City marks 165 years on Saturday

By Donna Beth Weilenman
Staff Reporter

Benicia turns 165 ON Saturday, and according to Beverly Phelan, curator of the Benicia Historical Museum, the city took a long and fascinating road to get here.

Since its founding May 19, 1847, Benicia has been the state’s capital, the place where the discovery of California gold first was proclaimed, and a major port and ship-building site on the Sacramento River.

It has been the home of a significant regional tannery, a place where author Jack London frequented and wrote — and wrote about — and the city with California’s first volunteer fire department, with each participant agreeing to pay $6 so the first fire engine could be bought.

Benicia was long home to the premier military arsenal on the West Coast. In more recent years it has evolved into both an industrial center, home to a major refinery and port, and a tourist destination, boasting a scenic waterfront and family-friendly atmosphere.

It’s an impressive story for a town that sprang up in the nearly empty countryside and tree-less, rolling hills between marshland and strait.

“There was no year-round water source, so the Patwin Indians who populated the area for millennia stayed close to the water when they ventured away from the rich hunting areas of the Suisun Marsh to the northeast and the oaken woodlands to the north,” Dr. James Lessenger, president of the museum’s board of directors, has written in his history of the city.

“The Patwin lived in small bands of fewer than one hundred persons and spoke a dialect of the Wintun Indians who lived in the Benicia-Vallejo area, the Napa Valley, and the Sacramento River valley.

“The Patwin were primarily hunter-gatherers who ground acorns on stone implements and traded with tribes to the east for obsidian, from which they made arrowheads. The arrowheads, stone implements and a few baskets is all that remains of them.”

Lessenger wrote that Capt. Gabriel Moraga, the first European born in California, became one of the first Spaniards to explore the Carquinez Straits. Moraga fought some Patwins northeast of the Benicia Arsenal. He killed most of them, but one surviving child was a boy later named Francisco Solano, after whom Solano County would be named.

According to a history of Benicia compiled by Capt. Frank B. Fisher, Albert Muller and Florence Andraieff and illustrated by Lester Vandre for Benicia’s Old Timers Fiesta Sept. 20-22, 1946, and provided to The Benicia Herald by Karen Burns, Dr. Robert Semple was instrumental in Benicia’s founding.

Semple was a member of the Bear Flag Expedition that took Gen. Mariano G. Vallejo prisoner, an act that introduced Semple to the section of California that later would become Benicia.

Vallejo, born a subject of Spain, served as a military officer in Mexico and was instrumental in the transition of California from a district of Mexico to one of the United States.

While escorting Vallejo, Semple saw and began admiring the north shore of the Carquinez Straits, imagining its potential as a city. Vallejo later transferred five square miles of the Suscol Grant to Semple and Thomas O. Larkin as a town site. One condition was that Semple and Larkin name their city for Vallejo’s wife, Doña Francisca Maria Felipa Benicia Carrillo de Vallejo.

Vallejo had married Doña Benicia in 1832, when she was 17. Lessenger wrote that she was a member of a wealthy and politically powerful Californio family. She also was reputed to be intelligent, a good shot with firearms, and a prodigious horsewoman, he wrote.

Originally, the town was to be named Francisca in her honor, until Yerba Buena, across the bay, changed its name to San Francisco. So Semple and Larkin decided to call the town Benicia.

The Benicia Historical Museum’s “Images of America” book on Benicia, compiled by Julia Bussinger, a past director, and Phelan, the museum’s curator, shows how Semple practiced law and medicine, piloted a Mississippi River steamboat, entered the printing trade and established the first California newspaper.

Friends said the former Kentuckian was nearly 7 feet tall, and had a grip like a vise. Lessenger wrote that Semple often wore fringed buckskin and a coonskin cap with the tail dangling in his face.

He was a lieutenant in the militia that arrested Vallejo in the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846, an event that “consisted of a group of Americans who left Sutter’s Fort, secretly entered Sonoma, captured Mariano Vallejo, manufactured a series of flags with bears on them, raised them, and then transported Vallejo back to Sutter’s Fort via the Peña Adobe which now lies on Highway 80 between Fairfield and Vacaville.”

Later, Lessenger wrote, Semple would return Vallejo home after his captivity.

Semple eventually became president of the constitutional convention that drew up California’s constitution on the road to statehood, Phelan and Bussinger wrote.

Semple was recruited to be the state’s first governor, but declined because of his health. He died in Colusa in 1865.

