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widow Maria Correo traveled by ox cart from san Diego to the fertile, shaded banks of santa rosa Creek near its convergence with Matanzas Creek, that's where she chose to build a ranch house of adobe brick made from soil along the creek bank completing santa Rose's first

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permanent structure. Maria creo daughter was General Bello's wife and the mexican general had good reason to set up his mother in law with a land grant and a ranch house establishing turf. In the early 1800s, Santa Rosa Valley was caught between the expansion of two world

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powers between the northernmost reaches of Spain on this continent and the expansion of the Russian Empire on the North. Both global powers conveniently ignored the much older culture they called the area. It's home, the coast miwok and southern pomo who lived at this location for thousands

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of years when the european diseases struck and the local people here had no antibodies to those diseases. The population soon started dying off, went from probably about 6000 to probably about 50. Nowadays the coast Miwok tribe, Southern pomo tribe is comprised of about 1400 people. I'm

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a descendant, Dona Maria Correo died in 1849. During the greatest migration in American history, the California gold rush California was already a U. S. Territory in a year it would become a state. Those who rushed to the santa rosa Valley founded different kind of gold and

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the people who found these valleys that were so lush that un irrigated land was obviously spectacular and if you were a dirt farmer from Missouri, you could get pretty excited about land like this. People from southern Missouri and adjacent south leaning states settled to santa rosa

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Valley. Most would be confederate sympathizers in the coming civil war. At first they planted wheat, but they quickly moved on to other crops. They experimented with all kinds of weird stuff like silk, corns and bamboo, but they ended up with fruit crop. And in 18 60

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they began to experiment with hops and hops became for 100 years the leading crop in the santa rosa Valley, powerful farmers ran early santa rosa. They had the money, they had the power, they had the land, the crops were abundant, they made fortunes And they had

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a ready market just 50 miles away. The booming city of san Francisco. The problem getting crops there 1870 actually, the railroad arrived after people have been calling for one for 20 years and when the railroad arrived, it opened the door to fruit because you could get

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it to San Francisco. That first train, the san Francisco and north pacific ran from a landing on the Petaluma river north to santa rosa. It had to have a boat, There was no way across to san Francisco or Oakland without water transportation, Santa Roses. Next train

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line came in 1888, it ran to a junction near Napa where it connected with the Central Pacific that put new york in the east in reach. The train came largely because of santa rose's first great political player, Mark Mcdonald. Friends with the Central Pacific's Big four

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on the Board of the Pacific Stock Exchange. MacDonald was a force to be reckoned with. He had chosen the route to come ride to santa rosa to his fruit sheds and his refrigerator cars that labeled santa rosa brand fruit. We're rolling out of here by 18

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88 and going all the way to new york. And this was, you know, probably the linchpin of our being a farm town through those years. The third and final train connected santa rosa to Sebastopol at Al UMA and Forest Bill. It was electric, a juice line.

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So by 1905 Santa Rosa was really the hub of the wheel. It was, it was the center of three railroads coming in and out. Mark Mcdonald didn't stop with trains and fruit. Here we are on Macdonald Avenue, one of the most beautiful streets in

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santa rosa coming up on the left to the Mcdonald mansion built by Mark Mcdonald. It's a gorgeous building. If santa rosa were a monopoly game, Mcdonald would have been the winner besides having the finest house on the finest street and being a railroads are, he owned

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the waterworks head by lake ralph teen named after his wife and he owned a trolley line that ran through the heart of town and passed his home at the same time a major italian immigration to santa rosa was taking place. They first came to work in

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the basalt quarries. One owned by Mcdonald's brother. Once the stones were in santa rosa. They were placed by the italian stonemasons and they had a great deal of respect in the community. If you wanted something built right use an italian stonemason railroad square. This holds the

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greatest concentration of assault. The buildings that were manufactured in the foothills near here, handcrafted by the italian workforce, italian families and townspeople followed the stonemasons to their new world of santa rosa. The Italians came to stay, I had one wonderful old guy tell me that he

