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...In January 1984, while the Hoag House was still at its original location - up on piers and ready to be moved - Adrian Praetzellis, at the request of architect Dan Peterson, excavated a trash-filled pit beneath the structure. For a while, it looked as if we had caught Obediah Hoag in one of these contradictions between what historical archaeologists call observed behavior -- Hoag as described by his contemporaries -- and preserved behavior -- Hoag as reflected by his trash. This article will present and resolve that apparent contradiction and, in the process, recount a good deal of Santa Rosa's history.
Many years after the rest of the neighborhood had been "renewed," the Hoag House persisted as a silent reminder of the frontier town of Santa Rosa. This quaint cottage, with its ivy-covered walls and distinctive sloping roof, looked almost as incongruous across from the new Sears store -- massive and angular in its dimensions -- as it does now seated upon blocks awaiting renovation in the old city corporation yard on Donahue Street.
The oldest wooden residence in Santa Rosa, the Hoag House is also the last home remaining from the city's first residential neighborhood laid out in 1853 by the town's founding fathers. Julio Carrillo owned the only house in town when it was first surveyed; it was located on a 2nd street site now occupied by a city parking lot, but slated shortly for development. Achilles Richardson had a small store nearby, south of 1st Street near Santa Rosa Creek, just outside the city limits.
The new town began to fill with homes and businesses and, in September of 1854, it displaced the City of Sonoma as the county seat. Two months later, Julio Carrillo sold the parcel of land that was later occupied by the Hoag House to John Ingram for $168. This parcel was just outside the city limits, fronting 1137 feet on 1st Street and bounded by Santa Rosa Creek and the property of Mr. Richardson, the storekeeper. John Ingram was one of the first settlers in Santa Rosa Township and another of Santa Rosa's founders. Arriving in the area by 1851, he worked at farming and, beginning in 1854, practiced as a building contractor in Santa Rosa. John Ingram helped in the original town survey and, according to his obituary, constructed "most of the first houses in Santa Rosa.
It is probable that the Hoag House was built by John Ingram between 1854 and 1857 when he sold the easternmost 431 feet of his lot -- including the Hoag House site -- to William Crowell for $1000. William Crowell served as County Clerk in 1857 and 1858, and it is possible that he was a lawyer by profession. He listed no occupation on the 1860 census, but his neighbors, residing within walking distance of the first county Court House on 4th Street between Mendocino and D, were nearly all either county employees or lawyers. Crowell, a native of Connecticut, had a wife and two young children at this time.
In 1863 Crowell sold his 1st Street lot to C. J. Hannath, a San Francisco based real-estate speculator, who already owned the former Richardson property to the east. In 1870 Hannath sold the property to attorneys John Brown and General Whallon. Some unrecorded transfer of property may have occurred before this date, however, for an 1867 map shows "Gen Whalon" as the parcel's owner. Whallon eventually purchased a vineyard outside of Sonoma and probably never lived on 1st Street. John Brown came to Santa Rosa in 1856, married Whallon's daughter in 1866, and apparently lived on 4th Street by 1870; so it is unlikely that he ever lived on the property either. Brown and Whallon sold the lot to Armstead Runyon in January of 1871.
Armstead Runyon was a Forty-niner who came to California with borrowed money and ended up a very wealthy man. Runyon owned a ranch in the Sacramento Valley, and the 1st Street property was his first real estate purchase in Santa Rosa. In April of 1871, he bought a large parcel of land on B Street at 8th where, in the following year, he proceeded to build an elegant residence. By Christmas of 1872 the builders were putting the finishing touches on his house, and the family moved in shortly thereafter. Runyon was certainly very active in town business during the construction of his home; he must have lived somewhere nearby, and it is conceivable that he lived in his 1st Street property, his first local holding.
In November of 1875, A. Runyon entered into a least-to-own agreement with O. H. Hoag regarding the lot "known as the Wm. H. Crowell" property, whereby Hoag could purchase the property if he paid Runyon $1150 within one year. Hoag paid half the money, but before the year was up and Hoag could make the final payment, Runyon died in a buggy accident and his property went to Probate Court. In December 1876, Hoag paid the remaining half of the purchase price and obtained legal title to the property that was to remain in his family for the next 100 years.
Obediah H. Hoag, or "Obe" as he was known to his friends, was a New Yorker by birth, coming as a young man from Poughkeepsie to Sonoma County in 1857. He and other members of his family settled in and around Bloomfield, where they farmed the land and participated in local politics. A few years after his arrival, O. H. Hoag married Lurena Cockrill, daughter of one of the first families to settle in the area. In the spring of 1853, Mr. and Mrs. Cockrill and their ten children started across the plains for California. In October of that year, they arrived in what was to become the town of Bloomfield where Mr. Cockrill built the first home, opened the first boarding house, and obtained the first parcel of deed land on the Blume Grant.
In 1862 O. H. Hoag ran for the State Assembly and was elected by a "flattering majority;" at the time he was the youngest member of the house. In 1865 Obe was reelected, despite the embarrassment of having his own brother as his opponent. While in the Assembly, Hoag won the gratitude of the citizens of Santa Rosa by thwarting an attempt to remove the county seat from their domain. The Sonoma Democrat described his victory as follows:
He did not jump on it with both feet. He was a good deal too bright for that. He just let it run gently along, and one day, by the exercise of a little legislative diplomacy he had the whole matter indefinitely postponed -- he put it in the legislative nine hole, and there it slept the sleep of Caplets.