Thomas Larkin was a merchant, land developer and financier, according to Bussinger and Phelan, and the only United States consul to Mexican California. He was born in Massachusetts but moved to California to be with his half brother, John Rogers Cooper. While he partnered with Semple for the founding of Benicia, he was more interested in Monterey and San Francisco. He died in the latter city in 1858, and was said to have been one of the richest men in California at the time.

By 1850, Benicia and Monterey were California’s first two incorporated cities, Bussinger and Phelan wrote.

The first family to arrive in Benicia was that of William Tustun, formerly of Virginia, who bought two lots from Semple and started building an adobe home, the town’s first structure. Semple constructed his own single-story building, according to the Fiesta program.

The third building was an adobe that later would belong to Capt. E.H. Von Pfister, who turned it into a store and saloon. It would gain fame as the place where, in 1848, a man would announce gold had been found on John Sutter’s property, which started the California Gold Rush a year later, according to the Old Time Fiesta program.

Sutter’s employee, James Marshall, was building a sawmill at Coloma on the American River on Jan. 24, 1948, when he saw some flecks of yellow in a cut in the river. Sutter and Marshall made several tests on the metal and decided it was gold.

Sutter sent a mill hand, Charles Bennett, to Monterey to validate his land title, and handed him a bag with six ounces of gold for the trip on a wood-burning vessel — the same that made regular overnight stops in Benicia for supplies.

Since he would be spending a night in Benicia, Bennett headed for Von Pfister’s Store and Saloon, which often was patronized by men who swapped tales of the discoveries of oil or coal near Mount Diablo.

According to the Old Time Fiesta chronicle of that night, Bennett poured his bag of gold out on the bar and shouted, “That will beat your black gold!”

Eventually, Von Pfister would be lured by gold to leave Benicia, though his adobe store and saloon still survive, kept under cover near Phil Joy’s boatyard at the lower end of First Street.

If 1849 brought prospectors to Northern California, it also brought the first church to Benicia. The Rev. Sylvester Woodbridge organized a Presbyterian congregation and led services in a school building in what is now City Park, according to Bussinger and Phelan.

It was the first Protestant church with an ordained resident pastor in California. Woodbridge taught school during the week and led worship on Sundays. Later the congregation would become divided because of conflicting sentiments about the American Civil War.

In 1851, years before the first shot was fired in that war, the U.S. Army established an arsenal on Benicia’s south coastline, according to the Fiesta program.

“From the beginning, the city of Benicia and the Benicia Arsenal were joined at the hip,” Jim Lessenger wrote in his history.

“In the first Benicia survey of 1847, two years before the Benicia Barracks were founded, the ‘Military Reservation’ was included. The fate of the city has risen and fallen in unison with the Arsenal since, first as a cavalry barracks, then as an Arsenal and finally as an industrial park.”

Benicia’s was the first U.S. arsenal on the Pacific Coast. Officers such as Lts. Ulysses S. Grant and Tecumseh Sherman, who later would become famous generals in the War Between the States, served in Benicia, whose arsenal also boasted the first military hospital in the West, built in 1856.

In the annals of peculiar historical footnotes, the Benicia Arsenal’s brief housing of a herd of War Department camels ranks highly. The Army wants to determine if they could be used as pack animals instead of horses and mules in the deserts of the American Southwest.

At first, the reports were glowing. The camels were strong and could cover terrain that impeded horses. In 1857, Lt. Edward Fitzgerald led a survey mission team that rode 25 camels from Fort Defiance to the Colorado River. It was the Fitzgerald team’s camels that were later stationed in Benicia.

Other Army surveys successfully used camels, too. But the Army also discovered that camels startled horses that weren’t used to the unusual animals, and Army handlers soon realized that camels were more difficult to handle than horses or mules. Eventually the U.S. Camel Corps was disbanded, with the animals sold to private owners or escaping into the desert, where they occasionally were spotted as late as 1941.

The Arsenal’s expansion and decline paralleled the nation’s times of war. During the Spanish-American War, the Benicia Arsenal became a significant distribution point for supplies to the Western battle zone.

It again became one of the Army’s top arsenals during World War I; and in 1941, when the United States entered the Second World War, the Arsenal expanded. At one time it may have been doing a greater volume of business than any arsenal in the nation, and the district became like a city within Benicia.

Shortly after the Army opened the Arsenal, Benicia began to compete with San Francisco, San Jose, Vallejo and Sacramento as a seat of governmental power in the new state, Bussinger and Phelan wrote.

“Even as the first Legislature met in San Jose in 1849 and 1851, and in Vallejo and Sacramento in 1852, Benicia was hoping to become the state capital,” they wrote.

By 1852, a red brick building with Grecian columns stood at the corner of First and West G streets, presumably planned as Benicia’s city hall.