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got off the train when he was 15 years old and he looked around and thought it was beautiful. So he says, I threw my passport into the weeds, which he was never going back. They were all about the land, they were all about working hard and

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they were the work force that shaped this community in many ways. Their story is like the Mexican immigrants today where they are the key labor force, they established thriving west side communities that continued intact for decades filled with hearty, delectable foods, wine and singing. They immediately

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put their winemaking skills to good use. But the first wines to sell in the east and in europe came from the utopian community of Fountain Grove. Fountain Grove was the province of of a very strange man named thomas Lake Harris who had founded a community called

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the brotherhood of the new life worldwide. Harris had over 1000 followers, most of whom were wealthy and most of whom turned their life savings over to thomas Lake Harris to join the community scandal drove Harris from Fountain Grove in Sonoma County. The Italians however, would stay

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to remake santa rosa in part with their own wine culture. But the irish Grace brothers were poised to do the same with beer. They started with an old brewery. My grandfather Frank P. Grace and my great uncle J. T. Grace bought that in 1897 had 10

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employees and two months later it burned down. The Grace brothers rebuilt, expanded and continued expanding. They bought land and became community leaders frank was the sheriff and coroner for Sonoma county J. T. Grace went on to be the president of the Bank of America. And the

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brewery became a mainstay of Santa Rosa. Business and Social Life well into the 1950s In 1953 they had 50 employees and they did approximately a million cases a year. They hired local people and I don't think my uncle tom ever fired anybody. Women had limited power

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in early santa rosa. But the McGaughey sisters broke the glass ceiling. The whole world was a world of men in those days. Yeah, but these three women were really remarkable. Annabelle was a doctor and her patients loved her doctor Dear. They called her doctor Dear. Her

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sister Frances was a lawyer. Her other sister Elizabeth was a pharmacist And it kind of made Santa Rosa into the feminist capital of the world right around the turn of the of the 20th century. By 1900, Santa Rosen's had many ways to entertain themselves. Buffalo Bill's

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Wild West Show came to town along with other touring spectacles. The 2000 seat Atheneum Theatre drew world class talent of every sort. The Rose carnival began, which would morph into a century plus tradition called the Rose Parade. And there were promenades around the spectacular domed courthouse.

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But santa roses, idyllic life was about to change April 18, 1906, the Mighty San Andreas fault ruptured just off San Francisco's coastline. The Pacific tectonic plate crushed northward. Santa rosa suffered greater earthquake damage than any city in the United States before or since. The devastation was

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so much worse here than it was in san Francisco. The brick buildings just crumbled in the early years there would have been fires which had destroyed the downtown area and so the city fathers had decreed before the turn of the century that that buildings would be

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built from brick. The problem was that we had our own brick yard and we got our mortar out of the creek. Both were inferior, the bricks were bad, the border was worse and and it all came apart very easily and the buildings crashed in on themselves.

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The fire devastated san Francisco. The earthquake devastated santa Rosa. Over 100 santa Rosen's died in the great quake, but the community pulled together. Santa rosa gained the title of the Plucky ist city in California. Two years later it's grand new courthouse was on its way to

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completion. This one would be reinforced with steel. The earthquake did nothing to dim. The luster of santa. Rose is most famous citizen Luther Burbank, The young man from Massachusetts Road, the Transcontinental Railroad West reaching Santa Rosa in 1875. Here he would revolutionize plant breeding upon arriving.

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He wrote home. He included a note to his mother and he said, I firmly believe from what I've seen, this is the chosen spot of all the earth. This is the chosen spot of all the earth so far as nature is concerned, as far as nature

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is concerned. And then he added, don't pass this around because if you do all the scuffs will come out here and ruin it From his four acre home and gardens in Santa Rosa And his nearby 18 acre experimental farm in Sebastopol Burbank introduced or developed more

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than 800 strains and varieties of plants, fruits, flowers, grains, grasses and vegetables. I can't explain to you how famous Burbank was in those years of the teens and the early part of the 20th century. Today's standards would probably be the Beatles Luther Burbank was referred to

