Theater with its Blue Room Bowling Alley.⁵ The marker on the Hogan Building names the Petaluma and Santa Rosa R.R. and the year 1903, and records that the building has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.⁶

Orchards, Packinghouses, and the Graton Stop

A postcard of about 1915, taken from the western hills, shows apple orchards in the foreground and the town of Sebastopol behind them.¹ The aerial view of Main Street from the 1940s and 1950s marks the Seb. Apple Growers Union apple packinghouse, the Sebastopol Apple Growers Assn, and the Sebastopol Creamery.⁵ The Hicks House nomination records a route from Sebastopol to Forestville in 1904, with a local stop needed to handle the agricultural produce of the Graton area.³

Suffrage at Janssen’s Hall

In 1896 the suffragists Helen Hurlbut of California and Elizabeth Upham Yates spoke for the Suffrage Campaign at what was then Janssen’s Hall.² In 2022 the William G. Pomeroy Foundation and the local historical society put up a marker at the site of the former hall, in Town Square.²

Sturgeon’s Mill

In 1913 Wade Sturgeon paid $700 for 1850’s sawmill equipment from the Korbel Brothers, and from 1914 through 1923 he ran it on Coleman Valley Road.⁷ The mill was then taken apart, hauled seven miles inland on horse-drawn sleds and wagons, and put back to work in 1924 at its present site near Sebastopol.⁷ The Native Sons of the Golden West marker puts the move in 1923 and names the crew: Wade, his partners John Gonnella and Joe Donati, and Wade’s sons Ralph and Merl.⁸ In 1943 Wade sold the mill to his son Ralph and Ralph’s friend James E. Henningsen, who ran it on a handshake until 1963.⁷ The mill then sat idle for 30 years, until a 1993 reunion of former mill workers at which seven preservationists gave $100 each to begin the Sturgeon’s Mill Restoration Project.⁷ The mill held its first open house in 2003 and ran on steam again in 2007, still using most of the 1800’s steam powered equipment from the original 1913 Coleman Valley sawmill.⁷