But a flood in Sacramento forced the Legislature to look elsewhere for a meeting place, and Benicians lobbied to lure the Legislature here.

The red brick building became California’s third capitol for 13 months, from 1853 to 1854, and is now the state’s oldest surviving pre-Sacramento capitol. The building was deeded to the state as a historical monument in 1951, and it underwent extensive restoration in 1958. Among those attending the restoration celebration was the actor and conservationist Leo Carrillo, son of Los Angeles’s first mayor and a descendant of Doña Benicia.

Author Jack London arrived in Benicia while still a teenager, and made the city his headquarters in 1892, when he was just 16, Bussinger and Phelan noted. He had a taste for alcohol even then, and would visit the local bars — one in particular: Jurgensen’s Saloon. That building, later named the Lido, was eventually preserved and moved to First and E streets.

London lived on a vessel anchored near the train depot and Jurgensen’s. At one time he was an oyster pirate, then a member of the California Fish Patrol.

He described his adventures in Benicia in his books “John Barleycorn” and “Tales of the Fish Patrol.” In later years he would return to visit in a sloop, said Steve De Benedetti, who contributed to the 1946 Old Timers Fiesta program.

“When he came ashore, he resembled anything but an author,” De Benedetti wrote. “His white duck trousers were soiled and baggy, and his shirt, once white, was almost black and was without sleeves.

“On top of his tousled and unkempt hair rested the most atrocious looking yacht cap I ever saw. It had been white at some time, but now was a greyish color. The visor was black with a black band around the cap.

“The hat set jauntily on his head gave the impression to one of the Italians working at the nearby creamery that he was a street sweeper and from the moment that he stepped ashore, this Italian nicknamed him ‘Spaciacaming,’ or streetsweeper.”

London came to visit Henry “Russ” Hartmen, his brother William, Charles Laplant and George Roxberg, spending much of the time at Jurgensen’s Saloon or drinking buttermilk from the creamery, De Benedetti wrote.

The Benicia men would take their vacations when London came to town and stayed tipsy until London sailed away. Some others, who were working at the time, would make fun of the friends as they wandered through Benicia’s lower end.

“I knew Jack London,” De Benedetti wrote. “But not until after his death did I realize that the man who the Italian called ‘Spaciacaming’ was one of the greatest writers of his day. Nor did I or any of the men who ridiculed this man at the time have any idea that he would immortalize the town of Benicia with two of his most famous books.”

Bussinger and Phelan wrote that London last visited Benicia in 1914. He died two years later on his ranch in the Valley of the Moon, Glen Ellen.

Ship building was a major industry in Benicia late in the 1800s. The Matthew Turner Shipyard, at the foot of West K Street between West Ninth and West Tenth streets, turned out ships that capitalized on the export lumber trade coming from the Klondike gold rush, including Turner’s own four-masted, 1,000-ton vessels the Benicia, Amazon, Amaranth, Ariel and M. Turner.

He has been called the “greatest individual shipbuilder of his time” by historian H.H. Bancroft, and Turner and his brother, Horatio, were said to have been among the best mariners in California.

The Galilee, built by Turner in 1891, has been called the most beautiful of the 228 he built. It set a record of 21 days sailing time from Tahiti to San Francisco on its maiden voyage. Among its duties was carrying the Carnegie Oceanic Magnetic Survey researchers.

From Dec. 22, 1906 to May 21, 1908, the Galilee sailed from California to Alaska, to Hawaii, the Marquesas, Tahiti, New Zealand, Samoa, Yap, into the mouth of the Yangtse River in China, and to Peru before returning to San Francsico, according to the Benicia Historical Museum.

Later, even more impressive vessels would be built here, including the auto ferry Charles Van Damme, the stern wheel ferry Petaluma and many barges.

The Southern Pacific’s 3,549-ton ferry Solano ported in Benicia in 1879. Its deck had four parallel tracks, and the vessel could carry two locomotives and 36 freight cars or 24 passenger cars, and it carried about 30 trains a day between Benicia and Port Costa.

The city also was important to the Pony Express system, Phelan and Bussinger wrote. The first mailbag carried by a Benician, Thomas Bedford, was picked up April 23, 1860, after being relayed by William Hamilton. The bag was taken across the Carquinez Strait to Martinez aboard the ferry boat Carquinez. Bedford then mounted a horse and rode 25 miles in one hour, 59 minutes, which was reported to be the fastest time made by any mail rider on any route.

The Pony Express would be displaced in 1861 by the telegraph.