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as the plant wizard. He was creating species of plants and in fact people questioned his ability and whether he was acting a little bit too much like God. Perhaps nothing illustrates his fame better than this 1915 photo at his home, he's flanked by pilgrims thomas, Edison

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and Henry ford. The captains of industry had taken a special train car from san Francisco's pan pacific exposition for the express purpose of meeting with Burbank. Burbank died in Santa Rosa at age 77 after a breathtakingly productive life. If Luther Burbank was the face of santa

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rosa frank, Doyle was its hard working muscle frank. Doyle was was the the son of the founder of the Exchange bank and he succeeded his father as the president of the bank. After the great quake, he became the first president of santa Roses Chamber of Commerce

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and he went around getting the merchants to donate land to widen the streets for the automobile, which was, was a huge thing. Doyle soon had his eye on a much larger civil works project bridging the Golden gate. Although construction wouldn't begin until 1933, Doyle called an

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important meeting about the bridge a whole decade earlier among his, a team of backers was Ernest Finley, the owner and editor of the press democrat santa Rose is dominant newspaper. When the advertising manager called over, Oh my God, you're pushing for the Golden Gate Bridge and

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advertisers are canceling. They don't want the Golden Gate Bridge and the famous Ernest Finley quote is damn. The circulation. The bridge must be built under Doyle's leadership. North Bay Counties issued bonds to pay for the entire bridge. In 1937, the bridge opened and Doyle was given

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the honor of cutting the chain that opened the bridge and also of riding in the first car to drive across the finished bridge and generally known as the father of the Golden Gate. At the same time, Doyle, Finley and Joe Grace had another project brewing. This

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story is that they sat down under an oak tree on Joe Grace's ranch up in Alexander Valley and had a cocktail and talked about bringing back the fare and they did in 1936 and the Sonoma County Fair began and has become an institution for decades. The

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fair has drawn hundreds of thousands of people yearly during its two week plus run when I was growing up. It was not possible to exist in this town without knowing that the fair was going on, but perhaps frank Doyle's finest gift to santa rosa came in

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the form of his endowment to the city's Junior College. Santa Rosa Junior College was the pride of the whole county in the 20th century. The Junior College started in 1918 using rooms of the top floor of the high school and in fact, the first dean of

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the college resigned after the first year saying that it was never going to be anything but a bump on the head of the high school. He was very wrong. The Chamber of Commerce owned over 100 acres of land on Mendocino Avenue land that was to be

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a park in memory of Luther Burbank. The great depression scuttled those plans. The current Dean Floyd Bailey convinced the chamber to sell the land to the Junior College District for $1. A bond election guaranteed the funds to start building. Meanwhile, frank Doyle, put more than half

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of the stock in the exchange bank into the Doyle Trust in order to provide scholarships to the junior college and he had no way of knowing what was gonna happen to that money. He had just exploded. Doyle's scholarship fund has been wildly successful since 1948. It's

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provided over 100 and 20,000 students over $82 million in awards. It's been a remarkable thing. It's made santa rosa Junior College into probably the best endowed two year college west of the Mississippi River. But Santa Rosa's history in the 20s and 30s wasn't just filled with

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philanthropy and rose carnivals. Santa rosa was a rough little town in a lot of ways it was bootleggers and stills and yes, there was the lynching In a building across the tracks from this train station. Popular sheriff James, Petrie and two deputies were shot and killed

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by san Francisco thugs, Locals took matters into their own hands. It was one of the last lynchings in the West. It was in 1920 as a child, I was fascinated by this ghoulish picture of the three men hanging from the tree prohibition decimated the area's grape

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vineyards and hop ranches. The gutters ran red as people like to say. The federal agents came around and made them empty their tanks. It cut the grape acreage by three quarters. It went from more than 40,000 acres at the beginning of prohibition to less than 10,000.