Perhaps due to its somewhat isolated position, the town of Bloomfield did not prosper to be the kind of place its founders had envisioned. It lacked sufficient inducements to keep an up-and-coming young lawyer and politician like Obediah Hoag among its inhabitants. Hoag was engaged in a campaign for County Recorder when he moved with his wife and children to Santa Rosa in the latter part of 1875. His family's staying in town was possibly contingent on his winning the election, which he did. In 1878, Hoag retired from politics and resumed his legal practice until he was appointed Federal Storekeeper in 1881, an office which he held until the close of the Cleveland Administration. He then resumed his old legal business, engaged primarily as a real estate and insurance agent.
Obe was always well respected by the citizens of Santa Rosa and "in the business community was rated as a careful, conscientious and energetic business man." Politically he was a "patriotic, though liberal and consistent Democrat." To further quote the Sonoma Democrat: "He is liberal and public spirited and is never backward when called upon to contribute to the success of a public enterprise." One of the public enterprises to which Hoag contributed and which bears directly upon the subject of this article was the Anti-Chinese Movement.
'In the nineteenth century, Santa Rosa, like many cities on the Pacific Coast, had a Chinatown in her midst that provided many of her citizens with a source of amusement, indignation, and fear. The population of Santa Rosa's Chinatown situated in the center of town to the southeast of the Plaza and north of Santa Rosa Creek, fluctuated according to the seasons and the need for laborers in the outlying agricultural districts. The Chinese who resided in town year-round worked primarily as cooks, waiters, and domestic servants; as merchants and boardinghouse keepers who catered almost exclusively to their countrymen; and as laundrymen who monopolized the washing business in Santa Rosa until 1885. The Chinese provided farmers and town dwellers with a reliable, cheap, and efficient source of labor, available upon demand. For decades California labor organizations had been working to eliminate this source of competition by lobbying for laws to prevent further Chinese immigration and by organizing anti-Chinese leagues to boycott the Chinese and thus drive them out of town, and eventually, it was hoped, when all communities had done likewise, out of the country. (For more on the Overseas Chinese in Sonoma County, see The Journal [of the Sonoma County Historical Society], 1981, No. 4.)
Fueled by a local incident, the Chinese became the focal point of intense racial propaganda in January of 1886 when Mr. and Mrs. Wickersham were murdered, allegedly by their Chinese cook, on their ranch in the mountains to the west of Healdsburg. This event received wide and sensational press coverage and provided a rallying point for an anti-Chinese movement that spread throughout the West and drove the Chinese out of numerous communities, to which they never returned. Statewide, anti-Chinese boycotts were organized in both California and Nevada. Locally the Sonoma Democrat assailed it readers with their vivid descriptions -- each different -- of the victims. During the hysteria that followed few persons came forward as being pro-Chinese, the worst accusation was to charge a person with being secretly in league with the "the Heathen." it was engaged in a public debate of this nature that we find O. H. Hoag in March of 1886.
In a letter to the editor of the Sonoma Democrat entitled "Sweet Consistency," a V. Stillwell of Bloomfield described a rousing anti-Chinese speech given in that town by O.H. Hoag, "advising us for the good of the country, the love of our families, the welfare of our citizens, and the benefit of schools and churches, to use all lawful means to rid ourselves of this black horde, these opium fiends, this leprous scourge." It seems Mr. Stillwell had been requested by the citizens of Bloomfield to report the "sequel" to Mr. Hoag's speech: the fact that Mr. Hoag owned two houses in their town -- "old fire traps" -- rented for six dollars a month to "these many-aliased Chinese." Hoag, according to the letter, had agreed to turn out his Chinese if a second party agreed contingent up the stand of a third landowner. The third party was not willing, so no one discharged their Chinese, thus the title of the piece, "Sweet Consistency." Mr. Stillwell concluded his letter with the lament that his action was "lawful although painful. Written by request. Yours truly..."
O.H. Hoag immediately took up this challenge, entitling his reply "Sour Consistency" and signing off "Written without request. Yours, without pain, ..." Hoag took his leave to explain and compare his record on the Chinese question with Stillwell's "'aided' effusion." Hoag, it seems, owned four structures on Main Street in the "once prosperous" village of Bloomfield; structures that were valuable properties until the "advent of the 'Chinese horde.'" It was after his removal that the Chinese "took possession" of the "beautiful village," and it was Stillwell, Hoag argued, who was "one of the foremost in offering them inducements for their accommodation." Hoag apparently did rent to Chinese, but lost their patronage to Stillwell who built "more attractive palaces for their accommodation." Stillwell, Hoag charged, went so far as to discharge his old butcher and replaced him with a "hog-killing Chinaman," who was so grateful that he named his only son after Stillwell. It was only recently, it seems, that Stillwell "caught the echoes of 'the Chinese must go'" and turned out his former Chinese friends. Hoag concluded that he renewed no contract with his Chinese tenants, that "For my own part, I neither employ Chinese, nor buy their goods, preferring wine to tea." The standoff between Mr. Stillwell and Mr. Hoag was typical of the political bickering of the time. Nearly all successful politicians voiced such rabid sentiments. There were, however, few segments of the economy which had not benefited from the presence of the Chinese, and many politicians found themselves in the awkward position of our two combatants -- the pot calling the kettle black...
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