Press Democrat story
GAYE LEBARON

What the archaeologists found in the summer dig at the Carrillo Adobe has not changed what will happen next in the orchard on Montgomery Drive, next to St. Eugene Cathedral.

What's been going on this summer behind the chain-link fence has piqued the curiosity of students, neighbors and Montgomery Drive commuters since early June. Now that the crew from Archaeological Resource Service has refilled their trenches and packed up their tools, we've heard some of what the final report will tell us.

The findings won't affect the development that has gained city approval after several years of negotiations over the fate of the adobe. There will be condos in the orchard and a park around a preserved ruin of the building generally regarded as the birthplace of Santa Rosa.

But the discovery of footings for a hitherto unknown third wing of the building is still pretty heady stuff for the team of archaeologists investigating the site.

The structure we have long believed was L-shaped, might have actually been U-shaped at one time, with an enclosed end, to form a courtyard.

Historians, as you might imagine, find this very interesting indeed. On a tour of the trenches a couple of weeks ago with Eric Stanley, history curator at the Sonoma County Museum, who wrote his master's thesis on the adobe, we agreed that the information causes us to view the adobe in a new light, to look on its history a little differently.

The ebb and flow of interest in this last outpost of Spanish/Mexican expansion, where one of the very few women to own a land grant rancho established a new town, is addressed in Stanley's thesis.

Several plans to preserve or restore the Carrillo Adobe have been notable failures. In the 1930s, when there was more left to preserve, there was a spurt of interest in restoration, occasioned by the state's attention to the romantic past as an antidote to the Depression.

A WPA-era government project called Historic American Buildings Survey, or HABS, undertook a study of the structure. The Press Democrat produced a series of articles entitled: "Romance of the Old Adobe" and began a fund drive for restoration.

The property was privately owned, by the pioneer Hahman family, who used it as a drying shed and for equipment storage for their prune and walnut orchard.

Critics questioned the use of public money for private property, and the fund drive sputtered and died.

In 1950, the Hahmans sold large chunks of their extensive holdings, including a cherry orchard that became Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and prune and walnut acreage that upstart developer Hugh Codding bought to build Montgomery Village.

When a new congregation of Catholics selected the corner of Farmers Lane and the new Montgomery Drive (formerly the railroad), the Hahmans made the church a gift of the land that included the adobe.

In 1960, when the Diocese of Santa Rosa was created, the property was designated for a Catholic boys high school. That school, Cardinal Newman, was built north of town when the site proved too small. The diocese's first bishop, the Rt. Rev. Leo Maher, was interested and formed a committee of leading citizens, including architect J. Clarence Felciano, to explore restoration.

The church, however, was not interested in any romantic past. Church historians arrived in the orchard to proclaim that the Carrillo family home was not what was important about the site. It was actually, the church said, the second building after an assistencia mission, a satellite chapel for the Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma - and therefore holy ground.

Despite the fact that the HABS survey had found no evidence of an earlier structure, or no evidence of mission use except corrals and sheds for the padres' hog farm, the church preferred that version of history, calling into play the unsubstantiated legend of the baptism of an Indian maid named Rosa in the creek. But the diocese fell into debt, Bishop Maher was transferred and plans were abandoned.

Through subsequent bishops' tenures, negotiations with the city to obtain control of the adobe failed, including a 1990s offer of $1 million for the orchard, to create a city park.

The current plans of the developer to preserve the existing ruin and create a historic park on the footprint of the original is the only option left.

NEWS OF a larger adobe offers an opportunity to take a fresh look at the Santa Rosa Valley 170 years ago. The Mexican period here was brief - 10, maybe 15, years. An illustration of this can be seen on a map showing California's coastal (or near-to-the-coast) towns. After all the Spanish names, marching north from Baja, Santa Rosa is the last.

Considering the frontier aspects of the place, there were a surprising number of visitors, including several who left us clear descriptions. One of these was Frank Marryat, an English writer and artist who visited in August 1850. Reading Marryat's account of the music and dancing in the courtyard makes a lot more sense in a U-shaped structure rather than the L, and it's even more believable when you know there are footings for at least a pole fence, if not a stone wall or even another adobe structure at the west end of the existing ruin.

"In front of the house was a courtyard of considerable extent, " Marryat wrote, "and part of this was sheltered by a porch. Here, when the 'vaccaros' have nothing to call them to the field, they pass the day, looking like retainers of a rude court. . .. When the sun gets warm they go to sleep in the shade .. . Presently a 'vaccaro,' judging the time by the sun, gets up and yawns and, staggering lazily toward his horse, gathers up his 'riatta' and twists it around the animal's neck; the others, awakened, rise and do the same. ... Huppa! Anda! Away they all go in cloud of dust, splashing through the river (Santa Rosa Creek), waving their lassos around their heads with a wild shout, and disappearing from the sight almost as soon as mounted."

A Swedish physician named Sandels who passed this way, on a return trip to Yerba Buena (later, San Francisco) from a visit to Stephen Smith in Bodega, wrote: "I went by way of the Santa Rosa farm to visit Señora Carrillo, the widowed mother of Mrs. Vallejo. .. . The Señora, the most persevering and industrious woman, had three fine looking unmarried daughters and three sons. They all worked in one way or another to promote the general benefit of their property, and had succeeded beyond all sanguine expectations."

William Heath Davis, one of the earliest Yankee traders in California, was all over this region in the 1830s and '40s. Davis, in his "Seventy-five Years in California," doesn't talk about the courtyard, or the look of the place, only that he had "eaten from water and musk melons of a hot summer day in the broad corridor of the homelike adobe dwelling."

And he tells us a lot about the Señora Carrillo. "I have seen Doña Maria Ygnacia robed in a neat calico dress of a French texture, with a broad-brim straw hat made by one of her Indian women, mounted on a horse which had been broken to the saddle by some of her sons expressly for her use, ride over the hacienda and direct the gentiles in sowing and planting seed and in harvesting the same."

THE DISCOVERY of the south wing didn't happen by chance. Magnetic imaging and electronic resistivity tests showed the crews foundation lines and where human impacts, like pathways and fire pits and - well, yes, a courtyard - might have been.

Ceramic fragments of the blue-on-white pottery common to the 1830s and '40s were found, but still no terra cotta of the type used by the mission padres, which casts more doubt on church historians' contention that the site was used as an assistencia mission before Doña Maria built her home.

Interestingly, the adobe was called "the new house" in letters of the time, perhaps because an even earlier structure, much smaller and less "important" shows on the earliest maps of Santa Rosa east of the Carrillo house, on the creek, in the vicinity of the present Franquette Avenue.

Described as "Salvador's Adobe," it may have been built by - or for - Salvador Vallejo, the hotheaded younger brother of General Vallejo, who also had a house on the Sonoma plaza and later owned the Napa Rancho. Salvador may have supervised the construction of the Carrillo house. He also wooed and wed Doña Maria's daughter, Maria Luz.

City planner Marie Meredith, who has followed the progress of the archaeologists, said the condominium project and the proposed park could be under way as early as next year. The small portion of the south wing footings that is outside the park, in the construction area, will be built on but, respectfully, protected from trenching or utility pipes or cables.

That's a good thing because, who knows, maybe 170 years from now - when "condominium" has become an old-fashioned term - archaeologists with even more science in hand will dig down again, through the buried Pepsi cans and Styrofoam cartons of the early 2000s, and get a new look at the stone footings and the adobe melt and muse over how the town began.