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When it ended, the wine industry would rise again, becoming more powerful than ever before. Since before a little santa rosa girl, Natasha Gordon became Natalie wood Hollywood has always had a love affair with santa rosa. Great directors often seem to find what they want here. Filmmaking

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in santa rosa was easy because of the welcoming nature of the residents, the variety of architecture, the variety of the surrounding landscape as well and the weather. Disney used that variety of architecture in filming Pollyanna. The Macdonald Mansion became the little girl's home. I was 11

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years old, stood right here under this eucalyptus tree and watched the filming of Pollyanna, it's quite a sight and Francis, Coppola shot key scenes of Peggy Sue got married at santa rosa High School. But if one movie cemented santa rosa's cinematic reputation, it was shadow of

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a doubt. Directed by the master of suspense. Alfred Hitchcock Santa Rosa started itself in shadow of a doubt in the 40s and it was the small, innocent town where evil visited it. Shot extensively in and around this residence on Macdonald Avenue in the classic courthouse area,

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at the old Carnegie library and around the basalt railroad station. There was a lot of goings and comings when anybody arrived on the train from san Francisco or whereabouts in the movie, this was where they got off and on the train you might think shadows. Uncle

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charlie played by joseph cotten is santa rose is most famous, fictitious charlie, you'd be wrong, it's actually this little fellow, you'll find him snoopy lucy and the other peanuts characters all over town. Why? Because his creator Charles schulz lived and worked here. A very quiet man,

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a man who was living in in part through his comic strip, I believe, I think that charlie brown in many ways was Charles schulZ. I remember as a kid, he was friends with various friends parents and he was just this man in a sweater and we

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knew he was famous, but we didn't really know that he was any more famous than any of the other figures in the town peanuts became the most popular comic strip in the world and santa rosa Schultz built the Redwood Empire ice arena next door is the

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Charles M schulz museum with his widow Jeannie and the philanthropy she extends in this community to environmental causes to Schroeder hall at the greene center. A lot of the wealth that came from his talent is being spread throughout santa rosa in a way that lasts. Colonel

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Schultz was a G. I During World War two. But long before he came to santa rosa, thousands of other G. I. S. Had preceded him. You take a town of 12,000 people, which is what was here in 1940 and send 7000 soldiers and sailors through that

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town in a period of four years and you've got tremendous change. It just can't help it. There were soldiers here two days after Pearl Harbor that they moved into the fairgrounds, santa Rosens warmly welcomed the G. I. S. At one point, women in the community were

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pledged to make 1000 cakes a week to deliver to the soldiers who were here. Of course some of the soldiers were looking for a little more than cake. Even Philly whose mother owned Lena's, which was the only nightclub in town used to say that when the

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navy was in town, there were five deep sleeping upstairs at Lena's. The dive bomber pilots had Alina special, which was a target bomb with Lena's name painted on it. So they remembered a little bit of santa rosa when they went to the front after the war,

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many of the men who had been stationed here returned to santa rosa. They wanted to live here and they loved it here. I can't tell you how many of my parents friends met during the war and decided to stay one of the G. I. S who

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didn't come back was Billy Montgomery. Billy was aboard the California in Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. He was the first santa rosen to die in the war. I'm heading west on Montgomery dr Montgomery drive. Most people don't know got its name when

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this was named for Billy Montgomery, another santa rosa sailor named Hugh Ka Ting returned to change the face of santa rosa. He was a seabee and went into the CBS and served in the pacific and came home as he liked to tell the story with his

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$60 of discharge pay in the pocket of his jeans and went back into business and started building houses outside the city limits on the fringe of the city. The flood of G. I. S coupled with the fulfilled promise of the Golden Gate Bridge lead to a

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population boom. The first day that gas rationing was lifted, there was more traffic across the Golden Gate Bridge than they had predicted 10 years in a hints coatings homes and shopping center flanked the street named in honor of fallen Billy Montgomery, hence the name Montgomery village.

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Montgomery village shopping center, totally conceived of and built by Hugh cottage In 1955, the city of Santa Rosa annexed Montgomery village. We had a growth explosion which was from 17,000 residents to 31,000 in one day and that was with Hugh Cott Ing's edition of Montgomery Village.