The Old Timers Fiesta program described some of Benicia’s livelier places, such as those frequented by London and his friends. “You were always welcome at the Belle Union Saloon. Marina Montague, who ran the place in the long years back, saw to it — that is, if your poke sack was filled or your pockets jingled,” the program writers said. “Girls, music and drinks were yours — if you had the money.”

Harry Wassmann, a lifelong resident and former curator of the Benicia Historical Museum, once said most people knew that the city had brothels at one time. They were made popular by Benicia’s easy access by railroad and boat, and because the city had attracted men without wives.

But if Benicia had its rowdy side, it also became known as both the Mother of Churches and the Mother of Schools, since many private schools were allied with houses of worship or religious orders.

After the first Protestant church was organized here, other denominations followed. The first Episcopal cathedral in Northern California would open here in 1876. The first seminarians ordained in California as Dominican priests took their vows in Benicia in 1847, three years after the first permanent foundation of the Dominican fathers in the West also opened here.

Saint Mary of the Pacific, a girls school, and the boy’s school, St. Augustine, were founded in Benicia by the Episcopalian diocese of Northern California. Saint Mary’s site later would become Benicia High School, and then City Hall.

Mills College, which later moved to Oakland, was begun in Benicia by Mary Atkins Lynch. Nearby was the Dominican House of Studies, which stayed in Benicia for more than 50 years.

St. Catherine’s Convent and School was started after a group of Dominican Sisters left Monterey in 1854 and moved north to rent a building from Dr. Robert Semple. Doña Maria Concepcion Arguello, a Dominican nun and daughter born in 1790 in San Francisco to Jose Arguello, then governor of California appointed by the King of Spain, was the first Californian to become a nun. Originally a member of the Third Order of St. Francis, she later was accepted into the Order of St. Dominic. She died Dec. 23, 1857.

Benicia has several other “firsts” to which it lays claim:

• Solano County’s first hotel, the California House, opened in 1847; its first recorded marriage was the same year, and its first hospital, Peabody, opened in 1849.

• The first public school in the state opened in 1849, and the first school for girls in California opened in 1854.

• The first official Masonic Hall in California opened in 1850. That same year, the first bell cast in California was made in Benicia for the Pacific Mail and Steamship Company.

• California’s first law school was established here in 1855.

• The first American heavyweight boxing champion was John Heenan, the “Benicia Boy” who on April 17, 1860, fought Tom Sayres in England for the Championship of the World. They two boxers battled to a draw, but the fight made Heenan world famous.

• Benicia was home to the first railroad ferry west of the Mississippi, operating by 1879.

Elizabeth d’Huart, current director of the Benicia Historical Museum, didn’t grow up in Benicia, but said she remembers “as a child, I was taken to every museum and architecturally important building within 500 miles of our home, not to mention the family forays to every ‘Old Town,’ ‘Historic District,’ and collection of … anything!”

She said she was taken to see dog collars, kitchen equipment, laboratory instruments and match boxes, which led to her fascination with a variety of collections. “It’s in my DNA, and has always made me wonder not just about the items on view, but also about the person who put the collection together, and how it was that someone would decide that a certain kind of object was worthy of focus and further study.”

Contemplating the anniversary of Benicia’s founding led d’Huart to consider “the landscape and mindset of a group of individuals, each of whom had their own personal history and personal agenda, but whose collaberative interests and intentions brought forth an infant city that aspired to be the first and best in a land previously occupied by Native Americans, Mexicans and European nationals.

“It is in the personal stories of these early Benicia residents that I find the commonality that expresses what those early founders felt and what we later residents, whether born here or ‘self-selected,’ feel about Benicia today, a sense that Benicia is a special place in a special location, and that ‘we’ have discovered it, and that we ourselves share in that specialness for recognizing and appreciating it.

“This ‘sense of place’ is formed both by the physical beauty of Benicia’s location, and by the historical importance of the events that took place here, and is as much about the people as it is about bricks and mortar,” d’Huart said.

In writing an article about Doña Benicia, she said during her research through the museum’s archived papers, photographs and documents, “I wondered if she had any inkling that she would play such an important part in the history of Benicia, along with so many others.

“This month is National Preservation Month, a wholly appropriate moment to commemorate the founding of Benicia and to reflect on the importance of remembering – and preserving – our past, since it is a reflection of who we are today,” she said.

Benicia hasn’t had a formal birthday celebration since it turned 150 years old, said Karen Burns, a longtime Benician and member of the city Historical Society. “We used to do things up right. In the past, we had parades, parties, plays and big celebrations.”

Burns said she’s worried that no events will mark the city’s founding this year. “I think it’s important. We’re losing our history and identity and what makes us special,” she said. “Benicia has a rich heritage.”