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The growth meant the need for a new high school. We had Montgomery village and we had Montgomery drive, but a further tribute to billy Montgomery was the building of Montgomery high school. The Rose Parade and the fair were stronger than ever during that Postwar boom period.

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But some of old santa rosa didn't survive the changing times. The magnificent old courthouse fell to the Wrecker's ball in 1966 because it fears that it wouldn't withstand the next big quake. The Grand California Theatre was closed in 1977 and demolished soon after the nearby Roxy

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met the same fate. They were classic. It was a great loss to santa rosa to lose that those architectural jewels. The santa rosa plaza is one result of the urban renewal that saw the demise of the theaters. One resident who greatly contributed to the changing face

00:26:41.500 - 00:26:59.690

of santa rosa was banker, entrepreneur and philanthropist Henry tree own while Hugh coating was building the houses after World War two. Henry understood that people needed to be able to pay for these houses and so he created his mortgage company and that's how people were able

00:26:59.690 - 00:27:17.930

to afford their piece of the american dream. The two of them together were the yin and yang of the post war development in santa rosa trio became very wealthy and believed he should give back to the community. One of Henry's famous lines was, there are no

00:27:17.930 - 00:27:41.920

luggage racks on the hearse. Perhaps his greatest gift to santa rosa was an Adele state park. Henry saw an idol as a terrific potential asset for the community. The massive 5000 plus acre. An Adele State Park connects to smaller Spring Lake County Park and finally to

00:27:41.920 - 00:28:02.740

Howard city Park. He was an Adele's relentless champion using his own money and influence to lobby for its creation in 1971 and to keep the park open during California's budgetary crisis, but his philanthropy didn't stop there because of Henry trio. Now we have two very, very

00:28:02.740 - 00:28:25.730

important assets in santa rosa, Annandale State Park and the Burbank Center for the Arts. Without him we probably would have neither. When the opportunity to acquire the Burbank Center Arose, Henry showed his remarkable ability to bring together his angels 10 investors and made it all happen.

00:28:27.150 - 00:28:48.710

Of course Triphones friend and business associate Hugh Ka Ting wasn't the only major builder in santa rosa Growth was the defining political issue in Santa Rosa in the 60s and the 70s and people wanted to live here. The subdivisions, the suburbs, grew up on old ranches

00:28:48.710 - 00:29:07.970

outside of town and that became the fight how much is too much with the continuing growth came the need for new public schools joining santa rosa high and Montgomery were pine er named after a local pioneer family. Elsie Allen named after an expert pomo basket weaver

00:29:07.970 - 00:29:41.990

and teacher and Maria Carrillo viticulture was another great force that changed santa rosa. We have one ft firmly planted in our agricultural roots and one ft placed on the concrete of an urban center, the vineyards and wineries that surrounded Santa Rosa started to go upscale really

00:29:41.990 - 00:29:58.930

in the 60s with the notion that we could compete on a world stage that we had the climate and we had the soil that could do it. Wine production became exacting sophisticated and expensive, a far cry from the days of simple italian jug wine and it

00:29:58.930 - 00:30:22.260

has just continued gangbusters ever since Today. The wine industry directly and indirectly contributes over $14 billion dollars annually to Sonoma County's economy. But santa rosa continues to fight the battle of urban growth. Santa rosa has urban growth boundaries and I think those will contain our growth.

00:30:22.350 - 00:30:47.710

The growth that's occurring in santa rosa now is what the planners like to call infill development. So you fill in among existing buildings before you expand on the outer edges of the city. But of course santa rosa was and always will be a place defined by

00:30:47.710 - 00:31:06.890

its people more than by its physical boundaries. The buildings have changed downtown has changed, but the people that love this area are not that different I don't think than they were in the 1940s, families are important, Children are important, our education and our schools are still

00:31:06.890 - 00:31:15.570

very, very important to our, to our residents and today the city of Santa Rosa is a big city with a really large heart. I don't think we've lost our small town values